CHAPTER VIII
The Apple of Doubt Is Nibbled
The rector of St. Antipas came from preaching his Easter sermon. He was elated. Of the sermons delivered in New York that morning, he suspected that his would be found not the least ingenious. Telling excerpts would doubtless appear in the next day's papers, and at least one paper would reprint his favourite likeness over the caption, "Dr. Allan Delcher Linford, the Handsome and Up-to-Date Rector of St. Antipas." Under this would be head-lines: "The Resurrection Proved; a Literal Fact in History not less than a Spiritual Fact in the Human Consciousness. An Unbroken Chain of Living Witnesses."
He even worded scraps of the article on his way from the church to his study:
"An unusually rich Easter service was held at fashionable St. Antipas yesterday morning. The sermon by its able and handsome young rector, the Reverend Dr. Linford, was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man. The Resurrection he declares to be a fact as well attested as the Brooklyn Bridge is to thousands who have never seen it—yet who are convinced of its existence upon the testimony of those who have. Thus one who has never seen this bridge may be as certain of its existence as a man who crosses it twice a day. In the same way, a witness to the risen Christ tells the glorious truth to his son, a lad of fifteen, who at eighty tells it to his grandson. 'Do you realise,' said the magnetic young preacher, 'that the assurance of the Resurrection comes to you this morning by word of mouth through a scant three thousand witnesses—a living chain of less than three thousand links by which we may trace our steps back to the presence of the first witness—so that, in effect, we have the Resurrection on the word of a man who beheld the living Saviour this very morning? Nay; further, in effect we ourselves stand trembling before that stone rolled away from the empty but forever hallowed tomb. As certainly as thousands know that a structure called the Brooklyn Bridge exists, so upon testimony of the same validity do we know that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed on him might not perish but have everlasting life." God has not expected us to trust blindly: he has presented tangible and compelling evidence of his glorious scheme of salvation.' The speaker, who is always imbued with the magnetism of a striking personality, was more than usually effective on this occasion, and visibly moved the throng of fashionable worshippers that——"
"Allan, you outdid yourself!" Aunt Bell had come in and, in the mirror over the dining-room mantel, was bestowing glances of unaffected but strictly impartial admiration upon the bonnet of lilac blossoms that rested above the lustrous puffs of her plenteous gray hair.
The young man looked up from his meditative pacing of the room.
"Aunt Bell, I think I may say that I pleased myself this morning—and you know that's not easy for me."
"It's too bad Nance wasn't there!"
"Nancy is not pleasing me," began her husband, in gentle tones.
"I didn't feel equal to it, Allan," his wife called from the library.
"Oh, you're there! My dear, you give up too easily to little indispositions that another woman would make nothing of. I've repeated that to you so often that, really, your further ignoring it appears dangerously like perverseness——"
"Is she crying?" he asked Aunt Bell, as they both listened.
"Laughing!" replied that lady.
"My dear, may I ask if you are laughing at me?"
"Dear, no!—only at something I happened to think of." She came into the dining-room, a morning paper in her hand. "Besides, in to-morrow's paper I shall read all about what the handsome rector of St. Antipas said, in his handsome voice, to his handsome hearers——"
He had frowned at first, but now smiled indulgently, as they sat down to luncheon. "You will have your joke about my appearance, Nance! That reminds me—that poor romantic little Mrs. Eversley—sister of Mrs. Wyeth, you know—said to me after service this morning, 'Oh, Dr. Linford, if I could only believe in Christian dogma as I believe in you as a man!' You know, she's such a painfully emotional, impulsive creature, and then Colonel Godwin who stood by had to have his joke: 'The symbol will serve you for worship, Madam!' he says; 'I'm sure no woman's soul would ever be lost if all clergymen were as good to look upon as our friend here!' Those things always make me feel so awkward—they are said so bluntly—but what could I do?"
"Mr. Browett's sister and her son were out with him this morning," began Aunt Bell, charitably entering another channel of conversation from the intuition that her niece was wincing. But, as not infrequently happened, the seeming outlet merely gave again into the main channel.
"And there's Browett," continued the Doctor. "Now I am said to have great influence over women—women trust me, believe me—I may even say look up to me— but I pledge you my word I am conscious of wielding an immensely greater influence over men. There seems to be in my ego the power to prevail. Take Browett— most men are afraid of him—not physical fear, but their inner selves, their egos, go down before him. Yet from the moment I first saw that man I dominated him. It's all in having an ego that means mastery, Aunt Bell. Browett has it himself, but I have a greater one. Every time Browett's eyes meet mine he knows in his soul that I'm his master—his ego prostrates itself before mine— and yet that man"—he concluded in a tone of distinguishable awe—"is worth all the way from two to three hundred millions!"
"Mrs. Eversley is an unlucky little woman, from what I hear," began Aunt Bell, once more with altruistic aims.
