CHAPTER XI.

It was noon when I awoke from the deep stupor rather than sleep into which I had plunged. How swiftly, when one is waked out of sleep, comes back the engrossing joy or grief which lay upon his heart when sleep stole it away! But at this awakening I was conscious only of a strange, dull sense of grief. I was for some time too much dazed to analyze my sensations or to fully realize what had occurred in the past few days, and on attempting to rise I found that I was stiff and sore, as after unusual exertion.

The copy of the _Bitter Cry_ which I had left in my room the day before lay on the floor. It served to recall to me the reality of the strange circumstances into which I had fallen. I remember that a humorous account of the Button Manufacturers’ plea before the Woman’s Executive Committee to allow mankind to continue the use of buttons, first caught my attention, and that afterward I read the following:

“LOVE WORKETH NO ILL TO HIS NEIGHBOUR.”

It was with more than his usual unction that the Rev. Jonathan Holworthy announced his text one bright Sunday May morning, to the distinctly rural congregation of Middlebrook.

Smoothing out with one soft, plump hand the pages of the large Bible which lay on the pulpit cushion in front of him, he raised the other impressively, and shot a comprehensive and penetrating glance toward his humble and unpretending auditors. This glance, proceeding from under a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and passing over the gold-rimmed spectacles set low on his nose, was intended as a kind of preliminary shot to awaken in the congregation any who were sleepily disposed, and to draw the attention of each one of his parishioners to the unusually “great effort” which he was about to make. And it must be confessed that this impressive manner and sharp glance had the effect of uncomfortably arousing several rather torpid individuals who had settled themselves comfortably into their pews, and on whom the ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had usually the effect of the droning of a bumble bee in August.

“Wonder if we’re going to have another ‘Great Awakenin’’ such as I remember forty years ago,” said Deacon Weatherby to himself. “The minister ’pears to have something powerful on his mind.”

And Deacon Weatherby, like several others in the congregation, shook off the sleepy fit which usually came on with great regularity as soon as he had settled himself in his pew. He now sat bolt upright, with an air of alertness that he did not manifest even in the numerous keen horse trades in which he participated, and in which he was always credited with coming off “first best.”

The Rev. Jonathan Holworthy, who had stood in silence with his hand on the page of the open Bible, critically surveying the assembled farmers and village folks of Middlebrook, appeared to be well satisfied with the effect of his unusual impressiveness. He therefore proceeded to deliberately announce his text, repeating it twice, slowly, as if each word were heavy, and he had to lift it with an effort: “Love-worketh-no-ill-to-his-neighbour--Love-worketh-no-ill-to-his- neighbour.”

Having thus delivered his text with much solemnity, and having apparently divided it in his mind under several heads, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy first addressed himself to the subject of Love. But Love cannot be said to have been the particular game which he was hunting in the great oratorical effort which he had planned for himself that morning. Beyond a few general platitudes interspersed with Scriptural quotations, he did not, therefore, expatiate upon this branch of his discourse. It was only when he came to consider the subject of “his neighbour” that he may be said to have really struck the trail, and to have warmed up in the pursuit of his argument. “Who is my neighbour?” he suddenly demanded, with so much imperative force, that a half-witted young man, who sat in the front row, promptly replied, “Ike Hunniwell, the infidel.”

This reply to the minister’s inquiry produced a half-frightened smile on the faces of some of the congregation. It must, however, be admitted, that in general to the simple-minded farmers of Middlebrook, unaccustomed as they were to much allegory or metaphor, their “neighbours” were simply the plain, hard-featured, but kindly, men and women who lived on the farms adjoining their own, and the but little more stylish men and women whose humble homes lined the streets of Middlebrook.

But the Rev. Mr. Holworthy was looking for a very different neighbour from any of these, and he therefore only frowned at the reply of half-witted Ira Aliter.

And in pursuit of this anomalous, hypothetical neighbour, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy may then be said to have proceeded to compass sea and land. He sought him in the far-off jungles of India, on the trackless wastes of Africa, among the nomadic hordes of Tartary, and in the rigorous confines of Siberia. No land known to be inhabited by the human race was too distant or too inaccessible for the broad sweep of his resistless benevolence to reach. Indeed, if man had been amphibious, there is but little doubt that he would have dragged the sea in the ardour of his all-pervading search for this neighbour to whom “love” was to “work no ill.” But as man did not occupy the depths of the sea, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy contented himself with traversing, in his astonishing mental flight, all the most distant and uncivilized countries known to the geographer.

And in all these far-away places, some of which the bewildered farmers of Middlebrook had never heard of before, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had no difficulty in triumphantly finding “his neighbour”; and having thus found “his neighbour” at the uttermost ends of the earth, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy unceremoniously haled him as it were, taking him by the nape of the neck, metaphorically speaking, and holding him up for the dumbfounded farmers of Middlebrook to gaze upon.

