← catalogue

The Puritans

by Arlo Bates · English · Gutenberg #8522 · 656,949 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Puritans
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Puritans

Author: Arlo Bates


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8522]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8522

Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, ckirschner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PURITANS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, ckirschner and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team












                  The Puritans


                      By


                   Arlo Bates


 The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
                                    _All's Well That Ends Well_, iv. 3.





"Abandoning my heart, and rapt in ecstasy, I ran after her till I came
to a place in which religion and reason forsook me."
                                  _Persian Religious Hymn.




                  CONTENTS


      I. AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT
     II. THERE BEGINS CONFUSION
    III. AS FALSE AS STAIRS OF SAND
     IV. SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE
      V. VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE
     VI. HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY
    VII. THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT
   VIII. LIKE COVERED FIRE
     IX. HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH
      X. A SYMPATHY OF WOE
     XI. IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING
    XII. THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE
   XIII. A NECESSARY EVIL
    XIV. HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY
     XV. HEARTSICK WITH THOUGHT
    XVI. THE GREAT ASSAY OF ART
   XVII. A BOND OF AIR
  XVIII. CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH
    XIX. 'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL
     XX. IN WAY OF TASTE
    XXI. THIS "WOULD" CHANGES
   XXII. THE BITTER PAST
  XXIII. THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME
   XXIV. FAREWELL AT ONCE, FOR ONCE, FOR ALL, AND EVER
    XXV. WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED
   XXVI. O WICKED WIT AND GIFT
  XXVII. UPON A CHURCH BENCH
 XXVIII. BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE
   XXIX. WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE
    XXX. PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP
   XXXI. HOW CHANCES MOCK
  XXXII. NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS
 XXXIII. A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN
  XXXIV. WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED
   XXXV. THE WORLD IS STILL DECEIVED
  XXXVI. THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
 XXXVII. THIS IS NOT A BOON




                   THE PURITANS




                       I


             AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT
                         Henry VIII., i. 3.


"We are all the children of the Puritans," Mrs. Herman said smiling.
"Of course there is an ethical strain in all of us."

Her cousin, Philip Ashe, who wore the dress of a novice from the Clergy
House of St. Mark, regarded her with a serious and doubtful glance.

"But there is so much difference between you and me," he began. Then he
hesitated as if not knowing exactly how to finish his sentence.

"The difference," she responded, "is chiefly a matter of the difference
between action and reaction. You and I come of much the same stock
ethically. My childhood was oppressed by the weight of the Puritan
creed, and the reaction from it has made me what you feel obliged to
call heretic; while you, with a saint for a mother, found even
Puritanism hardly strict enough for you, and have taken to
semi-monasticism. We are both pushed on by the same original impulse:
the stress of Puritanism."

She had been putting on her gloves as she spoke, and now rose and stood
ready to go out. Philip looked at her with a troubled glance, rising
also.

"I hardly know," said he slowly, "if it's right for me to go with you.
It would have been more in keeping if I adhered to the rules of the
Clergy House while I am away from it."

Mrs. Herman smiled with what seemed to him something of the tolerance
one has for the whim of a child.

"And what would you be doing at the Clergy House at this time of day?"
she asked. "Wouldn't it be recreation hour or something of the sort?"

He looked down. He never found himself able to be entirely at ease in
answering her questions about the routine of the Clergy House.

"No," he answered. "The half hour of recreation which follows Nones
would just be ended."

His cousin laughed confusingly.

"Well, then," she rejoined, "begin it over again. Tell your confessor
that the woman tempted you, and you did sin. You are not in the Clergy
House just now; and as I have taken the trouble to ask leave to carry
you to Mrs. Gore's this afternoon, more because you wanted to see this
Persian than because I cared about it, it is rather late for
objections."

Philip raised his eyes to her face only to meet a glance so quizzical
that he hastened to avoid it by going to the hall to don his cloak; and
a few moments later they were walking up Beacon Hill.

It was one of those gloriously brilliant winter days by which Boston
weather atones in an hour for a week of sullenness. Snow lay in a thin
sheet over the Common, and here and there a bit of ice among the
tree-branches caught the light like a glittering jewel. The streets
were dotted with briskly gliding sleighs, the jingle of whose bells
rang out joyously. The air was full of a vigor which made the blood
stir briskly in the veins.

Philip had not for years found himself in the street with a woman.
Seldom, indeed, was he abroad with a companion, except as he took the
walk prescribed in the monastic regime with his friend, Maurice Wynne.
For the most part he went his way alone, occupied in pious
contemplation, shutting himself stubbornly in from outward sights and
sounds. Now he was confused and unsettled. Since a fire had a week
earlier scattered the dwellers in the Clergy House, and sent him to the
home of his cousin, he had gone about like one bewildered. The world
into which he was now cast was as unknown to him as if he had passed
the two years spent at St. Mark's in some far island of the sea. To be
in the street with a lady; to be on his way to hear he knew not what
from the lips of a Persian mystic; to have in his mind memory of light
talk and pleasant story; all these things made him feel as if he were
drifting into a strange unknown sea of worldliness.

Yet his feeling was not entirely one of fear or of reluctance.
Sensitive to the tips of his fingers, he felt the influences of the
day, the sweetness of his cousin's laughter, the beauty of her face. He
was exhilarated by a strange intoxication. He was conscious that more
than one passer looked curiously at them as, he in his cassock and she
in her furs, they walked up Beacon Street. He felt as in boyhood he had
felt when about to embark in some adventure to childhood strange and
daring.

"It is a beautiful day," he said involuntarily.

"Yes," Mrs. Herman answered. "It is almost a pity to spend it indoors.
But here we are."

They had come into Mt. Vernon Street, and now turned in at a fine old
house of gray stone.

"Is there any discussion at these meetings?" he asked, as they waited
for the door to be opened.

"Oh, yes; often there is a good deal. You'll have ample opportunity to
protest against the heresies of the heathen."

"I do not come here to speak," he replied, rather stiffly. "I only come
to get some idea of how the oriental mind works."

He felt her smile to be that of one amused at him, but he could not see
why she should be.

"I must give you one caution," she went on, as they entered the house.
"It's the same that the magicians give to those who are present at
their incantations. Be careful not to pronounce sacred words."

"But don't they use them?"

"Oh, abundantly; but they know how to use them in a fashion understood
only by the initiated, so that they are harmless."

They passed up the wide staircase of Mrs. Gore's handsome, if
over-furnished house. They were shown into the drawing-room, where they
were met by the hostess, a tall, superb woman of commanding presence,
her head crowned with masses of snow-white hair. Coming in from the
brilliant winter sunlight, Philip could not at first distinguish
anything clearly. He went mechanically through his presentation to the
hostess and to the Persian who was to address the meeting, and then
sank into a seat. He looked curiously at the Persian, struck by the
picturesque appearance of the long snow-white beard, fine as silk,
which flowed down over the rich robe of the seer. The face was to
Philip an enigma. To understand a foreign face it is necessary to have
learned the physiognomy of the people to which it belongs, as to
comprehend their speech it is necessary to have mastered their
language. As he knew not whether the countenance of the old man
attracted or repelled him more, and could only decide that at least it
had a strange fascination.

Suddenly Ashe felt his glance called up by a familiar presence, and to
his surprise saw his friend, Maurice Wynne, come into the room,
accompanied by a stately, bright-eyed woman who was warmly greeted by
Mrs. Gore. He wondered at the chance which had brought Maurice here as
well as himself; but the calling of the meeting to order attracted his
thoughts back to the business of the moment.

The Persian was the latest ethical caprice of Boston. He had come by
the invitation of Mrs. Gore to bring across the ocean the knowledge of
the mystic truths contained in the sacred writings of his country; and
his ministrations were being received with that beautiful seriousness
which is so characteristic of the town. In Boston there are many
persons whose chief object in life seems to be the discovery of novel
forms of spiritual dissipation. The cycle of mystic hymns which the
Persian was expounding to the select circle of devotees assembled at
Mrs. Gore's was full of the most sensual images, under which the
inspired Persian psalmists had concealed the highest truth. Indeed,
Ashe had been told that on one occasion the hostess had been obliged to
stop the reading on the ground that an occidental audience not
accustomed to anything more outspoken than the Song of Solomon, and
unused to the amazing grossness of oriental symbolism, could not listen
to the hymn which he was pouring forth. Fortunately Philip had chanced
upon a day when the text was harmless, and he could hear without
blushing, whether he were spiritually edified or not.

The Persian had a voice of exquisite softness and flexibility. His
every word was like a caress. There are voices which so move and stir
the hearer that they arouse an emotion which for the moment may
override reason; voices which appeal to the senses like beguiling
music, and which conquer by a persuasive sweetness as irresistible as
it is intangible. The tones of the Persian swayed Ashe so deeply that
the young man felt as if swimming on a billow of melody. Philip
regarded as if fascinated the slender, dusky fingers of the reader as
they handled the splendidly illuminated parchment on which glowed
strange characters of gold, marvelously intertwined with leaf and
flower, and cunning devices in gleaming hues. He looked into the deep,
liquid eyes of the old man, and saw the light in them kindle as the
reading proceeded. He felt the dignity of the presence of the seer, and
the richness of his flowing garment; but all these things were only the
fitting accompaniments to that beautiful voice, flowing on like a topaz
brook in a meadow of daffodils.

The Persian spoke admirable English, only now and then by a slight
accent betraying his nationality. He made a short address upon the
antiquity of the hymn which he was that day to expound, its authorship,
and its evident inspiration. Then in his wonderful voice he read:--



                THE HYMN OF ISMAT.


Yesterday, half inebriated, I passed by the quarters where the vintners
dwell, to seek the daughter of an infidel who sells wine.

At the end of the street, there advanced before me a damsel, with a
fairy's cheeks, who in the manner of a pagan wore her tresses
dishevelled over her shoulders like a sacerdotal thread. I said: "O
thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave, what
quarter is this, and where is thy mansion?"

She answered: "Cast thy rosary to the ground; bind on thy shoulder the
thread of paganism; throw stones at the glass of piety; and quaff from
a full goblet."

"After that come before me that I may whisper a word in thine
ear;--thou wilt accomplish thy journey if thou listen to my discourse."

Abandoning my heart, and rapt in ecstasy, I ran after her until I came
to a place in which religion and reason forsook me.

At a distance I beheld a company all insane and inebriated, who came
boiling and roaring with ardor from the wine of love.

Without cymbals or lutes or viols, yet all filled with mirth and
melody; without wine or goblet or flagon, yet all incessantly drinking.

When the cord of restraint slipped from my hand, I desired to ask her
one question, but she said: "Silence!"

"This is no square temple to the gate of which thou canst arrive
precipitately; this is no mosque to which thou canst come with tumult,
but without knowledge. This is the banquet-house of infidels, and
within it all are intoxicated; all from the dawn of eternity to the day
of resurrection lost in astonishment."

"Depart thou from the cloister and take thy way to the tavern; cast off
the cloak of a dervish, and wear the robe of a libertine."

I obeyed; and if thou desirest the same strain and color as Ismat,
imitate him, and sell this world and the next for one drop of pure wine!

The company sat in absorbed silence while the reading went on. Nothing
could be more perfect than the listening of a well-bred Boston
audience, whether it is interested or not. The exquisitely modulated
voice of the Persian flowed on like the tones of a magic flute, and the
women sat as if fascinated by its spell.

When the reading was finished, and the Persian began to comment upon
the spiritual doctrine embodied in it, Ashe sat so completely absorbed
in reverie that he gave no heed to what was being said. In his ascetic
life at the Clergy House he had been so far removed from the sensuous,
save for that to which the services of the church appealed, that this
enervating and luxurious atmosphere, this gathering to which its
quasi-religious character seemed to lend an excuse, bred in him a
species of intoxication. He sat like a lotus-eater, hearing not so much
the words of the speaker as his musical voice, and half-drowned in the
pleasure of the perfumed air, the rich colors of the room, the
Persian's dress, the illuminated scroll, in the subtile delight of the
presence of women, and all those seductive charms of the sense from
which the church defended him.

The Persian, Mirza Gholan Rezah, repeated in his flute-like voice: "'O
thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave;'" and,
hearing the words as in a dream, Philip Ashe looked across the little
circle to see a woman whose beauty smote him so strongly that he drew a
quick breath. To his excited mood it seemed as if the phrase were
intended to describe that beautifully curved brow, brown against the
fair skin, and in his heart he said over the words with a thrill: "'O
thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave!'" Half
unconsciously, and as if he were taken possession of by a will stronger
than his own, he found himself noting the soft curve and flush of a
woman's cheek, the shell-texture of her ear, and the snowy whiteness of
her throat. She sat in the full light of the window behind him, leaning
as she listened against a pedestal of ebony which upheld the bronze
bust of a satyr peering down at her with wrinkled eyes; her throat was
displayed by the backward bend of her head, and showed the whiter by
contrast with the black gown she wore. Philip's breath came more
quickly, and his head seemed to swim. Sensitive to beauty, and starved
by asceticism, he was in a moment completely overcome.

Suddenly he felt the regard of his friend Maurice resting upon him with
a questioning glance, and it was as if the thought of his heart were
laid bare. Philip made a strong effort, and fixed his look and his
attention upon the speaker, who was deep in oriental mysticism.

"It is written in the Desatir," Mirza Gholan Rezah was saying, "that
purity is of two kinds, the real and the formal. 'The real consists in
not binding the heart to evil: the formal in cleansing away what
appears evil to the view.' The ultimate spirit, that inner flame from
the treasure-house of flames, is not affected by the outward, by the
apparent. What though the outer man fall into sin? What though he throw
stones at the glass of piety and quaff the wine of sensuality from a
full goblet? The flame within the tabernacle is still pure and
undefined because it is undefilable."

Ashe looked around the circle in astonishment, wondering if it were
possible that in a Christian civilization these doctrines could be
proclaimed without rebuke. His neighbors sat in attitudes of close
attention; they were evidently listening, but their faces showed no
indignation. On the lips of Wynne Philip fancied he detected a faint
curl of derisive amusement, but nowhere else could he perceive any
display of emotion, unless--He had avoided looking at the lady in
black, feeling that to do so were to play with temptation; but the
attraction was too strong for him, and he glanced at her with a look of
which the swiftness showed how strongly she affected him. It seemed to
him that there was a faint flush of indignation upon her face; and he
cast down his eyes, smitten by the conviction that there was an
intimate sympathy between his feeling and hers.

"This is the word of enlightenment which the damsel, the
personification of wisdom, whispered into the ear of the seeker,"
continued the persuasive voice of the Persian. "It is the heart-truth
of all religion. It is the word which initiates man into the divine
mysteries. 'Thou wilt accomplish thy journey if thou listen to my
discourse.' Life is affected by many accidents; but none of them
reaches the godhead within. The divine inebriation of spiritual truth
comes with the realization of this fact. The flame within man, which is
above his consciousness, is not to be touched by the acts of the body.
These things which men call sin are not of the slightest feather-weight
to the soul in the innermost tabernacle. It is of no real consequence,"
the speaker went on, warming with his theme until his velvety eyes
shone, "what the outer man may do. We waste our efforts in this
childish care about apparent righteousness. The real purity is above
our acts. Let the man do what he pleases; the soul is not thereby
touched or altered."

Ashe sat upright in his chair, hardly conscious where he was. It seemed
to him monstrous to remain acquiescent and to hear without protest this
juggling with the souls of men. The instinct to save his fellows which
underlies all genuine impulse toward the priesthood was too strong in
him not to respond to the challenge which every word of the Persian
offered. Almost without knowing it, he found himself interrupting the
speaker.

"If that is the teaching of the Persian scriptures," he said, "it is
impious and wicked. Even were it true that there were a flame from the
Supreme dwelling within us, unmanifested and undeniable, it is
evidently not with this that we have to do in our earthly life. It is
with the soul of which we are conscious, the being which we do know.
This may be lost by defilement. To this the sin of the body is death.
I, I myself, I, the being that is aware of itself, am no less the one
that is morally responsible for what is done in the world by me."

Led away by his strong feeling, Philip began vehemently; but the
consciousness of the attention of all the company, and of the searching
look of Mirza, made the ardent young man falter. He was a stranger,
unaccustomed to the ways of these folk who had come together to play
with the highest truths as they might play with tennis-balls. He felt a
sudden chill, as if upon his hot enthusiasm had blown an icy blast.

Yet when he cast a glance around as if in appeal, he saw nothing of
disapproval or of scorn. He had evidently offended nobody by his
outburst. He ventured to look at the unknown in black, and she rewarded
him with a glance so full of sympathy that for an instant he lost the
thread of what the Persian, in tones as soft and unruffled as ever, was
saying in reply to his words. He gathered himself up to hear and to
answer, and there followed a discussion in which a number of those
present joined; a discussion full of cleverness and the adroit handling
of words, yet which left Philip in the confusion of being made to
realize that what to him were vital truths were to those about him
merely so many hypotheses upon which to found argument. There were more
women than men present, and Ashe was amazed at their cleverness and
their shallow reasoning; at the ease and naturalness with which they
played this game of intellectual gymnastics, and at the apparent
failure to pierce to anything like depth. It was evident that while
everything was uttered with an air of the most profound seriousness, it
would not do to be really in earnest. He began to understand what Helen
had meant when she warned him not to pronounce sacred words in this
strange assembly.

When the meeting broke up, the ladies rose to exchange greetings, to
chat together of engagements in society and such trifles of life. Ashe,
still full of the excitement of what he had done, followed his cousin
out of the drawing-room in silence. As they were descending the wide
staircase, some one behind said:--

"Are you going away without speaking to me, Helen?"

Ashe and Mrs. Herman both turned, and found themselves face to face
with the lady in black, who stood on the broad landing.

"My dear Edith," Mrs. Herman answered, "I am so little used to this
sort of thing that I didn't know whether it was proper to stop to speak
with one's friends. I thought that we might be expected to go out as if
we'd been in church. I came only to bring my cousin. May I present Mr.
Ashe; Mrs. Fenton."

"I was so glad that you said what you did this afternoon, Mr. Ashe,"
Mrs. Fenton said, extending her hand. "I felt just as you did, and I
was rejoiced that somebody had the courage to protest against that
dreadful paganism."

Philip was too shy and too enraptured to be able to reply intelligibly,
but as they were borne forward by the tide of departing guests he was
spared the need of answer. At the foot of the stairway he was stopped
again by Maurice Wynne, and presented to Mrs. Staggchase, his friend's
cousin and hostess for the time being; but his whole mind was taken up
by the image of Mrs. Fenton, and in his ears like a refrain rang the
words of the Persian hymn: "O thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the
new moon is a slave!"



                         II


                THERE BEGINS CONFUSION
                          Henry VI., iv. 1.


That afternoon at Mrs. Gore's had been no less significant to Maurice
Wynne than to Philip Ashe. His was a less spiritual, less highly
wrought nature, but in the effect which the change from the atmosphere
of the Clergy House to the Persian's lecture had upon him, the
experience of Maurice was much the same. He too was attracted by a
woman. He gave his thoughts up to the woman much more frankly than
would have been possible for his friend. She was young, perhaps twenty,
and exquisite with clear skin and soft, warm coloring. Her wide-open
eyes were as dark and velvety as the broad petals of a pansy with the
dew still on them; her cheeks were tinged with a hue like that which
spreads in a glass of pure water into which has fallen a drop of red
wine; her forehead was low and white, and from it her hair sprang up in
two little arches before it fell waving away over her temples; her lips
were pouting and provokingly suggestive of kisses. The whole face was
of the type which comes so near to the ideal that the least
sentimentality of expression would have spoiled it. Happily the big
eyes and the ripe, red mouth were both suggestive of demure humor.
There was a mirthful air about the dimple which came and went in the
left cheek like Cupid peeping mischievously from the folds of his
mother's robe. A boa of long-haired black fur lay carelessly about her
neck, pushed back so that a touch of red and gold brocade showed where
she had loosened her coat. Maurice noted that she seemed to care as
little for the lecture as he did, and he gave himself up to the delight
of watching her.

When the company broke up Mrs. Staggchase spoke almost immediately to
the beautiful creature who so charmed him.

"How do you do, Miss Morison," Mrs. Staggchase said; "I must say that I
am surprised that cousin Anna brought you to a place where the doctrine
is so far removed from mind-cure. My dear Anna," she continued, turning
to a lady whom Wynne knew by name as Mrs. Frostwinch and as an
attendant at the Church of the Nativity, "you are a living miracle. You
know you are dead, and you have no business consorting with the living
in this way."

