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Woman Of Yesterday

<h3 class='c001'>CHAPTER XIV</h3></div> How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings, and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the tree on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.... Poor, sorely tried Faith! She has but one way out of the difficulty—the word Mystery. It is in the origins of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden, although the breathless sequence of after events has often many surprises for us too.—Amiel. The incredible luxury of her breakfast the next morning in the hotel in Portland made an impression upon Anna which she could never forget, since she was, in fact, very nearly starved. The rich coffee, the delicate and sumptuous food, the noiseless assiduity of the sleek black waiters, the great glittering room, all partook of the marvellous to her exhausted senses. Then she was conducted through endless passages where her feet trod in baffling silence upon the lanes of thick crimson carpet, for a few moments she was alone in a room to bathe and prepare herself, and then a low-voiced woman, stout and motherly, met her at the door, and she was led to Keith. He was lying, fully dressed, on a broad velvet sofa, in a richly furnished room, which was full of flowers, and bright with the light of the snowy winter morning and a blazing wood fire. His eyes were luminous, his colour better than she had known it, and he did not look ill. The nurse left them alone, and they met with unfeigned but quiet happiness. “Was I selfish to ask you to come this long journey, 120just for me?” Keith asked anxiously, holding her hands. Anna found his hot and tremulous, and soothed them with a slow, strong motion of her own. “No, not selfish,” she said. “You see, I am not very ill; in fact, I am sure the worst is over now, and I shall be just as well as ever in a few weeks; but I had a terrible cold and coughing so there was a little hemorrhage,—simply from the throat, we understand it now,—but at the time the doctor himself was alarmed, and so was I. If I had known how slight an affair it really was, I should not have asked so much of you, but I cannot be sorry, Anna. I shall have to stay right here for several weeks, they say, and it will be everything to have you near me, don’t you see?” “I am most grateful to be with you, Keith.” “And will you talk to me about India, and about our home there? I have thought of it so continually since I have been sick. It almost seems as if I had seen it, and you in it. I love it already, Anna. Please say that you do too, just a little.” “Tell me about it. Of course I shall love it.” “It is all made of bamboo, you know, the house, and perched up in the air, and there are great, wide rooms, with cool shade, and a sound of water flowing; there are broad bamboo lattices at the windows, and it is still and peaceful, and the servants go about softly, and you are there in a white dress, Anna,—oh, how I want to see you in that white dress! It has tiny borders of gilt and coloured embroidery, and it suits you so much better than this hard black gown. Will you have a dress made soon like that?” Anna smiled and pressed her hand over Keith’s eyes, 121which were full of childish imploring. She was beginning to see his weakness with a new pain at her heart. She sat with him an hour, and then, the doctor coming in, she was sent to her room to sleep until noon, while Keith should rest, and have an interview with Dr. Durham, their fatherly friend. When Anna reached her room, she found on a table a large jar of roses, rich in colour and fragrance, and a basket of hothouse grapes. The day was bitterly cold, and it was snowing hard, the thick snowflakes melting against the broad, thick glass of her window. The extravagant luxury of such fruit and flowers in this depth of midwinter astonished and disturbed her. There was no one of whom she could ask questions, but how could it be right for Keith to spend so much money? To remain for weeks in such a hotel as this seemed to Anna to involve an impossible expenditure, and she lay down on the great luxurious bed with a bewildering confusion of questions to which no answers were forthcoming. From the pinching cold and hunger of yesterday to the luxurious ease of to-day was like the transformation of a fairy tale; and Keith, with his weak hands, and his bright eyes, and his wistful eagerness was formidable in his appeal to her. She did not know what might be coming, but she felt anew that she had surrendered herself and was pledged now to do another’s will. At noon Anna had a moment’s conference with Keith’s physician. He assured her that there was a remarkable change for the better in his patient,—in fact, that he looked now for a speedy convalescence, adding that her coming had produced a most favourable effect. The whole afternoon of that January day, Keith and 122Anna were left alone together. The nurse, glad of a brief release, took her “afternoon out”; the various doctors of medicine and divinity betook themselves to other places; and word was given the page that Mr. Burgess could not receive visitors, so that flowers and cards accumulated, and interruptions were postponed. There was justice in what Keith said, that they had never yet had a chance to get acquainted, and now the afternoon was turned to good account. Experience and instinct made Anna a nurse. Keith was sure he had never been so wholly comfortable as she made him, and the effect of her personal presence was like health and healing to him. “How dear you are, Anna, and how absolutely necessary to me,” he said fondly, as he watched her quiet way of preparing his food and medicine. “I foresee plainly that I can never let you leave me.” When twilight