Having thus shown to the undiscriminating inhabitants of Middlebrook who their real “neighbours” were, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy proceeded to invest these “neighbours” with the garments made by the local branch of the Missionary Society, putting these garments on to these imaginary “neighbours” somewhat as a constable would clap handcuffs on to a miserable wretch who had long eluded justice. Thus, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy, to his own satisfaction, showed to his congregation that through the efforts of their local branch of the Missionary Society they were working no ill but positive good to their “neighbours” in the antipodes. He then indulged in much self-gratulatory and flowery complacence, assuring his congregation that they were sublimely proving the Apostle Paul’s great sentence that “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.”

In the minister’s pew, a little way to the left of the front of the pulpit, sat a pale and faded ghost of a woman. She sat in the middle of the pew, and on her right, looking very uneasy in tight jackets and broad white collars, sat five stout boys. On her left, in stiffly starched sun-bonnets and white aprons, were four print and meek-faced girls. Mrs. Holworthy was looking more than commonly pale and fragile on this particular May morning. The delicate blue veins in her white throat and in her slender wrists showed plainly. Two or three times that morning Mr. Holworthy had sent peremptory word out from his study that the children must be kept more quiet, as he was putting the finishing touches on his great sermon, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.” Two or three times that morning, while undergoing the fatigues of preparing the children for church, Mrs. Holworthy had stopped with a sudden fainting and fluttering at her heart. And now, while she turned her white, patient face toward the pulpit, strange fancies began to crowd her mind, interrupted only when Mr. Holworthy, in rounding off one of his turgid periods, brought out with extra force the beautiful words of St. Paul, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.”

In Mrs. Holworthy’s fancy, she seemed to see herself as she was at eighteen, a joyous care-free girl, with many tastes for art and books, and high companionships and charity, and great and noble deeds. Life, then, had stretched before her like a flower-strewn pathway, not devoid of suffering and sacrifice, to be sure, but the suffering and the sacrifice were to have had the sweetness and recompense of being her chosen own, freely accepted and joyfully submitted to with the sublime consciousness of her own soul’s development thereby.

Then Mrs. Holworthy remembered with a sudden shudder in the retrospect, of her meeting with Mr. Holworthy. Did she love the heavy, phlegmatic young minister who visited at her father’s house so long ago? No, she could see, oh, so clearly now, that she did not, that she had never known love, that she was too young and inexperienced to divine the depths of meaning in that word. She saw she had been somewhat flattered by the attentions of the young minister, that she had been drawn into marriage with him by the assiduous teaching that marriage was woman’s sole sphere, and that marriage with a clergyman was eminently pure and respectable. As she looked back over her married life, she saw that at its very threshold she had been compelled to lay aside all her tastes for art, her aspirations for doing something good and noble in her own way, even her simple enjoyment of her own poor little life, all had been ruthlessly sacrificed. From the day that her first child was born, she had never known an unbroken night’s rest, she had scarcely looked into a book, she had lost the use of her pen and pencil, the cares of breeding had absorbed her whole life, and what had she to show for them? Her children, to be sure; but even these could never compensate her for her ruthless dispossession of all the golden opportunities and innocent cravings of her own nature.

As Mrs. Holworthy mused thus over her mutilated past, the beautiful text of Mr. Holworthy’s sermon began to mingle with her thoughts, and to arouse strange questionings in her mind. Could these heathen “neighbours,” whom Mr. Holworthy was seeking so strenuously in the far-off Isles of the Sea, have a more unmitigated slavery than hers had been? However unenlightened they might be, were they not quite as free and happy as she, bound as she had been to bear children for this great man, whether she wanted to or not, whether she was able to or not? Surely, if any one deserved pity and needed succour, it was one whose lot had been like hers. Her head began to feel strangely confused. She repeated Mr. Holworthy’s text to herself, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.” Beautiful words! What could they mean? It was plain that something had worked ill to her unreconciled life, and therefore it could not be love. No, it was a blinding mistake, a fearful travesty, a hideous misnomer to call it love. “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” she repeated till her brain was dizzy.

Just as the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had completed his great effort and driven the last nail home, as it were, by reciting for the last time the noble words of St. Paul which had formed the theme of his discourse, there was a sudden stir in the congregation. Mrs. Holworthy had fallen forward in her seat, and her children were peering at her face with the unsuspecting curiosity of those who have experienced neither care nor sorrow. When the kind-hearted women who came to her relief had laid her on the cushioned seat, her lips moved as if she were repeating something, but the only word they could catch was “Love.” She had gone to a place where love truly “worketh no ill to his neighbour.”

“This is indeed a mysterious dispensation of Providence,” said the Rev. Mr. Holworthy to his awe-stricken parishioners.

But the village doctor, who was a man of few words, confided to his wife that evening that he thought that Mrs. Holworthy had died of a “dispensation of children.”

I had just finished reading this article in the _Bitter Cry_, when there was a knock at my door, and Mr. Lister entered.

“Come Mr. Carford,” he said, “it is past two o’clock and as the women’s parade will not pass through this street, we must take our luncheon at once and go down to the public square.”

I sprang up. “Let us go,” I said. “I would not miss such a spectacle for worlds. The sun never looked down on its like before, and it probably never will again.”

And taking a hasty luncheon, we left the house.

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