She went at once. On the train, thundering south through a snowy night, she lay awake until half of her journey was over. Scenes and moments, occurrences of the outer and inner life, went by her mind like some endless, shifting tapestry. Childhood, girlhood, womanhood, work and play, the daily, material task and the inner lift, lift, and ever-strengthening knowledge of the impalpable—that last was not tapestry; it was height and breadth and depth, and something more. The old, wide travel came back to her; shifting gleams of Eastern cities, deserts, time-broken temples, mountains, vineyards, haunted groves, endless surrounding, azure, murmuring seas.... Medway, white-clothed and helmeted, in his rolling chair.... The whistle shrieked; the train stopped with a jar at some lighted station, then, regathering its forces, rushed and roared on through the February night. Now it was the last three years and more: they passed in panorama before her. Stages and stairways and scaffoldings by which the world-spirit might mount an inch: ferments and leavens: voices telling of democracy and fair play and care for your neighbour's freedom as for your own, your woman-neighbour and your man-neighbour. Through her mind ran all the enormous detail of the work being pursued over all the country; countless meetings, speeches, appeals, talks to a dozen gathered together or to two or three; letters and letters and letters, press and magazine utterances, organization, the difficult raising of money, legislative work, petitions, canvassing; drudgery in myriad detail, letters and letters, voice and pen.... And all the opposition—blind bigotry to be met, and a maniac fear of change, inertia, tradition, habit, the dead past's hand, cold and heavy—and all the interested opposition, the things whose book the movement did not suit—and all the lethargy of womankind itself.... And in the very camp, in the huge, chaotic movement itself, as in all the past's vast human movements, recurring frictions, antagonisms, small jealousies, flags set up by individuals, pacifications and smoothings, bringing compatibles together, keeping incompatibles apart.... A contending with outer oppositions and inner weaknesses, resisting discouragement, fighting cynicism, acknowledging the vast road to travel, keeping on.... She knew nothing that was at once so weak and so mighty as the Woman Movement. One who was deep within it might feel at times a vast weariness, impatience, and despair ... but deep within it you never left it. Here you dealt with clay that was so cold and lumpish it seemed that no generous idea could germinate within; here you dealt with stuff so friable, light, and disintegrative that the thought would come that it were better to cast it to the winds ... but you did not; you comforted your soul with the very much that was noble, and you hoped for the other that was not yet noble, and you went on—went on. It was all you yourself—you had within you the intractable clay and the stuff light as chaff, inconsequent; but you went on transmuting, lifting.... There was no other hope, no other course, deep down no other wish. So with the Woman Movement.... Another station. Hagar looked out at the lights and the hurrying forms; then, as the train roared into the white countryside, at what could be seen of the fields and hills and storm-bent trees. She was thinking now of Gilead Balm and her childhood and her mother. She seemed to lie again, close beside Maria, on the big, chintz-covered sofa. At last she slept, lying so.
Captain Bob and Lisa met her at the station, three miles from Gilead Balm. Captain Bob had a doleful mien. "Oh, yes, the Colonel's better—but I don't think he's so much better. He's getting old—and Lisa and I are getting old, too, aren't we old girl?—old like Luna and going away pretty soon like Luna. Well, Gipsy, you're looking natural—No, it's been an open winter down here—not much snow." He put her in the carriage, and they drove slowly to Gilead Balm, over the heavy country road.
Old Miss was well; Serena was well; Captain Bob himself had had rheumatism, but he was better.—The Colonel didn't look badly; it was only that he didn't seem to want to get out of bed, and that every little while he set the clock back and rambled on about things and people—"It's creepy to hear him," said Captain Bob. "He thinks young Dr. Bude is old Dr. Bude, and he thinks that Maria is alive, and that she won't let you come into the room. And then it'll change like that, and he's just as much himself as he ever was—more so, in fact.—Hi, Li-sa! let that rooster alone—"
The house cedars showed over the brown hills. "Dr. Bude wanted Old Miss to get a trained nurse because somebody's got more or less to watch at night. But Old Miss wouldn't hear to it. She don't approve of women training for nurses, so she's got young Phœbe and Isham's second wife—and I think myself," said Captain Bob, "that I wouldn't want a young white woman that I couldn't order round."
Red brick and brown fields and the black-green of many cedars—here was Gilead Balm, looking just as it used to look of a February. The air was cold and still, the day a grey one, the smoke from the chimneys moving upward sluggishly. Miss Serena came down the porch steps and greeted Hagar as she stepped from the carriage.
"Yes, your old room. Did you have a tiresome journey?—Is your trunk coming? Then I'll send it up as soon as they bring it. Young Phœbe, you take Miss Hagar's bag up to her room. The fire's lighted, Hagar, and Mimy shall make you a cup of coffee. We're glad to see you."
The old room, her mother's and her own! Hagar had not been in it in winter-time for a long while. When Phœbe was gone, she sat in the winged chair by the fire and regarded the familiar wall-paper and the old, carved wardrobe and the four-poster bed and the sofa where Maria had lain, and, between the dimity curtains at the windows, the winter landscape. The fire was bright and danced in the old mahogany; the old chintz covers were upon the chair and sofa—the old pattern, only the hues faded. Hagar rose, took off her travelling dress, bathed and put on a dark, silken dressing-gown. She took the pins from her hair and let it stream; it was like Maria's. She stood for a moment, her eyes upon the pallid day, the rusty cedars without the window, then she went to the chintz sofa and lay down in the firelight, piling the pillows behind her head, taking, half-consciously, the posture that oftenest in her memory she saw Maria take. Her mother was present with her; there came an expression into her face that was her mother's. Old Miss knocked at the door, and entered without waiting for the "Come in!"
Hagar rose and embraced her grandmother; then Old Miss sat down in the winged chair and her granddaughter went back to the sofa. The two gazed at each other. Hagar did not know that she looked to-day like Maria, and Old Miss did not examine the springs and sources of a mounting anger and sense of injury. She sat very straight, with her knitting in her hand, wearing a cap upon her smoothly parted hair, in which there were yet strands of brown, wearing a black stuff skirt and low-heeled shoes over white stockings; comely yet, and as ever, authoritative.
"I am so very sorry about grandfather," said Hagar. "Uncle Bob thinks he is better—"
"Yes, he is better. He will be well presently. I should not," said Old Miss coldly, "have written asking you to come but that Dr. Bude advised it."