"That reminds me," said the Doctor, recalling himself from a downward look at the grovelling Browett, "she made me promise to be in at four o'clock. Really I couldn't evade her—it was either four o'clock to-day or the first possible day. What could I do? Aunt Bell, I won't pretend that this being looked up to and sought out is always disagreeable. Contrary to the Pharisee, I say 'Thank God I am as other men are!' I have my human moments, but mostly it bores me, and especially these half-religious, half-sentimental confidences of emotional women who imagine their lives are tragedies. Now this woman believes her marriage is unhappy——"
"Indeed, it is!" Aunt Bell broke in—this time effectually, for she proceeded to relate of one Morris Upton Eversley a catalogue of inelegancies that, if authoritative, left him, considered as a husband, undesirable, not to say impracticable. His demerits, indeed, served to bring the meal to a blithe and chatty close.
Aunt Bell's practice each day after luncheon was, in her own terminology, to "go into the silence and concentrate upon the thought of the All-Good." She was recalled from the psychic state on this afternoon, though happily not before a good half-hour, by Nancy's knock at her door.
She came in, cheerful, a small sheaf of papers in her hand. Aunt Bell, finding herself restored and amiable, sat up to listen.
Nancy threw herself on the couch, with the air of a woman about to chat confidentially from the softness of many gay pillows, dropping into the attitude of tranquil relaxation that may yet bristle with eager mental quills.
"The drollest thing, Aunt Bell! This morning instead of hearing Allan, I went up to that trunk-room and rummaged through the chest that has all those old papers and things of Grandfather Delcher's. And would you believe it? For an hour or more there, I was reading bits of his old sermons."
"But he was a Presbyterian!" In her tone and inflection Aunt Bell ably conveyed an exposition of the old gentleman's impossibility—lucidly allotting him to spiritual fellowship with the head-hunters of Borneo.
"I know it, but, Aunt Bell, those old sermons really did me good; all full of fire they were, too, but you felt a man back of them—a good man, a real man. You liked him, and it didn't matter that his terminology was at times a little eccentric. Grandfather's theology fitted the last days of his life about as crinoline and hoop-skirts would fit over there on the avenue to-day— but he always made me feel religious. It seemed sweet and good to be a Christian when he talked. With all his antiquated beliefs he never made me doubt as—as I doubt to-day. But it was another thing I wanted to show you—something I found—some old compositions of Bernal's that his grandfather must have kept. Here's one about birds—'jingle-birds, squeak-birds and clatter-birds.' No?—you wouldn't care for that?— well—listen to this."
She read the youthful Bernal's effort to rehabilitate the much-blemished reputation of Judas—a paper that had been curiously preserved by the old man.
"Poor Judas, indeed!" The novelty was not lost upon Aunt Bell, expert that she was in all obliquities from accepted tradition.
"The funny boy! Very ingenious, I'm sure. I dare say no one ever before said a good word for Judas since the day of his death, and this lad would canonise him out of hand. Think of it—St. Judas!"
Nancy lay back among the cushions, talking idly, inconsequently.
"You see, there was at least one man created, Aunt Bell, who could by no chance be saved—one man who had to betray the Son of Man—one man to be forever left out of the Christian scheme of salvation, even if every other in the world were saved. There had to be one man to disbelieve, to betray and to lie in hell for it, or the whole plan would have been frustrated. There was a theme for Dante, Aunt Bell—not the one soul in hell, but the other souls in heaven slowly awakening to the suffering of that one soul—to the knowledge that he was suffering in order that they might be saved. Do you think they would find heaven to be real heaven if they knew he was burning? And don't you think a poet could make some interesting talk between this solitary soul predestined to hell, and the God who planned the scheme?"
Aunt Bell looked bored and uttered a swift, low phrase that might have been "Fiddlesticks!"
"My dear, no one believes in hell nowadays."
"Does any one believe in anything?"
"Belief in the essentials of Christianity was never more apparent."
It was a treasured phrase from the morning's sermon.
"What are the essentials?"
"Belief that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son—you know as well as I, child—belief in the atoning blood of the Christ."
"Wouldn't it be awful, Aunt Bell, if you didn't believe in it, and had to be in hell because the serpent persuaded Eve and Eve persuaded Adam to eat the apple—that's the essential foundation of Christianity, isn't it?"
"Why, certainly—you must believe in original sin——"
"I see—here's a note in Bernal's hand, on one of these old papers—evidently written much later than the other: 'The old gentleman says Christmas is losing its deeper significance. What is it? That the Babe of Bethlehem was begotten by his Father to be a sacrifice to its Father—that its blood might atone for the sin of his first pair—and so save from eternal torment the offspring of that pair. God will no longer be appeased by the blood of lambs; nothing but the blood of his son will now atone for the sin of his own creatures. It seems to me the sooner Christmas loses this deeper significance the better. Poor old loving human nature gives it a much more beautiful significance.'"
"My dear," began Aunt Bell, "before I broadened into what I have called the higher unbelief, I should have considered that that young man had a positive genius for blasphemy; now that I have again come into the shadow of the cross, it seems to me that he merely lacks imagination."
"Poor Bernal! Yet he made me believe, though he seemed to believe in nothing himself. He makes me believe now. He calls to me, Aunt Bell—or is it myself calling to him that I hear?