gathered and the room grew dusky, they had no lights, but sat by the fire, Anna on a low seat beside the sofa, and silence fell. When Keith spoke again, his voice betrayed a rising emotion, and an appeal before which she trembled within herself. “Anna,” he said, “why should you leave me again? Why need we be separated any more? I need you. I can get strong far faster with you beside me, for you inspire me with a new life. Everything seems sure and strong when you are with me. But I want you wholly mine without fear or favour. Marry me, dear, to-night, to-morrow! What have we to wait for? It is only three months before our marriage was to be, you know.” Concealing her agitation, and speaking quite steadily and soothingly, Anna answered:— “But you know, Keith, I must go back in a few 123weeks, and finish my work in the school and hospital. I have still so much to learn before I can make a really useful missionary, and so little time before May to learn it in. You know I have cut my preparation short a year, now, so that we may go out together. I am sure we ought to wait until May.” “Oh, Anna!” The words, so spoken, had all the force of an inarticulate cry from the man’s heart. They told what hours of argument and pleading could not have conveyed,—the yearning need for her presence and her upholding. Anna lifted her eyes to Keith’s, and saw that they were dim with tears. She did not feel them to be unmanly tears, knowing his physical exhaustion, and they moved her profoundly. She rose and walked to the window, looking out into the snowy street. Again that sense that her life was taken out of her own hands came upon her; she felt like those of old who feared as they entered into the cloud. She feared, but, nevertheless, she went back to Keith, and said, very gently, but without hesitation:— “If we should be married to-morrow night, would that please you, Keith?” He caught her hand and pressed it to his cheek with pathetic eagerness. “Oh, my girl, am I wrong to move you to do this for my sake? Forgive me, leave me, if I am leading you faster, farther, than you wish to go.” “I will not leave you, Keith,” Anna replied, taking her low seat again at his side, “never, any more. It is the will of God.” The next day Keith was much stronger. He was able to walk about the room, to sit up for an hour at a 124time, and to talk and plan to his heart’s desire. His spirits were high, and he was full of irrepressible happiness, and yet a wistful, grateful question always rose in his eyes when they rested upon Anna. The marriage was arranged to take place in Keith’s room at six o’clock. Dr. Durham had consented to remain and perform the ceremony, returning to Boston that night. Keith’s physician had interposed no objection to the plan, and even regarded the inevitable excitement as likely to be a benefit rather than an injury to his patient. “He needs you, Miss Mallison,” he remarked with an emphasis which Anna felt to be peculiarly significant, finding him a man of few words. It was five o’clock, and Anna had gone to her room to make ready for the ceremony. At Keith’s urgent desire, and by the aid of one of the many efficient friends whom the circumstances of his illness had gathered around him, a white dress had been ordered for her. She found it now, lying in delicate tissue wrappings upon her bed, and beside it a box of orange flowers whose fragrance filled the room. She was becoming a little inured to luxury; colour, warmth, perfume, delight to sense, seemed here to be the natural order. A vague perplexity lay below it all, but she had ceased now to ask questions. As she bent to take her wedding-gown from its wrappings, some one knocked at her door. It was Dr. Durham. There was a shade of anxiety upon his kind old face, and he asked her to come with him into an alcove at the end of the hall. With an uneasy stirring at her heart, Anna followed him. Keith’s physician was standing by a table in the alcove, evidently awaiting them. Anna looked into his face, waiting without speaking 125for what he might have to say. Surely it was impossible that Keith could be worse; it was not ten minutes since she left him. “Miss Mallison,” said the doctor, gravely, “I have been having a little conference with your friend, Dr. Durham, and we find that there is a chance that you may be under some misapprehension of the actual conditions under which—under which you are about to take an important step.” “I did not understand it myself, my dear girl, until within the last hour,” interposed Dr. Durham; “and I really don’t know now what we ought to do. Still, perfect frankness, perfect understanding, you know, may be better for all parties.” The good old man was visibly oppressed with the burden of the part he had to bear in the interview. Motionless Anna stood, only turning her eyes from one man to the other in troubled wonder. “The facts are simply these,” the physician took up the word again, “and I am greatly surprised, and I may add greatly pained, that they have not apparently been understood before. Mr. Burgess will recover from this attack, and may have years yet of moderate health, but as for carrying out his purpose to go out as a foreign missionary, it is absolutely impossible. Such a course would simply be suicidal, and must not be considered for a moment.” “Not now, perhaps,” Anna spoke very low, in a strange, muffled tone; “but it may be—later—?” and she turned her imploring eyes from the face of one man to the other. “To be perfectly frank, my dear,” said Dr. Durham, pressing his hands nervously together, “after what the 126doctor has told me of the condition of our dear friend, the organic difficulty, and all that, you see—I fear that I can only, in justice to all concerned, state plainly that our Board would not be