"It is those whom you call dead that are really living," Mrs.
Frostwinch retorted smiling. "I brought Berenice so that she might see
the vanity of it all."

Mrs. Staggchase presented Maurice to the ladies, and after they had
spoken on the stairs with one and another acquaintance, and Maurice had
exchanged a word with his friend Ashe, it chanced that the four left
the house together. Wynne found himself behind with Miss Morison, while
his cousin and Mrs. Frostwinch walked on in advance. He was seized with
a delightful sense of elation at his position, yet so little was he
accustomed to society that he knew not what to say to her. He was
keenly aware that she was glancing askance at his garb, and after a
moment of silence he broke out abruptly in the most naively unconscious
fashion:--

"I am a novice at the Clergy House of St. Mark."

A beautiful color flushed up in Miss Morison's dark cheek; and Wynne
realized how unconventional he had been in replying to a question which
had not been spoken.

"Is it a Catholic order?" she asked, with an evident effort not to look
confused.

"It is not Roman," he responded. "We believe that it is catholic."

"Oh," said she vaguely; and the conversation lapsed.

They walked a moment in silence, and then Maurice made another effort.

"Has Mrs. Frostwinch been ill?" he asked. "Mrs. Staggchase spoke of her
as a miracle."

"Ill!" echoed Miss Morison; "she has been wholly given up by the
physicians. She has some horrible internal trouble; and a consultation
of the best doctors in town decided that she could not live a week.
That was two months ago."

"But I don't understand," he said in surprise. "What happened?"

"A miracle," the other replied smiling. "You believe in miracles, of
course."

"But what sort of a miracle?"

"Faith-cure."

"Faith-cure!" repeated he in astonishment. "Do you mean that Mrs.
Frostwinch has been raised from a death-bed by that sort of jugglery?"

His companion shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't think it would raise you in her estimation if she heard you.
The facts are as I tell you. She dismissed her doctors when they said
they could do nothing for her, and took into her house a mind-cure
woman, a Mrs. Crapps. Some power has put her on her feet. Wouldn't you
do the same thing in her place?"

Wynne looked bewildered at Mrs. Frostwinch walking before him in a
shimmer of Boston respectability. He had an uneasy feeling that he was
passing from one pitfall to another. He was keenly conscious of the
richness of the voice of the girl by his side, so that he felt that it
was not easy for him to disagree with anything which she said. He let
her remark pass without reply.

"For my part," she went on frankly, "I don't in the least believe in
the thing as a matter of theory; but practically I have a superstition
about it, because I've seen Cousin Anna. She was helpless, in agony,
dying; and now she is as well as I am. If I were ill"--

She broke off with a pretty little gesture as they came within hearing
of the others, who had halted at Mrs. Frostwinch's gate. Wynne said
good-by absently, and went on his way down the hill like a man in a
dream.

"Well," Mrs. Staggchase said, "you have seen one of Boston's ethical
debauches; what do you think of it?"

"It was confusing," he returned. "I couldn't make out what it was for."

"For? To amuse us. We are the children of the Puritans, you know, and
have inherited a twist toward the ethical and the supernatural so
strong that we have to have these things served up even in our
amusements."

"Then I think that it is wicked," Maurice said.

"Oh, no; we must not be narrow. It isn't wrong to amuse one's self; and
if we play with the religion of the Persians, why is it worse than to
play with the mythologies of the Greeks or Romans? You wouldn't think
it any harm to jest about classical theology."

Wynne turned toward her with a smile on his strong, handsome face.

"Why do you try to tangle me up in words?" he asked.

Mrs. Staggchase did not turn toward him, but looked before with face
entirely unchanged as she replied:--

"I am not trying to entangle you in words, but if I were it would be
all part of the play. You are undergoing your period of temptation. I
am the tempter in default of a better. In the old fashion of
temptations it wouldn't do to have the tempter old and plain. Then you
were expected to fall in love; now we deal in snares more subtle."

Maurice laughed, but somewhat unmirthfully. There was to him something
bewildering and worldly about his cousin; and he had come to feel that
he could never be at all sure where in the end the most harmless
beginning of talk might lead him.

"What then is the modern way of temptation?" he inquired.

"It shows how much faith we have in its power," she replied, as they
waited on the corner of Charles Street for a carriage to pass, "that I
don't in the least mind giving you full warning. Did you know the lady
in that carriage, by the way?"

"It was Mrs. Wilson, wasn't it?"

"Yes; Mrs. Chauncy Wilson. You have seen her at the Church of the
Nativity, I suppose. She is one phase of the temptation."

"I don't in the least understand."

"I didn't in the least suppose that you would. You will in time. My
part of the temptation is to show you all sorts of ethical jugglery,
the spiritual and intellectual gymnastics such as the Bostonians love;
to persuade you that all religion is only a sort of pastime, and that
the particular high-church sort which you especially affect is but one
of a great many entertaining ways of killing time."

"Cousin Diana!" he exclaimed, genuinely shocked.

"I hope that you understand," she continued unmoved. "I shall exhibit a
very pretty collection of fads to you if we see them all."

"But suppose," he said slowly, "that I refused to go with you?"

"But you won't," returned she, with that curious smile which always
teased him with its suggestion of irony. "In the first place you
couldn't be so impolite as to refuse me. A woman may always lead a man
into questionable paths if she puts it to his sense of chivalry not to
desert her. In the second, the spirit of the age is a good deal
stronger in you than you realize, and the truth is that you wouldn't be
left behind for anything. In the third, you could hardly be so cowardly
as to run away from the temptation that is to prove whether you were
really born to be a priest."

"That was decided when I entered the Clergy House."

"Nonsense; nothing of the sort, my dear boy. The only thing that was
decided then was that you thought you were. Wait and see our ethical
and religious raree-shows. We had the Persian to-day; to-morrow I'm to
take you to a spiritualist sitting at Mrs. Rangely's. She hates to have
me come, so I mustn't miss that. Then there are the mind-cure,
Theosophy, and a dozen other things; not to mention the
semi-irreligions, like Nationalism. You will be as the gods, knowing
good and evil, by the time we are half way round the circle,--though it
is perhaps somewhat doubtful if you know them apart."

She spoke in her light, railing way, as if the matter were one of the
smallest possible consequence, and yet Wynne grew every moment more and
more uncomfortable. He had never seen his cousin in just this mood, and
could not tell whether she were mocking him or warning him. He seized
upon the first pretext which presented itself to his mind, and
endeavored to change the subject.

"Who is Mrs. Rangely?" he asked. "A medium?"

"Oh, bless you, no. She is not so bad as a medium; she is only a New
Yorker. Do you think we'd go to real mediums? Although," she added,
"there are plenty who do go. I think that it is shocking bad form."

"But you speak as if"--

"As if spiritualism were one of the recognized ethical games, that's
all. It is played pretty well at Mrs. Rangely's, I'm told. They say
that the little Mrs. Singleton she's got hold of is very clever."

"Mrs. Singleton," Maurice repeated, "why, it can't be Alice, brother
John's widow, can it? She married a Singleton for a second husband, and
she claimed to be a medium."

"Did she really? It will be amusing if you find your relatives in the
business."

"She wasn't a very close relative. John was only my half-brother, you
know, and he lived but six months after he married her. She is clever
enough and tricky enough to be capable of anything."

"Well," Mrs. Staggchase said, as they turned in at her door, "if it is
she it will give you an excellent chance to do missionary work."

They entered the wide, handsome hall, and with an abrupt movement the
hostess turned toward her cousin.

"I assure you," she said, "that I am in earnest about your temptation.
I want to see what sort of stuff you are made of, and I give you fair
warning. Now go and read your breviary, or whatever it is that you sham
monks read, while I have tea and then rest before I dress."

Maurice had no reply to offer. He watched in silence as she passed up
the broad stairway, smiling to herself as she went. He followed slowly
a moment later, and seeking his room remained plunged in a reverie at
which the severe walls of the Clergy House might have been startled; a
reverie disquieted, changing, half-fearful; and yet through which with
strange fascination came a longing to see more of the surprising world
into which chance had introduced him, and above all to meet again the
dark, glowing girl with whom he had that afternoon walked.



                         III


             AS FALSE AS STAIRS OF SAND
                          Merchant of Venice, v. 2.


It was cold and gray next morning when Maurice took his way toward a
Catholic church in the North End. He had been there before for
confession, and had been not a little elated in his secret heart that
he had been able to go through the act of confession and to receive
absolution without betraying the fact that he was not a Romanist. He
had studied the forms of confession, the acts of contrition, and
whatever was necessary to the part, and for some months had gone on in
this singular course. To his Superior at the Clergy House he confessed
the same sins, but Maurice had a feeling that the absolution of the
Roman priest was more effective than that of his own church. He was not
conscious of any intention of becoming a Catholic, but there was a
fascination in playing at being one; and Wynne, who could not
understand how the folk of Boston could play with ethical truths, was
yet able thus to juggle with religion with no misgiving.

This morning he enjoyed the spiritual intoxication of the confessional
as never before. He half consciously allowed himself to dwell upon the
image of the beautiful Miss Morison to the end that he might the more
effectively pour out his contrition for that sin. He was so eloquent in
the confessional that he admired himself both for his penitence and for
the words in which he set it forth. He floated as it were in a sea of
mingled sensuousness and repentance, and he hoped that the penance
imposed would be heavy enough to show that the priest had been
impressed with the magnitude of the sin of which he had been guilty in
allowing his thoughts, consecrated to the holy life of the priesthood,
to dwell upon a woman.

It was one of those absurd anomalies of which life is full that while
Maurice sometimes slighted a little the penances imposed by his own
Superior, he had never in the least abated the rigor of any laid upon
him by the Catholic priest. It was perhaps that he felt his honor
concerned in the latter case. This morning the penance was
satisfactorily heavy, and he came out of the church with a buoyant
step, full of a certain boyish elation. He had a fresh and delightful
sense of the reality of religion now that he had actually sinned and
been forgiven.

Next to being forgiven for a sin there is perhaps nothing more
satisfactory than to repeat the transgression, and if Maurice had not
formulated this fact in theory he was to be acquainted with it in
practice. As he walked along in the now bright forenoon, filled with
the enjoyment of moral cleanness, he suddenly started with the thrill
of delicious temptation. Just before him a lady had come around a
corner, and was walking quietly along, in whom at a glance he
recognized Miss Morison. There came into his cheek, which even his
double penances had not made thin, a flush of pleasure. He quickened
his steps, and in a moment had overtaken her.

"Good morning," he said, raising his ecclesiastical hat with an air
which savored somewhat of worldliness. "Isn't it a beautiful day?"

She started at his salutation, but instantly recognized him.

"Good morning," she responded. "I didn't expect to find anybody I knew
in this part of the town."

"It isn't one where young ladies as a rule walk for pleasure, I
suppose," Maurice said, falling into step, and walking beside her.

"I am very sure that I don't," Miss Morison replied with a toss of her
head. "I do it because I was bullied into being a visitor for the
Associated Charities, and I go once a week to tell some poor folk down
here that I am no better than they are. They know that I don't believe
it, and I have my doubts if they even believe it themselves, only they
wouldn't be foolish enough to prevaricate about it. Oh, it's a great
and noble work that I'm engaged in!"

There was something exhilarating about her as she tossed her pretty
head. Wynne laughed without knowing just why, except that she
intoxicated him with delight.

"You don't speak of your work with much enthusiasm," said he.

"Enthusiasm!" she retorted. "Why should I? It's abominable. I hate it,
the people I visit hate it, and there's nobody pleased but the
managers, who can set down so many more visits paid to the worthy poor,
and make a better showing in their annual report. For my part I am
tired of the worthy poor; and if I must keep on slumming, I'd like to
try the unworthy poor a while. I'm sure they'd be more interesting."

She spoke with a pretty air of recklessness, as if she were conscious
that this was not the strain in which to address one of his cloth.
There was not a little vexation under her lightness of manner, however,
and Wynne was not so dull as not to perceive that something had gone
amiss.

"But philanthropy," he began, "is surely"--

"Your cousin," she interrupted, "declares that only the eye of
Omniscience can possibly distinguish between what passes for
philanthropy and what is sheer egotism."

He laughed in spite of himself, feeling that he ought to be shocked.

"But what," he asked, "has impressed this view of things upon you this
morning in particular?"

His companion made a droll little gesture with both her hands.

"Of course I show it," she said; "though you needn't have reminded me
that I have lost my temper."

"I beg your pardon," began Maurice in confusion, "I"--

"Oh, you haven't done anything wrong," she interrupted, "the trouble is
entirely with me. I've been making a fool of myself at the instigation
of the powers that rule over my charitable career, and I don't like the
feeling."

They walked on a moment without further speech. Maurice said to himself
with a thrill of contrition that he would double the penance laid upon
him, and he endeavored not to be conscious of the thought which
followed that the delight of this companionship was worth the price
which he should thus pay for it.

"This is what happened," Miss Morison said at length. "I don't quite
know whether to laugh or to cry with vexation. There's a poor widow who
has had all sorts of trials and tribulations. Indeed, she's been a
miracle of ill luck ever since I began to have the honor to assure her
weekly that I'm no better than she is. It may be that the fib isn't
lucky."

She turned to flash a bright glance into the face of her companion as
she spoke, and he tried to clear away the look of gravity so quickly
that she might not perceive it.

"Oh," she cried; "now I have shocked you! I'm sorry, but I couldn't
help it."

"No," he replied, "you didn't really shock me. It only seemed to me a
pity that you should be working with so little heart and under
direction that doesn't seem entirely wise."

"Wise!" she echoed scornfully. "There's a benevolent gentleman who
insisted upon giving this old woman five dollars. It was all against
the rules of the Associated Charities, for which he said he didn't care
a fig. That's the advantage of being a man! And what do you think the
old thing did? She took the whole of it to buy a bonnet with a red
feather in it! The committee heard of it, though I can't for my life
see how. There are a lot of them that seem to think that benevolence
consists chiefly in prying into the affairs of the poor wretches they
help! And they posted me off to scold her."

"But why did you go?"

"They said they would send Miss Spare if I didn't, and in common
humanity I couldn't leave that old creature to the tender mercies of
Miss Spare."

"What did you say?"

The face of Miss Morison lighted with mocking amusement.

"That's the beauty of it," she cried, bursting into a low laugh which
was full of the keenest fun. "I began with the things I'd been told to
say; but the old woman said that all her life long she had wanted a
bonnet with red feathers, but that she had never expected to have one.
When she got this money, she went out to buy clothing, and in a window
she saw this bonnet marked five dollars. She piously remarked that it
seemed providential. She's like the rest of the world in finding what
she likes to be providential."

"Yes," murmured Maurice, half under his breath; "like my meeting you."

Miss Morison looked surprised, but she ignored the words, and went on
with her story.

"She said she concluded she'd rather go without the clothes, and have
the bonnet; and by the time we were through I had weakly gone back on
all the instructions I'd received, and told her she was right. She knew
what she wanted, and I don't blame her for getting it when she could.
I'm sick of seeing the poor treated as if they were semi-idiots that
couldn't think without leave from the Associated Charities."

The whole tone of the conversation was so much more frank than anything
to which Wynne was accustomed that he felt bewildered. This freedom of
criticism of the powers, this want of reverence for conventionalities,
gave him a strange feeling of lawlessness. He felt as if he had himself
been wonderfully and almost culpably daring in listening. He wondered
that he was not more shocked, being sure that it was his duty to be.
There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile
unsophistication. The New England mind often seems to inherit from
bygone Puritanism a certain repellent quality through which it takes
long for anything savoring of worldliness or worldly wisdom to
penetrate. When once this covering is broken, it may be added, the
result is much the same as in the case of the cracking of other glazes.

After he had parted from Miss Morison, Maurice walked on in a blissful
state of conscious sinfulness. He understood himself well enough to
know that before him lay repentance, but this did not dampen his
present enjoyment. He had not so far outgrown his New England
conscience as to escape remorse for sin, but he had become so
accustomed to the belief that absolution removed guilt that there was
in his cup of self-reproach little abiding bitterness.

That afternoon he accompanied Mrs. Staggchase to the house of Mrs.
Rangely with a confused feeling as if he were some one else. His cousin
wore the same delicately satirical air which marked all her intercourse
with him. She carried her head with her accustomed good-humored
haughtiness, and her straight lips were curled into the ghost of a
smile.

"This is the most stupid humbug of them all," she remarked, as they
neared Mrs. Rangely's house on Marlborough Street. "You'll think the
deception too transparent to be even amusing,--if you don't become a
convert, that is."

"A convert to spiritualism?" Wynne returned with youthful indignation.
"I'm not likely to fall so low as that. That is one of the things which
are too ridiculous."

She laughed, with that air of superiority which always nettled him a
little.

"Don't allow yourself to be one of those narrow persons to whom a thing
is always ridiculous if they don't happen to believe it. You believe in
so many impossible things yourself that you can't afford to take on
airs."

The tantalizing good nature with which she spoke humiliated Wynne. She
seemed to be playing with him, and he resented her reflection upon his
creed. He was, however, too much under the spell of his cousin to be
really angry, and he was silenced rather than offended. They entered
the house to find several of the persons whom he had seen at Mrs.
Gore's on the day previous; and Wynne was at once charmed and
disquieted by the entrance a moment later of Miss Morison, who came in
looking more beautiful than ever. It gave him a feeling of exultation
to be sharing her life, even in this chance way.

The preliminaries of the sitting were not elaborate. Mrs. Rangely, the
hostess, impressed it upon her guests that Mrs. Singleton, the medium,
was not a professional, but that she was with them only in the capacity
of one who wished to use her peculiar gifts in the search for truth.

"She does not understand her powers herself," Mrs. Rangely said; "but
she feels that it is not right to conceal her light."

Maurice was too unsophisticated to understand why Mrs. Rangely's talk
struck him as not entirely genuine, but he was to some extent
enlightened when his cousin said to him afterward: "Frances Rangely has
the imitation Boston patter at her tongue's end now, but she is too
thoroughly a New Yorker ever to get the spirit of it. She rattles off
the words in a way that is intensely amusing."

The shutters of the small parlor in which the company was assembled had
been closed and the gas lighted. There were about a dozen guests, and
all had the air of being of some position. While the hostess went to
summon the medium, Maurice asked in a whisper if the master of the
house was present, and was answered that Fred Rangely was too clever to
be mixed up in this sort of thing. Wynne caught a satirical glance
between his cousin and Miss Morison, and more than ever he felt that
the meeting was a farce in which he, vowed to a nobler life, should
have had no part.

His musings were cut short by the entrance of Mrs. Rangely with the
medium. He recognized Mrs. Singleton at a glance, and was struck as he
had been before by the appealing look of innocence. She was a slender,
almost beautiful woman, with exquisite shell-like complexion, and
delicate features. An entire lack of moral sense frequently gives to a
woman an air of complete candor and purity, and Alice Singleton stood
before the company as the incarnation of sincerity and truth. Her face
was of the rounded, full-lipped, wistful type; the sensuous, selfish
face moulded into the likeness of childlike guilelessness which of all
the multitudinous varieties of the "ever womanly" is the one most
likely to be destructive.

Had it not been that Maurice was acquainted with her history, he could
hardly have resisted the fascination of this creature, as tender and as
innocent in appearance as a dewy rose; but he was thoroughly aware of
her moral worthlessness. Yet as she stood shrinking on the threshold as
if she were too timid to advance, he could not but feel her
attractiveness and the sweetness of her presence. He watched curiously
as in response to a word from Mrs. Rangely she came hesitatingly
forward, bowed in acknowledgment to a general introduction, and sank
into the chair placed for her in the centre of the circle. She was clad
in black, but a little of her creamy neck was visible between the folds
of lace which set off its fairness. Her arms were bare half way to the
elbows, and her hands were ungloved. Maurice wondered if she would
recognize him; then he reflected that he sat in the shadow, out of the
direct line of her vision, and that it was years since she had seen him.

"We will have the gas turned down," Mrs. Rangely said; and at once
turned it, not down, but completely out, leaving the room in absolute
darkness.

There followed an interval of silence, and Maurice, whose wits were
sharpened by his knowledge of the medium, and who was on the lookout
for trickery, reflected how inevitable it was that this breathless
silence, coupled with the darkness and the expectation of something
mysterious, should bring about the frame of mind which the medium would
desire. The silence lasted so long that he, not wrapt in expectation,
began to grow impatient. He put out his hand timidly in the darkness
and touched the chair in which Miss Morison was sitting, getting
foolish comfort from even such remote communion. He fell into a reverie
in which he felt dimly what life might have been with her always at his
side, had he not been vowed to the stern refusal of all earthly
companionship.

