The Puritans by Arlo Bates

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The train was already clear of the city, and was speeding through the
suburbs, rattling gayly and noisily past the ostentatious stations and
the scattered houses. Maurice felt that his companion was secretly
observing him, although she was apparently looking at the landscape
which slid precipitately past. He wished to say something, and desired
that it should not be clerical in tone. He would fain have spoken, not
as a deacon, but as a man of the world.

"Are you going to New York?" he asked.

"I shall not have the pleasure of your company so far," she returned
with a smile.

"No," he responded naively. "I am going only to Springfield."

"Ah," she said, smiling again; and too late he realized that she had
meant that she was not going through.

He was the more vexed with himself because he was sure that his
confusion was so plain that she could not but see it, and that it was
with a kind intention of relieving his embarrassment that she spoke
again.

"I am going to visit my grandmother in Brookfield."

He replied by some sort of an unintelligible murmur, and was doubly
angry with himself for being so shy and awkward. He glanced furtively
at the trim young man opposite, and was relieved to find that that
individual was reading and giving no heed. He wondered why he should be
so completely thrown out of his usual self-possession by this girl, so
that when he talked to her, and was most anxious to appear at his best,
he was most surely at his worst. There came whimsically into his head a
thought of the wisdom of training the clergy to the social gifts and
graces, and he remembered the flippant speech of Mrs. Wilson about the
need of their being able to pay compliments.

"I seem to be specially stupid when I try to talk to you," he said with
boyish frankness.

Miss Morison looked at him curiously.

"Am I to take that as a compliment or the reverse?" she asked.

"It must be a compliment, I suppose, for it shows how much power you
have over me."

He was reassured by her smile, and felt that this was not so badly
said.

"The power to make you stupid, I think you intimated."

"Oh, no," he responded, with more eagerness than the occasion called
for; "I didn't mean that."

She smiled again, a smile which seemed to him nothing less than
adorable, and yet which teased him a little, although he could not tell
why. She took up the novel which lay in her lap.

"Have you read this?" she inquired.

He shook his head.

"You forget," he answered, "that I am a deacon. At the Clergy House we
do not read novels."

"How little you must know of life," returned she.

There was a silence of some moments. The train rushed on, past fields
desolate under patches of snow, and stark, leafless trees; over rivers
dotted with cakes of grimy ice; between banks of frost-gnawed rock. The
landscape in the dim January afternoon was gray and gloomy; and as day
declined everything became more lorn and forbidding. Maurice turned
away from the window, and sighed.

"How disconsolate the country looks!" said he. "I am country bred, and
I don't know that I ever thought of the sadness of it; but now if I see
the country in winter it makes me sigh for the people who have to live
there all the year round."

"But they don't notice it any more than you did when you lived in it."

"Perhaps not; but it seems to me as if they must. At any rate they must
feel the effects of it, whether they are conscious of it or not."

Miss Morison looked out at the dull, sodden fields and stark trees.

"I am afraid that you were never a true lover of the country," said she
thoughtfully. "You should know my grandmother. She is almost ninety,
but she is as young as a girl in her teens. She has lived in the finest
cities in the world,--London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and of course our
American cities. Now she is happiest in the country, and can hardly be
persuaded to stay in town. She says that she loves the sound of the
wind and the rain better than the noise of the street-cars."

"That I can understand," he answered; "but I am interested in men. I
don't like to be away from them. There is something intoxicating in the
presence of masses of human beings, in the mere sense that so many
people are alive about you."

She looked at him with more interest than he had ever seen in her eyes.

"But I don't understand," she began hesitatingly, "why"--

"Why what?" he asked as she paused.

"I don't know that I ought to say it, but having begun I may as well
finish. I was going to say that I could not understand how one so
interested in men and so sensitive to humanity could be content to
choose a profession which cuts him off from so much of active life."

"It was from interest in men, I suppose, that I chose it. I wanted to
reach them, to do something for them. Although," Maurice concluded,
flushing, "I don't think that I realized at that time the feeling of
being carried away by the mere presence of crowds of living beings."

There was another interval of silence, during which they both looked
out at the cold landscape, blotted and marred by patches of snow tawny
from a recent thaw.