"And blasphemy—even the word is ridiculous, Aunt Bell. I was at the day-nursery yesterday when all those babies were brought in to their dinner. They are strictly forbidden to coo or to make any noise, and they really behaved finely for two-and three-year-olds —though I did see one outlaw reach over before the signal was given and lovingly pat the big fat cookie beside its plate—thinking its insubordination would be overlooked—but, Aunt Bell, do you suppose one of those fifty-two babies could blaspheme you?"
"Don't be silly!"
"But can you imagine one of them capable of any disrespect to you that would merit—say, burning or something severe like that?"
"Of course not!"
"Well, don't you really believe that God is farther beyond you or me or the foolish boy that wrote this, than we are beyond those babies—with a greater, bigger point of view, a fuller love? Imagine the God that made everything—the worlds and birds and flowers and butterflies and babies and mountains—imagine him feeling insulted because one of his wretched little John Smiths or Bernal Linfords babbles little human words about him, or even worries his poor little human heart with doubts of His existence!"
"My child, yours is but a finite mind, unable to limit or define the Infinite. What is it, anyway—is it Christian Science taking hold of you, or that chap who preaches that they have the Messiah re-incarnated and now living in Syria—Babbists, aren't they—or is it theosophy— or are you simply dissatisfied with Allan?" A sudden shrewd glance from Aunt Bell's baby-blue eyes went with this last.
Nancy laughed, then grew serious. "I think the last is it, Aunt Bell. A woman seems to doubt God and everything else after she begins to doubt the husband she has loved. Really, I find myself questioning everything —every moral standard."
"Nance, you are an ungrateful woman to speak like that of Allan!"
"I never should have done it, dear, if you hadn't made me believe you knew. I should have thought it out all by myself, and then acted, if I found I could with any conscience."
"Eh? Mercy! You couldn't. The idea! And there's Allan, now. Come!"
The Doctor was on the threshold. "So here you are! Well, I've just sent Mrs. Eversley away in tears."
He dropped into an arm-chair with a little half-humorous moan of fatigue.
"It's a relief, sometimes, to know you can relax and let your whole weight absolutely down on to the broad earth!" he declared.
"Mrs. Eversley?" suggested Aunt Bell.
"Well, the short of it is, she told me her woes and begged me to give my sanction to her securing a divorce!"
Nancy sat up from her pillows. "Oh—and you did?"
"Nancy!" It was low, but clear, quick-spoken, stern, and hurt. "You forget yourself. At least you forget my view and the view of my Church. Even were I out of the Church, I should still regard marriage as a sacrament—indissoluble except by death. The very words—'Whom God hath joined'"—he became almost oratorical in his warmth—"Surely you would not expect me to use my influence in this parish to undermine the sanctity of the home—to attack our emblem of Christ's union with His Church!"
With reproach in his eyes—a reproach that in some way seemed to be bland and mellow, yet with a hurt droop to his handsome head, he went from the room. Nancy looked after him, longingly, wonderingly.
"The maddening thing is, Aunt Bell, that sometimes he actually has the power to make me believe in him. But, oh, doesn't Christ's union with his Church have some ghastly symbols!"
CHAPTER IX
Sinful Perverseness of the Natural Woman
Two months later a certain tension in the rectory of St. Antipas was temporarily relieved. Like the spring of a watch wound too tightly, it snapped one day at Nancy's declaration that she would go to Edom for a time—would go, moreover, without a reason—without so much as a woman's easy "because." This circumstance, while it froze in the bud every available objection to her course, quelled none of the displeasure that was felt at her woman's perversity.
Her decision was announced one morning after a sleepless night, and after she had behaved unaccountably for three days.
"You are not pleasing Allan," was Aunt Bell's masterly way of putting the situation. Nancy laughed from out of the puzzling reserve into which she had lately settled.
"So he tells me, Aunt Bell. He utters it with the air of telling me something necessarily to my discredit— yet I wonder whose fault it really is."
"Well, of all things!" Aunt Bell made no effort to conceal her amazement.
"It isn't necessarily mine, you know." Before the mirror she brought the veil nicely about the edge of her hat, with the strained and solemn absorption of a woman in this shriving of her reflection so that it may go out in peace.
"My failure to please Allan, you know, may as easily be due to his defects as to mine. I said so, but he only answered, 'Really, you're not pleasing me.' And, as he often says of his own predicaments—'What could I do?' But I'm glad he persists in it."
"Why, if you resent it so?"
"Because, Aunt Bell, I must be quite—quite certain that Allan is funny. It would be dreadful to make a mistake. If only I could be certain—positive—convinced— sure—that Allan is the funniest thing in all the world——"
"It never occurred to me that Allan is funny." Aunt Bell paused for an instant's retrospect. "Now, he doesn't joke much."
"One doesn't have to joke to be a joke, Aunt Bell."
"But what if he were funny? Why is that so important?"
"Oh, it's important because of the other thing that you know you know when you know that."
