Bohemian Days Part 26

As he stopped, and the pause was prolonged, Agnes herself, by a powerful inner impulsion, took up the prayer aloud, and carried it along like inspiration. She was not of the strong-minded type of women, rather of the wholly loving; but the deep afflictions of the past few months, working down into the crevices and cells of her nature, had struck the impervious bed of piety, and so deluged it with sorrow and the lonely sense of helplessness that now a cry like an appeal to judgment broke from her, not despair nor accusation, but an appeal to the very equity of G.o.d.

It arose so frankly and in such majesty, finding its own aptest words by its unconscious instinct, that the aged minister was presently aware of a preternatural power at his side. Was this woman a witch, genius, demon, or the very priestess of G.o.d, he asked.

The solemn prayer ranged into his own experience by that touch of nature which unlocks the secret spring of all, being true unto its own deep needs. The minister was swept along in the resistless current of the prayer, and listened as if he were the penitent and she the priest. As the pet.i.tion died away in Agnes's physical exhaustion, the venerable man thought to himself:

"When Jacob wrestled all night at Peniel, his angel must have been a woman like this; for she has power with G.o.d and with men!"

CHAPTER VII.

FOCUS.

Calvin Van de Lear had been up-stairs with Duff Salter, and on his way out had heard the voice of Agnes Wilt praying. He slipped into the back parlor and listened at the crevice of the folding-door until his father had given the pastoral benediction and departed. Then with cool effrontery Calvin walked into the front parlor, where Agnes was sitting by the slats of the nearly darkened window.

"Pardon me, Agnes," he said. "I was calling on the deaf old gentleman up-stairs, and perceiving that devotions were being conducted here, stopped that I might not interrupt them."

Calvin's commonplace nature had hardly been dazed by Agnes's prayer. He was only confirmed in the idea that she was a woman of genius, and would take half the work of a pastor off his hands. In the light of both desire and convenience she had, therefore, appreciated in his eyes. To marry her, become the proprietor of her snug home and ravishing person, and send her off to pray with the sick and sup with the older women of the flock, seemed to him such a comfortable consummation as to have Heaven's especial approval. Thus do we deceive ourselves when the spirit of G.o.d has departed from us, even in youth, and construe our dreams of selfishness to be glimmerings of a purer life.

Calvin was precocious in a.s.surance, because, in addition to being unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed, clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age, found him over them as he had been over their parents--a righteous, intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought of objecting to anything after he had insisted upon it, and in this spirit the whole church had heard submissively that Calvin Van de Lear was to be their next pastor.

This, of course, was conditional upon his behavior, and all knew that his father would be the last man to impose an injurious person on the church; they had little idea that "Cal." Van de Lear was devout, but took the old man's word that grace grew more and more in the sons of the Elect, and the young man had already professed "conviction," and voluntarily been received into the church. There he a.s.sumed, like an heir-apparent, the vicarship of the congregation, and it rather delighted his father that his son so promptly and complacently took direction of things, made his quasi pastoral rounds, led prayer-meetings, and exhorted Sunday-schools and missions. A priest knows the heart of his son no more than a king, and is less suspicious of him. The king's son may rebel from deferred expectation; the priest's son can hardly conspire against his father's pulpit. In the minister's family the line between the world and the faith is a wavering one; religion becomes a matter of course, and yet is without the mystery of religion as elsewhere, so that wife and sons regard ecclesiastical ambition as meritorious, whether the heart be in it piously or profanely. Calvin Van de Lear was in the church fold of his own accord, and his father could no more read that son's heart than any other member's. Indeed, the good old man was especially obtuse in the son's case, from his partiality, and thus grew up together on the same root the flower of piety and hypocrisy, the tree and the sucker.

"Calvin," replied Agnes, "I do not object to your necessary visits here.

Your father is very dear to me."

"But can't I return to the subject we last talked of?" asked the young man, shrewdly.

"No. That is positively forbidden."

"Agnes," continued Calvin, "you must know I love you!"

Agnes sank to her seat again with a look of resignation.