"I doubt if you have got the whole of it," Miss Morison said
thoughtfully, turning toward him. "Dear old grandmother is as deeply
interested in the human as anybody can be. She always makes me feel
that my life in the midst of folk is very thin and poor as compared to
hers. She has known almost everybody worth knowing. Grandfather was
minister to England and Russia, and she of course was with him. Yet
she's content and happy off here in Brookfield."

"Perhaps," Wynne returned hesitatingly, "there's something the matter
with the age. I don't suppose that at her time of life she has anything
of this generation's restless"--

He broke off abruptly.

"Well?" his companion said curiously.

He smiled and sighed.

"I don't know why I am talking to you so frankly," replied he. "As a
matter of fact I find that I'm more frank with you than I am with
myself. I've always refused to own to myself that there was anything
restless in my feeling toward life; yet here I am saying it to you."

"One often thinks things out in that way. Hasn't that been your
experience?"

"Yes," he responded thoughtfully; "although I don't know that I ever
realized it before. I see now that I've often reasoned out things that
bothered me simply by trying to tell them to my friend, Mr. Ashe."

"Is he your bosom friend and confidant? It is usually supposed to be a
woman in such a case."

"Oh, no," was his somewhat too eager rejoinder; "I never talked like
this to a woman. I never wanted to before."

A look which passed over her face seemed to tell him that the talk was
taking a tone more confidential than she liked. He was keyed up to a
pitch of excitement and of sensitiveness; and a thrill of
disappointment pierced him. He became at once silent; and then he
fancied that she glanced at him as if in question why his mood had
changed so suddenly. The train rolled into the station at Worcester,
and he went out to walk a moment on the platform, and to try to collect
his thoughts. He had forgotten now to question his right to be enjoying
the companionship of Miss Morison; he gloated over her friendly looks
and words, thinking of how he might have said this and that, and thus
have appeared to better advantage, and resolving to be more self-
controlled for the remainder of the ride. The open air was refreshing;
and a great sense of joyousness filled him to overflowing. When again
he took his seat in the car he could have laughed from simple pleasure.

The chat of the latter part of the journey was more easy and
unconstrained than at the beginning. It was not clear to Wynne what the
change was, but he was aware that he was somehow talking less self-
consciously than before. They spoke of one thing and another, and it
teased the young man somewhat that when now and then his companion
mentioned a book he had seldom seen it. The things which he had read of
late years he knew without asking that she would not have seen. Even
the names of current writers of fiction were hardly known to him, and
an allusion to what they had written was beyond him. In spite of a word
which now and again brought out the difference between his world and
hers, however, Maurice thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Now and then he
would reflect in a sort of sub-consciousness that the delight of this
hour was to be dearly paid for with penance and repentance, but this
provoked in him rather the determination at least to enjoy it to the
full while it lasted, than any inclination to deny himself the present
gratification.

It has been remarked that the ecclesiastical temper is histrionic; and
Wynne was not without a share of this spirit. He would have gone to the
stake for a conviction, and made a beautifully effective death-scene
for the edification of men and angels, not for a moment aware that
there was anything artificial in what he was doing. Now he was not
without a consciousness that he was playing the role of a lover and a
prodigal, sincere in his love and devotion; yet none the less subtly
aware how much more interesting is repentance when there is genuine
human passion to repent, is renunciation when there is real love to
sacrifice; of how much more effective is saintliness set off against a
background of transgression. It was a real if somewhat childish joy to
be able to sin actually yet without going beyond hope; of being
dramatically false to his vows without crossing the line of possible
pardon.

"We shall be in Brookfield in ten minutes," Miss Morison said,
beginning to look about for her belongings. "We pass the New York
express just here."