"Mercy! Child, you should have a cup of cocoa or something before you start off—really——"
The last long hatpin seemingly pierced the head of Nancy and she turned from the glass to fumble on her gloves.
"Aunt Bell, if Allan tells me once more in that hurt, gentle tone that I don't please him, I believe I shall be the freest of free women—ready to live."
She paused to look vacantly into the wall. "Sometimes, you know, I seem to wake up with a clear mind— but the day clouds it. We shouldn't believe so many falsities, Aunt Bell, if they didn't pinch our brains into it at a tender age. I should know Allan through and through at a glance to-day, if I met him for the first time; but he kneaded my poor girl's brain this way and that, till I'd have been done for, Aunt Bell, if some one else hadn't kneaded and patted it into other ways, so that little memories come back and stay with me— little bits of sweetness and genuineness—of realness, Aunt Bell."
"Nance, you are morbid—and I think you're wrong to go up there to be alone with your sick fancies—why are you going, Nance?"
"Aunt Bell, can I really trust you not to betray me? Will you promise to keep the secret if I actually tell you?"
Aunt Bell looked at once important and trustworthy, yet of an incorruptible propriety.
"I'm sure, my dear, you would not ask me to keep secret anything that your husband would be——"
"Dear, no! You can keep mum with a spotless conscience."
"Of course; I was sure of that!"
"What a fraud you are, Aunt Bell—you weren't sure at all—but I shall disappoint you. Now my reason——" She came close and spoke low——"My reason for going to Edom, whatever it is, is so utterly silly that I haven't even dared to tell myself—so, you see—my real reason for going is simply to find out what my reason really is. I'm dying to know. There! Now never say I didn't trust you."
In the first shock of this fall from her anticipations Aunt Bell neglected to remember that All is Good. Yet she was presently far enough mollified to accompany her niece to the station.
Returning from thence after she had watched Nancy through the gate to the 3:05 Edom local, Aunt Bell lingered at the open study door of the rector of St. Antipas. He looked up cordially.
"You know, Allan, it may do the child good, after all, to be alone a little while."
"Nancy—has—not—pleased—me!" The words were clean-cut, with an illuminating pause after each, so that Aunt Bell might by no chance mistake their import, yet the tone was low and not without a quality of winning sweetness—the tone of the injured good.
"I've seen that, Allan. Nance undoubtedly has a vein of selfishness. Instead of striving to please her husband, she—well, she has practically intimated to me that a wife has the right to please herself. Of course, she didn't say it brutally in just those words, but——"
"It's the modern spirit, Aunt Bell—the spirit of unbelief. It has made what we call the 'new woman' —that noxious flower on the stalk of scientific materialism."
He turned and wrote this phrase rapidly on a pad at his elbow, while Aunt Bell waited expectantly for more.
"There's a sermon that writes itself, Aunt Bell. ' Woman's deterioration under Modern Infidelity to God.' As truly as you live, this thing called the 'new woman' has grown up side by side with the thing called the higher criticism. And it's natural. Take away God's word as revealed in the Scriptures and you make woman a law unto herself. Man's state is then wretched enough, but contemplate woman's! Having put aside Christ's authority, she naturally puts aside man's, hence we have the creature who mannishly desires the suffrage and attends club meetings and argues, and has views— views, Aunt Bell, on the questions of the day—the woman who, as you have just succinctly said of your niece, 'believes she has a right to please herself!' There is the keynote of the modern divorce evil, Aunt Bell— she has a right to please herself. Believing no longer in God, she no longer feels bound by His commandment: 'Wives be subject to your husbands!' Why, Aunt Bell, if you can imagine Christianity shorn of all its other glories, it would still be the greatest religion the world has ever known, because it holds woman sternly in her sphere and maintains the sanctity of the home. Now, I know nothing of the real state of Nancy's faith, but the fact that she believes she has a right to please herself is enough to convince me. I would stake my right arm this moment, upon just this evidence, that Nancy has become an unbeliever. When I let her know as plainly as English words can express it that she is not pleasing me, she looks either sullen or flippant—thus showing distinctly a loss of religious faith."
"You ought to make a stunning sermon of that, Allan. I think society needs it."
"It does, Aunt Bell, it does! And we are going from bad to worse. I foresee the time in this very age of ours when no woman will continue to be wife to a man except by the dictates of her own lawless and corrupt nature—when a wife will make so-called love her only rule—when she will brazenly disregard the law of God and the word of his only begotten crucified Son, unless she can continue to feel what she calls 'love and respect' for the husband who chose her. We prize liberty, Aunt Bell, but liberty with woman has become license since she lost faith in the word of God that holds her subject to man. We should be thankful that the mother Church still stands firm on that rock—the rock of woman's subjection to man. Our own Church has quibbled, Aunt Bell, but look at the fine consistency of the Church of Rome. As truly as you live, the Catholic Church will one day hold the only women who subject themselves to their husbands in all things because of God's command—regardless of their anarchistic desire to 'please themselves.' There is the only Christian Church left that knows woman is a creature to be ruled with an iron hand—and has the courage to send them to hell for 'pleasing themselves.'"
