Part 2 (2/2)

When the first strophe had been sung below, and the sweet-voiced sisters caught up the antistrophe, Brother Friedsam, sitting in the midst, listened with painful attention, vainly trying to detect the sound of Tabea's voice. But when the second strophe had been sung, and the sisters began their second response, a thrill of excitement went through all as the long-silent voice of Sister Tabea rose above the rest with even more than its old fervor and expression.

And the next Sat.u.r.day--for the seventh day was the Ephrata Sabbath--Tabea took a new, solemn, and irrevocable vow; and from that time until the day of her death she was called Sister Anastasia--the name signifying that she had been re-established. What source of consolation Anastasia had the rest never divined. How should they guess that alongside her religious fervor a human love grew ethereally like an air plant?

NOTE.--Much of this little story is fact. I have supplied details, dialogue, and pa.s.sion. For the facts which const.i.tute the groundwork I am chiefly indebted to Dr. Oswald W. Seidensticker's very valuable monograph ent.i.tled ”Ephrata, eine amerikanische Klostergeschichte.” The reader will find a briefer account of the monastery from the same learned and able writer in _The Century_ magazine for December, 1881.

THE REDEMPTIONER.

A STORY IN THREE SCENES.

PROLOGUE.

The stories we write are most of them love stories; but in the lives of men there are also many stories that are not love stories: some, truly, that are hate stories. The main incident of the one I am about to tell I found floating down from the eighteenth century on the stream of Maryland tradition. It serves to present some of our forefathers, not as they seem in patriotic orations and reverent family traditions, but as they appear to a student of the writings and prints of their own age.

SCENE I.

The time was a warm autumn day in the year 1751. The place was a plantation on the Maryland sh.o.r.e of the Potomac. A planter of about thirty years of age, clad in buckskin shortclothes, sat smoking his pipe, after his noonday meal, in the wide entry that ran through his double log house from the south side to the north, the house being of the sort called alliteratively ”two pens and a pa.s.sage.” The planter's wife sat over against him, on the other side of the pa.s.sage, carding home-grown cotton wool with hand cards. He had placed his shuck-bottom chair so as to see down the long reach to the eastward, where the widening Potomac spread itself between low-lying banks, with never a brown hill to break the low horizon line. Every now and again he took his cob pipe from his mouth, and scanned the distant water wistfully.

”I know what you're looking for, Mr. Browne,” said his wife, as she reversed her hand cards and rubbed the carded cotton between the smooth backs of the two implements to make it into a roll for spinning.

”You're looking to see the Nancy Jane come sailing into the river one of these days.”

”That's just what I'm looking after,” he answered.

”Why should you care?” she said. ”You don't expect her to fetch you a new bonnet and a hoop skirt seven feet wide.” She laughed merrily at her own speech, which, after all, was but a trifling exaggeration of the width of a hoop skirt in that time.

Sanford Browne did not laugh, but took his pipe from his mouth, and stood up a moment, straining his sight once more against the distant horizon, where the green-blue water of the wide estuary melted into the blue-green of the sky with hardly a line of demarcation. Then he sat down and took a dry tobacco leaf lying on a stool beside him and crushed it to powder by first chafing it between his open hands and then grinding it in the palm of his left hand, rubbing it with the thumb of his right in a mortar-and-pestle fas.h.i.+on.

”I've a good deal more reason to look for the Nancy Jane than you have, Judy. I wrote my factor, you know, to find some trace of my father and mother, or of my sister Susan, if it took the half of my tobacco crop.

I hope he'll find them this time.” Saying this, he filled his cob pipe with the powdered tobacco, and then rose and walked into the large western room of the house, which served for kitchen and dining-room. It was also the weaving-room, and the great heavy-beamed loom stood in the corner. At the farther end was the vast, smoke-blackened stone fireplace, with two large rude andirons and a swinging crane. A skillet and a gridiron stood against the jamb on one side, a hoe for baking hoe cakes and a little wrought-iron trivet were in order on the other. The breakfast fire had burned out; only the great backlog, h.o.a.ry with gray ashes, lay slumbering at the back of the fireplace. The planter poked the drift of ashes between the andirons with a green oak stick until he saw a live coal s.h.i.+ning red in the gray about it. This he rolled out upon the hearth, and then took it between thumb and finger and deposited it within the bowl of his pipe by a deft motion, which gave it no time to burn him.

Having got his pipe a-going, he strolled back into the wide pa.s.sage and scanned the horizon once more. Judith Browne did not like to see her husband in this mood. She knew well how vain every exercise of her wifely arts of diversion would prove when he once fell into this train of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless task by holding up her ap.r.o.n of homespun cloth full of cotton rolls, pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying: ”Now, Mr. Browne, why don't you praise my cotton? Did you ever see better carding than that?”

The young planter took a roll of the cotton in his hands, holding it gingerly, and essaying absentmindedly to yield to his wife's mood. Just at that moment Sanford Browne the younger, a boy about eight years of age, came round the corner of the house and stood in front of his father, with his feet wide apart, feeling among the miscellanies in the bottom of his pocket for a periwinkle sh.e.l.l.

”How would you like to have him spirited away by a crimp, Judy?”

demanded the husband, replacing the cotton and pointing to the lad.

”I should just die, dear,” said Judy Browne in a low voice.

”That's what happened to my mother, I suppose,” said Browne. ”I hope she died; it would be too bad to think that she had to live all these twenty-two years imagining all sorts of things about her lost little boy. I remember her, Judy, the day I saw her last. I went out of a side street into Fleet Street, and then I grew curious and went on out through Temple Bar into the road they call the Strand. I did not know how far I had gone from the city until I heard the great bell of St.

Martin's in the Fields chiming at five o'clock. I turned toward the city again, but stopped along the way to look at the n.o.blemen's houses.

Somehow, at last I got into Lincoln's Inn Fields and could not tell which way to go. Just then a sea captain came up to me, and, pretending to know me, told me he would fetch me to my father. I went with him, and he got me into a boat and so down to his s.h.i.+p below the bridge. The s.h.i.+p was already taking aboard a lot of kids and freewillers out of the cook houses, where some of them had been shut up for weeks. I cried and begged for my father, but the captain only kicked and cuffed me. It was a long and wretched voyage, as I have told you often. I was brought here and sold to work with negroes and convicts. I don't so much mind the beatings I got, or the hard living, but to think of all my mother has suffered, and that I shall never see her or my father again! If I ever lay eyes on that Captain Lewis, he will go to the devil before he has time to say any prayers.”

”I'd like to shoot him,” said the boy, in sympathy with his father's mood. ”I'll kill him when I get big enough, pappy.” And he went off to seek the bow and arrow given him by an Indian who lingered in the region once occupied by his tribe.

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