Hardly had she spoken when suddenly and without warning there was an
outburst of shrieks from the whistle of the engine, answered and
blended with that of another. Before Maurice could realize what the
outburst meant, there followed a horrible shock which seemed to
dislocate every joint in his body. Berenice was thrown violently into
his arms, flung as a dead weight, and shrieking as she fell against his
breast. Instinctively he clasped her, and in the terror of the moment
it was for a brief instant no more to him that his embrace enfolded her
than if she had been the veriest stranger. A hideous din of yells, of
crashing wood and rending iron, of shivering glass, of escaping steam,
of indescribable sounds which had no resemblance to anything which he
had ever heard or dreamed of, and which seemed to beat upon his ears
and his brain like blows of bludgeons wielded by the hands of infuriate
giants. The end of the car before him was beaten in; splinters of wood
and fragments of glass flew about him like hail; it was like being
without warning exposed to the fiercest fire of batteries of an
implacable enemy. A woman was dashed at his very feet torn and
bleeding, her face mangled so that he grew sick and faint at the sight;
pinned against the seat opposite, transfixed by a long splinter as with
a javelin, was the dapper young man, horribly writhing and mowing, and
then stark dead in an instant, staring with wide open eyes and
distorted face like a ghastly mask. Moans and shrieks, grindings and
roarings, howlings and babbling cries that were human yet were
piercingly inarticulate filled the air with an inhuman din which drove
him to a frenzy. It seemed as if the world had been torn into
fragments.

Yet all this was within the space of a second. Indeed, although all
these things happened and he saw and heard them clearly, there was no
pause between the first alarming whistle and the overturning of the
car which now came. He was lifted up; he saw the whole car sway with a
dizzying, sickening motion, and then plunge violently over. Fortunately
it so turned that he and Miss Morison were on the upper side. He fell
across the aisle, striking the chair opposite, but somehow
instinctively managing to protect Berenice from the force of the
concussion. She no longer cried out, but she clung convulsively about
his neck, and as they swayed for the fall he saw in her eyes a look of
wild and desperate appeal. He forgot then everything but her. The
desire to protect and save her, the feeling that he belonged absolutely
to her and that even to the death he would serve her, swallowed up
every other feeling. As they went over a vise-like grip caught his arm,
and amid all the infernal confusion he somehow connected that
despairing clutch with a succession of shrill and piercing shrieks
which rang in his ear, seeming to be close to him. He remembered that
in the chair behind his had been a young girl, and he felt a pity for
her that choked him like a hand at his throat. Then as they went down
he instinctively but vainly tried to shake off the hold, which was as
that of a trap. It was like being in the actual grip of death.

All sorts of loose articles fell with them from the upturned side of
the car to the other; they were part of a cataract of falling bodies,
involved as in a crushing avalanche. Wynne found himself in this
falling shower crumpled up between two chairs, one of his feet
evidently thrust through a broken window and the other still held by
that convulsive clasp. Miss Morison was half above him, partly
supported by a chair which still held by its fastenings to the floor.
He could not see her face, and his body was so twisted that he could
not move his head with freedom. Berenice was evidently insensible, but
whether stunned from the shock or more seriously hurt he could not
tell. He struggled fiercely to free himself, straining her to his
breast. There were still movements in the car after it had overturned.
It rocked and settled; for some time small articles continued to fall.
He drew the face of the unconscious girl more closely into his bosom to
protect it. As he did so he was aware that his arm was hurt. A burning,
biting pain singled itself out from all the aches of blows and
contusions. He seemed to remember that a long time ago, some hours
nearer the beginning of this catastrophe which had lasted but a moment,
he had felt something rip and tear the flesh; but he had been so
absorbed in the attempt to shield Berenice that he had not heeded. Now
the anguish was so great that it seemed impossible to endure it. He set
his teeth together, determined not to cry out lest she should hear him
and think that he lacked courage. Then it seemed to him that he was
swooning. He struggled against the feeling; and for what seemed to him
an interminable time he wavered between consciousness and
insensibility. It was either growing darker or he was losing the power
to see. He could not distinguish clearly any longer that human hand,
smeared with blood, sticking ludicrously in the air from amid a pile of
bags, coats, and all sorts of things thrown together just where the
position of his head constrained him to look. He had been seeing that
hand for a long time, it seemed to him, and only now that the darkness
had so increased as to cut it off from his sight did he realize what it
was and what it must mean.

He still retained a consciousness of the face of Berenice, warm against
his bosom, and with each wave of faintness he struggled to keep his
senses that he might protect her. The din of noises seemed far away,
the cries somewhere at a distance ever increasing. The moans that had
seemed to him those of the girl who clutched his arm grew fainter,
until they were lost in the buzz and whirr of a hundred other sounds.
Then the clasp which held him relaxed as suddenly as if a rope had been
cut away. It came into his mind with a wave of horror that the girl who
had held him was dead. The thought that Berenice might be dead also
followed like a flash, and aroused his benumbed senses. He spoke to
her; he tried to move; to release her from her position. He seemed
buried under a mound of debris, and she gave no sign of life. He
exhausted himself in frantic attempts to escape; to get his arms free;
to turn his head far enough to see her face; to thrust back the rubbish
which had fallen against them. The anguish to his arm was so great that
he could not continue; he could do nothing but suffer whatever fate had
in store for him. He tried to pray; but his prayers were broken and
confused ejaculations.