His reflections were broken by a loud, quivering sigh seeming to come
from the medium, and echoed in different parts of the room. There was
another brief interval of silence, and then the medium began to speak.
Her tone was strained and unnatural, and at first she murmured to
herself. Then her words came more clearly and distinctly.

"Oh, how beautiful!" she whispered. Then in a voice growing clearer she
went on: "Bright forms! There are three,--no, there are five; oh, the
room is full of them. Oh, how bright they are growing! They shine so
that they almost blind me. Don't you see them?"

The room rustled like a field of wheat under a breeze.

"There is one that is clearer than the others," went on the voice of
the medium in the electrical darkness. "She is all shining, but I can
see that her hair is white as snow. She must have been old before she
went into the spirit world. She smiles and leans over the lady in the
armchair. Oh, she is touching you! Don't you feel her dear hands on
your head?"

Maurice felt the chair against which his fingers rested shaken by a
movement of awe or of impatience. He flushed with indignation. It was
Miss Morison to whom the medium was directing this childish
impertinence. He longed to interfere, and even made so brusque a
movement that Mrs. Staggchase leaned over and whispered to him to
remain quiet.

"There are many spirits here," the medium went on with increasing
fervor, "but none of them are so clear. She is speaking to you, but you
cannot hear her. She is grieved that you do not understand her. Oh, try
to listen so that you may hear her message with the spiritual ear. She
is so anxious."

The audience seemed to quiver with excitement. Simply because a woman
whom Maurice knew to be capable of any falsehood sat here in the
darkness and pretended to see visions, these men and women were
apparently carried out of themselves. It seemed to him at once
monstrous and pitifully ridiculous.

"It must be your grandmother," spoke again the voice of Mrs. Singleton,
now thick with emotion. "Yes, she nods her head. She is so anxious to
reach through your unconsciousness. Wait! she is going to do something.
I think she is going to give you some token. Let me rest a moment, so
that I can help her. She wants to materialize something."

Heavy silence, but a silence which seemed alive with excitement, once
more prevailed. Maurice began himself to feel something of the
influence pervading the gathering, and was angry with himself for it.
Suddenly a cry from the medium, earnest and full of feeling, broke out
shrilly.

"Oh, she has something in her hand. Try to assist her. She will succeed
in materializing it fully if we can help her with our wills. I can see
it becoming clearer--clearer--clearer! Now she is smiling. She is
happy. She knows she will succeed. Yes; it is--Oh, what beautiful
roses! They are changing from white to red in her hands. She holds them
up for me to see; she is lifting them up over your head. Now, now she
is going to drop them! Quick! The light!"

The voice of Mrs. Singleton had risen almost to a scream, and bit the
nerves of the hearers. As she ended Maurice heard the soft sound of
something falling, and felt Miss Morison start violently. The gas was
at once lighted, and there in the lap and at the feet of Berenice, who
regarded them with an expression of mingled disgust and annoyance, lay
scattered a handful of crimson roses.

The company broke into expressions of admiration, of belief, of awe.
Mrs. Singleton had played to her audience with evident success. Miss
Morison gathered up the flowers without a word, and held them out to
the medium, who lay back wearied in her chair.

"Don't give them to me," Mrs. Singleton said in a faint voice. "They
were brought for you."

"How can you bear to give them up?" a woman said. "It must be your
grandmother that brought them."

"My grandmother was in very good health in Brookfield yesterday,"
Berenice responded. "I hardly think that they come from her."

The tone was so cold that Mrs. Singleton was visibly disconcerted.

"Of course I don't know the spirit," she said. "But are both your
grandmothers living?"

"She nodded her head, you know," put in another.

To this Miss Morison did not even reply; but the awkwardness of the
situation was relieved by Mrs. Rangely, who broke into conventional
phrases of admiration and wonder.

"Yes, Frances," Mrs. Staggchase observed dryly, "as you say, it
couldn't be believed if one hadn't seen it."

Her manner was unheeded in the flood of praise and congratulation with
which Mrs. Singleton was being overwhelmed.

"It is what I've longed for all my life," one lady declared, wiping her
eyes. "I never could have confidence in professional mediums, but this
is so perfectly satisfactory. Oh, I _do_ feel that I owe you so much,
Mrs. Singleton!"

"Yes, this we have seen with our own eyes," another added. "It is
impossible for the most skeptical to doubt this."

To this and more Maurice listened in amazement, until he rather thought
aloud than consciously spoke:--

"But it all depends upon the unsupported testimony of the medium."

Mrs. Rangely drew herself up with much dignity.

"That," she said, "I will be responsible for."

"It isn't unsupported," chimed in one of the ladies. "Here are the
roses."

At the sound of Maurice's voice Mrs. Singleton had turned toward him,
and he saw that she recognized him. She looked around with a glance
half terrified, half appealing.

"It is so kind in you to believe in me," she murmured pathetically. "I
don't ask you to. I only tell you what I see, and"--

Maurice rose abruptly and strode forward.

"Alice," he exclaimed, "what do you mean by this humbug? Don't you see
that they take it seriously? Tell them it's a joke."

Again Mrs. Singleton looked around as if to see whether she had support.

"It is manly of you to attack me," she answered, evidently satisfied
with the result of her survey. "I cannot defend myself."

"Do you mean to insist?" he demanded, with growing anger.

"If the roses do not justify what I said," responded she, sinking back
as if exhausted, "it may be that I saw only imaginary shapes."

A sharp murmur ran around the room. The believers were evidently
rallying indignantly to the support of their sibyl, and cast upon Wynne
glances of bitter reproach. He looked at Mrs. Staggchase, but it was
impossible to judge from her expression whether she approved or
disapproved of what he had done. He was suddenly abashed, and stood
speechless before the rising tide of outraged remonstrance. Then
unexpectedly came from behind him the clear voice of Miss Morison.

"It is unfortunate that the roses should have been given to me," she
said, "for by an odd chance I saw them bought a couple of hours ago on
Tremont Street."

There was an instant of hushed amazement, and then the medium fled from
the parlor in hysterics.



                         IV


              SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE
                          Measure for Measure, v. 1.


"O thou to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave!"

Philip Ashe colored with self-consciousness as the words came into his
mind. He felt that he had no right to think them, and yet as he looked
across the table at his hostess it seemed almost as if the phrase had
been spoken in his ear by the seductive voice of Mirza Gholan Rezah. He
sighed with contrition, and looked resolutely away, letting his glance
wander about the room in which he was sitting at dinner. He noted the
panels of antique stamped leather, and although he had had little
artistic training, he was pleased by the exquisite combination of rich
colors and dull gold. Some Spanish palace had once known the glories
which now adorned the walls of Mrs. Fenton's dining-room, and even his
uneducated eye could see that care and taste had gone to the decoration
of the apartment. Jars of Moorish pottery, few but choice, and pieces
of fine Algerian armor inlaid with gold were placed skillfully, each
displayed in its full worth and yet all harmonizing and combining in
the general effect. Ashe knew that the husband of Mrs. Fenton had been
an artist of some note, and so strongly was the skill of a master-hand
visible here that suddenly the painter seemed to the sensitive young
deacon alive and real. It was as if for the first time he realized that
the beautiful woman before him might belong to another. By a quick,
unreasonable jealousy of the dead he became conscious of how keenly
dear to him had become the living.

Ashe had met Mrs. Fenton a number of times during the week which had
intervened since the Persian's lecture at Mrs. Gore's. He had seen her
once or twice at the house of his cousin, with whom Mrs. Fenton was
intimate, and chance had brought about one or two encounters elsewhere.
He had until this moment tried to persuade himself that his admiration
for her was that which he might have for any beautiful woman; but
looking about this room and realizing so completely the husband dead
half a dozen years, he felt his self-deception shrivel and fall to
ashes. With a desperate effort he put the thought from him, and gave
his whole attention to the talk of his companions.

"Yes, Mr. Herman is in New York," Mrs. Herman was saying. "He has gone
on to see about a commission. They want him to go there to execute it,
but I don't think he will."

"Doesn't he like New York?" asked Mr. Candish, the rector of the Church
of the Nativity, who was the fourth member of the little company.

Mrs. Herman and Mrs. Fenton both laughed.

"You know how Grant feels about New York, Edith," the former said. "If
anything could spoil his temper, it is a day in what he calls the
metropolis of Philistinism."

"I never heard Mr. Herman say anything so harsh as that about
anything," Candish responded. "Do you feel in that way about it?"

"The thing which I dislike about the place is its provincialism," she
answered. "It is the most provincial city in America, in the sense that
nothing really exists for it outside of itself. If I think of New York
for ten minutes I have no longer any faith in America."

"Then I shouldn't think of it, Helen," put in Mrs. Fenton.

"Then you wouldn't go with your husband if he went there to do this
work, I suppose," Mr. Candish observed.

"I should go with him anywhere that, he thought it best to go. I fear
that you haven't an exalted idea of the devotion of the modern wife,
Mr. Candish."

Ashe watched with interest the rector, who flushed a little. He knew of
him well, having more than once heard the awkwardness and social
inadaptability of the man urged as reasons of his unfitness to be
placed at the head of the most fashionable church in the city. Philip
saw him glance at the hostess and then cast down his eyes; and wondered
if this were simple diffidence.

"That is hardly fair," Mr. Candish said, somewhat awkwardly. "The
clergy, not having wives, are poor judges in such a matter."

"That might be taken as an argument for the marriage of the clergy,"
she responded with a smile.

"How so?"

"If they had wives they would be better able to sympathize with the
trials and joys of their parishioners."

"I never thought of that," murmured Mrs. Fenton.

Mr. Candish flushed all over his homely, freckled face.

"By the same reasoning you might hold that a clergyman should have
committed all the sins in the decalogue, so that he should have ready
sympathy with all sorts of sinners."

"I'm not sure that he wouldn't be more useful if he had," Mrs. Herman
answered with a smile; "at least a man who hasn't wanted to commit a
sin must find it hard to sympathize with the wretch that hasn't been
strong enough to resist temptation. Still, I hope that sin and marriage
are not put into the same category."

"Oh, of course not," Mrs. Fenton interpolated. "Marriage is a
sacrament."

"It has always seemed to me inconsistent," Mrs. Herman went on, "that
the church should exclude her priests from one of the sacraments."

Ashe saw a faint cloud pass over the face of the hostess. He was
himself a little shocked; and Candish frowned slightly.

"The church admits her priests to this sacrament in a higher sense," he
said with some stiffness.

Helen smiled.

"Now I have shocked you," was her comment. "I beg your pardon."

"I can never accustom myself to a familiar way of handling sacred
things," he returned. "It is to me too vital a matter."

"I am afraid that that is because you are still so young," she
retorted. "It is, if you'll pardon me, the prerogative of youth to find
all views but its own intolerable."

The manner in which this was said deprived the words of their sting,
but Mrs. Fenton evidently felt that they were getting upon dangerous
ground, and she interposed.

"We shall ask you to define youth next, Helen," she threw in.

"Oh, that is easy. Young people are always those of our own age."

In the laugh that followed this the question of the marriage of the
clergy was allowed to drop; but to all that had been said Philip had
listened with a beating heart. He felt the air about him to be charged
with meanings which he could not divine. He had somehow a suspicion
that the hostess was more interested in this talk than she was willing
to show; and with what in a moment he recognized as consummate and
fatuous egotism, he felt in his heart the shadow of a hope that there
might be some connection between this and her interest in him. Then a
fear followed lest there might be things here hidden which would make
him miserable did he understand.

"Mrs. Herman insists that she is a Puritan," Mrs. Fenton said a moment
later. "You see how she proves it by the position she takes on all
these questions."

"Of course I am a Puritan," was the answer. "I was born so. There is
nothing which I believe that wouldn't have seemed to my forefathers
good ground for having me whipped at the cart's tail, but I am Puritan
to the bone."

"I don't see what you mean," Candish said.

"I mean that I inherit, like all of us children of the Puritans, the
way of looking at things without regard to consequences, of feeling
devoutly about whatever seems to us true, and of realizing that
individual preferences do not alter the laws of the universe; isn't
that the essence of Puritanism?"

"Perhaps," he answered; "but are the unbelievers of to-day devout?"

Ashe looked at his cousin as she paused before answering. He felt that
the question must baffle her. He did not comprehend what was behind her
faint smile.

"Certainly not all of them," was her reply. "The age isn't greatly
given to reverence. I am a Puritan, however, and I must say what I
think. I believe that there is a hundredfold more devoutness in the
infidelity of New England to-day than in its belief."

Ashe leaned forward in amazement, half overturning his glass in his
eagerness.

"Why, that is a contradiction of terms," he exclaimed.

Mrs. Herman's smile deepened.

"Not necessarily, Cousin Philip," returned she.

"It is possible for belief to degenerate into mere conventionality,
while sincere doubters at least must have a realization of the mystery
and the awe which overshadow life."

Mrs. Fenton put up her hand in a pretty gesture of deprecation.

"Come," she said, "I don't wish to be despotic, but I can't let Mrs.
Herman lead you into a discussion of that sort. We'll talk of something
else."

"Am I to bear the blame of it all?" demanded Helen. "That I call
genuinely theological."

"Worse and worse," the hostess responded. "Now you attack the cloth."

"It seems to me," observed Mr. Candish, coming out of a brief study in
which he had apparently not heard Mrs. Fenton's last words, "that you
leave out of account the matter of desire. The believer at least longs
to believe, and surely deserves well for that."

"I don't see why. Certainly he hasn't learned the first word of the
philosophy of life who still confounds what he desires and what he
deserves."

"Come, Helen," put in Mrs. Fenton; "I wouldn't have suspected you of
trying to pose as a belated remnant of the Concord School."

Ashe easily perceived that the hostess was becoming more and more
uneasy at the course of the discussion. He could see too that Mr.
Candish was growing graver, and his sallow face beginning to flush
through its thin skin. It was evident that Mrs. Fenton saw and
appreciated these signs, and wished to change the subject of
conversation. Philip wondered that she took the matter so gravely, but
cast about in his own mind for the means of helping her. Before he
could think of anything to say his cousin had started a fresh topic.

"By the way," she asked, "who is to be bishop?"

Candish shook his head with a grave smile.

"We should be relieved if we knew," was his answer.

"There's a great deal being done to defeat Father Frontford," Ashe
added; "but the lay delegates haven't been chosen."

"The friends of Mr. Strathmore are working very hard," observed Mrs.
Fenton. "It would be a great misfortune if they were to succeed."

"But I suppose the friends of Father Frontford are at work too?"
returned Helen.

Ashe thought that he detected a faint trace of satire in her voice, and
he turned toward her with earnest gravity.

"It is not to be supposed," he answered, "that the friends of the
church are idle at a time of so much importance. Mr. Strathmore is
really little better than a Unitarian; or at least he is so lax that he
gives the world that opinion."

He felt that this was a reply which must end all inclination to
raillery on her part. He began to feel fresh sympathy with the
disturbance of Mr. Candish earlier in the dinner. The matter now was to
him so vital that he could not talk of it except with the greatest
gravity. He watched Helen closely to discover if she were disposed to
smile at his reply. He could detect no ridicule in her expression,
although she did not seem much impressed with the weight of the charge
he had brought against Mr. Strathmore, the popular candidate for the
bishopric of the diocese, then vacant.

"Mrs. Chauncy Wilson is doing a good deal," Mrs. Fenton remarked,
glancing smilingly at Helen.

"Oh, yes," responded the other. "I remember now that she declined to be
on a committee for the picture-show because, as she said, she had to
run the campaign for the bishop."

"The expression," Candish began, rather stiffly, "is somewhat"--

"It is hers, not mine," Helen replied. "I should not have chosen the
phrase myself."

"It is singular," Mrs. Fenton said thoughtfully, "how little general
interest there is in this matter of the choice of a bishop."

"And what there is," Mrs. Herman put in with a faint suspicion of
raillery in her tone, "comes from the fact that Mr. Strathmore is
popular as a radical."

"It is natural enough that the general public should look at it in that
way," Mr. Candish commented. "Mr. Strathmore has all the elements of
popularity. He is emotional and sympathetic; and religious laxity
presented by such a man is always attractive."

"The infidelity of the age finds such a man a living excuse," Ashe
said, feeling to the full all that the words implied.

Mrs. Fenton smiled upon him, but shook her head.

"That is a somewhat extreme view to take of it, Mr. Ashe. I think it is
rather the personal attraction of the man than anything else."

The talk drifted away into more secular channels, and Ashe in time
forgot for the moment that he was already almost a priest. Youth was
strong in his blood, and even when a man has vowed to serve heaven by
celibacy the must of desire may ferment still in his veins. A youthful
ascetic has in him equally the making of a saint and a monster; and
until it is decided which he is to be there will be turmoil in his
soul. His newly realized love for Mrs. Fenton threw Ashe into a tumult
of mingled bliss and anguish. The heart of the most simple mortal soars
and exults in the sense that it loves. It may be timid, sad,
despairing, but even the smart of love's denial cannot destroy the joy
of love's existence. Philip felt the sting of his conscience; he looked
upon his passion as no less hopeless than it was opposed to his vows;
he was overshadowed by a half-conscious foresight of the pain which
must arise from it; yet he swam on waves of delight such as even in his
moments of religious ecstasy he had never before known. He felt his
cheeks flush, and when his cousin glanced at him he dropped his eyes in
the fear that they would betray his secret. He dared not look openly at
Mrs. Fenton, yet from time to time he stole glances so slyly that he
seemed almost to deceive himself and to conceal from his conscience the
transgression.

Yet, too, he struggled. He realized at moments what he was doing, and
his cheek grew pale at the idea that he was juggling with his
conscience and his soul. He tried to attend to the talk, and could only
succeed in listening for the sound of her voice. He kept no more hold
on the conversation than was sufficient to allow him to put in a word
now and then to cover his preoccupation. The instinct of simulation
asserted itself as it springs in a bird which flies away to decoy the
hunter from its nest. He feigned to be interested, to be as usual, but
all his blood was trembling and tumbling with this new delirium; and
all struggles to forget his passion only increased its intensity.

At moments he was astonished at himself. He could not understand what
had taken possession of him. He even whispered a desperate question to
himself whether it might not be that he had been singled out for a
special temptation of the devil,--a distinction too flattering to be
wholly disagreeable. Then he glanced again at his hostess, fair, sweet,
and to his mind sacred before him, and felt that he had wronged her by
supposing that the arch fiend could make of her a temptation. He had
for a moment a humiliating fear that he might have eaten something that
after the spare diet of the Clergy House had exhilarated him unduly. He
felt that at best he was a poor thing; and he seemed to stand outside
of his bare, empty life, pitying and scorning the futility of an
existence unblessed by the love of this peerless woman.

The evening went on, and Ashe struggled to conceal the wild commotion
of his mind, feeling it almost a relief to get away, so fearful had he
been of losing control of his tumultuous emotions. It would be bliss to
be alone with his dream.

As he and Mrs. Herman were going home, Helen said:--

"I do wonder"--

"What do you wonder?" he asked.

"Did I say that out loud?" she responded. "I didn't mean to. I was
thinking that I couldn't help wondering whether Edith Fenton will ever
marry Mr. Candish."

The first thought of Ashe was terror lest his secret had been
discovered; his second was a memory of the way in which he had seen
Mrs. Fenton look at the rector at dinner. He was overwhelmed by a rush
of hot anger against his rival.

"Mr. Candish!" he echoed. "Why, he is an ordained priest!"

His own words cut him like a sword. He had himself pronounced the death
sentence of his own hope. It was with difficulty that he suppressed a
groan, and what reply or comment Mrs. Herman made was lost in the
tumult of an inner voice crying in his heart: "O thou, to the arch of
whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave!"



                         V


             VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE
                         Comedy of Errors, ii. 1.


On the morning after the dinner at Mrs. Fenton's, Philip Ashe and
Maurice Wynne met on the steps of Mrs. Chauncy Wilson's. The house was
on the proper side of the Avenue, with a regal front of marble and with
balconies of wrought iron before the wide windows above, one of
especially elaborate workmanship, having once adorned the front of the
palace of the Tuileries. Pillars of verd antique stood on either side
of the doorway, as if it were the portal of a temple.

"Good morning, Phil," Maurice called out as they met. "Are you bound
for Mrs. Wilson's too?"

"Yes," was the answer. "I had a note last night."

"Well," Wynne said gayly, as they mounted the steps, "if the inside of
the house is as splendid as the outside, we two poor duffers will be
out of place enough in it."

Ashe smiled.

"You may be a duffer if you like," he retorted, "but I'm not."

