Agnes Maule Machar

“ Nora sang the old, tender, Scotch love-song with a simple pathos that suited it as well as did her fine contralto. Roland, who like most emotional people, was exceedingly sensitive to the power of music, felt it float through his whole being—soothing the nervous system which had been on the strain all day, and taking him, for a moment, into that world of romance among whose bowery walks it is so pleasant, for even the most practical-minded, occasionally to wander. ”

“ They must think not only of rights, but of duty, of helping others as well as themselves. With thrift, steadiness, mutual confidence and the franchise, the workingmen of America could be masters of the position. If they would refuse to sell their votes to partisan politicians, their intelligence to liquor-sellers, their children to those who would set them to premature drudgery;—if they would be true to the interests of coöperative labor generally, true to the grand ideal of human brotherhood and faith in its realization, they need despair of nothing they could reasonably desire. ”

“ Chillingworth did not often indulge in retrospection. When one gives one's self up to its influence, one cannot select at will. Pleasant recollections are interwoven with painful ones, which have a way of pouncing unawares on the unwary dreamer. And men whose lives are filled to overflowing with present engrossing interests, do not usually give much play to the power of painful memories. Still, whatever it might be that had stirred the vision, he was haunted to-night by a picture that stood, as real as the engravings opposite him, before that "inward eye" which is not always ”

“ The audience was not reflective enough to take in the satire. A little farther on, Roland introduced the lean, gaunt, wretched boy and girl who appear at the edge of the robe of the Spirit of Christmas Presents, "yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish, but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful Youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of Age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked and jibed out menacing. ”

“ What can man do more?"
"I'm afraid most of us do a great deal less!" said Mr. Alden. "But I wish people would only read their Bibles with the intelligent common-sense with which they read other books;—history, for example. We Americans are always talking of our Declaration of Independence, just as Englishmen do of their Magna Charta. It affects the position, the freedom of every man, woman and child in this great country. We talk of George Washington as the deliverer of his country, of his heroism as affecting the destinies of every one in it, even the infant in arms! ”

“ Alden's sort. You would like that, dear, I know." Nora did not speak, but the expression of her glad eyes was enough.
"And how are Kitty and Mr. Waldberg?" asked Nora, by and by, with natural fellow-feeling.
"Oh, as happy as turtle-doves!" said Roland. For lovers can always see something amusing in the devotion of another pair of lovers, serious as is their own. "Waldberg is already looking out for the cottage of the future. He has steadied down, and forsworn speculation forever. Mr. Dunlop left him a legacy, too."
"And what of Harold Pomeroy? Has he found consolation yet?" ”

“ I am told he's got all sorts and conditions of people in it, Unitarians, Socialists, Knights of Labor, Agnostics!"
"I don't think-it's quite so bad as that!" Nora exclaimed, in amaze.
"Well, I'm told that this agitator, this Roland Graeme, actually belongs to it, and I believe he's a rank agnostic, if not an atheist."
"Oh, I am sure he can't be an atheist!" said Nora.
"An agnostic then, at any rate! Archer told me so. After all, there isn't much to choose between them. The atheist will tell you there's no God—the agnostic, that he doesn't know of one. Practically, there's no difference." ”

“ Yet, had she only known it, her grace and gentleness and culture had had their effect on this girl, under all her insouciance; had set her vaguely longing for something that as yet she only dimly felt, something better and nobler than anything she yet knew. We are not, as a rule, ready to show outwardly when our self-satisfaction has been upset, and more than half of the elevating influences of life arise out of mere contact of the higher with the lower; far more out of what we are, than out of what we say. ”

“ By and by, in spite of Nora's best efforts, the conversation flagged perceptibly. Mr. Chillingworth himself seemed indisposed to talk much. After a short pause he began, however, in a tone that was low, and more tenderly modulated than usual.
"It is curious how this spring weather seems to wake up all sorts of associations and longings in us; just as it wakes the stirring life in the flowers! Years ago, a blight—the result of a great trouble—seemed to come over my life. But it has gradually worn off, and of late I have been cherishing a hope that my life might yet blossom anew." ”

“ Yes, my dear Miss Blanchard, this fleeting life of ours has many mysteries about it, sad and strange enough, but we should only be making ourselves perpetually miserable, if we were always looking at them and trying to solve them. And then you must remember that things often look worse, when we see them from the outside. Human nature has a wonderful way of adapting itself to circumstances, and this life is only a fleeting one, you know. ”

