The New Missioner/Chapter 13

UGUST was passing, and as her hours drew to a close she began to spin rainbow veils of illusion all of sun-films and purple hazes. White puffs of seeds floated over the grasses and through the air, and the spiders, eternal spinners, spilled broadcast their silken, silver skeins.

Frances would often stand at her doorway in the morning and watch those floating webs sagging with the diamond sparkle of dewdrops. The snow had melted from all save the highest peaks, the earth was warmed to her heart and lay basking in sun-flooded content, sending up toward the sky the incense of her myriad and delicate fragrances; and because of the happiness in her own heart, Frances grew to know the earth as a mother. She could feel about her the maternal, enfolding arms, and was privileged to listen to what only a few ever hear, the song of the globe as it rolls in its orbit—a song of joy—the eternal joy that lies at the heart of the universe; and in the dim woods of purple shadow, in the arrowy rush of the mountain streams, she caught continual echoes of the insistent whisper: "You are the daughter of my bounteous and teeming life; for you I have spread my broad, clear, happy spaces, for you is the healing silence of my forests, for you I spin my iridescent glories of light and colour. Then live; it is thus that you express your being which is mine. Live! That is Life's eternal, irrefutable mandate."

And Frances listened, dwelling in her world of dreams. She had had no word from Garvin, and yet she knew, through the subtle avenues of intuition and sympathy, that she was in his thoughts as he was in hers.

In her frequent visits to his library she was often accompanied by Herries, who had long been one of the pensioners of Garvin's intellectual bounty, and although their literary tastes were antipathetic, he and Frances browsed amiably enough over the books, in spite of his somewhat irritating fashion of pulling one volume after another from the shelves, turning over the pages, reading a few words here and there, and calling out in stentorian bitterness: "Lies! Lies!"

One morning when the Missionary and himself had started for the Pierian spring on the flats, the old man's arms full of books which he and she were returning to their proper places on the shelves, Frances paused a moment to speak to Mrs. O'Brien, who was industriously weeding in the little garden before her trim, toy-like house, carefully removing every intruding, wayside plant which had crept among her scarlet geraniums and yellow zinnias flaring crudely in the morning sunshine.

"Don't you find it warm, Mrs. O'Brien, weeding without a hat?" called Frances.

"No-o." The dancer rose slowly to her feet and came toward them with her languid and inimitable grace. "No, I like the heat. Was you ever down in the desert, Missioner?" she asked, with apparent irrelevance, leaning her elbows on the bars of the gate and sinking her chin in the palms of her hands.

The mountains afforded a blue and green background, serene, remote, in the sun-flooded atmosphere; but in all this harmony of nature, the Black Pearl, in her dull blue dress, standing among the scentless red and yellow flowers of her garden, was a startling and nerve-thrilling discord.

"The desert!" repeated Frances in a surprised tone. "Why, yes; I lived there for a while."

"An' me," drawled Mrs. O'Brien in her soft, lazy voice. "I don't like the mountains. I always feel like they was goin' to fall on me an' smother me. An' you get to the top of 'em where you think you can breathe an' there's ranges an' ranges beyond. I want places where they ain't nothin' to shut you in." rebelliously; "where you can feel free."

Frances gazed at her with puzzled eyes; but the Pearl's wistful, resentful glance was far beyond her. "Perhaps the rare air doesn't agree with you," suggested the Missionary.

"Oh, I'm well enough. I'm always well. I guess maybe I'm pinin' for a little excitement," she smiled her crooked, fascinating smile at Herries.

"Then you need look no further." His cold blue eyes held the Pearl's veiled gaze for a moment, and then it wandered to the hills she loathed. He leaned against the paling fence watching her, a figure of distinction even in his clean, shrunken, patched clothes and heavy boots. Over his flannel shirt flowed his white beard, and his strong profile was outlined against the gold light of the morning—a profile hawk-like, cruel and fine, with the long droop of the lids at the corners over the keen eyes, the sharp aquiline curve of the nose, the bitter, ironic lines of the mouth.

