Читать книгу A Woman of Yesterday - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 6

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Nay, but I think the whisper crept

Like growth through childhood. Work and play,

Things common to the course of day,

Awed thee with meanings unfulfill’d;

And all through girlhood, something still’d

Thy senses like the birth of light,

When thou hast trimmed thy lamp at night

Or washed thy garments in the stream.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Until her twelfth year Anna had not encountered the severities of Calvinistic theology, Samuel Mallison having intrusted the spiritual guidance of his children, during their earlier years, to their mother. Anna was the youngest child. Mrs. Mallison was of a German Moravian family who, coming from Pennsylvania, had settled on the eastern boundary of New York early in the century. She possessed the serene and trustful temperament of her people. The subtleties of her husband’s religious system were beyond her simple ken; she loved to sing the hymns of Zinzendorf, as she sewed and spun and ordered her household in true German Hausfräulichkeit, a sincere, devout, affectionate soul who had found the tone of the frigid little north New England community more chilling than she dared to own.

From her Anna inherited her warm impulses, her abounding delight in nature, her susceptibility to the simplest impressions of sweet and common things. Gulielma Mallison understood the child when she came running to her one early spring morning from the parsonage garden, where the dark brown earth was freshly upturned and young green things were springing, and had tears in her eyes, veiling wonder, and a shy thrill of joy in all her small birdlike frame, and had asked, her hands clasped upon her breast:—

“Why am I so happy, mother, that I can’t bear it? Why does something ache so here?”

“It is because thou art in God’s beautiful world, little Benigna,” the mother had said, “and thou art God’s child. He is near thee, and thy heart yearns to him. Be glad in God.”

In his study, through the open door, Samuel Mallison heard these words, and, whatever his perplexity as to their doctrinal inconsistency, he did not gainsay them. From his point of view at this time little Anna was entirely out of relation to God and out of harmony with his being, and it would have been impossible for her to please him. But just then an old question, which would not always down, had forced its way to his mind—What if there were a wrong link somewhere in the logic? What if the love of God were something greater than the schoolmen guessed?

But on a certain winter night Anna’s childhood died, and the battle of her life began.

Well she remembered every physical sensation even, accompanying that experience.

It had been a snowy Saturday night, and she had come in from the warm kitchen where, in a round washing-day tub, drawn close to the hot stove, she had taken a merry, splashing bath, after the regular order of exercises for Saturday night at the parsonage. Her older sister, Lucia, had presided over the function, and when it was accomplished she had been closely wrapped in a pale straw-hued, homespun flannel sheet, over her nightclothes, preparatory to facing the rigours of the bitterly cold hall and stairs, and the little bedroom above.

So she had trailed into the living-room, where the boys and her parents were gathered around a large table. The room was not very brightly lighted by the single oil lamp, but a great fire crackled loudly in the stove, and the rattle of the hard snowflakes on the window panes and the whistling of the wind outside gave keen emphasis to the sense of cheerful safety and comfort.

Warm and languid from the heat of her bath, Anna had sat down on a low seat and dropped her head on her mother’s knees, feeling an indescribable sensation of happy lassitude and physical well-being. She recalled how interested she had been in the shrivelled whiteness of her own long, little fingers, and how soft and woolly that dear old blanket had felt; it was on her bed now, with her mother’s maiden name worked in cross-stitch in one corner, in pale pink crewel.

They had been waiting for her, to proceed with the evening devotions, and her father had at once begun to read a part of a sermon from one of the standard divines who, though somewhat out of fashion in the centres of progressive thought, were still held infallible in these remoter regions.

The subject was “The Benevolence of God in Inflicting Punishment,” from a work entitled “The Effects of the Fall.”

Anna did not listen very closely for a time, but presently her attention was caught and held. The writer was seeking to prove that “the damnation of a large part of the human race directly subserved the general happiness of mankind and the glory of God.” That even if he had saved none of the sons of men, but “had left them to the endless torment they had so justly deserved,” and “had glorified himself in their eternal ruin, they would have had no cause to complain.” That the best of what were illusively known as “good works,” were “no more than splendid sins.” That no doubt, if any heathen could be found who was truly virtuous and holy, who loved God in the strictly evangelical sense, as infinitely great, wise, and holy, and who kept all his perfect law without infraction, such heathen might be saved. But as there was no evidence that any such heathen ever had existed, or ever could exist, there was no reason to believe that any had been saved. As the heathen still formed a vast proportion of the population of the globe, and as only a small fraction of those nations commonly known as Christian had actually and experimentally come under the law of grace, the only conclusion possible was, that a vast proportion of the human family throughout all ages and down to the present time “were serving the purposes of God’s infinite wisdom and benevolence in their creation in endless misery or torment.”

The triumphant logic of the old divine, which Mrs. Mallison secretly found discomfiting but accepted calmly enough considering its terrific import, and which her husband read with the sad and solemn pathos of one to whom it was a mournful verity, had a curious effect upon little Anna. For the first time the real meaning of familiar words like these smote full and sharp upon her mind, and in the physical lassitude of the moment acted like a bodily injury upon her. She grew whiter and whiter, and she touched and grasped the soft blanket about her with powerless fingers, to convince herself that she could feel and find what was familiar, faintness being an absolutely unknown sensation.

Suddenly, with an imperious impulse, and a singular effect of childish courage which dared to do an unheard-of thing, she rose and said with perfect apparent composure, breaking in upon the reading:—

“I am too tired to stay here any longer, I am going upstairs now,” and so left the room. Her mother had watched the slight figure in its close drapery with anxious eyes until the door closed upon her, but had not thought of following. This reading was a solemn function not to be lightly interrupted.