He glowed in meditation a moment, then, in a burst of confidence, continued:
"This is not to be repeated, Aunt Bell, but I have more than once questioned if I should always allow the Anglo-Catholic Church to modify my true Catholicism. I have talked freely with Father Riley of St. Clements at our weekly ministers' meetings—there's a bright chap for you—and really, Aunt Bell, as to mere universality, the Church of Rome has about the only claim worth considering. Mind you, this is not to be repeated, but I am often so much troubled that I have to fall back on my simple childish faith in the love of the Father earned of him for me by the Son's death on the cross. But what if I err in making my faith too simple? Even now I am almost persuaded that a priest ordained into the Episcopal Church cannot consecrate the elements of the Eucharist in a sacrificial sense. Doubts like these are tragedies to an honest man, Aunt Bell—they try his soul—they bring him each day to the foot of that cross whereon the Son of God suffers his agony in order to ransom our souls from God's wrath with us—and there are times, Aunt Bell, when I find myself gazing longingly, like a little tired child, at the open arms of the mother Church—on whose loving bosom of authority a man may lay all his doubts and be never again troubled in his mind."
Aunt Bell sighed cheerfully.
"After all," she said briskly, "isn't Christianity the most fascinating of all beliefs, if one comes into it from the higher unbelief? Isn't it fine, Allan—doesn't the very thought excite you—that not only the souls of thousands now living, but thousands yet unborn, will be affected through all eternity for good or bad, by the clearness with which you, here at this moment, perceive and reason out these spiritual values—and the honesty with which you act upon your conclusions. How truly God has made us responsible for the souls of one another!"
The rector of St. Antipas shrugged modestly at this bald wording of his responsibility; then he sighed and bent his head as one honestly conscious of the situation's gravity.
CHAPTER X
The Reason of a Woman Who Had No Reason
It was not a jest—Nancy's telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself. At least such reticence to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner woman. Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a secret began to tell itself: at first in whispers, then low like a voice overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until all the noise of the train did no more than confuse the words so that only she could hear them.
When the exciting time of this listening had gone and she stepped from the train into the lazy spring silence of the village, her own heart spelled the thing in quick, loud, hammering beats—a thing which, now that she faced it, was so wildly impossible that her cheeks burned at the first second of actual realisation of its enormity; and her knees weakened in a deathly tremble, quite as if they might bend embarrassingly in either direction.
Then in the outer spaces of her mind there grew, to save her, a sense of her crass fatuity. She was quickly in a carriage, eager to avoid any acquaintance, glad the driver was no village familiar who might amiably seek to regale her with gossip. They went swiftly up the western road through its greening elms to where Clytie kept the big house—her own home while she lived, and the home of the family when they chose to go there.
At last, the silent, cool house with its secretive green shutters rose above her; the wheels made their little crisping over the fine metal of the driveway. She hastily paid the man and was at the side door that opened into the sitting-room. As she put her hand to the knob she was conscious of Clytie passing the window to open the door.
Then they were face to face over the threshold— Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with that fine wisdom.
She started back from the doorway by way of being playfully dramatic—her hands on her hips, her head to one side at an astounded angle. Yet little more than a second did she let herself simulate this welcoming incredulity—this stupefaction of cordiality. There must be quick speech—especially as to Nancy's face—which seemed strangely unfamiliar, set, suppressed, breathless, unaccountably young—and there had to be the splendid announcement of another matter.
"Why, child, is it you or your ghost?"
Nancy could only nod her head.
"My suz! what ails the child?"
Here the other managed a shake of the head and a made smile.
"And of all things!—you'll never, never, never guess!——"
"There—there!—yes, yes—yes! I know—know all about it—knew it—knew it last night——"
She had put out a hand toward Clytie and now reached the other from her side, easing herself to the doorpost against which she leaned and laughed, weakly, vacantly.
"Some one told you—on the way up?"
"Yes—I knew it, I tell you—that's what makes it so funny and foolish—why I came, you know——" She had now gained a little in coherence, and with it came a final doubt. She steadied herself in the doorway to ask—"When did Bernal come?"
And Clytie, somewhat relieved, became voluble.
"Night before last on the six-fifteen, and me getting home late from the Epworth meeting—fire out—not a stick of kindling-wood in—only two cakes in the buttery, neither of them a layer—not a frying-size chicken on the place—thank goodness he didn't have the appetite he used to—though in another way it's just downright heartbreaking to see a person you care for not be a ready eater—but I had some of the plum jell he used to like, and the good half of an apple-John which I at once het up—and I sent Mehitty Lykins down for some chops——"
"Where is he?"
There had seemed to be a choking in the question. Clytie regarded her curiously.
"He was lying down up in the study a while ago— kicking one foot up in the air against the wall, with his head nearly off the sofy onto the floor, just like he used to—there—that's his step——"
"I can't see him now! Here—let me go into your room till I freshen and rest a bit—quick——"
Once more the indecisive knees seemed about to bend either way under their burden. With an effort of will she drew the amazed Clytie toward the open door of the latter's bedroom, then closed it quickly, and stood facing her in the dusk of the curtained room.