"Excitement!" he exclaimed. "You might travel the world over and you wouldn't find as much excitement in the whole journey as you can get any day in Zenith. Why, Mrs. O'Brien, this camp fairly tingles with excitement. There is the true neighbourly spirit here. They know not only what is going on in your house, but in your soul." He laughed his single, harsh croak. "Here's the raspberry social coming on. It may seem only a dance and a supper to you; but to us that have got any sporting blood in us, it's the last of a match game, where Myrtle Swanstrom and Mrs. Evans are to play off their finals. Out in the world, beyond those blue mountains, they have their whist and chess tournaments and play for some tuppenny stake or other; but in Zenith the stakes are hearts and lives. If it ain't exciting watching that kind of a game, what is? And it will be exciting all right. Frank McGuire has stated publicly that he'll have his answer that night."

"I didn't think of it so until you put me wise," the Pearl smiled cynically and understandingly. "I been used to seein' the game played that way myself."

The conversation seemed to Frances to have, in some way, slipped beyond her. She looked from Mrs. O'Brien to Herries with a slightly bewildered expression, and the Black Pearl, seeing it, with the faintest of shrugs and the smallest of expressive glances, the mere flutter of an eyelid toward Herries, changed the subject.

"How are you getting along without Angel, Mr. Herries?"

"I'm too busy looking after her infernal pets to miss her much. Here's where her damnable coon-cat, appropriately called Lambie, scratched me yesterday." He held up a torn finger. "And if I hadn't had on my high boots 'White Puppy,' as vicious a bull as ever barked, would have taken a piece out of my leg this morning. Her parrot and her squirrels do their best to nip me, too. Her last words were: 'Be tareful how you handle 'em, Herries, 'ay's full of ginger.'" The old man's face shone with pride. "She said she was going to bring a monkey back with her, and she will, too, if she stays in the same mind. It wouldn't surprise me if she brought a lion-cub, and she'd tame it, mind you; she'd tame it."

"Ain't she the queer one, though?" commented the Pearl. "She certainly" She broke off suddenly and peered up the road. "Why, here come Ethel and Mr. Campbell. Ethel, she's a-tryin' to save my soul, now that Mis' Garvin's passed beyond her experiments." She laughed mockingly, and Frances failed to repress a slight start. Mrs. O'Brien fortunately laughed rarely, but when she did, it was apt to jar on the nerves of her hearers, provided they were at all sensitive. It was low laughter, but coarse and curiously unmodulated.

Down the road, a faint cloud of dust rising about them, came the Salvation Army girl and old Andrew Campbell; Ethel, slim and swaying in her straight blue gown, her bonnet swung from her arm by the strings, and the sun turning the pale gold of her hair to shining silver strands.

As for Mr. Campbell, who stepped out firmly by her side, holding a staff taller than himself, he seemed to have undergone some vital and transforming change. He wore his Sunday suit of shiny, black broadcloth, and over his gleaming white shirt flowed a black silk necktie, this last a most unaccustomed concession to the conventionalities. The tangled mass of hair which usually hung about his head and face in wild disorder was combed and brushed into a semblance of beard and whisker. The look of blank dreaming had passed from his eyes, and, as Frances immediately noted, they wore, for the first time, according to her observation, an expression of limpid tranquillity.

"We're a-goin' to Mount Tabor," called out Ethel to the little group at the gate before she reached them, breathless with the importance of her tidings. "Mr. Campbell's goin' to address a meetin' this afternoon, an' maybe to-night. Yes, he is," as if meeting doubt of her statement. "They've been a-wantin' him for a good long time, but though I been a-coaxin' him day in an' day out, I couldn't get him to say he'd go."

"How could I when my lips were sealed?" asked Campbell. "There was naught to say."

"But it's all right now," returned Ethel, in quick and happy assurance. "The Word came to you in the night. Goodness!" turning to the others, "I don't want to live through another such week as this last one. Me just wild for him to accept this invitation and the folks over there to Mount Tabor wonderin' why we was actin' so queer an' kind of holdin' off: an' I couldn't tell 'em, 'cause they'd never understand in a thousand years."

"Then the Word came, the swift, dividing sword of the Word," Campbell's sonorous voice pealed out like a chant of exultation. The strange change that this coming of the Word, as he called it, always brought, was now especially manifest in him. He was a new creature, erect, alert, informed with initiative and decision.

