"Please take me with you, Miss Lady," the Stray pleaded, as he ran along beside me, trying to keep up with my long steps. "I"ve got me a dog now to keep off turkles from me and you." And the slinking brindle bunch of ears and tail and very little else, at our heels, regarded me with the same brave entreaty. He and the Stray, indeed, presented a picture of chivalrous attention as they stood regarding me.
"But what will your mother say?" I asked of my small human attendant with conscientious contention against my desire to take them both with me on out of the dirt and heat and flies and other swarming young humans up into the coolness and shade and--loneliness--of my own life.
"She groceries all day and has to forget me," he answered calmly. "You can bring me back to bed when she is through." And to this plea was added a pathetic wag of the brindle tail.
"Well, I"ll take you up as far as Mother Spurlock"s and give you both a tea cake," I capitulated as I started again up the street of the Settlement towards the haven of the Town.
And as my escort and I progressed through the Settlement I could see the most violent signs of interest being manifested in all of us. Dirty, sweaty women, with their sleeves rolled up, came to the doors to look at us, and as I greeted them one and all with a nod they smiled back with pleased astonishment. I had never been down in the Settlement before, but most of them spoke to me by name and one toothless old woman hastily broke off a bloom from a struggling geranium, came to her rickety gate and offered it to me with an admiring smile.
"Bless my soul, Miss Charlotte, be you a-kidnappin" Martha"s Stray?" she asked, as I accepted it with enthusiasm.
"He and the dog are kidnapping me as far as Mother Spurlock"s, and then they"ll let me go and come back," I answered, with a laugh, as we started on. Not once had the strong little fingers let go of my hand as we stood and talked and they only held the closer as we started climbing the long, hot dusty hill to the Little House by the Side of the Road.
But in the long climb not once did the st.u.r.dy little legs lag or the small arm drag on my strength. The clasp was one of equality and affectionate attraction, not of dependence.
CHAPTER XIII
THE SHORT-CIRCUIT
And at last we arrived at the old s...o...b..ll guarding the open gate of the Little House and we went under its low boughs and up the walk. But we did not march to an undisputed and stealthy raid on the tea cake box above the kitchen table. The Little House was no longer the deserted scene I had left it, but was teeming with human and juvenile activities which streamed out to meet us at the door.
"You can"t come in here, Auntie Charlotte," was the command that greeted me at the very doorstep as young Charlotte faced me with short skirts outspread determinedly, while behind her Mikey of the red head, Jimmy, Sue, Maudie, the sister of Mikey, and other known and unknown juveniles, presented a solid support of defiance. "We are doing some Lord"s work and we don"t need you, but we"ll let the nice little boy and the lovely dog come in. We do need them. Come in, little boy!" and as she spoke Charlotte held out a welcoming hand to the Stray, who faltered and looked up into my face to see if he might accept the invitation which evidently swayed him by its commanding tone.
"Couldn"t I come in for just a second?" I asked with all due meekness.
"Not for even a second," answered Charlotte sternly. "You"d interrupt Minister. You go away and leave the boy."
"Then how"ll I get him back to his mother?" I pleaded, but as I spoke I allowed the little fingers to slip from mine and I pushed the waif towards Charlotte with the greatest confidence, which evidently communicated itself to both him and the dog, for they left me simultaneously and went towards the enemy"s camp.
"Shoo, it"s only little Stray Ensley. I"ll take him home when I go," the redoubtable Mikey a.s.sured me with a wide smile at the kiddie, which was answered with a rapture of hero worship.
"What"s his name?" demanded Charlotte as if seeking a pa.s.sport.
"Just Stray," answered Mikey in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "He ain"t got no father, dead or alive."
"Then Stray is just short for stranger, because everybody else has fathers, dead, alive or drunk," said Charlotte, in the same matter-of-fact tone that Mikey had used, and he in no way seemed to feel her remark personally derogatory to his paternal parent.
"Well, let"s take him to Minister to be learned his verses of the song and dance. Come on, for we are keeping him and the Lord waiting," said Charlotte as she marshaled them all into the Little House and calmly shut the door in my face and left me standing alone in the middle of the walk. Even the yellow pup had squeezed into the door before it was shut and only I was left in the outer darkness away from the grand opera voice that I could hear booming with a juvenile chorus out at the back of the cottage where I knew the rehearsal was being held under the twin of the old apple tree from which the front roof tree over my head was eternally separated by the Little House. With actual sadness and a queer feeling of shut-outness I did the only thing left to me and sauntered slowly on up the hill under the tall old elm trees that the Town had planted a century ago to keep the heat from the heads of the like of me while the toilers down in the Settlement had no such proof of ancestral care.
"They are producing in the sweat of their brows while I--saunter," I said to myself, as I stretched out my bare arm from which the white silk sleeve had been rolled away after the prevailing mode of the sport for which it was designed, and flexed and regarded the bunch of muscles that knotted themselves on my smooth, tanned forearm.
"It _could_ swing a wash tub as well as the best racquet this side of the Meadowbrook Club," I added aloud with a queer kind of primitive shame mixed with my physical pride in myself.
"Or juggle a heavy baby and a kitchen stove into a square meal?" added a laughing voice as the Jaguar padded up beside my shoulder on his tennis shoes before I had heard him at all, so deep was my absorption in my own judgment and absolution of myself.
"Still I was put out just a few minutes ago by a woman half my size," I laughed in return as the long strides shortened into harmony with mine.