"Clytie—I'm weak—it's so strange—actually weak— I shake so—Oh, Clytie—I've got to cry!"
There was a mutual opening of arms and a head on Clytie's shoulder, wet eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman's neck—and stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from head to foot—the next to leave it limp and falling. From the nursing shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her arms from that desperate grip of Clytie's neck. Long she held her so, even after the fit of weeping passed, clasping her with arms in which there was almost a savage intensity— arms that locked themselves more fiercely at any little stirring of the prisoned one.
At last, when she had lain quiet a long time, the grasp was suddenly loosened and Clytie was privileged to ease her aching neck and cramped shoulders. Then, even as she looked down, she heard from Nancy the measured soft breathing of sleep. She drew a curtain to shut out one last ray of light, and went softly from the room.
Two hours later, as Clytemnestra attained ultimate perfection in the arrangement of four glass dishes of preserves and three varieties of cake upon her table— for she still kept to the sinfully complex fare of the good old simple days—Nancy came out. Clytie stood erect to peer anxiously over the lamp at her.
"I'm all right—you were a dear to let me sleep. See how fresh I am."
"You do look pearter, child—but you look different from when you came. My suz! you looked so excited and kind of young when I opened that door, it give me a start for a minute—I thought I'd woke out of a dream and you was a Miss in short skirts again. But now— let me see you closer." She came around the table, then continued: "Well, you look fresh and sweet and some rested, and you look old and reasonable again— I mean as old as you had ought to look. I never did know you to act that way before, child. My neck ain't got the crick out of it yet."
"Poor old Clytie—but you see yesterday all day I felt queer—very queer, and wrought up, and last night I couldn't rest, and I lay awake and excited all night— and something seemed to give way when I saw you in the door. Of course it was nervousness, and I shall be all right now——"
She looked up and saw Bernal staring at her— standing in the doorway of the big room, his face shading into the dusk back of him. She went to him with both hands out and he kissed her.
"Is it Nance?"
"I don't know—but it's really Bernal."
"Clytie says you knew I had come."
"Clytie must have misunderstood. No one even intimated such a thing. I came up to-day—I had to come—because—if I had known you were here, wouldn't I have brought Allan?"
"Of course I was going to let you know, and come down in a few days—there was some business to do here. Dear old Allan! I'm aching to get a stranglehold on him!"
"Yes—he'll be so glad—there's so much to say!"
"I didn't know whom I should find here."
"We've had Clytie look after both houses—sometimes we've rented mine—and almost every summer we've come here."
"You know I didn't dream I was rich until I got here. The lawyer says they've advertised, but I've been away from everything most of the time—not looking out for advertisements. I can't understand the old gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a thoroughly decent chap."
"Oh, hardly a reprobate!"
"Worse, Nance—an ass—think of my talking to that dear old soul as I did—taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith. I shudder when I remember it. And yet I honestly thought he might be made to see things my way."
Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of their last parting —that singular moment when they blindly groped for each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all time since—and increasingly during the later years—secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled —those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other—faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty.
Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind. Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp—the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.
They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot.
Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.
As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman—listening, waiting, judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.
Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together—with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.
Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered her way to womanhood. Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her dreaming girlhood must be to the present. Should she enter it, she knew the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled rooms.
And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy. Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal's devising had frightened them for the last time—when in a sudden flash of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding. One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child's faith in the Gratcher. He had replied that, as an institution, the Gratcher was imperishable—that it was brute humanity's instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child's Gratcher was not the man's, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity: that the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter him when he hears God's call to live.
She had not been able to understand, nor did she now. She was looking out to the two trees where once her hammock had swung—to the rustic chair, now falling apart from age, from which Bernal had faced her that last evening. Then with a start she was back in the present. Nancy of the old days must be shut fat in the old house. There she might wander and wonder endlessly among the echoes and the half-seen faces, but never could she come forth; over the threshold there could pass only the wife of Allan Linford.
Quick upon this realisation came a sharp fear of the man beside her—a fear born of his hand's hold upon hers when they had met. She shrank under the memory of it, with a sudden instinct of the hunted. Then from her new covert of reserve she dared to peer cautiously at him, seeking to know how great was her peril —to learn what measure of defense would best insure her safety—recognising fearfully the traitor in her own heart.
Their first idle talk had died, and she noted with new alarm that they had been silent for many minutes. This could not safely be—this insidious, barrier-destroying silence. She seemed to hear his heart beating high from his own sense of peril. But would he help her? Would he not rather side with that wretched traitor within her, crying out for the old days—would he not still be the proud fool who would suffer no man's law but his own? She shivered at the thought of his nearness—of his momentous silence—of his treacherous ally.