Upstairs, Anna had betaken herself hastily to bed, and lay there, motionless, somewhat alarmed at her own revolutionary action, and with little to say when questioned by her mother presently.

But when the house was still, and the night advancing to its mid depth of darkness, the child, still lying with wide, wakeful eyes, cried silently with a piteous consciousness of desolation and sorrow. A sense of the bitterness of a world where millions of helpless human spirits were shut up to endless agony had overwhelmed her, and a spirit of rebellion against God who willed it so for his own glory had taken intense possession of her thought.

In the passion of her childish resentment and grief and worn by the unwonted wakefulness, her breath came in long, quivering sobs which were heard in the next room, and brought her father to her side.

She could answer nothing to his questions, but he found her hands cold, and her pulse weak and rapid.

“You did not eat your supper to-night, little Anna,” he said gently, remembering her faint appetite for the frugal fare of the parsonage table.

Anna only sobbed more convulsively. She had expected severity and blame, feeling verily guilty in spirit.

Samuel Mallison said nothing more, but Anna, wondering, heard him go downstairs, heard doors open and shut, and then silence fell again. Ten minutes later her father stood again by the bedside in the icy chill of the winter midnight in the unwarmed chamber, and he had brought a bowl of broth, hot and smoking, bread, too, and, most unwonted pampering, a piece of the rare poundcake, kept for company and never given to children except on high holidays.

Neither of them spoke, but Samuel Mallison, for all the cold, sat on the bed’s edge while Anna ate and drank, drawing her frail little body to rest against his own.

The broth was salted for Anna by her tears, and the long-drawn sobs, coming at intervals, half choked her as she ate, but she was comforted at last and fortified against the woe of the world, and she pressed her cheek against her father’s arm with a sense of the infinite sweetness of fatherhood warm at her heart. As she finished the last crumb of cake, she thought:—

“If only God had been kind like my father! I was naughty, and that only makes him good to me and pitiful.” But she said nothing, only looked with a world of wondering gratefulness in her large innocent eyes up into her father’s face, finding some perplexity that cake and broth should reconcile her to the everlasting torment of the majority of mankind, but wisely concluding to make the best of it since such seemed to be the effect, and, as it was now undoubtedly high time, to go to sleep.

Finding her bright and well next morning, the Mallisons, father and mother, had thought little more of that Saturday night revolt, which they, indeed, had not known as such; but, as she looked back over her years to-night, in her gable window, Anna perceived that from that time there had always been in the secret place of her heart a sense of enmity against a God who was not kind like her father. To-night she knew herself, at last, reconciled; faith had triumphed and declared that even the darkest decree of God’s great will must be right, since he was the absolutely Good. But her heart yearned with mighty yearning for the subjects of his just wrath, and as she knelt in the darkness and silence she gave herself with simple, unreserved sincerity to the service of the lost among men.

Rising from her knees, Anna felt a strange glow and exaltation of spirit. In her own personal life sin had been met and vanquished. Tremendous apostolic assertions buoyed her soul upward like strong wings: “free from the law of sin and of death,” “passed from death unto life,” “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” Thus she felt her finite linked to the infinite. Her spirit was suffused with thrilling and unspeakable joy; God was closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.

But, as she stood rapt and absorbed, there came up through the hush of the night from the dim street below a strange sound, and she was caught back by it, and listened painfully. It was a little child crying piteously.

Peering down through the clustering branches, below her window, Anna could discern by the dim light of the stars the shape of a woman, forlorn and spiritless, passing silently along the shadowed way. Behind her followed the crying child, with weary little feet stumbling at every stone. The woman carried something in her arms, hidden by an apron; she turned and looked at the child, and shook her head, but did not speak.

This woman, who moved abroad only at night, was the village outcast, and the child was her child, born in sin.

Vague and uncomprehended to Anna’s mind was the abyss into which this woman had fallen, but she felt it to be black and bottomless, and to place an everlasting separation between her and the good. She drew back from the window, a sharp pain, made of pity and horror, at her heart, sin embodied thus confronting her. She felt as Sir Launfal felt when he saw the leper.

Lying down to rest at last, Anna slept, in spite of spiritual ecstasies and sufferings, the sound sleep of a healthy girl who is fortunate enough to forget the ultimate destinies of human souls, her own with the rest, for certain favoured hours.

It was long before her sleep was disturbed by dreams, but an hour before sunrise she awoke with a pervading sense of exquisite happiness brought over with her from a dream just dreamed. It was a still dream of seeing, not of doing. She had seen the form of a man of heroic aspect, old rather than young, with a grey head, leonine and majestic, strong stern features, a glance mild and yet searching and subduing; a man imperial and lofty, and above his fellows, but whether as king or saint or soldier she could not guess. But here was made visible a power, a freedom, and a greatness for which her own nature, she felt in a swift flash of self-revelation, passionately cried out, which it had nowhere found, and to which it bowed in a curious delight hitherto unknown. This only happened: this mysterious personality, more than human, she thought, if less than divine, had looked kindly upon her, in her weak, childish abasement, and had shed into her eyes, and so into her heart, the impossible, inexplicable happiness with which she awoke. She did not sleep again. This waking consciousness enamoured her.

What did it mean? Anna asked herself all day. Was it a dream sent from God at this solemn hour of dedication? If so, what did it prefigure? Even at the sacramental feast, her first communion, that majestic head, with the controlling sweetness of the eyes upon her, came before her vision, and made her heart beat fast.