"Here comes somebody," was the reply. "For my part I'm half afraid of
Mrs. Wilson. They say"--

But the door began to move on its hinges, and cut short his words.

Wynne might have concluded his remark in almost any fashion, for there
were few things which had not been said about Mrs. Wilson. Although she
had been born and bred in Boston, one of the most common comments upon
her was that she was "so un-Bostonian." Exactly what the epithet
"Bostonian" might mean would probably have been hard to explain, but it
is seldom difficult to defend a negation; it was at least easy to show
that the lady did not regard the traditions in which she had been
nourished, and that she had a boldness which was as far as possible
from the decorous conventionality to be expected of one in whose veins
ran the blood of the most correctly exclusive old Puritan families.

There was a general feeling that Mrs. Wilson's marriage was to be held
accountable for many of her eccentricities; although, as Mrs.
Staggchase remarked, if Elsie Dimmont had not been what she was she
would not have chosen Chauncy Wilson. Well-born, wealthy, pretty, and
not without a certain cleverness, Miss Dimmont had had choice of
suitors enough who were all that the most exacting of her relatives
could desire; yet she had disregarded the conviction of the family that
it was her duty to marry to please them, and had chosen to please
herself by selecting a handsome young doctor whom she met at the house
of a cousin in the country. He was of some local eminence in his
profession, it is true, although as time went on he gave less attention
to it; he was handsome, and astute, and amusing; but he was a man
without ancestors or traditions. He seemed born to justify the saying
that nothing subdues the feminine imagination like force; and although
the stormy times which were liberally predicted at the marriage of two
creatures so strong-willed had undoubtedly marked their marital career,
it was in the end impossible not to see that Dr. Wilson had secured and
held command of his household.

It is impossible for two to live together, however, without mutual
reaction, and Elsie had unquestionably lost something of the fineness
of the breeding which was hers by right of birth. For a time after her
marriage she had been excessively given up to gayety. She had figured
as a leader in the fastest of the "smart set," as society journals
called it. She rode well, owned a stud which could not be matched in
town, and raced for stakes which startled the conservative old city. It
was even affirmed by the more credulous or more scandalous of the
gossips that it was only the stand taken by the managers of the County
Club which prevented her on one occasion from riding as her own jockey;
and short of this there was little she did not do.

All this, however, was in the early days of the marriage, before Dr.
Wilson had become accustomed to his position as husband of the richest
woman in town and a member of what was to him the sacred aristocracy.
When the time came that he had found his place and entered his veto
upon these wild doings, there was an instant and determined revolt on
the part of his wife. Elsie fought desperately to maintain her position
as head of the family. By way of humiliating her husband she flirted
with an openness which won for her a reputation by no means to be
envied, and she wantonly trampled on his wishes. Given a husband,
however, with an iron will and a fibre not too fine, with a good temper
and yet with a certain ruthlessness in asserting his sway, and there is
little doubt that in the end he will triumph. If a clever, handsome,
good-humored man does not subdue a wild, headstrong wife, it is almost
surely owing to over-delicacy; and Chauncy Wilson was never hampered by
this. Elsie plunged and reared when she felt the curb,--to use a figure
which in those days might have been her own,--but she was by a
judicious application of whip and spur taught that she had found her
master. The result was that she became not only manageable, but
devotedly fond of her husband. No woman was ever mastered and treated
with kindness who did not thereupon love. Dr. Wilson was too
good-natured to be unkind, and for the most part he allowed his wife to
have her way, fully aware that he had but to speak to restrain her; and
thus it came about that the household was on a most peaceful and
satisfactory basis.

Mrs. Wilson, however, craved excitement, and ethical amusements she
laughed to scorn. She did, it is true, take up high-church piety, which
she treated, as Mrs. Staggchase did not hesitate to say, as a
plaything; but her interest in church matters was chiefly in the line
of politics. She took charge of the affairs of the Church of the
Nativity with a high hand which abashed and disquieted the devout
rector. She liked Mr. Candish, although she did not hesitate to jest at
his unpolished manners and rather unprepossessing person, and it was
inevitable that she should be unable to appreciate his self-denying
devotion. On one or two occasions she had found him to have a will not
inferior to her own; and although she resented whatever balked her
pleasure, she was yet a woman and respected power in a man.

Mr. Candish was of all men the one least resembling the traditional
pastor of a fashionable church, and had nothing of the caressing manner
dear to the souls of self-pampered penitents. Fashionable women found
little to admire in this man with the air of a bourgeois and the
simplicity of a babe. He had, however, a strong will, and a sure faith
which was not without its effect upon his parishioners. Ladies whose
religion was largely an affair of nerves found comfort in relying upon
his simple and untroubled devotion. They were piqued by being treated
as souls rather than bodies, but this was perhaps one of the secrets of
his influence. Every woman of his flock had unconsciously some secret
conviction that to her was reserved the triumph of subduing this
intractable nature, hitherto unconquered by the fascinations of the
sex. An ugly man may generally be successful with women if he remains
sufficiently indifferent to them. His unattractiveness, suggesting, as
it must, the idea of his having cause to be especially solicitous and
humble, imparts to his attitude in such a case an all-subduing flavor
of mystery. The instinctive belief of the other sex is that he is but
protecting his sensitiveness, and each longs to tear aside the veil of
dissimulation. The rector, it may be added, was an eloquent preacher,
and he intoned the service wonderfully. His voice in speaking was
somewhat harsh, but when he intoned, it melted into a beautiful
baritone, rich, full, and sweet, which, informed by his deep and
earnest feeling, thrilled his hearers with profound emotion. Mrs.
Wilson was proud of the effect which the service at the Nativity always
had, and she took in it the double pleasure of one who claimed a share
in religious enthusiasms and who had something of the glory of a
manager whose tenor succeeds in opera.

Into the contest over the election of a bishop to fill the place
recently left vacant Mrs. Wilson had thrown herself with characteristic
vigor. There were but two candidates now seriously considered, the Rev.
Rutherford Strathmore and Father Frontford. The former, a popular
preacher of liberal views, was regarded as the more likely to receive
the appointment, but the High Church party contested the point warmly,
supporting the claims of the Father Superior of the Clergy House which
was the home of Maurice Wynne and Philip Ashe. The political side of
the matter was exactly to Mrs. Wilson's taste. A woman has but to be
rich enough and determined enough to be allowed to amuse herself with
the highest concerns of both church and state; and Mrs. Wilson lacked
neither money nor determination. Her vigor at first disconcerted and in
the end outwardly subdued the clergy. If she actually had less
influence than she supposed, she was at least thoroughly entertained,
and that after all was her object. She interviewed influential persons,
she wrote letters, some of them sufficiently ill-judged, she sought
information in regard to the character and circumstances of the clergy
in the diocese, and did everything with the zeal and dash which
characterized whatever she undertook.

"Have you any idea what Mrs. Wilson wants of us?" Wynne asked of
Philip, as they waited in the luxurious reception-room.

"I only know that Father Frontford said that we were to put ourselves
under her orders," was the reply. "Of course it is something about the
election."

Maurice looked at him keenly.

"Old fellow," he said, "you look pale. What's the matter with you?"

"I didn't sleep well," Ashe answered with a flush. "I went to Mrs.
Fenton's to dine, and the indulgence wasn't good for me. It's really
nothing."

Maurice did not reply, but sank into an easy-chair and looked about
him. The room was a charming fancy of the decorator, who claimed to
have taken his inspiration from the American mullein. The ceiling was
of a pale, almost transparent blue, a tint just strong enough to
suggest a sky and yet leave it half doubtful if such a meaning were
intended; the walls were hung with a rough paper matching in hue the
velvety leaves of the plant, here and there touched with
conventionalized figures of the yellow blossoms. This contrast of green
and yellow was softened and united by a clever use of the clear red of
the mullein stamens sparingly used in the figures on the walls, in the
cords of the draperies, and in the trimmings of the velvet furniture.
The decorator had used the same simple tone for walls, furniture, and
curtains; and the effect was delightfully soothing and distinguished.

Wynne felt somehow out of place in this room which bore the stamp of
wealth and taste so markedly. He smiled to himself a little bitterly,
recalling how alien he was to these things. Descended from a family for
generations established in a New England town, he had in his veins too
good blood to feel abashed at the sight of splendors; but he had in his
life seen little of the world outside of lecture-rooms or the Clergy
House. Born with the appreciation of sensuous delight, with the
instinctive desire for the beautiful and refined, he felt awake within
him at contact with the richness and luxury of the life which he was
now leading tastes which he had before hardly been aware of possessing.
He was being influenced by the joy of worldly life, so subtly presented
that he did not even appreciate the need of guarding against the danger.

His reflections were cut short by the entrance of a servant who
conducted the young men to a private sitting-room up-stairs. The halls
through which they passed were hung with superb old tapestry,
interspersed with magnificent pictures. On the broad landing it was
almost as if the visitors came into the presence of a beautiful woman,
lying naked amid bright cushions in an oriental interior. As he dropped
his eyes from the alluring vision, Maurice saw in the corner the name
of the artist.

"Fenton," he said aloud. "Did he paint that?"

His companion started, regarding the picture with widening eyes. The
English footman, whom Wynne addressed, turned back to say over his
shoulder:--

"Yes, sir; they say it's his best picture, and some says he painted his
best friend's wife that way, with nothing on, sir."

"It is a wicked picture!" Ashe said with what seemed to Maurice
unnecessary emphasis.

The footman regarded the speaker over his shoulder with a smile.

"Oh, that's owin' to your bein' of the cloth, sir," was his comment.
"They don't generally feel to own to likin' it; but they mostly notices
it."

A superb screen of carved and gilded wood stood before an open door
above. When this was reached, the footman slipped noiselessly behind
it, and they heard their names announced.

"Show them in," Mrs. Wilson's voice said.

The lady met them in a wonderful morning gown which seemed to be
chiefly cascades of lace, with bows of carmine ribbon here and there
which brought out the color of the dark eyes and hair of the wearer.
Maurice could hardly have told why he flushed, yet he was conscious of
the feeling that there was something intimate in the costume. To be met
by this beautiful woman, her hand outstretched in greeting, her eyes
shining, her white neck rising out of the foam of laces; to breathe the
air, soft and perfumed, of this room; to be surrounded by this luxury,
these tokens of a life which stinted nothing in the pursuit of
enjoyment; more than all to appreciate by some subtle inner sense the
appealing charm of femininity, the suggestions of domestic intimacies;
all this was to the young deacon to be exposed to influences far more
formidable to the ascetic life than those grosser temptations with
which a stupid fiend assailed St. Anthony. Wynne drew a deep breath,
wondering why he felt so strangely moved and confused; yet
unconsciously steeling himself against owning to his conscience what
was the truth.

"It is so good of you to come early," Mrs. Wilson said brightly. "I
hope you don't mind coming upstairs. I wanted to talk to you
confidentially, and we might be interrupted. Besides, you see, I am not
dressed to go down."

The young men murmured something to the effect that they did not in the
least mind coming up.

"Didn't mind coming up!" she echoed. "Is that the way you answer a lady
who gives you the privilege of her private sitting-room? Come, you must
do better than that. If you can't compliment me on my frock, you might
at least say that you are proud to be here."

The two deacons stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, abashed at
her raillery. Maurice saw the lips of Ashe harden, and he hastened to
speak lest his companion should say something stern.

"You should remember, Mrs. Wilson," he said a little timidly, yet not
without a gleam of humor, "that our curriculum at the Clergy House does
not include a course in compliment."

"It should then," she responded gayly. "How in the world is a clergyman
to get on with the women of his congregation if he can't compliment?
Why, the salvation or the damnation of most women is determined by
compliments."

The visitors stood speechless. Mrs. Wilson broke into a gleeful laugh.

"Come," cried she; "now I have shocked you! Pardon me; I should have
remembered--_virginibus puerisque!_ Sit down, and we will come to
business."

Both the young men flushed at her half-contemptuous, half-jesting
phrase, but they sat down as directed. Mrs. Wilson took her seat
directly in front of them, and proceeded to inspect them with cool
deliberation.

"I am looking you over," she observed calmly. "I must decide what work
you are fitted for before I can assign anything to you."

Two young men do not live together so intimately, and care for each
other so tenderly as did the two deacons without coming to know each
other well; and Maurice was so fully aware of the extreme sensitiveness
of Ashe that he involuntarily glanced at his friend to see how he bore
this inspection. He resented the impertinence of the scrutiny far more
on Philip's account than his own. Ashe's pale face had on it the
faintest possible flush, and his always grave manner had become really
solemn; but otherwise he made no sign. Wynne had a certain sense of
humor which helped him through the ordeal, and there was a faint gleam
of a smile in his eye as he confronted the brilliant woman before him;
but he was ill-pleased that his friend should be made uncomfortable.

"Do you judge by outward appearances," he asked, "or have you power to
read the heart?"

"Men so seldom have hearts," she retorted, "that it is not worth while
to bother with that branch." Then she added, as if thinking aloud, and
looking Ashe in the face: "You are an enthusiast, and take things with
frightful seriousness. You must see Mrs. Frostwinch. You'll just suit
her."

Maurice could see his companion shrink under this cool directness, and
he hastened to interpose.

"But Mrs. Frostwinch," he said, "is absorbed in Christian Science or
something, isn't she?"

"Oh, dear, yes," Mrs. Wilson answered, toying with the broad crimson
ribbon which served her as a girdle. "There is a horrid woman named
Trapps, or Grapps, or Crapps, or something, that has fastened herself
upon cousin Anna, and is mind-curing her, or Christian-sciencing her,
or fooling her in some way; but Mrs. Frostwinch is too well-bred really
to have any sympathy with anything so vulgar. She takes to it in
desperation; but she really detests the whole thing."

"But," Ashe began hesitatingly, "does her conscience"--

Mrs. Wilson laughed, making a gesture as if sweeping all that sort of
thing aside.

"I dare say her conscience pricks her, if that's what you mean; but
it's so much easier to endure the sting of conscience than of cancer
that I'm not surprised at her choice."

"Besides," Maurice put in, "this is all done nowadays under the name of
religion. It isn't as if it were called by the old names of mesmerism
or Indian doctoring."

"That's true enough," assented she. "At any rate Anna is mixed up with
this woman, who gets a lot of money out of her, and earns it by making
her think that she's better. However, Cousin Anna must be made to see
that it's her duty in this case to use her influence to prevent the
election of a man who would subvert the church if he could."

"But if you are her cousin," Ashe began, "would it not"--

"Be better if I went to see her myself? Not in the least. She entirely
disapproves of my having anything to do with the election. Besides,
nobody can successfully talk religion to a woman but a man."

Maurice smiled in spite of himself at the air with which this was said,
but he none the less felt that Mrs. Wilson was flippant.

"What influence has Mrs. Frostwinch?" he asked.

"Well," Mrs. Wilson answered, leaning back to consider, "I don't know
whether to say that she controls three votes in the upper house of the
Convention, or four."

The two young men regarded her in puzzled silence.

"There are at least three clergymen in the diocese that are dependent
upon her," Mrs. Wilson explained. "There is Mr. Bobbins: he married her
cousin,--not a near cousin, but near enough so that Anna has half
supported the family, and the family is always increasing. I tell Anna
that they have babies just to work on her compassion. I think it's
wrong to encourage it, myself. Then there is Mr. Maloon; he depends on
Mrs. Frostwinch to support his mission. Then there's Brother
Pewtap,--did you ever know such a lovely name for a country parson?--he
just lives on her with a family bigger than Mr. Robbins's. He's really
a Strathmore man, but he wouldn't dare to vote against her wishes. She
might manage all those votes. Besides, there's a Mr. Jewett somewhere
near Lenox that she's helped a good deal; but I haven't found out about
him yet."

She rose as she spoke, and went to a writing-table fitted out with all
the inventions known to man for the decoration of the desk and the
encumbrance of the writer.

"I have here a list of all the clergy of the diocese," she said, taking
up a book bound in red morocco and silver. "I've marked them down as
far as I've found out about them. It's necessary to be systematic. I've
done just as they do in canvassing a city ward."

Maurice regarded Mrs. Wilson with ever-increasing amazement, but, too,
not without increasing amusement. He was somewhat shocked by the
business way in which she treated the subject, but his heart was set on
the election of Father Frontford; he was honest in feeling that the
church would be injured by the election of Mr. Strathmore, and he was
too completely a man not to be half-unconsciously willing that for the
accomplishment of an end he desired a woman should do many things which
he would not do himself. The three went over the list together, the
young men giving such information as they possessed, Maurice all the
time strangely divided in his mind between disapprobation of Mrs.
Wilson and admiration. Her breath was on his cheek as she bent over the
book, the perfume of her laces filled faintly the air, now and then her
hand touched his. He was not conscious of the potency of this feminine
atmosphere which enveloped him; he did not so much think personally of
Mrs. Wilson, beautiful and near though she was, as he felt her presence
as a sort of impersonation of woman. He thought of Miss Morison, and
warmed with a nameless thrill, of longing. Then he recalled the remark
of Mrs. Staggchase that he was undergoing his temptation, and his heart
sank.

"You see," Mrs. Wilson was saying, when he forced his wandering
attention to heed her words, "men are really elected before the
convention. The work must be done now. You two can, of course, do a lot
of things that it wouldn't be good form for a regular clergyman to do.
Of course you wouldn't be able to manage the directing, but there is a
good deal of work that is in your line."

"Of course we are glad to do what we can," Maurice responded, smiling.

He glanced at Ashe and saw that his friend's face was stern.

"I knew you would be," the lady went on. "Mr. Ashe is to see Mrs.
Frostwinch. You can't be too eloquent in telling her the consequences
of Mr. Strathmore's election. If you can get her to write to the men
I've named, she can secure them. It won't be amiss to flatter her a
little; and above all don't abuse the faith-cure business."

"But if she speaks of it," Ashe returned hesitatingly, "what am I to
do?"

"Oh, she'll be sure to speak of it; but you must manage to evade. Let
her say, and don't you contradict. She'll say enough, I've no doubt.
Very likely she'll abuse it herself; but don't for goodness' sake make
the mistake of falling in with her. If you do, it'll be fatal."

"But I know Mrs. Frostwinch so slightly," Philip objected, "that I do
not see"--

"Come!" she interrupted; "there is to be none of this. You are under my
orders. I'll give you a letter to Cousin Anna now."

"But"--

"But! But what?" she cried, laughing. "Do you mean that you distrust
your leader so soon? Do I look like a woman to fail?"

She spread out her arms in a gesture half imploring, half jocose, her
laces fluttering, her ribbons waving, the ringlets about her face
dancing. Her eyes were brimming with mocking light, and however poorly
she might seem to represent ideas theological she certainly did not
personify failure.

Maurice laughed lightly and glanced at his friend. Ashe did not smile,
but he bowed as if in resignation to the command of a leader.

"You are to go to Mrs. Frostwinch's this very afternoon," Mrs. Wilson
declared. "It won't do to lose any time. If once her votes get pledged
to the other party, there's an end to that. That's your work. Now you,"
she continued, turning to Wynne, "are to go to Springfield and the
western part of the State."

"The western part of the State?" Maurice ejaculated in astonishment.
"Do you work there too?"

"Of course we have to cover the whole diocese," she returned
vivaciously. "Did you suppose we left everything but Boston to the
enemy?"

He could only reply by a stare. He had never in his life encountered
anything like this woman, and he was bewildered by her audacity, her
alertness, her beauty, and the dash with which she carried everything
off.

"You will go to-morrow," she went on, "and I will send you the list of
the men you have to see. I'm sorry not to go over it with you, but I
have an engagement this morning, and I shall be late now. You are
staying with Mrs. Staggchase, aren't you?"

"Yes; she is my cousin."

"So much the better for you. It's a liberal education to have a cousin
as clever as that. Good-by. Thank you both for coming."

She rang as she spoke, and handed the young men over to the maid who
appeared; the maid in turn handed them over to the footman, and by him
they were seen safely out of the house. As they turned away from the
door, Ashe sighed deeply, while Wynne was smiling to himself.

"What a--a--what a woman!" Philip said fervently. "She's amazing!"

"Oh, yes," his friend laughed; "but what do you or I know about women
anyway?"



                         VI


             HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY
                          Love's Labour's Lost, i. 1.


As Philip Ashe, his eyes cast down in earnest thought, approached Mrs.
Frostwinch's gate that afternoon, he looked up suddenly to find himself
face to face with Mrs. Fenton. She was dressed in dark, heavy cloth,
set down the waist with small antique buckles of dark silver; and
seemed to him the perfection of elegance and beauty.

