Part 22 (1/2)
”You know,” she said, ”I just _adore_ Wordsworth. I think 'Lucy Grey'
and 'Peter Bell' are too sweet for anything, and the 'Picnic'--no, I mean the 'Excursion' is my favorite of them all. So light and cheerful; I'm glad the dear man did take a day off once in a while.”
Flint gravely promised a Life of Wordsworth, to be sent to the ”Etruria” to-morrow, and then, bidding his companions adieu, he pa.s.sed out into the night.
His mood, as he strolled up the avenue, was far from complacent. He felt a contempt for himself, as the sport of every pa.s.sing impression.
It was not enough, it seemed, that he should have cut short a summer vacation, and come hurrying back to the city at Winifred Anstice's behest. He must vibrate to every whim about him. He had found, with inward disgust, that he was raising his elbow to shake hands with the Grahams, instead of holding his hand at the customary, self-respecting angle; and that he might be still further convicted of weak mindedness, he had a sense of being in some inexplicable fas.h.i.+on dominated by the vision of Nora Costello and her comrades. Not that he experienced any sudden drawing to the Salvation Army; he felt, to the core, its crudeness, its limitations, its social dangers. His reason a.s.sured him that its methods threatened socialism and anarchy. He could have demolished all General Booth's pet theories by an appeal to the simplest logical processes, but that it seemed absurd to apply logic to so crude a scheme. ”Nevertheless,” said conscience, ”these people are striving, however blunderingly, to better the condition of the forlorn, the wicked, and the wretched. What are _you_ doing about it?” He had almost framed a defence, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was under no accusations, except from his own soul, and such thoughts and impulses as had arisen at sight of Nora Costello, moving in the world outside the social wall behind which he had intrenched himself.
”I suppose,” he said to himself, with a shrug, ”if I were living in the Ma.s.sachusetts of a hundred years ago, I should be considered in a hopeful way to conversion. Now, we have learned just how far we may indulge an emotion, without allowing it to eventuate in action.”
Yet the pa.s.sing of Nora Costello, like the pa.s.sing of Pippa in the poem, had left its light, ineffaceable touch on at least one life that night.
CHAPTER XIII
A SOLDIER
”'T was August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green; And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.
”I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 'Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?'
'Bravely!' he said; 'for I of late have been Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the _living bread_.'”
Nora Costello was even more moved than Flint by their chance meeting, if meeting it could be called, under the white light of the lamps of Madison Square. On leaving Nepaug, she had resolutely shut out of her mental horizon the acquaintances that she had made in her few days there. She felt instinctively that any further continuance of the a.s.sociations would be fraught with embarra.s.sing complications, if not actual perils. These people belonged to a world to which she was as dead as though she had taken the black veil in a convent.
As the daughter of the manse, in her young girlhood she had come in contact with people of refinement and some wealth; people of keen perceptions if somewhat p.r.o.nounced limitations; and she realized that in enlisting in the Salvation Army, she had not only shocked their prejudices beyond repair, but had wrenched herself out of their sympathies in a degree which could not have been exceeded by an actual crime on her part.
Time had in some measure healed the sensitiveness which had been sorely wounded by the withdrawal and disapproval of these early friends; but she seemed to feel all reflected and renewed in her brief acquaintance with the strangers at Nepaug, especially in her intercourse with Miss Standish. There is a curious resemblance, which lies deeper than outward circ.u.mstances, between New England and Scotland. The same outward environment of frugal poverty, the same inward experience of intense religious exaltation, continued from generation to generation, produced in early New England a type closely allied to the Scotch Covenanters, and many resemblances still linger among their descendants, widely as they may be removed from the primitive conditions which formed their ancestors.
Miss Standish's manner was marked by all the old Covenanters'
directness, and in spite of her prepossession in Nora Costello's favor, showed clearly that she looked upon her as an extremist, if not a fanatic.
”What took you into that Salvation Army?” she had asked, as she sat by Nora's bedside in the upper front chamber of the White-House.
”A divine call, I hope,” Nora had answered.
”Couldn't you have done just as much good in some of the churches?”
”Very likely, but there's many will be doing that work, and there's no over-crowding among us highway-and-hedgers.”
Nora remembered a curious little look on Miss Standish's face, as if she thought the answer savored of sarcasm. This expression had led her on to further explanation:--
”I know just how folk will be feeling about the Army. I know how I felt myself before I signed the Articles of War,--as if it was much like joining a circus-troop, going about so with a bra.s.s band.”
”Well, isn't it?” asked Miss Standish, bluntly.
Nora colored, but answered amiably: ”No, it does not look so to me now,--whiles there's things in the Army work for which I've no liking myself, the noise and a'; but such things are not for you and me. We can get our spiritual aid and comfort somewhere else; but these are like a snare spread for the souls we are hunting, and when you see the rough men come round us like those in the London streets, it's fair wonderfu' how they be taken wi' the drums and torches.”
”Humph!” sniffed Miss Standish, ”it is as easy to gather converts with a drum as to collect flies round a lump of sugar,--men will always come buzzing about where there is any excitement. The question is, Have you got the fly-paper to make 'em stick?”