She stirred in her chair to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen and dining-room. Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction. For a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer terror. Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving fearful point to them now? Would the old eager hand come again upon hers with a boy's pleading and a man's power? And what of her own secret guilt? She had cherished the memory of him and across space had responded to him through that imperious need of her heart. Swiftly in this significant moment she for the first time saw herself with critical eyes—saw that in her fancied security she had unwittingly enthroned the hidden traitor. More and more poignant grew her apprehension as she felt his eyes upon her and divined that he was about to speak. With a little steadying of the lips, with eyes that widened at him in the dim light, she waited for the sound of his voice—waited as one waits for something "terrible and dear"—the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or pass—to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against elemental forces.
"Would you mind if I smoked, Nance?"
She stared stupidly. So tense had been her strain that the words were mere meaningless blows that left her quivering. He thought she had not heard.
"Would you mind my pipe—and this very mild mixture?"
She blessed him for the respite.
"Smoke, of course!" she managed to say.
She watched him closely, still alert, as he stuffed the tobacco into his pipe-bowl from a rubber pouch. Then he struck the match and in that moment she suffered another shock. The little flame danced out of the darkness, and wavering, upward shadows played over a face of utter quietness. The relaxed shoulders drooped sideways in the chair, the body placidly sprawled, one crossed leg gently waving. The shaded eye surveyed some large and tranquil thought—and in that eye the soul sat remote, aloof from her as any star.
She sank back in her chair with a long, stealthy breath of relief—a relief as cold as stone. She had not felt before that there was a chill in the wide sweetness of the night. Now it wrapped her round and slowly, with a soft brutality, penetrated to her heart.
The silence grew too long. With a shrugging effort she surmounted herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in the gloom. A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her. Her intellect awoke to inquiries. She began to question him of his days away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.
"You know, Nance, I was a prodigal—only when I awoke I had no father to go to. Poor grandad! What a brutal cub I was! That has always stuck in my mind. I was telling you about that cold wet night in Denver. I had found a lodging in the police station. There were others as forlorn—and Nance—did you ever realise the buoyancy of the human mind? It's sublime. We rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us. You would have thought that none of them could fear bad luck—worse luck—none of them could have been more dismally situated. But, do you know? most of those fellows became nervous—as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been pampered princes in a time of revolution. I was one of the two that volunteered to restore confidence by bringing in another man.
"We found an undersized, insignificant-looking chap toddling aimlessly along the street a few blocks away from the station. We grappled with him and hustled him back to the crowd. He slept with us on the floor, and no one paid any further attention to him, except to remark that he talked to himself a good bit. He and I awoke earliest next morning. I asked him if he was hungry and he said he was. So I bought two fair breakfasts with the money I'd saved for one good one, and we started out of town. This chap said he was going that way, and I had made up my mind to find a certain friend of mine—a chap named Hoover. The second day out I discovered that this queer man was the one who'd been turning Denver upside down for ten days, healing the halt and the blind. He was running away because he liked a quieter life."
He stopped, laughing softly, as if in remembrance— until she prompted him.
"Yes, he said, 'Father' had commanded him to go into the wilderness to fast. He was always talking familiarly with 'Father,' as we walked. So I stayed by him longer than I meant to—he seemed so helpless— and I happened at that time to be looking for the true God."
"Did you find him, Bernal?"
"Oh, yes!"
"In this strange man?"
"In myself. It's the same old secret, Nance, that people have been discovering for ages—but it is a secret only until after you learn it for yourself. The only true revelation from God is here in man—in the human heart. I had to be years alone to find it out, Nance— I'd had so much of that Bible mythology stuffed into me—but I mustn't bore you with it."
"Oh, but I must know, Bernal—you don't dream how greatly I need at this moment to believe something— more than you ever did!"
"It's simple, Nance. It's the only revelation in which the God of yesterday gives willing place to the better God of to-day—only here does the God of to-day say, 'Thou shalt have no other God before me but the God of to-morrow who will be more Godlike than I. Only in this way can we keep our God growing always a little beyond us—so that to-morrow we shall not find ourselves surpassing him as the first man you would meet out there on the street surpasses the Christian God even in the common virtues. That was the fourth dimension of religion that I wanted, Nance—faith in a God that a fearless man could worship."
He lighted his pipe again, and as the match blazed up she saw the absent look still in his eyes. By it she realised how far away from her he was—realised it with a little sharp sense of desolation. He smoked a while before speaking.
"Out there in the mountains, Nance, I thought about these things a long time—the years went before I knew it. At first I stayed with this healing chap, only after a while he started back to teach again and they found him dead. He believed he had a mission to save the world, and that he would live until he accomplished it. But there he was, dead for want of a little food. Then I stayed a long time alone—until I began to feel that I, too, had something for the world. It began to burn in my bones. I thought of him, dead and the world not caring that he hadn't saved it—not even knowing it was lost. But I kept thinking—a man can be so much more than himself when he is alone—and it seemed to me that I saw at least two things the world needed to know —two things that would teach men to stop being cowards and leaners."
Her sympathy was quick and ardent.
"Oh, Bernal," she said warmly, "you made me believe when you believed nothing—and now, when I need it above all other times, you make me believe again! And you've come back with a message! How glorious!"