"Good morning, Mr. Ashe," she greeted him, smiling. "I did not expect
to find you coming to hear Mrs. Crapps."

"To hear Mrs. Crapps?" he echoed. "Who is Mrs. Crapps?"

Mrs. Fenton turned back as she was entering the iron gate which between
stately stone posts shut off the domain of the Frostwinches from the
world, and marked with dignity the line between the dwellers on Mt.
Vernon Street and the rest of the world.

"Do you mean," asked she, "that you didn't know that Mrs. Crapps, the
mind-cure woman, is to lecture here this afternoon?"

Ashe drew back.

"I certainly did not know it," he answered. "I was coming to speak to
Mrs. Frostwinch about the election."

"It's the last of three lectures," Mrs. Fenton explained. "Mrs. Crapps,
you know, is the woman that has been curing Mrs. Frostwinch."

Ashe stood hesitatingly silent in the gateway a moment.

"I should like to see her," he said thoughtfully. "Not from mere
curiosity, but because I cannot understand what gives these persons a
hold over intelligent men and women."

"The thing that gives her a hold over Mrs. Frostwinch is that she has
raised her up from a bed of sickness. Come in with me, and see her. I
should like to see how she strikes you. You can speak to Mrs.
Frostwinch after the lecture."

He hesitated a moment, and then followed her, saying to himself with
suspicious emphasis that the fact that the invitation came from her had
nothing to do with his acceptance. He soon found himself seated in the
great dusky drawing-room of the Frostwinch house, an apartment whose
very walls were incrusted with conservative traditions. It was
furnished with richness, but both with much greater simplicity and
greater stiffness than he had seen in any of the houses he had thus far
been in. The chief decoration, one felt, was the air of the place's
having been inhabited by generations of socially immaculate Boston
ancestors. There was a savor of lineage amounting almost to godliness
in the dark, self-contained parlors; and if pedigree were not in this
dwelling imputed for righteousness, it was evidently held in becoming
reverence as the first of virtues. There are certain houses where the
atmosphere is so completely impregnated with the idea of the departed
as to give a certain effect as a spiritual morgue; and in the
drawing-room of Mrs. Frostwinch there was a good deal of this flavor of
defunct, but by no means departed, merit. Grim portraits stared coldly
from the walls, Copleys that would have looked upon a Stuart as
parvenu; the Frostwinch and Canton arms hung over the ends of the
mantel; while the very furniture seemed to condescend to visitors. Ashe
could not have told why the place affected him as overpowering, but he
none the less was conscious of the feeling. The company was apparently
nearly all assembled when he came in, and he sank down into a chair in
a corner, glad to escape observation.

The speaker of the afternoon was already in her place when he entered,
and he examined her with curiosity. She was a woman who might have been
forty years of age, with a hard, eager, alert face; her forehead was
narrow, her lips thin and straight, her nostrils cut too high. Her eyes
were bold and sharp, dominating her face, and fixing upon the hearers
the look of a bird of prey. Mrs. Crapps's hair was tinged with gray,
and in her whole appearance there was a sharpness which seemed to speak
of one who had battled with the world. Ashe was struck by the
personality of the woman, yet strongly repelled. She was evidently a
creature of abundant vitality, and exultantly dominant of will. The
bold, black eyes sparkled with determination, and he could at once
understand that Mrs. Crapps was one to establish easily an influence
over any nature naturally weak or debilitated by disease.

Ashe listened with curiosity to the opening of the address. The voice
of the speaker had much of the vivacity of her glance. She spoke with
an air of candor and frankness, and yet Philip found himself
distrusting her from the outset. He said to himself that it was because
he was prejudiced, that he doubted; but he yet felt that her manner
would in any case have begotten repulsion. She had that air of
insistence, of determination to be believed, which belongs to the
speaker who is absorbed rather in the desire to prevail than in the
wish to be true. He felt that her air of conviction was no proof of her
conception of the truth of what she was saying; she protested too much.
He was at first so absorbed in watching the woman that he paid little
heed to her theories; but he soon began to flush with indignation. This
woman, with her bold air and masculine dominance, sat there talking of
herself as a present incarnation of Christ; of Christ as the
incarnation of the human will; of disease as a sin; and of death as a
mere figment of the imagination. The paganism of the Persian as he had
heard it at Mrs. Gore's seemed to him less offensive than this. He
moved uneasily in his seat, his cheeks flushing, and his lips pressed
together. Presently he felt the glance of Mrs. Fenton, who sat near
him, and looking up he encountered her eyes. She seemed to him to show
sympathy with his feeling, but to remind him that this was not the time
or place for protest. He regained instantly his self-control, and
perhaps from that time on thought less of Mrs. Crapps than of his
neighbor.

The talk of Mrs. Crapps was commonplace enough, and hackneyed enough,
could Ashe but have known it. There was the usual patter about
spiritual and physical freedom, about faith and perfection, "the Deific
principle as a rule of health," a jumble of things medical and things
physical, things profane and things holy mingled in a strange and
unintelligible jargon. By the time that the eager-eyed speaker had
talked for an hour Ashe felt his mind to be in confusion, and he could
not but feel that not a few of the hearers must be in a state of utter
mental bewilderment if the address had impressed at all.

"The end of the whole matter is," Mrs. Crapps said in closing, "that
mankind has for ages submitted to this cruel superstition of death. We
have bowed ourselves beneath the wheels of this Juggernaut; we have
sent to the dark tomb our best loved friends; we crouch and cower in
awful fear of the time when we shall follow. We hear ever thrilling in
our ears the quivering minor chord of human woe, voice of the burning
heart-pain of the race, launched rudderless upon a troubled sea of woe,
and undrowned even by the throbbing march-beats of the progression of
man down the vista of the ages. And yet there is no death. This fear is
only the terror of children frightened by ghosts of their own
invention. What we dread has no existence save in the fevered and
fancy-fed fear of blinded men. O my hearers, why can we not seize upon
the hem of this truth which the Messiah came to teach! Death is but
sin; and sin has been removed by atonement; the holiness of the soul is
immortal. There is, there can be no death! Receive the glad tidings,
and cry it aloud! There is no death! Let all the earth hear, until
there is none so base, so low, so poor, so ignorant, so sinful that he
shall not be immortal. It is his birthright, for we are all born to
eternal life."

The voice of Mrs. Crapps took on a more persuasive inflection as she
delivered this peroration; and it was easy to see that she had affected
the nerves if not the minds of her audience. There was a deep hush as
she concluded. She lifted for a moment her sharp black eyes toward
heaven, and then dropped her glance to earth, as if overcome by
feeling, or as if with awe she had caught sight of sacred mysteries
which it was not lawful to look upon. In a moment more she raised her
eyes, and invited any of her hearers to question her about anything
connected with the subject which troubled them. For a breathing time
there was silence, and then a lady asked with a puzzled air:--

"But do you Christian Scientists deny"--

"I beg your pardon," Mrs. Crapps interrupted, leaning forward with a
deprecatory smile, "but I am not a Christian Scientist."

"I mean do you Faith Healers"--

"That is not our title," Mrs. Crapps said with gentle insistence.

"Are you called Mind Curers, then?"

"No," the priestess responded, with an air lofty yet condescending;
"with those forms of error we have no dealing or sympathy. It is true
that those who teach faith-healing, mind-cure, or any sort of religious
rejuvenance, have in part taken our high tenets; but they have in each
case obscured them by errors and follies of their own. We are the
Christian Faith Healed,--not healers, you will observe, because we
believe that all mankind are really healed, and that all that is needed
is that they recognize and acknowledge this precious truth."

The ladies present looked at one another in some confusion, and Ashe
caught in the eyes of Mrs. Staggchase, who sat half facing him, a gleam
of amusement. This emboldened him to repeat the question which had been
abandoned by its first asker, who had evidently been overwhelmed by the
delicacy of the distinction of sects made by Mrs. Crapps.

"Do you then," he asked, "deny the existence of death?"

"Utterly," the seeress returned, bending upon him a bold look as if to
challenge him to differ from what she asserted. "It is as amazing as it
is melancholy that mankind should have submitted to the indignity of
death so long."

"How can they submit to that which does not exist?"

"It exists in seeming, but not in reality."

A murmur ran through the company, and Philip met the eyes of Mrs.
Fenton, who shook her head slightly, as who would say that discussion
was futile.

"But--but how"--one hearer began falteringly, and then stopped,
evidently too overwhelmed by the astounding nature of the proposition
laid down to be able even to frame a question.

"Indeed," Mrs. Crapps said, taking up the word, "we may well ask how.
It transcends the incredible that the monstrous delusion of death
should ever have been entertained for an instant. The explanation lies
in sin. Death is but the projection of a sin-burdened conscience upon
the mists of the unknown. Thank God that it has been given to our
generation to tear away the veil from this falsehood, and to recognize
the absolute unreality of the phantom which the ignorance and
superstition of guilty humanity have conjured up." The smooth,
deliberate voice of Mrs. Staggchase broke the silence which this
declaration produced.

"It is then your idea that death comes entirely from the belief of
mankind?"

"What we call death undoubtedly has that origin," Mrs. Crapps answered.

"How then could so extraordinary a delusion have had a beginning?"

A faint shade crossed the face of the seeress, but it merged instantly
into a smile of patient superiority.

"That is the question unbelief always asks," she said. "It seems so
difficult to answer, and yet it is really so simple. The idea of death
of course arose from a distorted projection of the condition of sleep
upon the diseased imagination. With sin came the bewilderment of human
reason, and the delusion followed as an inevitable morbid growth."

"Then the earlier generations of mankind were immortal?"

"Undoubtedly. We have traces of the fact in all the old mythologies."

"But what became of them?"

"Once the idea of death had entered the world," Mrs. Crapps said
impressively, "it spread like the plague until it had infected all
mankind. Even those who had lived for ages to prove it false were not
able to resist the prevalence of the thing they knew to be untrue,--any
more," she added, dropping her eyes, and speaking in a tone sad and
patient, "than we who to-day understand that there is no such thing as
death can resist the overwhelming power of the belief of the masses of
the race. The might of the will of the majority, directed by an
appalling delusion, compels us to submit to that which we yet know to
be an unreality."

Again there was a hush. The woman was appealing to the most fundamental
facts of human experience and the most poignant emotions of human life,
and boldly denying or confounding both. It seemed to Ashe that the only
possible answer to such talk was an accusation either of madness or
blasphemy. The silence was once more broken by Mrs. Staggchase.

"But if there is no such thing as death," she observed, with the
faintest touch of irony perceptible in her well-bred voice, "of course
you do not really die; and since you do not share the general delusion
in thinking yourselves to be dead, it would seem to follow that
although you may be dead for the world in general, you are still
immortal for yourselves and each other."

The black eyes of Mrs. Crapps sparkled, but she controlled herself, and
shook her head with an air of gentle remonstrance.

"It proves how strong is the hold upon mankind of this delusion," she
said, "that what I tell you appears incredible. The truth is always
incredible, because the blind eyes of humanity can see only half-truths
except by great effort. I have tried to enlighten you, and I can do no
more. It is for you and not for myself that I speak."

She rose from her chair, which seemed to be the signal for the breaking
up of the assembly, and that her cleverness in securing the last word
was not without its effect was apparent by the murmurs of the company.
In another moment, however, Ashe heard as at Mrs. Gore's the exchange
of greetings and bits of news, the making of appointments for shopping
or theatre-going, and all the trivial chat of daily life. He stood
aside until the crowd should thin, and in the mean time had the
felicity of being near Mrs. Fenton. He began to feel himself almost
overcome by the delight of being so near her, of meeting her clear
glance, frank and sympathetic, of hearing her voice, of noting the
ripples of her hair, the curve of nostril and neck. He was like a boy
in the first budding of passion before reason has softened the
extravagance of his feeling. The talk of the afternoon, his indignation
at the words of Mrs. Crapps, his feeling that he had been assisting at
a sacrament of impiety, were all forgotten as he stood talking to his
neighbor.

"Come," she said at length, "I must speak to Mrs. Frostwinch before I
go."

He bent forward to remove a chair which was in her way, and her gloved
hand brushed against his. He covered the spot with his other hand as if
he would preserve the precious touch.

"I found Mr. Ashe at the door," Mrs. Fenton said to the hostess, "and I
would not let him turn back. I was too much interested in his errand."

"I am sorry if he needed urging to come in," Mrs. Frostwinch responded
with graceful courtesy; "but what was the errand?"

"Mrs. Wilson asked me to see you in relation to the election," Ashe
answered.

"Elsie is having a beautiful time managing this election," commented
Mrs. Frostwinch. "She hasn't been so amused for a long time. She thinks
Father Frontford is a puppet in her hands, while he knows that she is
one in his."

"I hope," Mrs. Fenton put in, "that you may be able to help Mr. Ashe. I
can answer for it that he is not making the matter one of amusement."

Ashe could not help flushing. He thanked her with a glance, and turned
again to Mrs. Frostwinch.

"I do not know or like the electioneering of such affairs," he said
gravely; "but since there is a strong effort being made on the other
side it certainly seems necessary to do whatever can be done fairly."

A few last visitors who had been chatting among themselves now came
forward to say good-by. Mrs. Fenton also took leave, and Ashe found
himself alone with his hostess and Mrs. Crapps.

"Mrs. Crapps, Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Frostwinch said.

It seemed to him that there was in the manner of Mrs. Frostwinch
something of condescension, as if the Faith Healed was a sort of upper
servant. He had himself not outlived the ingenuous period wherein a
youth feels that the preservation of truth in the world depends upon
his not covering his impressions, and he was accordingly extremely cold
in his manner.

"Ah, a new disciple to our faith, I trust," Mrs. Crapps said, fixing
upon him her keen, bold eyes.

"I have never even heard of your doctrine until to-day," he answered.

"But surely it must strike you at once," she responded, with a manner
evidently meant to be insinuating.

He hesitated. He remembered that he had been expressly warned not to
say anything against the vagaries with which Mrs. Frostwinch was
concerned; but his conscience would not allow him to evade this direct
challenge.

"It struck me as being blasphemous," he responded with unnecessary
fervor.

Mrs. Crapps raised her eyes to the ceiling, and uttered a theatrical
sigh.

"Oh, sacred truth!" she exclaimed.

"Come, Mrs. Crapps," Mrs. Frostwinch interposed almost sharply, "you
know that Mr. Ashe is right. It is blasphemous, and I feel as if I'd
allowed my house to be used for a sacrifice to false gods. If you will
excuse us, I wish to speak with Mr. Ashe on business. Will you kindly
come to the library, Mr. Ashe."

As he followed, Philip caught sight in a mirror of the face of Mrs.
Crapps. It wore a singular smile, but whether of anger or contempt he
could not tell.

"I dare say, Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Frostwinch remarked, as soon as they were
seated in the library, "that it seems strange to you that I have that
woman speak in my parlors. Of course I don't mean to apologize, but I
am sorry that you should hear things that shocked you."

"Dear madam," he answered, leaning forward in his eagerness, "what I
heard does not matter; but it does seem to me a pity that such things
should be said, and said under your protection."

He was too much in earnest to be self-conscious, even when she regarded
him in silence a moment before replying.

"You are perhaps right," she said at length, "although you exaggerate
the influence of such things."

"I do not pretend to know whether they are influential or not," he
returned simply. "It is only that they do not seem to me to be right.
If they are wrong, they are wrong."

She smiled and sighed.

"Life is not so simple as that," was her reply. "The woman has saved my
life. I should have been in my grave months ago but for her. My
physician insists now that I haven't any real right to be out of it. I
cannot refuse to allow her to say the thing that she believes, since
that thing has a certain proof in my very life."

Philip shook his head.

"It is not for me to judge," said he, "but the way in which all sorts
of heresies and strange doctrines are taught and played with in Boston
seems to me monstrous. The persons of influence who lend their names
and aid"--

He broke off suddenly, recalled by the half-smile in her eyes to the
fact that he was condemning her.

"There is much in what you say," Mrs. Frostwinch assented. "I suppose
that the difficulty is that we have ceased to recognize any authority
in matters of belief."

"But the church!"

"Yes, there is the church," she said doubtfully, "but to many it has
ceased to be an authority, and modern thought allows so much individual
freedom. Our church has never claimed to be infallible like the
Catholic; and individual freedom of conscience has come pretty
generally to mean freedom from conscience."

"Then it is a pity that the authority which is exercised in the Roman
church is not exercised in ours."

"Ah, Mr. Ashe, you reckon without the spirit of the age in which we
live. But tell me what I can do for you in the matter of the election."

Mrs. Frostwinch was a devout churchwoman in her way, although she was
now in appearance following after strange gods. She readily promised
her aid in favor of Father Frontford.

"I agree with you, Mr. Ashe," she said, "that everything possible
should be done to stem the tide of laxness which seems advancing
everywhere. The mental reservations of Mr. Strathmore are certainly so
broad that they may cover anything. I know women who go to his church
and simply say the beginning of the creed: 'I believe in God;' and who
do not hesitate in private to explain that by the name God they mean
whatever force it is that moves the universe, whether it is intelligent
or not."

"How dreadful!" Philip exclaimed. "How can the church endure if this
goes on?"

They talked for some time longer, and Mrs. Frostwinch assured him that
she would do her best to secure the votes of the clergymen who were her
pensioners. Ashe left her with a pleasant feeling in his heart that he
had accomplished his mission without sacrificing his convictions. Yet
perhaps more potent still in warming his heart was the remembrance of
the pleasant words which Mrs. Fenton had spoken in his behalf. The
memory colored all his thoughts of elections, of bishops, and of
creeds, as a gleam of rosy light tinges all upon which it falls.



                         VII


                 THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT
                          Othello, iv. 1.


"I knew that she was to send me tickets," Maurice Wynne said, standing
with an open note in his hand. "She insisted upon that; but why should
she send parlor-car checks too?"

"It is all part of your temptation," Mrs. Staggchase responded,
smiling. "Of course if you go as the representative of Mrs. Wilson it
is fitting that you go in state. If you were to represent the church
now"--

"If I don't go as a representative of the church," he responded, as she
paused with a significant smile, "I go as nothing."

"Oh, I thought that it was Elsie that was sending you. However, it's no
matter. The point is that you are becoming acquainted with the luxuries
of life. You are being tried by the insidious softness of the world."

He regarded her with some inward irritation. He had a half-defined
conviction that she was mocking him, and that her words were more than
mere badinage. He was not without a suspicion that his cousin was
sometimes histrionic, and that many things which she said were to be
regarded as stage talk. He did not know how far to take her seriously,
and this gave him a feeling at once confused and uncomfortable. To be
played with as if he were not of discernment ripe enough to perceive
her raillery or as if he were not of consequence sufficient to be taken
seriously, offended his vanity; and the man whom the devil cannot
conquer through his vanity is invulnerable. Wynne had no answer now for
the words of Mrs. Staggchase. He contented himself with a glance not
entirely free from resentment, at which she laughed.

"I wonder, Cousin Maurice," she said, "if you realize how completely
you have changed in the ten days you have been here. It is like
bringing into light a plant that has been sprouting in the dark."

He did not answer for a moment, trying to find it possible to deny the
charge.

"The fact that you know me better makes me seem different," he answered
evasively.

"How much has the fact that you don't know yourself so well to do with
it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, anything you like. I merely suspect that you are not so sure of
your vocation as you were in the Clergy House. Even a deacon is human,
I suppose; and if life is alluring, he can't help feeling it. Are you
still sure that the clergy should be celibate, for instance?"

He felt her eyes piercing him as if his secret thoughts were open to
her, and he knew that he was flushing to his very hair. He hastened to
answer, not only that he might not think, but that she might not
perceive that he had admitted any doubt to his heart.

"More than ever," he responded. "It is impossible not to see that a
clergyman who is married must have his thoughts distracted from his
sacred calling."

Mrs. Staggchase leaned back in her chair and regarded him with the
smile which he found always so puzzling and so disconcerting.

"You did that very well," she said, "only you shouldn't have put in the
word 'sacred.' That made it all sound conventional. However, you
probably meant it. She is distracting."

The hot blood leaped into his face so that he knew that it was utterly
impossible to conceal his confusion.

"I don't know what you mean," he stammered.

Instantly his conscience reproached him with not speaking the truth. He
responded to his conscience that it was impossible in circumstances
like these to say the whole, and that what he had said was not untrue.
He could not know what his cousin meant by her pronoun, and if the
thought of Miss Morison had come instantly into his mind, it by no
means followed that it was she of whom Mrs. Staggchase was thinking.
Life seemed suddenly more complex than he had ever dreamed it possible;
and before this remark the unsophisticated deacon became so completely
confused that for the instant it was his instinctive wish to be once
more safely within the sheltering walls of the Clergy House, protected
from the temptations and vexations of the world. He was after all of a
nature which did not yield readily, however, and the next thought was
one of defiance. He would not yield up his secret, and he defied the
world to drag it from him. His companion smiled upon him with the
baffling look which her husband called her Mona Lisa expression, and
then she laughed outright.