"Calvin," she said, "this is not the time. I am not the person for such remarks. I have just risen from my knees; my eyes are not in this world."

"You will be turning nun if this continues."

"I am in G.o.d's hands," said Agnes. "Yet the hour is dark with me."

"Agnes, let me lift some of your burden upon myself. You don't hate me?"

"No. I wish you every happiness, Calvin."

"Is there nothing you long for--nothing earthly and within the compa.s.s of possibility?"

"Yes, yes!" Agnes arose and walked across the floor almost unconsciously, with the palms of her hands held high together above her head. As she walked to and fro the theological student perceived a change so extraordinary in her appearance since his last visit that he measured her in his cool, worldly gaze as a butcher would compute the weight of a cow on chance reckoning.

"What is it, dear Agnes?"

He spoke with a softness of tone little in keeping with his unfeeling, vigilant face.

"Oh, give me love! Now, if ever, it is love! Love only, that can lift me up and cleanse my soul!"

"Love lies everywhere around you," said the young man. "You trample it under your feet. My heart--many hearts--have felt the cruel treatment.

Agnes, _you_ must love also."

"I try to do so," she exclaimed, "but it is not the perfect love that casteth out fear! G.o.d knows I wish it was."

Her eyes glanced down, and a blush, sudden and deep, spread over her features. The young man lost nothing of all this, but with alert a.n.a.lysis took every expression and action in.

"May I become your friend if greater need arises, Agnes? Do not repulse me. At the worst--I swear it!--I will be your instrument, your subject."

Agnes sat in the renewed pallor of profound fear. G.o.d, on whom she had but a moment before called, seemed to have withdrawn His face. Her black ringlets, smoothed upon her n.o.ble brow in wavy lines, gave her something of a Roman matron's look; her eyebrows, dark as the eyes beneath that now shrank back yet shone the larger, might have befitted an Eastern queen. Lips of unconscious invitation, and features produced in their wholeness which bore out a character too perfect not to have lived sometime in the realms of the great tragedies of life, made Agnes in her sorrow peerless yet.

"Go, Calvin!" she said, with an effort, her eyes still upon the floor; "if you would ever do me any aid, go now!"

As he pa.s.sed into the pa.s.sageway Calvin Van de Lear ran against a man with a crutch and a wooden leg, who looked at him from under a head of dark-red hair, and in a low voice cursed his awkwardness. The man bent to pick up his crutch, and Calvin observed that he was badly scarred and had one eyebrow higher than the other.

"Who are you, fellow?" asked Calvin, surprised.

"I'm Dogcatcher!" said the man. "When ye see me coming, take the other side of the street."

Calvin felt cowed, not so much at these mysterious words as at a hard, lowering look in the man's face, like especial dislike.

Agnes Wilt, still sitting in the parlor, saw the lame servant pa.s.s her door, going out, and he looked in and touched his hat, and paused a minute. Something graceful and wistful together seemed to be in his bearing and countenance.

"Anything for me?" asked Agnes.

"Nothing at all, mum! When there's n.o.body by to do a job, call on Mike."

He still seemed to tarry, and in Agnes's nervous condition a mysterious awe came over her; the man's gaze had a dread fascination that would not let her drop her eyes. As he pa.s.sed out of sight and shut the street door behind him Agnes felt a fainting feeling, as if an apparition had looked in upon her and vanished--the apparition, if of anything, of him who had lain dead in that very parlor--the stern, enamored master of the house whose fatherhood in a fateful moment had turned to marital desire, and crushed the luck of all the race of Zanes.

Duff Salter was sitting at his writing table, with an open snuff-box before him, and, as Calvin Van de Lear entered his room, Duff took a large pinch of snuff and shoved the tablets forward. Calvin wrote on them a short sentence. As Duff Salter read it he started to his feet and sneezed with tremendous energy:

"Jeri-cho! Jericho! Jerry-cho-o-o!"

He read the sentence again, and whispered very low:

"Can't you be mistaken?"

"As sure as you sit there!" wrote Calvin Van de Lear.

"What is your inference?" wrote Duff Salter.

"Seduction!"