He spoke with such triumphant assurance, such poignant conviction, that for a brief moment, to Frances at least, the tongues of fire seemed almost to glow in his eyes and to flicker about his head. There was victory in his glance, and the mystic and dreamer in the Missionary saw in one quickly obscure moment of belief this half-mad old man as one of earth's conquerors.

At his first words Ethel had lifted her hand, as if to still the very breeze that swept over the mountains, swayed the garish flowers of the Black Pearl's garden, stirred the grasses by the wayside, and then dropped with a falling sigh into the road itself to send up thin spirals and faint clouds of dust; and now, with her hand so upheld, she stood gazing at him with the ecstatic eyes of the disciple.

Frances, too, leaned forward, the hunger for righteousness on her face. She had forgotten her ivory gates and her splendid worlds, with their fair courts and delicate pleasances. There was something beyond these, and Campbell had spoken of it. He had found it. Her arms had fallen by her side, her dark, earnest gaze hung on the old man as if awaiting a revelation.

The moment of silence was so full of emotion that even in the clear morning sunlight, beside the Black Pearl's gaudy flowers, there was not one of the little group who did not feel in the light wind which lifted their hair and brushed their cheeks the intangible, floating wings of awe and wonder.

"But, Ethel," Campbell gripped her by the arm and planted his tall staff firmly on the ground, "we must be about our business, our Father's business." The ineffable tenderness of his words expressed itself fitly through the solemn music of his voice. The girl and himself took a step forward, and then he paused and looked back; a shadow passed over his face and he sighed. "A message to these," laying a detaining hand upon Ethel's arm. "When the Word comes, I see far into the unseen, and this world is a dim, grey shadow—a mist that passes." He peered into Frances's face. "Roses! Nay, a crown. The thistles sting and prickle; but they burst into queen's purple." He sighed again, and dejection fell over him. Then he turned his eyes upon the Black Pearl, holding her with his clear, intense gaze. "Repent ye!" he cried, with a shudder. "Repent ye! Now, now, lest ye be purified as by fire. Lest ye? Ye will. Your heart, which is as dead as Sodom and Gomorrah, will be swept by fire. Water cannot cleanse it. I have given you the Word from beyond the veil. Come, Ethel."

"Yes, Mr. Campbell." It was almost as if she had murmured "Raboni."

Without a word the three at the gate watched the pair, the little old man and the tall young girl trudging on through the shimmering, golden flood of the morning.

"My Lord!" said the Pearl at last. "My Lord! are they both crazy, or is it something else?"

"I was taught many stern doctrines in my youth," Herries laughed shortly, "and all I have retained is a belief in original sin." He showed his long teeth. "But I've got something in my blood—I'm a Scotchman, and what Campbell calls his mysteries are to many of us the realities. We sense things the world refuses to accept; but," harking back to an old cry, "crazy or not, the old man saved Ethel."

"Oh, Ethel!" cried Mrs. O'Brien contemptuously. "She's just one that opens her mouth and swallows everything you give her. But, my Lord!" in a burst of passionate impatience, "who wouldn't be half cracked if they could get a look on their faces like they had! Oh, if you could only feel dead sure of things like they do, what's the difference whether you're believin' lies or truth—if you could only believe 'em? Why, Missioner," to Frances, "the Padre down in the desert, he was a good, kind old soul, an' he used to hand me out a line of talk about repentin' an' believin' an' all that, an' I tried to, honest, I did; but 'twas no good—all lies. Yet," with a sort of wild wistfulness, "I often think if a person could just be free—really free"

"Free!" cried Herries scornfully. "Who's free? We're all slaves of other people or ourselves; and if we ever do succeed in getting our heads out of one noose, we run and stick 'em into another. Isn't it so, Missioner?"

But Frances, as if acting upon a sudden impulse, had started forward that she might overtake Ethel and Campbell, and then had paused, irresolutely. Herries and the Black Pearl were forgotten, even the books on Garvin's shelves; for the spirit of her, the soul of the dreamer and mystic, stirred and yearned.