"My dear boy," she said, "you are no more a priest than I am; and you
are as transparent as a piece of crystal. Well, I am fond of you, and
I'm glad to have a hand in proving to you that you are not meant for
the priesthood before it's too late."

"But it hasn't been proved to me," he cried, not without some sternness.

"Oh, bless you, it's in train, and that's the same thing. 'Not poppy,
nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the east' could put you to
sleep again in the dream you had in the Clergy House. It will take you
a little longer to find yourself out, but the thing is done
nevertheless."

As she spoke, a servant came to the door to announce the carriage. Mrs.
Staggchase held out her hand.

"Good-by," she said, as Maurice rose, and came forward to take it. "I
hope that we shall see you again in a couple of days. I have still a
good deal to show you."

He had recovered his self-possession a little, and answered her with a
smile:--

"You make it so delightful for me here that I am not sure you are not
right in saying that you are my temptation."

"Oh, I've already given up the office of tempter," she responded
quickly. "I found a rival, and that I never could endure. You'll have
your temptation with you."

It seemed to Maurice when he came to take his seat in the parlor car
that his cousin was little short of a witch. In the chair next to his
own sat Berenice Morison. She greeted him with a friendly nod and smile.

"Mrs. Wilson told me that you were going on this train," she said, "and
she got a chair for you next to mine so that you should take care of
me."

He bowed rather confusedly, but with his heart full of delight.

"I shall be glad to do anything I can for you," he answered, vexed that
he had not a better reply at command.

He saw the dapper young man across the aisle regard him curiously, and
a feeling of dissatisfaction came over him as he reflected upon the
singularity of his garb, and the incongruity between the clerical dress
and the squiring of dames. Religious fervor is nourished by martyrdom,
but it is seldom proof against ridicule. It is not impossible that the
faint shade of amusement which Maurice fancied he detected in the eyes
of the stranger opposite was a more effective cause for discontent with
his calling than any of the influences to which he had been exposed
under the auspices of Mrs. Staggchase.

He could not help feeling, moreover, that there was a gleam of fun in
the clear dark eyes of Miss Morison. She was so completely at ease, so
entirely mistress of the situation, that Wynne, little accustomed to
the society of women, and secretly a little disconcerted by the
surprise, felt himself at a disadvantage. It touched his vanity that he
should be smiled at by the trimly appointed dandy opposite, and that he
should be in experience and self-possession inferior to the girl beside
him. He began vaguely to wonder what he had been doing all his life; he
reflected that he had not in his old college days been so ill at ease,
and it annoyed him to think that two years in the Clergy House should
have put him so out of touch with the simplest matters of life. He said
to himself scornfully that he was a monk already; and the thought,
which would once have given him satisfaction, was now fraught with
nothing but vexation and self-contempt. He had a subtile inclination to
give himself up to the impulse of the moment. He felt the intoxication
of the presence of Miss Morison, and he yielded to it with frank
unscrupulousness. He resolved that he would repent afterward; yet
instantly demanded of himself if this were really a sin. He was after
all a man, if he had chosen the ecclesiastic calling. If indeed he were
transgressing he told himself half contemptuously that as he did
penance doubly, once that imposed by his own spiritual director and
again that set by the Catholic at the North End, he might be held to
expiate amply the pleasure of this hour. He at least was determined to
forget for the once that he was a priest, and to remember only that he
was a man, and that he loved this beautiful creature beside him. He
noted the curve of her clear cheek and shell-like ear; the sweep of her
eyelashes and the liquid deeps of her dark eyes. He let his glance
follow the line of her neck below the rounded chin, and became suddenly
conscious that he was fascinated by the soft swell of her bosom. The
blood came into his cheeks, and he looked hastily out of the window.

The train was already clear of the city, and was speeding through the
suburbs, rattling gayly and noisily past the ostentatious stations and
the scattered houses. Maurice felt that his companion was secretly
observing him, although she was apparently looking at the landscape
which slid precipitately past. He wished to say something, and desired
that it should not be clerical in tone. He would fain have spoken, not
as a deacon, but as a man of the world.

"Are you going to New York?" he asked.

"I shall not have the pleasure of your company so far," she returned
with a smile.

"No," he responded naively. "I am going only to Springfield."

"Ah," she said, smiling again; and too late he realized that she had
meant that she was not going through.

He was the more vexed with himself because he was sure that his
confusion was so plain that she could not but see it, and that it was
with a kind intention of relieving his embarrassment that she spoke
again.

"I am going to visit my grandmother in Brookfield."

He replied by some sort of an unintelligible murmur, and was doubly
angry with himself for being so shy and awkward. He glanced furtively
at the trim young man opposite, and was relieved to find that that
individual was reading and giving no heed. He wondered why he should be
so completely thrown out of his usual self-possession by this girl, so
that when he talked to her, and was most anxious to appear at his best,
he was most surely at his worst. There came whimsically into his head a
thought of the wisdom of training the clergy to the social gifts and
graces, and he remembered the flippant speech of Mrs. Wilson about the
need of their being able to pay compliments.

"I seem to be specially stupid when I try to talk to you," he said with
boyish frankness.

Miss Morison looked at him curiously.

"Am I to take that as a compliment or the reverse?" she asked.

"It must be a compliment, I suppose, for it shows how much power you
have over me."

He was reassured by her smile, and felt that this was not so badly said.

"The power to make you stupid, I think you intimated."

"Oh, no," he responded, with more eagerness than the occasion called
for; "I didn't mean that."

She smiled again, a smile which seemed to him nothing less than
adorable, and yet which teased him a little, although he could not tell
why. She took up the novel which lay in her lap.

"Have you read this?" she inquired.

He shook his head.

"You forget," he answered, "that I am a deacon. At the Clergy House we
do not read novels."

"How little you must know of life," returned she.

There was a silence of some moments. The train rushed on, past fields
desolate under patches of snow, and stark, leafless trees; over rivers
dotted with cakes of grimy ice; between banks of frost-gnawed rock. The
landscape in the dim January afternoon was gray and gloomy; and as day
declined everything became more lorn and forbidding. Maurice turned
away from the window, and sighed.

"How disconsolate the country looks!" said he. "I am country bred, and
I don't know that I ever thought of the sadness of it; but now if I see
the country in winter it makes me sigh for the people who have to live
there all the year round."

"But they don't notice it any more than you did when you lived in it."

"Perhaps not; but it seems to me as if they must. At any rate they must
feel the effects of it, whether they are conscious of it or not."

Miss Morison looked out at the dull, sodden fields and stark trees.

"I am afraid that you were never a true lover of the country," said she
thoughtfully. "You should know my grandmother. She is almost ninety,
but she is as young as a girl in her teens. She has lived in the finest
cities in the world,--London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and of course our
American cities. Now she is happiest in the country, and can hardly be
persuaded to stay in town. She says that she loves the sound of the
wind and the rain better than the noise of the street-cars."

"That I can understand," he answered; "but I am interested in men. I
don't like to be away from them. There is something intoxicating in the
presence of masses of human beings, in the mere sense that so many
people are alive about you."

She looked at him with more interest than he had ever seen in her eyes.

"But I don't understand," she began hesitatingly, "why"--

"Why what?" he asked as she paused.

"I don't know that I ought to say it, but having begun I may as well
finish. I was going to say that I could not understand how one so
interested in men and so sensitive to humanity could be content to
choose a profession which cuts him off from so much of active life."

"It was from interest in men, I suppose, that I chose it. I wanted to
reach them, to do something for them. Although," Maurice concluded,
flushing, "I don't think that I realized at that time the feeling of
being carried away by the mere presence of crowds of living beings."

There was another interval of silence, during which they both looked
out at the cold landscape, blotted and marred by patches of snow tawny
from a recent thaw.

"I doubt if you have got the whole of it," Miss Morison said
thoughtfully, turning toward him. "Dear old grandmother is as deeply
interested in the human as anybody can be. She always makes me feel
that my life in the midst of folk is very thin and poor as compared to
hers. She has known almost everybody worth knowing. Grandfather was
minister to England and Russia, and she of course was with him. Yet
she's content and happy off here in Brookfield."

"Perhaps," Wynne returned hesitatingly, "there's something the matter
with the age. I don't suppose that at her time of life she has anything
of this generation's restless"--

He broke off abruptly.

"Well?" his companion said curiously.

He smiled and sighed.

"I don't know why I am talking to you so frankly," replied he. "As a
matter of fact I find that I'm more frank with you than I am with
myself. I've always refused to own to myself that there was anything
restless in my feeling toward life; yet here I am saying it to you."

"One often thinks things out in that way. Hasn't that been your
experience?"

"Yes," he responded thoughtfully; "although I don't know that I ever
realized it before. I see now that I've often reasoned out things that
bothered me simply by trying to tell them to my friend, Mr. Ashe."

"Is he your bosom friend and confidant? It is usually supposed to be a
woman in such a case."

"Oh, no," was his somewhat too eager rejoinder; "I never talked like
this to a woman. I never wanted to before."

A look which passed over her face seemed to tell him that the talk was
taking a tone more confidential than she liked. He was keyed up to a
pitch of excitement and of sensitiveness; and a thrill of
disappointment pierced him. He became at once silent; and then he
fancied that she glanced at him as if in question why his mood had
changed so suddenly. The train rolled into the station at Worcester,
and he went out to walk a moment on the platform, and to try to collect
his thoughts. He had forgotten now to question his right to be enjoying
the companionship of Miss Morison; he gloated over her friendly looks
and words, thinking of how he might have said this and that, and thus
have appeared to better advantage, and resolving to be more
self-controlled for the remainder of the ride. The open air was
refreshing; and a great sense of joyousness filled him to overflowing.
When again he took his seat in the car he could have laughed from
simple pleasure.

The chat of the latter part of the journey was more easy and
unconstrained than at the beginning. It was not clear to Wynne what the
change was, but he was aware that he was somehow talking less
self-consciously than before. They spoke of one thing and another, and
it teased the young man somewhat that when now and then his companion
mentioned a book he had seldom seen it. The things which he had read of
late years he knew without asking that she would not have seen. Even
the names of current writers of fiction were hardly known to him, and
an allusion to what they had written was beyond him. In spite of a word
which now and again brought out the difference between his world and
hers, however, Maurice thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Now and then he
would reflect in a sort of sub-consciousness that the delight of this
hour was to be dearly paid for with penance and repentance, but this
provoked in him rather the determination at least to enjoy it to the
full while it lasted, than any inclination to deny himself the present
gratification.

It has been remarked that the ecclesiastical temper is histrionic; and
Wynne was not without a share of this spirit. He would have gone to the
stake for a conviction, and made a beautifully effective death-scene
for the edification of men and angels, not for a moment aware that
there was anything artificial in what he was doing. Now he was not
without a consciousness that he was playing the role of a lover and a
prodigal, sincere in his love and devotion; yet none the less subtly
aware how much more interesting is repentance when there is genuine
human passion to repent, is renunciation when there is real love to
sacrifice; of how much more effective is saintliness set off against a
background of transgression. It was a real if somewhat childish joy to
be able to sin actually yet without going beyond hope; of being
dramatically false to his vows without crossing the line of possible
pardon.

"We shall be in Brookfield in ten minutes," Miss Morison said,
beginning to look about for her belongings. "We pass the New York
express just here."

Hardly had she spoken when suddenly and without warning there was an
outburst of shrieks from the whistle of the engine, answered and
blended with that of another. Before Maurice could realize what the
outburst meant, there followed a horrible shock which seemed to
dislocate every joint in his body. Berenice was thrown violently into
his arms, flung as a dead weight, and shrieking as she fell against his
breast. Instinctively he clasped her, and in the terror of the moment
it was for a brief instant no more to him that his embrace enfolded her
than if she had been the veriest stranger. A hideous din of yells, of
crashing wood and rending iron, of shivering glass, of escaping steam,
of indescribable sounds which had no resemblance to anything which he
had ever heard or dreamed of, and which seemed to beat upon his ears
and his brain like blows of bludgeons wielded by the hands of infuriate
giants. The end of the car before him was beaten in; splinters of wood
and fragments of glass flew about him like hail; it was like being
without warning exposed to the fiercest fire of batteries of an
implacable enemy. A woman was dashed at his very feet torn and
bleeding, her face mangled so that he grew sick and faint at the sight;
pinned against the seat opposite, transfixed by a long splinter as with
a javelin, was the dapper young man, horribly writhing and mowing, and
then stark dead in an instant, staring with wide open eyes and
distorted face like a ghastly mask. Moans and shrieks, grindings and
roarings, howlings and babbling cries that were human yet were
piercingly inarticulate filled the air with an inhuman din which drove
him to a frenzy. It seemed as if the world had been torn into fragments.

Yet all this was within the space of a second. Indeed, although all
these things happened and he saw and heard them clearly, there was no
pause between the first alarming whistle and the overturning of the car
which now came. He was lifted up; he saw the whole car sway with a
dizzying, sickening motion, and then plunge violently over. Fortunately
it so turned that he and Miss Morison were on the upper side. He fell
across the aisle, striking the chair opposite, but somehow
instinctively managing to protect Berenice from the force of the
concussion. She no longer cried out, but she clung convulsively about
his neck, and as they swayed for the fall he saw in her eyes a look of
wild and desperate appeal. He forgot then everything but her. The
desire to protect and save her, the feeling that he belonged absolutely
to her and that even to the death he would serve her, swallowed up
every other feeling. As they went over a vise-like grip caught his arm,
and amid all the infernal confusion he somehow connected that
despairing clutch with a succession of shrill and piercing shrieks
which rang in his ear, seeming to be close to him. He remembered that
in the chair behind his had been a young girl, and he felt a pity for
her that choked him like a hand at his throat. Then as they went down
he instinctively but vainly tried to shake off the hold, which was as
that of a trap. It was like being in the actual grip of death.

All sorts of loose articles fell with them from the upturned side of
the car to the other; they were part of a cataract of falling bodies,
involved as in a crushing avalanche. Wynne found himself in this
falling shower crumpled up between two chairs, one of his feet
evidently thrust through a broken window and the other still held by
that convulsive clasp. Miss Morison was half above him, partly
supported by a chair which still held by its fastenings to the floor.
He could not see her face, and his body was so twisted that he could
not move his head with freedom. Berenice was evidently insensible, but
whether stunned from the shock or more seriously hurt he could not
tell. He struggled fiercely to free himself, straining her to his
breast. There were still movements in the car after it had overturned.
It rocked and settled; for some time small articles continued to fall.
He drew the face of the unconscious girl more closely into his bosom to
protect it. As he did so he was aware that his arm was hurt. A burning,
biting pain singled itself out from all the aches of blows and
contusions. He seemed to remember that a long time ago, some hours
nearer the beginning of this catastrophe which had lasted but a moment,
he had felt something rip and tear the flesh; but he had been so
absorbed in the attempt to shield Berenice that he had not heeded. Now
the anguish was so great that it seemed impossible to endure it. He set
his teeth together, determined not to cry out lest she should hear him
and think that he lacked courage. Then it seemed to him that he was
swooning. He struggled against the feeling; and for what seemed to him
an interminable time he wavered between consciousness and
insensibility. It was either growing darker or he was losing the power
to see. He could not distinguish clearly any longer that human hand,
smeared with blood, sticking ludicrously in the air from amid a pile of
bags, coats, and all sorts of things thrown together just where the
position of his head constrained him to look. He had been seeing that
hand for a long time, it seemed to him, and only now that the darkness
had so increased as to cut it off from his sight did he realize what it
was and what it must mean.

He still retained a consciousness of the face of Berenice, warm against
his bosom, and with each wave of faintness he struggled to keep his
senses that he might protect her. The din of noises seemed far away,
the cries somewhere at a distance ever increasing. The moans that had
seemed to him those of the girl who clutched his arm grew fainter,
until they were lost in the buzz and whirr of a hundred other sounds.
Then the clasp which held him relaxed as suddenly as if a rope had been
cut away. It came into his mind with a wave of horror that the girl who
had held him was dead. The thought that Berenice might be dead also
followed like a flash, and aroused his benumbed senses. He spoke to
her; he tried to move; to release her from her position. He seemed
buried under a mound of debris, and she gave no sign of life. He
exhausted himself in frantic attempts to escape; to get his arms free;
to turn his head far enough to see her face; to thrust back the rubbish
which had fallen against them. The anguish to his arm was so great that
he could not continue; he could do nothing but suffer whatever fate had
in store for him. He tried to pray; but his prayers were broken and
confused ejaculations.

All at once he distinguished amid the chaos of noises roaring and
singing in his ears something which made his heart stand still; which
pierced to his dulled consciousness like a stab. It was the cry of
"Fire!" He had once seen a servant with her hair in flames, and
instantly arose before him the picture of her shriveling locks and the
terror of her face. He seemed to see the dear head on his bosom--The
thought was more than he could bear, and for the first time he cried
out, shouting for help in a transport of frenzied fear. He was so
absorbed in his thought of Berenice that he had forgotten himself; but
the realization of his own peril revived as a waft of smoke came over
him, choking and bewildering. He was then to die here, stifled or
wrapped in the torture of flame. Then the wild and desperate thought
sprang up that at least if he must die he should die with her on his
bosom, clasped in his arms. He might give himself up to the delirium of
that joy, since there was no more of earth to contaminate it. But the
horror of it! The anguish for her as well as for him! Not by fire! His
thoughts whirled in his brain like sparks caught in a hurricane. He
scarcely knew where he was or what had happened to him. Only he was
acutely aware of the acrid smoke, of how it increased, constantly more
dense and stifling.

However the mind may for a moment be turned aside from its usual way by
circumstances, habit is quick to reassert itself. The habitual
constrains men even in the midst of events the most startling. The mind
of Wynne had been too long bred in priestly forms not to turn to the
religious view here in the face of death. His conscience cried out that
he might be responsible for the peril and disaster which had come upon
them. With the unconscious egotism of the devotee, he felt that heaven
had been avenging the impiousness of his sin. He had dared to trifle
with his sacred calling, to look back to the loves of the world and of
the flesh, and swift destruction had overtaken him. And Berenice had
been crushed by the divine vengeance which had so deservedly fallen on
him. He groaned in anguish, seeming to see how she had perished through
the blight of his passion. Not by fire, O God! Not by fire! How long
would it be possible to breathe in this stifling reek, heavy with
unspeakable odors? It was his crime that had brought her to this death.
He, a man set apart and consecrated to the work of God, had turned from
heaven to earth, and heaven had smitten with one blow him and the woman
who had been unwittingly his temptation. And she so innocent, so pure,
so sacred! Through his distraught mind rushed a pang of hatred against
the power that could do this. He was willing to suffer for his sin, but
where was the justice of involving her in his ruin? It was because this
was what would hurt him most! It was the work of a devil! Then this
thought seemed to him a new transgression which might lessen the
chances of his being able to save her, and he tried to forget it in
prayer, to atone by penitence. He offered his own life amid whatever
tortures would propitiate the offended deity, but he prayed that she
might be spared.

All this time--and whether the time were long or short he could not
tell--he had heard continued cries and groans. He had now and then been
dully aware of a change in the noises. Now it would seem as if all else
was swallowed up in the sound of tremendous blows, as if the car were
being struck again and again by a mighty battering-ram. Then a chorus
of shouting went roaring up, as if an army cried. Noise and physical
sensation were too intimately blended to be separated; his brain
struggled in confusion, emerging now and then for a moment of
consecutive thought and sinking back into semi-unconsciousness as a
spent swimmer goes down, fighting wildly for life. He knew that a light
had come into the car. He saw it amid the smoke, and his first thought
was that it was flame. Dulled and half asphyxiated, he said to himself
now almost with indifference that the end had come. Then with a thrill
which for a moment aroused all his energies he recognized that it was
the glow of a lantern. He was aware that rescuers were close above him,
climbing down through the windows over his very head. He cried to them
in a paroxysm of appeal:--

"Save her! Save her!"