He smiled musingly.
"I started with one, Nance—one that had grown in me all those years till it filled my life and made me put away everything. I didn't accept it at first. It found me rebellious—wanting to live on the earth. Then there came a need to justify myself—to show that I was not the mere vicious unbeliever poor grandad thought me. And so I fought to give myself up—and I won. I found the peace of the lone places."
His voice grew dreamy—ceased, as if that peace were indeed too utter for words. Then with an effort he resumed:
"But after a while the world began to rumble in my ears. A man can't cut himself off from it forever. God has well seen to that! As the message cleared in my mind, there grew a need to give it out. This seemed easy off there. The little puzzles that the world makes so much of solved themselves for me. I saw them to be puzzles of the world's own creating—all artificial—all built up—fashioned clumsily enough from man's brute fear of the half-God, half-devil he has always made in his own image.
"But now that I'm here, Nance, I find myself already a little bewildered. The solution of the puzzles is as simple as ever, but the puzzles themselves are more complex as I come closer to them—so complex that my simple answer will seem only a vague absurdity."
He paused and she felt his eyes upon her—felt that he had turned from his abstractions to look at her more personally.
"Even since meeting you, Nance," he went on with an odd, inward note in his voice, "I've been wondering if Hoover could by some chance have been right. When I left, Hoover said I was a fool—a certain common variety of fool."
"Oh, I'm sure you're not—at least, not the common kind. I dare say that a man must be a certain kind of fool to think he can put the world forward by leaps and bounds. I think he must be a fool to assume that the world wants truth when it wants only to be assured that it has already found the truth for itself. The man who tells it what it already believes is never called a fool— and perhaps he isn't. Indeed, I've come to think he is less than a fool—that he's a mere polite echo. But oh, Bernal, hold to your truth! Be the simple fool and worry the wise in the cages they have built around themselves."
She was leaning eagerly forward, forgetful of all save that her starved need was feasting royally.
"Don't give up; don't parrot the commoner fool's conceits back to him for the sake of his solemn approval. Let those of his kind give him what he wants, while you meet those who must have more. I'm one of them, Bernal. At this moment I honestly don't know whether I'm a bad woman or a good one. And I'm frightened— I'm so defenseless! Some little soulless circumstance may make me decisively good or bad—and I don't want to be bad! But give me what I want—I must have that, regardless of what it makes me."
He was silent for a time, then at last spoke:
"I used to think you were a rebel, Nance. Your eyes betrayed it, and the corners of your mouth went up the least little bit, as if they'd go further up before they went down—as if you'd laugh away many solemn respectabilities. But that's not bad. There are more things to laugh at than are dreamed of. That's Hoover's entire creed, by the way."
She remembered the name from that old tale of Caleb Webster's.
"Is—is this friend of yours—Mr. Hoover—in good health?"
"Fine—weighs a hundred and eighty. He and I have a ranch on the Wimmenuche—only Hoover's been doing most of the work while I thought about things. I see that. Hoover says one can't do much for the world but laugh at it. He has a theory of his own. He maintains that God set this planet whirling, then turned away for a moment to start another universe or something. He says that when the Creator glances back at us again, to find this poor, scrubby little earth-family divided over its clod, the strong robbing the weak in the midst of plenty for all—enslaving them to starve and toil and fight, spending more for war than would keep the entire family in luxury; that when God looks closer, in his amazement, and finds that, next to greed, the matter of worshipping Him has made most of the war and other deviltry—the hatred and persecution and killing among all the little brothers—he will laugh aloud before he reflects, and this little ballful of funny, passionate insects will be blown to bits. He says if the world comes to an end in his lifetime, he will know God has happened to look this way, and perhaps overheard a bishop say something vastly important about Apostolic succession or the validity of the Anglican Orders or Transubstantiation or 'communion in two kinds' or something. He insists that a sense of humour is our only salvation—that only those will be saved who happen to be laughing for the same reason that God laughs when He looks at us—that the little Mohammedans and Christians and things will be burned for their blasphemy of believing God not wise and good enough to save them all, Mohammedan and Christian alike, though not thinking excessively well of either; that only those laughing at the whole gory nonsense will go into everlasting life by reason of their superior faith in God."
"Of course that's plausible, and yet it's radical. Hoover's father was a bishop, and I think Hoover is just a bit narrow from early training. He can't see that lots of people who haven't a vestige of humour are nevertheless worth saving. I admit that saving them will be a thankless task. God won't be able to take very much pleasure in it, but in strict justice he will do it—even if Hoover does regard it as a piece of extravagant sentimentality."
A little later she went in. She left him gazing far off into the night, filled with his message, dull to memory on the very scene that evoked in her own heart so much from the old days. And as she went she laughed inwardly at a certain consternation the woman of her could not wholly put down; for she had blindly hurled herself against a wall—the wall of his message. But it was funny, and the message chained her interest. She could, she thought, strengthen his resolution to give it out—help him in a thousand ways.
As she fell asleep the thought of him hovered and drifted on her heart softly, as darkness rests on tired eyes.