justified in sending him. I assure you the blow is a severe one to me in my capacity as secretary; for we regard Keith Burgess as, perhaps, the most promising candidate who has ever come before us. It is a dark Providence, and you will believe me that only a sense of our duty in the matter has led us to put the case so plainly before you.” Anna did not speak. “I was not aware, Miss Mallison,” said the physician, “until an hour ago, that you were yourself under appointment as a missionary. When I learned this fact, it seemed to me that you should not enter upon the proposed line of action without knowing clearly that it involves giving up your chosen career,” and with these words the doctor bowed and turned to withdraw. Anna turned to Dr. Durham. “Mr. Burgess does not know that he must give up—?” she asked. “No, oh, no,” was the reply; “the doctor says that he must on no account be allowed to learn it until he is stronger. His heart is so entirely bound up in this noble purpose, that the blow will be a terrible one when it comes.” “We must wait, Miss Mallison, until he is as far as may be recovered, before we allow him to even suspect the actual state of the case;” the doctor added this, looking at Anna’s face with surprise and concern. “If I can serve you in any way, do not fail to call upon me. For the present I must say good evening,” and he hastened away. 127Dr. Durham followed, walking along the hall by his side. The look in Anna’s face awed him. He felt that it was not his right to share in an hour of such conflict as this bade fair to be to her, for he perceived already something of what her missionary vocation meant to her. Anna, however, did not notice that he had gone; the crisis was too great to permit her paying heed to the accidental circumstances around her. A voice in her heart seemed crying with constant iteration, “Father! Father! What does God mean?” For ten minutes Anna stood alone in the alcove, looking steadily before her, but in her bewildered pain seeing no outward thing, while in the far dim reaches of the hall the good old clergyman paced noiselessly to and fro. On one side Anna saw her father’s life, with all its deep renunciation, its pure aims, its defeat, and its one final hope of fulfilment in herself; she saw the look in his eyes as he bent above her in the little church that night, when she declared her purpose to become a missionary; she remembered his Nunc Dimittis as he blessed her with dying eyes; she lived again through the solemn hour of dedication, just after her father’s death, when the sense came upon her that she was called of God to carry on what her father began, to be in herself the continuance, and through divine grace the fruition, of his life. Since that hour life had meant only one thing to Anna; no other purpose or desire had ever entered to divide or diminish its control over her: she was set apart to carry the gospel of Christ to the heathen; this one thing only would she do. This on the one side, strong as life itself, inwoven into the very texture of her soul and her consciousness. 128On the other side Keith Burgess, even now scarcely better than a stranger, and yet, by the will of God as she believed, bound to her by sacred and indissoluble vows. To be faithful to those vows, to save him from despair, perhaps from death, she must cut off all her past, must read her life all backward, must annul and declare vain and void the most solemn purposes of her soul. From his retreat, watching, Dr. Durham at length saw Anna advancing down the hall toward the door of her room. He met her there, a question he did not dare to speak in his tired, kind old eyes. Her face was as the face of one who has even in the moment received a spiritual death-blow. He held his watch in his hand. Without speaking, Anna motioned to him, and he replied:— “It is nearly half-past five, my dear.” “Very well,” she said, her voice dull and toneless; “I will be ready at six o’clock.” As if in a dream she prepared herself for her marriage. She moved as if in response to another will than her own; her own will seemed to lie dead before her, a visible, tangible thing, done to death by her own hand. The white gown, Keith’s gift, seemed less a wedding-garment than a burial robe, and a strange smile crossed her face when she caught her reflection in the glass, and saw that, save for her eyes, her face was wholly colourless, the pale flowers on her breast hardly paler, hardly colder. At the clock-striking of the appointed hour, Anna entered the room, and, taking her place beside Keith, whose face was full of tender gladness, she lifted her eyes steadily to the old clergyman’s face, listening as for life and death to his words. 129“In sickness and in health, ... for richer for poorer, ... and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him.” Yes, all others. God only knew the significance of those words, for they seemed to mean God himself just then; but God would pity. He would help. Her response came low but unfaltering, and then, with bowed heads, standing side by side in their youth, their innocence, their patience of hope, they two listened solemnly to the last irrevocable words. So steadfastly Anna held herself until the end, but hardly had the final word of blessing been pronounced, when, with a low cry for help, she wavered as she stood, and fell fainting. <div class='chapter'> 131 <h2 class='c006'>BOOK II AFTERNOON</h2></div> <div class='lg-container-b c016'> <div class='linegroup'> <div class='group'> <div class='line'>Hear now our cry for strength to bear the weight of prayers unanswered.</div> <div class='line in48'>—Maarten Maartens.</div> </div></div> </div> <div> 133 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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