Whether he was heeded amid the babble of cries and all the noises which
seemed to swell to drown his voice, he could not tell, but in another
instant he felt that friendly hands had seized Miss Morison, and were
endeavoring to lift her insensible form. He strove to loosen his hold,
but the effort gave him agony so intolerable that he could do nothing.
A thousand points seemed to rend and tear him as he tried to move, and
when a voice somewhere above him shouted: "We'll have to try to lift
them together!" he experienced a strange sort of double consciousness
as if he stood outside of himself and heard others talking of him. He
felt himself grasped under the arms, and the pain of being moved was
too horrible to be endured. He shrieked in mortal agony, and then in a
whirl of dizzying circles seemed to go down in a tide of blackness
sparkling with millions of sharp scintillations.



                      VIII


                LIKE COVERED FIRE
                        Much Ado about Nothing, iii. 1.


Philip Ashe found himself less and less able either to understand or to
sympathize with the politics of Mrs. Wilson. He believed in the
righteousness of her cause, and was keenly alive to the peril of the
appointment of Mr. Strathmore to the vacant bishopric. It is an
inevitable and necessary condition of enthusiasm that it shall be
narrow; and religious fervor would be impossible to a mind open to
conviction. To accept the possibility of any opposed truth is to be
secretly doubtful of the creed which one holds; and tolerance is of
necessity the child of indifference. Had Ashe been able to perceive
that the church would go on much the same no matter which of the rival
candidates was chosen, it would have been impossible for him to be so
deeply concerned for the success of Father Frontford. As it was he was
as much in earnest as Mrs. Wilson, and thus he felt forced to acquiesce
in the strangeness of her methods of work. He said to himself that he
supposed this electioneering to be a necessity, no matter how
unpleasant; and he added the reflection that in any case it was not in
his power to prevent it.

Other feelings were, moreover, completely absorbing his mind. Although
he was not yet conscious that anything had come between him and the
church, priesthood in which had been his highest earthly ideal, the
truth was that his passion for Mrs. Fenton waxed steadily. Chance threw
them together. Mrs. Fenton had been appointed to a committee on
charities, and it happened that Ashe was a visitor in the North End in
a region which the committee were making an especial field of labor. He
was called into consultation with her, and sometimes they even went
together to visit some of the poverty-stricken families which evidently
existed chiefly to be subjects for philanthropic manipulation. Day by
day Ashe felt her speak to him more easily and familiarly; and although
their talk was strictly impersonal and unemotional, none the less did
it feed his growing love.

The nature which does not sometimes try to deceive itself is an
abnormal one; and Ashe was not behind his fellows in devising excuses
for the joy which he found in Mrs. Fenton's presence. He dwelt in his
musings upon her devotion to the church, her good works, her visitings
of the poor and sick. He assured himself with a vehemence too feverish
not to be fallacious that he was instigated only by entirely
disinterested feelings; by the desire to assist in deeds of Christian
helpfulness, and by pleasure in the society of one whose devotion to
godliness was so marked. He argued with himself as eagerly as if he
were struggling to convince another, protesting to his own secret heart
as earnestly as he would have protested to a friend.

A man seldom really deceives himself, however, save in thinking that he
can deceive himself. There were moments in which his inner self rose up
and laughed him to scorn; moments in which his sin glowed before him in
colors blood-red. He saw himself apostate, false to his vows, drawn
away by his earthly lusts and beguiled. There were nights when he cast
himself upon the ground in an agony of self-abasement, beating his
breast and praying in a passion of remorse; times when by the cruelty
of his self-accusings he involuntarily sought to do penance for the
sweet sin which festered in his bosom.

Worse than all was the color which was imparted to his passion by the
self-imposed prohibitions which he was violating. The insistence upon
the earthly side of love which is an inevitable accompaniment to the
idea that woman is a temptation, cannot but degrade the relation of the
sexes in the mind of the professed celibate. To keep before the
thoughts the theory that passion is a snare and a pollution is to
render it impossible to love with purity and self-abandonment. Poor
Philip, endowed at birth with a nature of instinctive delicacy, could
not free himself from the taint of his training; yet he shrank as from
hot iron from the blasphemy of connecting any shadow of earthliness
with the woman who had become his ideal. His only resource was to take
refuge in repeating to himself that he did not love Mrs. Fenton; but
even in denying it he felt that he was defending himself from a charge
which was a degradation to her as well as to himself. He fell into that
morbid state of mind where whatever he tried as a remedy made his
disease but the worse; where the idea of love was the more horrible to
him the more it possessed and pervaded his whole being.

Mrs. Herman was not unobservant of his condition, although she was far
from understanding his state of mind. She felt that there was little
use in forcing his confidence, but she gave him now and then an
opportunity to confide in her, feeling sure that he would be the better
for freeing his heart in speech.

She was sitting one afternoon alone in the library when Ashe came home
from a missionary expedition. The day was gray and gloomy, and the
early twilight was shutting down already, so that the fire began to
shine with a redder hue. Mrs. Herman was taking her tea alone, and as
it chanced, she was thinking of her cousin.

"You are just in time for tea," she greeted him. "It is hot still."

"But I seldom take tea," he answered, seating himself by the fire with
an air of weariness which did not escape her.

"That is so much more reason that you should take it now. It will have
more effect. I can see that you are tired out. One lump or two?"

He yielded with a wan smile, and, resuming his seat, sat sipping his
tea in silence for some moments. At length he sighed so heavily that
she asked with a smile:--

"Is it so bad as that?"

"Is what so bad?" he returned, looking at her in surprise.

"You sighed as if all life had fallen in ruins about your feet, and I
couldn't help wondering if there were really no joy left to you."

He smiled rather soberly, and did not at once reply. The fire burned
cheerily on the hearth, noiseless for the most part, but now and then
purring like a cat full of happy content; the shadows showed themselves
more and more boldly in the corners, daring the firelight to chase them
to discover their secrets. The colors of the room were softened into a
dull richness; the dim gilding on the old books which had belonged to
Helen's father, dead since her infancy, caught now and then a gleam
from a tongue of flame which sprang up to peer into the gathering dusk;
the copper tea equipage reflected a red glow, and gave to the picture a
certain suggestion of comfort and cheer.

"I was thinking how comfortable it is here," Philip said at length.

"And that made you sigh?"

"Yes; I'm ashamed to say that it came over me how far away from me all
this is."

"If it is," she returned slowly, "it is simply because you choose that
it shall be."

He turned his face toward her as if about to protest; then looked again
into the fire. The conversation seemed ended, until Mrs. Herman spoke
again as if nothing had been said.

"You have been slumming this afternoon?"

"I do not like the name, but I suppose I have."

"It isn't a cheerful day to go poking about alone among the tenement
houses."

"I was not alone," Ashe answered with a hesitation which she could not
help noting and with a significant softening of voice. "Mrs. Fenton was
with me."

"Ah!"

The exclamation was involuntary. In an instant there had flashed upon
Helen's mind a suspicion of the true state of things. The despondency
of her cousin, the reflection upon the comfort of domesticity,
connected themselves in her thought with trifling incidents which had
before come under her observation; and his manner of speaking brought
instantly to her mind the conviction that Ashe was thinking of Mrs.
Fenton with more than the friendliness of acquaintanceship. When Philip
looked up with a question in his eyes, however, she was already on her
guard.

"The weather is so doleful," she hastened to add, "that I should think
that even philanthropy might lose its power of amusing."

"Cousin Helen," returned he, with some hesitation, "I do not like to
hear you speak in that way of what is part of my life work."

She smiled; then sighed and shook her head.

"My dear Philip," replied she, "I had certainly no intention of
wounding you; and if you'll let me say so, I think you are going out of
your way to find cause of offense. Philanthropy isn't a thing so sacred
that it is not to be spoken of with a smile."

"No; but"--

"But what?"

He did not answer at once. He put down his empty cup absently, and then
sat staring into the fire as if he were trying there to read the
solution of the riddle of existence.

"Come," Helen observed, after waiting for a little, "you have something
on your mind. What is it? It will do you good to tell it, even if I'm
not clever enough to help you."

"I am sure that you could help me," he began eagerly; and then in a
changed voice he added, "if anybody could."

She left her place behind the tea-table and came nearer to him, sitting
directly before the fire. The light fell on her convincing face and on
her wavy hair. She folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him.

"Well?" she said.

"I do not know how to say it," Philip responded slowly. "I am afraid
that you have not much sympathy with my views of life."

"I probably have more than you realize. It's true that I do not believe
as you do, but we are both Puritans at heart, so that in the end our
theories come to much the same thing."

He looked up with evident inability to follow her meaning.

"I don't understand," he said.

"Very likely I couldn't make myself clear if I tried to explain.
Suppose we give up abstractions and come to the concrete. What is the
especial thing in which you think that my theories are different from
yours?"

"I do not think," he answered, hesitating more than ever, "that you
have much sympathy with asceticism."

"None whatever," she declared uncompromisingly. "Nobody could have more
honor for a sacrifice to principle than I have; but I believe that a
sacrifice to an idea is apt to be the outcome of nothing but vanity or
policy."

"But what is the difference?"

"Why, an idea is a thing that we believe with the head; don't you know
the way in which we think things out while we secretly feel altogether
different?"

"I do not think I follow you; but surely self-denial is a sacrifice to
principle."

"Not necessarily. I'm afraid I may seem to you profane, Philip, but I
must say that it seems to me that asceticism is one of the worst
plague-spots which ever afflicted humanity. The root of it is the pagan
idea of propitiating a cruel deity by self-torture."

"How can you say so!" he cried. "It is the pure devotion of a man to
the good of his higher nature and to the good of the race."

"As far as the race goes, vicarious suffering can't be anything, so far
as I see, except an effort to placate an unforgiving deity. As for the
devotion of a man to his higher nature, you will never convince me that
to go against nature and to indulge in morbidness is improving to
anything. But here we are, swamped in a bog of great moral propositions
again. We can't agree about these things, and the thing which we really
want to say will be lost sight of entirely."

He turned his face away from her again, either troubled by what she had
been saying or unable to find words and confidence to go on with the
confession of his trouble.

"Is it," Helen inquired, "that you have found that you have yourself a
doubt of the value of asceticism?"

"No, not that," he answered, dropping his voice; "but--but I begin to
doubt myself."

She leaned forward in her chair. Some power outside of her own will
seemed to constrain her.

"Philip," she said, bending over and touching his hand, "has love made
you doubt?"

The question evidently took him entirely by surprise. She wondered what
impulse had made her speak and how her question would affect him. He
flushed to his forehead, and cast at her a look so full of pathetic
appeal that she felt the tears come into her eyes. It was the look of a
hunted creature which sees no way of escape, yet which has not the fury
of resistance, which pleads its own weakness. She knew that Philip
could not equivocate and that the secret of his heart lay bare before
her. She shrank from what she had done, and a flood of pity and
sympathy filled her mind.

He gave her no more than a single look, and then buried his face in his
hands.

"I have betrayed my high calling," he exclaimed in a voice of bitter
suffering. "I have put my hand to the plough and looked back. I am too
weak to be worthy to"--

"Stop," she interposed brusquely, although she was deeply touched. "I
can't listen to that sort of talk. It isn't wholesome and it isn't
manly. If you have fallen short of your ideal, your experience is that
of the rest of the race. I suppose the secret of our making any
progress is the power of conceiving things higher than we can reach. It
keeps us trying."

"But I devoted myself to"--

"My dear boy," she interrupted him again, "you are like the rest of us.
You told yourself that you would be above all the passions and emotions
of common humanity, and you are discouraged to find that you're human
after all. That's really the whole of it."

"But to allow yourself to love"--

It was not necessary for her to interrupt him now. He stopped of his
own will, casting down his eyes and blushing like a school-boy. It
seemed to her that it might be better to try raillery.

"To allow yourself, O wise cousin!" she cried. "Men do not allow or
disallow themselves to love. It's deeper business than that."

"But I should have had strength not to yield."

"Is there anything discreditable in loving?" she demanded.

"There is for a priest."

"If there were, you are not a priest."

"In intention I am; and that is the same in the sight of Heaven."

She could not repress a gesture of impatience. She felt at once an
inward annoyance and a secret admiration. The temper of his mind was
exasperatingly like her own in its tenacity of conviction. He would not
excuse himself by any shifts, no matter how convincing they might seem
to others. The matter must be met fairly and frankly, and she must
reach his deepest feelings if she would move him. She reflected how
best to deal with him, and with her thoughts mingled the question
whether Edith Fenton could return Philip's love. The young man was well
made and sufficiently good-looking, although paled by study and
austerities. He was of good birth and property, and from a worldly
point of view not entirely an unsuitable match for the widow, should
she think of a second husband. He was somewhat younger than Mrs.
Fenton; and Helen was not without the thought that this passion might
be on his part no more than the inevitable result of his coming in
contact with a beautiful woman after having been immured in the
monastic seclusion of the Clergy House; a passion which would pass with
a wider acquaintance with the world. The whole matter perplexed and
troubled her, and yet she earnestly longed to help her cousin.

"Dear Philip," she said, "I can't tell you how I enter into your
feeling. I don't agree with you, but we are not so far apart in
temperament, if we are in doctrine. I'm afraid that you'll think that
I'm merely tempting you when I say that it seems to me that your
conscientiousness is entirely right, and that your conviction is all
wrong."

"Of course I know that you do not hold the same faith that I do."

"But one of your own faith might remind you that your own church
upholds the marriage of the clergy."

"Yes," he assented with apparent unwillingness, "but my conscience does
not."

"Do you mean that you find your conscience a better guide than the
church? That seems to put you on my ground, after all."

"Oh, no, no! Certainly I do not put myself above the authority of the
church."

"The eagerness with which you disclaim any common ground with me isn't
polite," she retorted, glad of a chance to speak more lightly and
smilingly; "but it's sincere, and that is better."

"I wasn't trying to disclaim thinking as you do; but to insist that I
do not set myself above the church."

"Then I repeat that the church sanctions the marriage of the clergy. If
you don't agree, I don't see why you do not really belong in the Roman
Catholic Church."

There was a long pause, during which she watched her cousin narrowly.
He seemed to be thinking deeply, with eyes intent on the fire. She was
so little prepared for the direction which his thought took that she
was startled when he said at last with a sigh:--

"I do sometimes find myself envying the absolute authority with which
the Roman Catholic Church speaks."

"Authority!" she repeated indignantly. "Do you mean that you wish to
give up your individuality?"

"No; not that; but it must be of unspeakable comfort in times of mental
doubt to repose on unquestioned and unquestionable authority."

Helen rose from her place by the fire and walked to the window. She
felt that she was on very delicate ground, and she would gladly have
escaped from the discussion could she have done so without the feeling
of having evaded. She stood a moment looking out into the darkening
street, dusky in the growing January twilight, bleak and dreary. Then
with a sudden movement she went to her husband's desk and took up a
picture of her boy, a beautiful, manly little fellow of three years, of
whom Philip was especially fond. Crossing to her cousin, she put the
picture in his hand, at the same time turning up the electric light
behind him.

"See," she said, with feminine adroitness. "I don't think I've shown
you this picture of Greyson."

He looked at it earnestly, and sighed.

"It is beautiful," said he. "Greyson is a son to be proud of and to
love."

"Well?" she asked significantly.

"What do you mean?" returned he. "What has Greyson's picture to do with
what we were talking about?"

She took the photograph from his hand, extinguished the light, and
walked back toward the desk. The room seemed darker than before now
that the firelight only was left. Suddenly she turned, with an outburst
almost passionate:--

"O Philip!" she exclaimed. "Can't you see? My son! Surely if there is
anything in this world that is holy, that is entirely pure and noble,
it is parentage. Do you suppose that all the churches in the world,
with authority or without it, could make Grant and me feel that there
is anything higher for us than to take our little son in our arms and
thank God for him!"

He did not answer, and she controlled her emotion, smiling at her own
extravagance, while she wiped away a tear. She kissed the picture, and
put it in its place; then she returned to her chair by the fire.

"I don't expect you to understand my feeling," she said. "You never can
until you have a son of your own. If a little cherub like Grey puts his
baby hands into your eyes and pulls your hair, you'll suddenly discover
that a good many of your old theories have evaporated."

"But, Cousin Helen," he began hesitatingly, "certainly there is often
sin"--

She interrupted him indignantly.

"There is no sin in faithful, loving, self-respecting marriage," she
insisted. "That is what I am talking about. It is the holiest thing on
earth. Anything may be degraded. I've even heard of a burlesque of the
sacrament. I don't see why I shouldn't speak frankly, Philip. You are
in a state of mind that is morbid and self-tormenting. If you love a
woman, tell her so honestly and clearly; and if she is a good woman and
can love you, go down on your knees, and thank God."

He leaned his forehead on his hands, as if he were struggling with
himself. The firelight shone on his rich hair, auburn like her own.
Helen watched him anxiously, wondering if she had said too much, and
whether she were taking too great a responsibility in the advice she
gave. Certainly anything must be good that took him out of his
unhealthy mood.

"Come," she said, rising, and turning on the electric light again. "It
is time for Grant to be at home, and for me to be dressing. We are to
dine at the Bodewin Rangers to-night."

He put up his hand to arrest her, and said in a tone that wrung her
heart:--

"But, Cousin Helen, I cannot speak of love to a woman until I am ready
to give up for her my priestly calling."

"Until you are willing to give up your unwholesome idea of celibacy and
asceticism, you mean."

"It would be sacrificing a principle to a passion."

Helen sighed.

"I could reason with you," she returned, half-humorously, "but how
shall I get on with all the Puritan ancestors who prevail in you and
me! The thing that I say isn't that you are to give up your notions
about the celibacy of the priesthood in order to marry, but because
they are unwholesome and abnormal. The thing that most closely links
you to humanity is the thing that best fits you to be of use in the
world."

He regarded her with a glance of painful intensity.

"But suppose," he suggested, "that the woman I loved could not love me?
Then I should come back to the church, and lay on the altar only a
discarded and worthless sacrifice."

"Come back to the church!" she echoed. "You don't leave it. If marriage
takes you out of the church, then the sooner such a church is left the
better! Do you realize what you are doing, Philip? Do you remember that
you insult the good name of your mother by the view you take of
marriage? I am sick of all this infamous condemnation of what to me is
holy! If the church cannot rise to a noble and pure conception of it,
the sooner the church is done away with, the better for mankind!"

"But you wrong the church," he interrupted eagerly. "The church makes
marriage a sacrament; it recognizes its purity; it"--

"Then what are you doing," she burst in, "with your exceptions to the
theory of the church? It is you who degrade it--Pardon me, cousin," she
added in a calmer voice, coming to him and laying her fingers lightly
on his shoulder. "I am speaking out of my heart. I have the shame of
knowing that I once failed to realize how high and how noble a thing
marriage is. I am older than you, and I have suffered as I hope you may
never have to suffer; the end of it all is that I have learned that
there is nothing else on earth so blessed as the real love of husband
and wife. Of course," she concluded, as he would have interrupted, "I
talk as a woman, and I cannot decide what you are to do. Only I would
like you to believe that I would help you if I could, and that what I
say of marriage is the thing which seems to me the truest thing on
earth."

Then without waiting for reply, she went away and left him to his
thoughts.



                         IX


               HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH
                          Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv. 2.


"Who is Mr. Rangely?" Ashe inquired one morning at breakfast.

Mrs. Herman looked at her husband as if she expected him to reply,
although the question had been addressed to her.

"Fred Rangely," Grant Herman answered, "is a writer. He writes for the
magazines and is a newspaper man. He's written one or two novels, and
the first one was pretty successful. He's written plays too."

Helen smiled.

"Grant is too good-natured to tell you what you really want to know,"
she commented. "Mr. Rangely was once in some sort a friend of his, in
the old days when there was still something like an artistic
brotherhood in Boston, and he can't bear to say things that are not to
his credit. Now I should have answered your question by saying that
Fred Rangely is a warning."

"A what?" Ashe asked, while Herman sighed.

"A warning. A dozen years ago he was one of the most promising men
about. He had made a good beginning, he was clever and popular, and
both as a novelist and as a playwright we hoped for great things from
him."

"And now?"

"Now he is a failure."

Herman looked up almost reprovingly.

"I don't think he would recognize that," he observed.

"No, he wouldn't; and that's the worst of it. Ten years ago if anybody
had said of Fred Rangely: 'Here's a fellow that has started out to do
good work, but has found that there's more money in sensationalism; who
despises the popular taste and caters to it; who writes things he
doesn't believe for the newspapers and spends the money in running
after society,' he would have pronounced such a fellow a cad. Now he
would say: 'Well, a man must live, you know; and the public will only
pay for what it wants.' It's lamentable."

"You put it rather worse than it is," her husband responded. "We are
all in the habit of judging men as if their degradation was deliberate,
which as a matter of fact I suppose it never is. Rangely hasn't coolly
accepted the choice between honesty and Philistinism. It's all come
gradually."