All at once he distinguished amid the chaos of noises roaring and
singing in his ears something which made his heart stand still; which
pierced to his dulled consciousness like a stab. It was the cry of
"Fire!" He had once seen a servant with her hair in flames, and
instantly arose before him the picture of her shriveling locks and the
terror of her face. He seemed to see the dear head on his bosom--The
thought was more than he could bear, and for the first time he cried
out, shouting for help in a transport of frenzied fear. He was so
absorbed in his thought of Berenice that he had forgotten himself; but
the realization of his own peril revived as a waft of smoke came over
him, choking and bewildering. He was then to die here, stifled or
wrapped in the torture of flame. Then the wild and desperate thought
sprang up that at least if he must die he should die with her on his
bosom, clasped in his arms. He might give himself up to the delirium of
that joy, since there was no more of earth to contaminate it. But the
horror of it! The anguish for her as well as for him! Not by fire! His
thoughts whirled in his brain like sparks caught in a hurricane. He
scarcely knew where he was or what had happened to him. Only he was
acutely aware of the acrid smoke, of how it increased, constantly more
dense and stifling.

However the mind may for a moment be turned aside from its usual way by
circumstances, habit is quick to reassert itself. The habitual
constrains men even in the midst of events the most startling. The mind
of Wynne had been too long bred in priestly forms not to turn to the
religious view here in the face of death. His conscience cried out that
he might be responsible for the peril and disaster which had come upon
them. With the unconscious egotism of the devotee, he felt that heaven
had been avenging the impiousness of his sin. He had dared to trifle
with his sacred calling, to look back to the loves of the world and of
the flesh, and swift destruction had overtaken him. And Berenice had
been crushed by the divine vengeance which had so deservedly fallen on
him. He groaned in anguish, seeming to see how she had perished through
the blight of his passion. Not by fire, O God! Not by fire! How long
would it be possible to breathe in this stifling reek, heavy with
unspeakable odors? It was his crime that had brought her to this death.
He, a man set apart and consecrated to the work of God, had turned from
heaven to earth, and heaven had smitten with one blow him and the woman
who had been unwittingly his temptation. And she so innocent, so pure,
so sacred! Through his distraught mind rushed a pang of hatred against
the power that could do this. He was willing to suffer for his sin, but
where was the justice of involving her in his ruin? It was because this
was what would hurt him most! It was the work of a devil! Then this
thought seemed to him a new transgression which might lessen the
chances of his being able to save her, and he tried to forget it in
prayer, to atone by penitence. He offered his own life amid whatever
tortures would propitiate the offended deity, but he prayed that she
might be spared.

All this time--and whether the time were long or short he could not
tell--he had heard continued cries and groans. He had now and then been
dully aware of a change in the noises. Now it would seem as if all else
was swallowed up in the sound of tremendous blows, as if the car were
being struck again and again by a mighty battering-ram. Then a chorus
of shouting went roaring up, as if an army cried. Noise and physical
sensation were too intimately blended to be separated; his brain
struggled in confusion, emerging now and then for a moment of
consecutive thought and sinking back into semi-unconsciousness as a
spent swimmer goes down, fighting wildly for life. He knew that a light
had come into the car. He saw it amid the smoke, and his first thought
was that it was flame. Dulled and half asphyxiated, he said to himself
now almost with indifference that the end had come. Then with a thrill
which for a moment aroused all his energies he recognized that it was
the glow of a lantern. He was aware that rescuers were close above him,
climbing down through the windows over his very head. He cried to them
in a paroxysm of appeal:--

"Save her! Save her!"

