The House of Martha

by Frank R. Stockton

"Goodness, Mother Anastasia," cried Sylvia, "you made me scald the outside of his throat."

At the foot of the bed stood Mother Anastasia clad in her severest gray, her brows knit and her lips close pressed.

"Sister Hagar," she repeated, "what is all this?"

I let down the old man's head, and Sylvia, placing the almost empty bowl upon the table, replied serenely:—

"Mr. Vanderley is making a beginning in brotherhood work—the brotherhood of the House of Martha, you know. I think it would work splendidly. Just look around and see what he has done. He has made this charming cottage out of an old rattle-trap house. Everything you see in one afternoon, and lots of provisions in the kitchen besides. Sisters alone could never have done this."

Mother Anastasia turned to me.

"I will speak with you, outside," she said, and I followed her into the little yard. As soon as we were far enough from the house to speak without being overheard, she stopped, and turning to me, said:—

"You are not content with driving me from the life on which I had set my heart, back into this mistaken vocation, but you are determined to make my lot miserable and unhappy. And not mine only, but that of that simple-hearted and unsuspecting girl. I do not see how you can be so selfishly cruel. You are resolved to break her heart, and to do it in the most torturing way. But you shall work her no more harm. I do not now appeal to your honor, to your sense of justice; I simply say that I shall henceforth stand between you and her. What misery may come to her and to me from what you have already done I do not know, but you do no more."

I stood and listened with the blood boiling within me.

"Marcia Raynor," I said—"for I shall not call you by that title which you put on and take off as you please—I here declare to you that I shall never give up Sylvia. If I never speak to her again or see her I shall not give her up. I make no answer to what you have charged me with, but I say to you that as Sylvia's life and my life cannot be one as I would have it, I shall live the life that she lives, even though our lives be ever apart. For the love I bear her, I shall always do the work that she does. But I believe that the time will come when people, wiser than you are, will see that what I proposed to do is a good thing to do, and the time will come when a man and a woman can labor side by side in good works, and both do better work because they work together. And to Sylvia and to my plan of brotherhood, I shall ever be constant. Remember that."