"Like learning to pick pockets," she interpolated.

"Besides," Herman continued, "we over-estimated in the beginning both
his character and his talent. He found he couldn't do what was expected
of him, and he was weak enough to do then what was most comfortable
instead of what seemed to him highest. It is what nine men out of ten
do."

"Of course," Helen assented, "but after all it has come about by his
giving in on one thing after another. There was always a good deal that
is attractive about him, but he never showed much moral stamina. He
could never have married as he did if he had possessed fine instincts."

"And his wife?" Ashe inquired.

"Oh, he married a New York girl, who"--

"There, there," broke in Herman good-naturedly. "It is just as well not
to go into a characterization of Mrs. Rangely. I own that there isn't
much good to be said of her; so it is as well to let her pass."

"Well, so be it," his wife assented, smiling. "I have only to say," she
added, turning to her cousin, "that when Grant declines to have a woman
discussed it is equivalent to a condemnation more severe"--

"Nonsense," protested Herman. "Don't believe her, Ashe. As for Mrs.
Rangely, it's enough to say that she is merely an imitation in most
things, and that she has called out the worst of her husband's nature
instead of the best. I'm sorry to say it, but I'm afraid it's true."

Mrs. Herman looked at him with a smile which seemed to tease him for
having been betrayed into saying a thing so much more severe than were
his usual judgments. Then with true feminine instinct she brought the
talk back to its most significant point.

"Why did you ask about his wife?" she inquired of Philip.

"I--I did not know," he returned, so evidently disconcerted that she
did not press the matter.

Had Helen been a gossip she might have added that Rangely had acquired
the reputation of being always philandering with some woman or other.
Before his marriage he had been the slave of Mrs. Staggchase, and now,
after devotion to all sorts of society women, he had come to be counted
as one of the train of admirers who offered their devotion at the
shrine of Mrs. Wilson. Where a Frenchwoman prides herself on the
intensity of the devotion of some man not her husband, an American of
the same type glories in the number of slaves that her charms ensnare.
In either case the root of the matter is vanity rather than passion.
The American fashion is at once the more demoralizing and the less
dangerous. Mrs. Wilson in the early days of her married life had tried
to make her husband jealous by allowing the desperate attentions of a
single lover. She never repeated the experiment. The lover went abroad
to recover from the sting of having been made hopelessly ridiculous,
and Mrs. Wilson learned that in marrying she had found a master.
Fortunately she had married for love, and no woman loves a man less for
finding him able to control her. In these days Mrs. Wilson amused
himself by having a troop of admirers, and perhaps prided herself upon
being able to outdo the wiles of the other women of her set in securing
and holding her captives; but she discussed them with her husband with
the utmost frankness, mocking them to their faces if they made a step
across the line which she drew for them. They were kept in a state of
marked but respectful admiration. It was expected of them that they
should pretend to be consumed by a passion as violent as they might
please, but always a passion which was hopeless, which asked for no
reward but to be allowed to continue; which found in mere admission to
her presence joy enough at least to keep it alive.

It may be that Rangely had more vanity than the rest of Mrs. Wilson's
followers, or it may be that he was more resolute. Certain it is that
he was more presuming than the rest, and that his devotion had not
failed to produce a good deal of talk. Little as Mrs. Herman was
accustomed to pay attention to social gossip, she had not failed to
hear tattle about Elsie Wilson; and while she probably did not much
heed it, she was at heart too conscientious not to feel shame and
irritation. That a woman in the position of Mrs. Wilson should allow
herself to give rise to vulgar gossip moved her to deep disapproval;
while she could not but feel contempt for the man who neglected his own
wife to wait upon the caprices of one whom Helen looked upon as a
heartless and vain creature.

Behind the question which Ashe had asked about Rangely lay an incident
which had occurred the day previous. He was now called upon to see Mrs.
Wilson frequently in relation to matters connected with the election,
and with that instinct which was inborn she had carelessly exercised
upon him her arts of fascination. There is a certain sort of woman in
whom the mere presence of anything masculine awakens the rage for
conquest. It is as impossible for such women not to exert their
fascinations as it is for a magnet to cease to attract. It is the
destiny of woman to love, and dangerous is she who is inspired only
with the desire to be loved, the woman who instead of loving man loves
love. Elsie was saved from being such a monster by the fact that she
had a husband strong enough to subdue and control her nature; but
nothing could prevent her from trying her wiles on every man she met.

Philip was too completely unsophisticated to understand, and too much
absorbed by his passion for another woman to respond to the cunning
attractions of Mrs. Wilson; yet it is not impossible that she so far
influenced him as to render him unconsciously jealous of another man.
He had surprised Rangely kissing the hand of that lady with an air of
devotion so warm that the blood of the young deacon rose in resentment
which he supposed to be entirely disapproval. He was in a state of mind
which made him especially sensitive to any suggestion of love; and the
sight of any man caressing the hand of a beautiful woman could not but
set his heart throbbing with disconcerting rapidity. In his world even
the touch of a woman's fingers was almost a forbidden thing, and to
kiss them an act not to be so much as imagined. Philip dared not think,
or to define to himself what significance he attached to this incident.
An unsophisticated man is often suspicious from the simple fact that he
is forced to distrust his judgment. He is unable to estimate the value
of appearances, and in the end often falls the victim of errors which
might seem to arise from malevolence or low-mindedness, when in reality
they are the inevitable fruit of ignorance.

As Philip stood confronted with Mrs. Wilson after Rangely had left the
room it seemed to him that he read unspeakable things in her glance.
His clerical bias with its unholy blight of asceticism, his ignorance
of the world, made him a victim of a misapprehension which brought the
blood to his cheeks. His hostess looked at him curiously, and then
burst into a laugh.

"Upon my word," she cried, "I believe you are shocked! You are really
too delicious!"

He flushed hotter yet, and there came over him a helpless sense of
being alike unable to understand this brilliant creature or to cope
with her.

"But--but," he stammered, "I--I"--

"Well?" she demanded, her eyes dancing. "You what? You saw Mr. Rangely
kiss my hand. You may kiss it too, if you like; though I doubt if you
can do it half so devotedly. He's had a lot of practice with a lot of
hands."

Ashe stared at her with wide open eyes.

"But has he a wife?" he asked gravely.

"Meaning to remind me that I have a husband?" she gayly returned. "Yes;
we are both of us married. To think," she continued, spreading out her
hands and appealing to the universe at large, "that such simplicity
exists! Where have you been all your life? Did you never kiss a lady's
hand--or a lady's lips, for that matter?"

"I think you forget, Mrs. Wilson," Ashe said with real dignity, "that I
am a priest."

She regarded him with lifted brows for a moment. Then she moved to a
seat.

"Come," said she; "sit down and talk to me. Where have you passed your
life? You cannot have been brought up in a monastery, for we don't have
them in our church."

"It is a great pity," responded Philip, obeying her command, and
seating himself in a large arm-chair near her.

"Do you really mean it?" was her reply. "Yes, I believe you do! You
were evidently born to be a monk. Oh, how _triste_ it must be to be
made without an appreciation of us!"

He remained silent, his face more grave than ever.

"Well," she went on, settling herself comfortably in the corner of her
sofa amid a pile of sumptuous cushions, "tell me something about your
life. It may be that you were designed by fate to introduce a new order
of monks."

"There is not much to tell," he responded stiffly and almost
mechanically. "I was brought up in the country by a widowed mother. I
went through Harvard and the Divinity School, and since then I have
lived at the Clergy House."

She regarded him closely. Her glance seemed half mocking, and yet to
search into the very secrets of his heart, as if she were asking him
questions which he would not have dared to ask himself. Her eyes
suggested impossible things; they demanded if he had not known of
forbidden cups which held wine deliriously enticing. He cast down his
glance, no longer able to endure hers, yet not knowing why he was thus
abashed.

"But don't you know anything of life?" she questioned. "How could you
go through Harvard without seeing something of it? What were your
amusements?"

"I rowed some, and I walked. The only thing that was a real pleasure
outside of my work was to be with Maurice Wynne. I do not remember that
I ever thought about needing to be amused. Of course I knew a few
fellows. I never knew a great many of the men."

"And no women?"

"None except the boarding-house keeper."

She looked at him rather incredulously. Then she once more threw out
her hands in a gesture of amusement and amazement.

"Good heavens!" declared she; "there are just two things which might be
done with you. You should be put in a glass case as a unique specimen
of otherwise extinct virtue; or you should be sent to Paris to learn to
be a real man. However, it's not my place to take charge of you, so
that may pass."

There burned in the cheek of Ashe a spot of crimson which was perhaps
too deep not to betoken something of the nature of earthly indignation.

"Mrs. Wilson," he said, "I came here to discuss church interests, and
not to be myself the subject of remarks which you certainly would not
think of making to other gentlemen who call on you."

She clapped her hands.

"Bravo!" she cried. "There's the making of a man in him. It's a
thousand pities you can't go to Paris and learn the fun of life."

He rose indignantly.

"If you wish only to talk lightly of evil things," said he, "I do not
see that it is necessary for me to take up more of your time."

"Well," she responded, smilingly unmoved, "I'll confess that if there
is one thing for which I am especially grateful to Providence it is for
its having spared me the ennui of having to live in a virtuous world!
But sit down, and I'll talk as if that blessing had not been granted to
us. As for the salutation of Mr. Rangely which so shocked your
reverence, that was part of the campaign. He had just promised to write
an article for the 'Churchman' advocating Father Frontford from the
point of view of a layman; and of course until that is in print it is
necessary to be gracious to him. The trouble with you is that you've
seen so little of life that you exaggerate the most innocent things.
You really are rather insulting to me, if you think of it; but I pardon
it because you don't know what you were doing. I suppose you never
wanted to kiss a woman's hand or to write a sonnet to her eyebrow?"

Ashe felt the blood rush into his face in so hot a tide that he
involuntarily turned away from his tormentor and walked toward the
door. The question would in any case have been disconcerting, but it
was made doubly so by the word which recalled the phrase from the
Persian hymn which was in his mind so closely associated with Mrs.
Fenton: "O thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave!"
He had taken but a step, however, before Mrs. Wilson sprang from her
seat, clapping her hands again. She interposed between him and the
door, her face radiant with fun and mischief.

"Oh, what a blush!" she cried. "Upon my word, there's a woman; there is
a woman even in that icebox you keep for a heart!"

She burst into a peal of laughter, while he stood confounded and
speechless, trying to look unconscious, and vexatiously aware of how
completely he failed. Mrs. Wilson laid the tips of her slender fingers
on his arm, and peered up into his eyes.

"I wouldn't have believed it, St. Anthony! Come, make me your mother
confessor, and I'll give you good advice. It's part of my mission to
take charge of the love affairs of the clergy. Only yesterday I spent
half the afternoon trying to find out how deeply Mr. Candish is smitten
with a pretty widow."

Ashe started in amazement and alarm. The words of Mrs. Herman
connecting the name of Mrs. Fenton with that of Candish flashed into
his mind, and seemed to supply what Mrs. Wilson left unspoken. The
jealous pang which he felt at this confirmation of the interest of
Candish in the woman he loved was doubled by the resentment he felt
that this mocking torment before him should dare even to think of
Edith. Almost without knowing it he broke out excitedly into protest.

"How dare you meddle with her affairs?" he cried.

Mrs. Wilson stared at him an instant in amazement, evidently taken
completely aback. Then a light of cunning comprehension flashed into
her sparkling eyes.

"Ah!" exclaimed she. "You too! Is Mrs. Fenton so irresistible to the
ecclesiastical heart?"

He confronted her in silence. A wave of misery, of helplessness, of
weakness, swept over him. He had no right even to be Mrs. Fenton's
defender. He was, as Mrs. Wilson intimated, not a real man, but a
priest. The very tone of the whole conversation this morning showed how
far she was from regarding him as one having any part in her world. He
had only injured Mrs. Fenton by his ill-judged outburst, and given this
creature who so delighted in baiting him one more opportunity. Worse
than all else was the fact that he had given her a chance to jest about
the woman whom he loved. The tears rushed to his eyes in the intensity
of his feelings, and the beautiful face before him, with its teasing
brightness and dancing fun, swam in his vision. He hated its laughter,
and he expected fresh mockery for the emotion which he could not help
betraying. To his surprise, however, Mrs. Wilson again laid her hand on
his arm, and her face lost its gayety.

"You poor boy," she said, with genuine feeling in her tone, "is it so
real as that? I wouldn't have hurt you for the world, if I had known.
What business had you to be meddling with vows and renunciation until
you knew what they meant?"

She moved back to her seat as she spoke, motioning Ashe to resume his
place. He was too deeply moved to obey her.

"If you will excuse me," he said, "I will see you to-morrow in regard
to those delegates. I--I am not quite myself."

"But you shall not go without saying that you forgive me for my
teasing. Really, I am sorry and ashamed. I never intend to hurt you,
but I see that my teasing may be taken more seriously than it is meant."

There was real gentleness and pity in her smile, and as she rose to
stand looking into his face with a winning smile of apology he forgot
all his bitterness.

"The trouble is with me," he said. "I do not understand the world, and
I should keep out of it."

"Oh, not at all," she retorted briskly. "You should learn how to live
in it."

A spark of mischief kindled in her glance as she spoke, and she
extended to him the back of her hand. Her smile challenged him, and he
had been won and moved by the sympathy of her voice. The hand, too, was
so beautiful, so slender, so feminine; he had so keen a longing to be
comforted, to be soothed by womanly softness, and to assuage his
loneliness by woman's sympathy, that it seemed impossible to resist the
invitation of those delicate fingers. He took her hand, and raised it
half way to his lips. Then he dropped it abruptly, letting his own arm
swing lifelessly to his side.

"No," he said bitterly. "I am a priest!"



                         X


                A SYMPATHY OF WOE
                         Titus Andronicus, iii. 1.


The first sensation which returning consciousness brought to Berenice
Morison, after the shock of the collision and the feeling that the
whole train had been hurled confusedly into space, was that of coming
into fresher air as if she were emerging from the depths of the sea.
Opening her eyes without comprehending where she was or what had
happened, she found herself on the side of an overturned car. Around
her were dreadful noises, yells, groans, cries, shouts; her nostrils
were filled with the reek of burning stuffs; the light of lanterns and
of torches blinded her eyes; a sense of horror oppressed her; appalling
calamity which she could not understand seemed to have overtaken her;
and she shuddered with terror unspeakable. Her first impulse was to
shriek and to attempt to flee from the fearful things which surrounded
her; but instantly the self-control of returning reason made itself
felt.

Berenice found herself supported by a couple of men, and it became
clear to her in an instant that she had just been lifted from that pit
below where she could see the glint of flame and the blinding smother
of smoke, and from which came such heartrending cries that she
instinctively tried to cover her ears. In the movement she realized
that beside the hold which her rescuers had of her, she was grasped by
other arms; that she was in the embrace of a man apparently dead. In
the dim light her dazed sense did not recognize him, and she struggled
to release herself from the hold of this corpse.

"Take him away from me!" she shrieked hysterically in mingled terror
and repulsion.

"Gently, gently," said one of the men who held her. "He's got killed
tryin' to save yer."

"If this cut in his arm was in your back," remarked the other, who was
unlocking the hands so strongly clasped behind her, "it'd 'a' been a
finisher."

Her head reeled, and she nearly swooned again; but somehow she found
herself released, and passed down from the car into the arms of more
men.

"For God's sake, hurry," one of them said. "It's getting too hot to
stand here."

A blistering puff of smoke enwrapped her as she went down. She saw a
face blackened and ghastly advance in the flaring light of a lantern.
Hands that seemed to come out of a cloud and a great darkness helped
and sustained her, until she was out of the instant press beside the
burning car. When once she was free and stood upon her feet, she
regained something like self-possession. Her head swam, but she
realized the situation and felt that she was able to help herself.

"I am not hurt," she said to those who would have assisted her. "Don't
mind me."

As she spoke, the body of a man was passed out of the smoke close to
her, and she saw that it was Wynne. Instantly she remembered being
flung into his arms, although what followed she could not recall. She
looked at him now with a piercing conviction that he was dead. His
cassock hung about him in rags, his face was smeared with blood and
grime, his arm hung limp and bleeding. The words of the rescuer on the
car-roof came to her, and she saw in the disfigured form of the young
deacon the body of the man who had given his life for hers. Instantly
all her powers rallied to help and if possible to save him.

"Bring him this way," she said, stepping forward eagerly, her weakness
forgotten. "I'll take care of him."

She moved out of the smoke without any clear idea where she was going
or what she could do. The hurt man was brought after her, one of the
many that were being carried as dead weights among the confused and
agonized crowd. At a short distance from the track there were hastily
arranged car-cushions, coats, and loose coverings thrown down on a bank
half covered with snow. Here the bearers laid Wynne, hurrying back to
their work with a precipitancy which seemed to Berenice heartless.

The scene which Berenice took in at a glance was so wild and terrible
that it stamped itself on her brain in a flash. Lanterns were burning
all about, dancing and flitting to and fro like fireflies in a mist.
The eye caught everywhere glimpses by their light of disordered groups,
dim and dreadful as a nightmare. Close about her were the victims
heaped as if from a battlefield, the wounded moaning in pain, the women
wailing over the dying or the dead, each with cruel egotism intent upon
her own, and seizing upon any helper with terrible eagerness of
despair. A hundred feet away, lighted by the flames which were
beginning to thrust quick tongues through the smoke and the darkness,
was a long heap of shapeless wreck, about which dark figures were
swarming like midges about a bonfire. She could distinguish in the
middle of the line the two locomotives silhouetted against the
darkness, standing half on end like two grotesque monsters rearing in
deadly conflict. Every moment the flames became fiercer, and the
hurrying lanterns moved more wildly.

It was Wynne, however, that claimed her attention. One swift glance
took in the awful picture, and then she sank down on her knees beside
him as he lay, bleeding and insensible, perhaps dead. For a moment she
was ready to cast herself down on the snow in helplessness and in
terror at the horrors of the situation; but the grit of stout Puritan
ancestors was in her fibres, the moral endurance which finds in the
sense of a duty to be done an inspiration that lifts above all
difficulties. Her work was before her; to abandon it impossible.

The flames of the burning car brightened with appalling rapidity.
Shrieks arose so piercing that they wrung her heart as if with a
physical agony. It was the car from which she and Wynne had been taken
which was now that hell of fire. Its glare lit up the pale and bleeding
face beside her, and she realized that at that minute they might have
been in that awful agony. She began to sob wildly, but she began, too,
to try to bring Wynne back to consciousness. She took snow in her hands
and put it to his forehead; she twisted her handkerchief about his arm
to stop its bleeding. She tried to recall what she had heard at
Emergency Lectures, with a strong determination forcing herself to
remember. Kneeling in the snow, in the light of the burning car, her
heart torn by the cries of the suffering, trembling with excitement,
fear, and the shock she had undergone, sobbing almost hysterically, she
yet constrained herself to do her best, binding up his arm with strips
of her clothing, and trying to bring back his senses.

A physician came to her without her knowing until he was at her side.
He bent to examine Wynne, and Berenice tried to repress her sobs that
she might talk to him, and take his directions. The life of Wynne might
depend upon her calmness. She caught up more snow, and pressed it to
her own temples.

"Is he much hurt?" she asked feverishly.

"It is not dangerous as far as I can judge," the doctor answered
hurriedly. "Get him away from here as soon as you can."

She looked after him as he hurried on to other patients, and her first
feeling was one of indignation. Then it occurred to her that his going
so soon must mean that her patient was less hurt than she had feared.
But why was Wynne so long insensible? She knelt beside him again, and
as she did so he opened his eyes.

"Where am I?" he cried feebly.

He tried to start up, but fell back with a groan.

"There has been an accident," she said hurriedly. "It's all right now.
You are safe. Are you in much pain?"

"Are you hurt?" he demanded almost fiercely.

"No, no; never mind me."

He struggled again to rise, but fell back with a groan. She put her
hand on his shoulder.

"Lie still," she commanded authoritatively. "I'll see what can be done.
Lie still while I look about."

A second car was burning, and the whole place was aglare with yellow
light. The wild groups stood out black against the trodden and dingy
snow, while overhead rolled clouds of sooty smoke. It occurred to
Berenice that the accident had taken place so near Brookfield that many
persons must have come from the town. She seized a respectable-looking
man by the arm, and asked him if he knew of any way in which she could
get an injured friend to Brookfield. He stared at her a moment as if it
was impossible at such a time to receive words in their ordinary
meaning, but when the question had been repeated he answered that there
were some hackmen from town in the crowd. H

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/8522