Whether he was heeded amid the babble of cries and all the noises which
seemed to swell to drown his voice, he could not tell, but in another
instant he felt that friendly hands had seized Miss Morison, and were
endeavoring to lift her insensible form. He strove to loosen his hold,
but the effort gave him agony so intolerable that he could do nothing.
A thousand points seemed to rend and tear him as he tried to move, and
when a voice somewhere above him shouted: "We'll have to try to lift
them together!" he experienced a strange sort of double consciousness
as if he stood outside of himself and heard others talking of him. He
felt himself grasped under the arms, and the pain of being moved was
too horrible to be endured. He shrieked in mortal agony, and then in a
whirl of dizzying circles seemed to go down in a tide of blackness
sparkling with millions of sharp scintillations.

VIII

LIKE COVERED FIRE
Much Ado about Nothing, iii. 1.

Philip Ashe found himself less and less able either to understand or to
sympathize with the politics of Mrs. Wilson. He believed in the
righteousness of her cause, and was keenly alive to the peril of the
appointment of Mr. Strathmore to the vacant bishopric. It is an
inevitable and necessary condition of enthusiasm that it shall be
narrow; and religious fervor would be impossible to a mind open to
conviction. To accept the possibility of any opposed truth is to be
secretly doubtful of the creed which one holds; and tolerance is of
necessity the child of indifference. Had Ashe been able to perceive
that the church would go on much the same no matter which of the rival
candidates was chosen, it would have been impossible for him to be so
deeply concerned for the success of Father Frontford. As it was he was
as much in earnest as Mrs. Wilson, and thus he felt forced to acquiesce
in the strangeness of her methods of work. He said to himself that he
supposed this electioneering to be a necessity, no matter how
unpleasant; and he added the reflection that in any case it was not in
his power to prevent it.

Other feelings were, moreover, completely absorbing his mind. Although
he was not yet conscious that anything had come between him and the
church, priesthood in which had been his highest earthly ideal, the
truth was that his passion for Mrs. Fenton waxed steadily. Chance threw
them together. Mrs. Fenton had been appointed to a committee on
charities, and it happened that Ashe was a visitor in the North End in
a region which the committee were making an especial field of labor. He
was called into consultation with her, and sometimes they even went
together to visit some of the poverty-stricken families which evidently
existed chiefly to be subjects for philanthropic manipulation. Day by
day Ashe felt her speak to him more easily and familiarly; and although
their talk was strictly impersonal and unemotional, none the less did
it feed his growing love.

The nature which does not sometimes try to deceive itself is an
abnormal one; and Ashe was not behind his fellows in devising excuses
for the joy which he found in Mrs. Fenton's presence. He dwelt in his
musings upon her devotion to the church, her good works, her visitings
of the poor and sick. He assured himself with a vehemence too feverish
not to be fallacious that he was instigated only by entirely
disinterested feelings; by the desire to assist in deeds of Christian
helpfulness, and by pleasure in the society of one whose devotion to
godliness was so marked. He argued with himself as eagerly as if he
were struggling to convince another, protesting to his own secret heart
as earnestly as he would have protested to a friend.

A man seldom really deceives himself, however, save in thinking that he
can deceive himself. There were moments in which his inner self rose up
and laughed him to scorn; moments in which his sin glowed before him in
colors blood-red. He saw himself apostate, false to his vows, drawn
away by his earthly lusts and beguiled. There were nights when he cast
himself upon the ground in an agony of self-abasement, beating his
breast and praying in a passion of remorse; times when by the cruelty
of his self-accusings he involuntarily sought to do penance for the
sweet sin which festered in his bosom.

Worse than all was the color which was imparted to his passion by the
self-imposed prohibitions which he was violating. The insistence upon
the earthly side of love which is an inevitable accompaniment to the
idea that woman is a temptation, cannot but degrade the relation of the
sexes in the mind of the professed celibate. To keep before the
thoughts the theory that passion is a snare and a pollution is to
render it impossible to love with purity and self-abandonment. Poor
Philip, endowed at birth with a nature of instinctive delicacy, could
not free himself from the taint of his training; yet he shrank as from
hot iron from the blasphemy of connecting any shadow of earthliness
with the woman who had become his ideal. His only resource was to take
refuge in repeating to himself that he did not love Mrs. Fenton; but
even in denying it he felt that he was defending himself from a charge
which was a degradation to her as well as to himself. He fell into that
morbid state of mind where whatever he tried as a remedy made his
disease but the worse; where the idea of love was the more horrible to
him the more it possessed and pervaded his whole being.

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