"I heard about it and ran after you to ask you to come back or, if you refused, to let me go with you wherever you are going. I left Mother Spurlock in charge of the newly installed Epworth Leaguers. Charlotte disapproved of my coming and said so," and we both laughed in delight over my strenuous name-daughter.
"Are you asking me _quo vadis?_" I demanded, with a look at him out of a corner of my eye that got in return a glint of the jewels under dull gold that always infuriated as well as interested me.
""Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge--""
the parson suddenly chanted under his breath, using the old Gregorian measure for the few words of the oldest song of impersonal love extant.
"Thank you for bringing Martha"s boy up to the Little House. Jacob has refused both Mother Spurlock and me to let him come."
"I didn"t bring him. He and the pup brought me and then he was stolen from me into the fold, as it were," I answered as I paused at the front gate of the Poplars, which had a white clematis drifting over its tall stone pillars and clutching at the straight iron bars as if trying to keep me out of even my own fold. "Will you come in with me?" I asked with a laugh, as I flung the old gate wide in spite of the tendril fingers.
The parson laughed, whistled a strain of his "whither thou goest" chant to me and followed me across the lawn to the foot of the poplars. On the bench surrounding their trunks I found my basket with the fine seam I was sewing for the Suckling in it and I dropped upon the thick mat of gra.s.s on the very edge of the shadow from the silver branches above and began to hunt for my thimble, leaving the Jaguar standing over me.
"Stop looking down on me and come tell me what particular religious incantations were going on from which Charlotte so violently barred me,"
I laughed up at him, as I threw a flat gra.s.s cushion a little way from my skirts, upon which he immediately sank and seemed to curl up at my feet.
"I had the whole bunch rehearsing the children"s part in the dedication services of our chapel. Do you know that small Sue can really sing? The rest stagger well but Susan sings. It is delicious. It is going to be hard on you women folks to hear her chant her responses to me on that great day." And as he spoke he looked beyond me over to his beautiful shimmering gray chapel and there was not a glint in his eyes that showed me he was trying to sound out my intentions about attendance on that ceremony.
"Please, Mr. Goodloe, don"t be serious in saying as you did last night that you are not going to dedicate your chapel until I--I help you," in all gentleness I said.
"I can"t do it until you come," he answered me with just as great gentleness and he turned his head away from me, but not before I saw a glow in his eyes that made me suddenly strong and calm and curiously humble.
"I--I could go as your guest," I faltered, offering a compromise which I felt sure would not be accepted.
"I can"t, I just can"t dedicate the chapel until you echo my ceremony in your heart," he answered me with his eyes still turned away from me and looking with the greatest sadness out on Paradise Ridge.
"Why?" I asked with a simple directness that the situation demanded and with no trace of the coquetry the question might have held.
"Shall I tell you all of the reason with no reservations?" the parson asked, as he swung around on his mat and faced me, with his eyes looking straight into mine.
"All," I answered.
"In every community there is one soul which holds the real leadership of the souls of those surrounding them. G.o.d seems to appoint captains of the regiments of His people to lead them along the way, Christ the captain of all the hosts. Spiritually you are more evolved than any other person in this town and with you doubting I cannot get the others to see. You are so gorgeous and so brilliant that you blind them all.
They have always followed your lead--up or down. There are a few like Mother Spurlock who have gained their Christ knowledge through suffering, but they are not of the calibre to help others to gain theirs. With your hand in mine I can make this whole community see and know; separated from you, you going one way and I another, I can do nothing. You simply short-circuit my force and I am helpless without you." He spoke very simply and directly down into my heart.
"That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry.
"The old "brother"s keeper" question will never be settled in any but the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are responsible for the att.i.tude of this whole town towards the cause I represent and they"ll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for you to make them see."
"You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or understand.
"They were listening to me--from a distance, as it were--and I might have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the arraignment.
"Everybody in this town adores you," were the words that gushed out of my heart for his comforting before I could stop them. "That is one reason I have acted as I have. I do not, I cannot believe that the religion which is great enough to bring the redemption of the whole race into a desirable immortality can be composed of nine-tenths emotion, with which all of them were following your beautiful voice and beautiful eyes and beautiful church and beautiful words. If I am to be saved it will be by something sterner than that; it will be something that makes me sweat drops of blood from my mind, take up a hard cross of duty and work, work to make the fibre of my soul strong enough to enjoy the robust kind of immortality that alone seems worth while to me. Your Son of Man walked from town to town in the hot sun and taught the people, healed the mult.i.tude and yet had not where to lay his head to rest. His church has lost His vigor. Your whole scheme hasn"t enough action in it.
Your organization is too easy and too full of surface observances. It is conducted with slipshod business methods and there is no force in it to help me. If I join any church ever it will have to be a new one that can compare with modern business in its efficiency. Your scheme of redemption to immortality through an efficient mediation is perfectly sound, but you don"t back it up."
"The Church of Christ has stood, endured and done business for almost two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is from the inside, not the outside. These people _must_ get their vision _now_. Will you come and help me?" As he spoke he looked again down into the depths from which I had been trying to translate some of the hieroglyphics to him and he held out his long powerful hand to me in an entreaty that shook my very foundations.
"You make me want to do as you ask me, but I do not see what it is we should strive for, what it is from which we should be saved. There are tears in my eyes but do you want my emotions without my reason?" And I asked my question with a quiver almost of timidity.