The Puritans Part 8

"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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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. c.r.a.pps."

"To hear Mrs. c.r.a.pps?" he echoed. "Who is Mrs. c.r.a.pps?"

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. c.r.a.pps, 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. c.r.a.pps, 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 G.o.dliness 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 a.s.sembled 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. c.r.a.pps'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. c.r.a.pps 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 flus.h.i.+ng, 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. c.r.a.pps than of his neighbor.

The talk of Mrs. c.r.a.pps 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. c.r.a.pps said in closing, "that mankind has for ages submitted to this cruel superst.i.tion 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. c.r.a.pps 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. c.r.a.pps interrupted, leaning forward with a deprecatory smile, "but I am not a Christian Scientist."