"Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum, Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit."
All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman"s talk.]
"And if ever Gifted makes a book,--don"t say anything about it, Mr.
Gridley, for goodness" sake, for he wouldn"t have anybody know it, only I can"t help thinking that some time or other he will print a book,--and if he does, I know whose name he"ll put at the head of it,--"Dedicated to B. G., with the grat.i.tude and respect--" There, now, I had n"t any business to say a word about it, and it"s only jest in case he does, you know. I"m sure you deserve it all. You"ve helped him with the best of advice. And you"ve been kind to me when I was in trouble. And you"ve been like a grandfather" [Master Gridley winced,--why could n"t the woman have said father?--that grand struck his ear like a spade going into the gravel] "to those babes, poor little souls! left on my door-step like a couple of breakfast rolls,--only you know it"s the baker left then. I believe in you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker and in Father Pemberton,--but, poor man, he"s old, and you won"t be old these twenty years yet."
[Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n"t so, but felt comforted and refreshed.]
"You"ve got to help Myrtle Hazard again. You brought her home when she come so nigh drowning. You got the old doctor to go and see her when she come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and nonsense, whatever they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh bein" crazy, too. I know, for Nurse Byloe told me all about it. And now Myrtle"s gettin" run away with by that pesky Minister Stoker. Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday crying and sobbing as if her heart would break about it. For my part, I did n"t think Cynthy cared so much for the girl as all that, but I saw her takin" on dreadfully with my own eyes. That man"s like a hen-hawk among the chickens, first he picks up one, and then he picks up another.
I should like to know if n.o.body but young folks has souls to be saved, and specially young women!"
"Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,"
said Master Gridley.
Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to her, of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of which the keen spinster had been a witness, having followed them for the express purpose of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister was up to.
It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet kindness of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best of her adventure. He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to consider himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the thought that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers that surrounded her. He loved his cla.s.sics and his old books; he took an interest, too, in the newspapers and periodicals that brought the fermenting thought and the electric life of the great world into his lonely study; but these things just about him were getting strong hold on him, and most of all the fortunes of this beautiful young woman. How strange! For a whole generation he had lived in no nearer relation to his fellow-creatures than that of a half-fossilized teacher; and all at once he found himself face to face with the very most intense form of life, the counsellor of threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled loveliness. What business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of which he had said in "Thoughts on the Universe,"--"Every man leads or is led by something that goes on four legs."
Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes all human interests everybody"s business, and had a sudden sense of dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an extra gallon of air at every breath, Then--you who have written a book that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand the movement--he took down "Thoughts on the Universe" for a refreshing draught from his own wellspring. He opened as chance ordered it, and his eyes fell on the following pa.s.sage:
"The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch, the Western Empedocles, "Some things can be done as well as others."
A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and hierarchies. These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that some things can NOT be done as well as others."
"There, now!" he said, talking to himself in his usual way, "is n"t that good? It always seems to me that I find something to the point when I open that book. "Some things can be done as well as others," can they?
Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle Hazard? I think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be trusted. She does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable bodies?"
Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the Library, when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her. Miss Cynthia, who received him, led him to this apartment and left him alone with Myrtle. She welcomed him very cordially, but colored as she did so,--his visit was a surprise. She was at work on a piece of embroidery.
Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out of sight with the thought of concealment; but she checked this, and before the blush of detection had reached her cheek, the blush of ingenuous shame for her weakness had caught and pa.s.sed it, and was in full possession. She sat with her worsted pattern held bravely in sight, and her cheek as bright as its liveliest crimson.
"Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you," he said, "or I should not have ventured to disturb you in this way. A work of art, is it, Miss Myrtle Hazard?"
"Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,--for my pastor."
"Oh! oh! That is well. A good old man. I have a great regard for the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. I wish all ministers were as good and simple and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. And I wish all the young people thought as much about their elders as you do, Miss Myrtle Hazard. We that are old love little acts of kindness. You gave me more pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked that handsome cushion for me. The old minister will be greatly pleased,--poor old man!"
"But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father Pemberton. They are for--Mr. Stoker."
"The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker! He is not an old man, the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker. He may perhaps be a widower before a great while.--Does he know that you are working those slippers for him?"
"Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley. I meant them for a surprise to him. He has been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I thought anybody did. He is so different from what I thought; he makes religion so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would agree with him, if they could only hear him talk."
"Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n"t he?"
"Too much, almost, I am afraid. He says he has been too hard in his sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his hearers enough."
"Don"t you think he worries himself about the souls of young women rather more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?"
There was something in the tone of this question that helped its slightly sarcastic expression. Myrtle"s jealousy for her minister"s sincerity was roused.
"How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley? I am sure I wish you or anybody could have heard him talk as I have. There is no age in souls, he says; and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or young."
"No age in souls,--no age in souls. Souls of forty as young as souls of fifteen; that "s it." Master Gridley did not say this loud. But he did speak as follows: "I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker"s love of being useful to people of all ages. You have had comfort in his companionship, and there are others who might be very glad to profit by it. I know a very excellent person who has had trials, and is greatly interested in religious conversation. Do you think he would be willing to let this friend of mine share in the privileges of spiritual intercourse which you enjoy?"
There was but one answer possible. Of course he would.
"I hope it is so, my dear young lady. But listen to me one moment.
I love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your own--grandfather." (There was moral heroism in that word.) "I love you as if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in mind, body, or estate. You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt me; but until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near you, you will find me there. Now, my dear child, you ought to know that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has the reputation of being too fond of prosecuting religious inquiries with young and handsome women."
Myrtle"s eyes fell,--a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.
"He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,--a very pretty girl, as you know."
Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.
"I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about with him. He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death, and cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother"s blood if nature did not tell her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first good-looking young woman he can get to listen to him."
Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.
"Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?"
"Of course I would," said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts, her shame, her pride, were all excited. "Who is your friend, Mr. Gridley?"
"An excellent woman,--Mrs. Hopkins. You know her, Gifted Hopkins"s mother, with whom I am residing. Shall the minister be given to understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?"
Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations. "As you say," she answered. "Is there n.o.body that I can trust, or is everybody hunting me like a bird?" She hid her face in her hands.
"You can trust me, my dear," said Byles Gridley. "Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern,--it will come out a rose by and by.
Life is like that, Myrtle, one st.i.tch at a time, taken patiently, and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. You can trust me. Good-by, my dear."
"Let her finish the slippers," the old man said to himself as he trudged home, "and make "em big enough for Father Pemberton. He shall have his feet in "em yet, or my name is n"t Byles Gridley!"
CHAPTER XV. ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.
Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had ceased to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of the old mansion. Then she went to her little chamber and sat down in a sort of revery. She could not doubt his sincerity, and there was something in her own consciousness which responded to the suspicions he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other words which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest lessons and our sharpest rebukes. The hint another gives us finds whole trains of thought which have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a burning syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for a spark to become letters of fire.
The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his "developing" room, and he will give you a more exact ill.u.s.tration of the truth just mentioned. There is nothing to be seen on the gla.s.s just taken from the camera. But there is a potential, though invisible, picture hid in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he pours a wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought which is at once a surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of your own features where a moment before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.
In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard. It was not merely their significance, it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting time. If they had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the first st.i.tch on the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as the artist"s developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed in the camera. But she had been of late in training for her lesson in ways that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last ill.u.s.tration will perhaps hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.
These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it happened that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and emotional elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky, had been quietly doing their work. The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health. It needed but the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being. The word had been spoken. She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How hard for any!--but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard!
She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by the first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle"s bed hung that other portrait, which was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful souls of the Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung up in her chamber.