“ Nora looked "serious," as Kitty called it. She had been afraid about Kitty of late, and still more afraid for young Waldberg. "Well, be sure you know your own mind, and stick to it," she said, gravely. "Remember, Kitty dear, it really isn't worth while to be a Lady Clara Vere de Vere, even if you could; and flirting is a dangerous amusement!"
"Never fear," laughed Kitty, "I'm not going to hurt anybody, that I know of. But do look at Mr. Wharton and Miss Harley—at it still! ”

“ Roland Graeme was, by birth, a Canadian. His father had been a Scottish clergyman who had emigrated to Canada in early life; a man of poetical and dreamy temperament, of large and loving nature, which yet, by force of education and habit, had been somehow forced into the compress of an intricate and somewhat narrow creed; or at least had been led, like many others, by an intense veneration for ancient authority, to submit without chafing even to some articles against which his heart and moral intelligence would have strongly protested had he allowed them any voice in the matter. ”

“ Is it not strange that, at the time when the amount of surplus production is the subject of national lamentation, the people who produce by their labor the very things which they need for their own use and comfort, are the ones that are often destitute of them, while a few capitalists who do little or nothing toward the production or distribution, are supplied with all the comforts and luxuries of life, at half or less than half their usual price? ”

“ If life is to be measured by happiness, the days that followed should have been reckoned by years for the poor young woman, so long defrauded of the rightful love of her life. To Mr. Chillingworth, they were days of strangely mingled happiness and pain. As, little by little, he learned most of her story, in the long, quiet days when husband and wife were left alone together, he felt, with deep humiliation, how great a wrong his impatient harshness bad done to her, and to himself. ”

“ The clergyman looked at him keenly, but with a genial smile. "Certainly," he said; "I believe in both, but I believe also in something else, that is not either; and in this lies the difference between my philosophy and that of the people who are so bent on making automata of us all. They always seem to me to give, in their own persons, a most apt illustration of the lines,
"'Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!'"
"Yes," replied Roland, "I believe we were meant to aspire. 'Excelsior' seems the motto of the universe." ”

“ Roland spoke with all the warmth of his intensely altruistic nature, and his voice thrilled with irrepressible feeling. Nora felt her own pulse quicken with the contagion of his enthusiasm. Mr. Alden, who overheard the last words, turned back to add:—
"Yes, Graeme, I believe it will be all that; if only you can, at the same time, raise this great mass of toiling humanity in the moral and spiritual scale, as well as in the material and intellectual one. ”

“ Roland ought, in the exercise of a judicious discretion, to have stopped here; but he was a young man with a young man's heat of impulse, and he let himself be carried on into the words that follow, giving them with a stirring emphasis that vibrated through every chord in Nora's sensitive heart.
"'Man,' said the ghost, 'if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant till you have discovered what that surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? ”

“ The long procession having been finally completed, Nora was called to come and admire.
"See, Auntie, it isn't a Noah's Ark percession," said Eddie, "it's a 'nagery percession. And those ar'n't Noah and his sons either. They're Barnum and the keepers."
"Oh, young America!" said Nora, laughing, in a semi-soliloquy. "You must remodel everything, even Noah's Ark."
"Well, Noah's Ark was a sort of 'nagery," replied Eddie, answering the tone rather than the words, "and I guess Noah was about as clever as Mr. Barnum." ”

“ But Grace, she was sure, would never be the "shallow-hearted cousin Amy" in any event. Was she too much of a child, still, to be touched by this unspoken, though evident admiration on the part of a young man so attractive as Roland Graeme? Nora could not, at any rate, detect, in the frank ingenuous face, any trace of consciousness. And the father and mother seemed equally unconscious; which was scarcely to be wondered at, for they regarded Grace, at sixteen, as only a child still. Fathers and mothers are often the last to see that the nestlings are fledged. ”

“ As she lay there on her soft couch in the daintily-appointed room, with the pretty things about her with which girls like to surround themselves, and the light softly shaded to make an artificial twilight, visions rose before her of droning wheels and flashing shuttles, of long arrays of frames, such as she had seen in the factory some time before; and the thought of the girls with feelings and nerves like her own, tending, through so many weary hours, these senseless and relentless machines, oppressed her quick sensibilities like a nightmare. ”

“ From Lizzie Mason, who had sat with her for an hour or two of her vigil, Nora had heard, while the patient lay unconscious in a heavy slumber, some details about her past life which had gone to her heart, and had made her realize, with a sickening sensation, something of that struggle for life which a poor friendless woman, cast adrift in a busy world, must often endure. ”

“ Roland Graeme, taking his solitary way homeward, noticed the same thing with much the same feeling. And yet, he thought, in the dreamy poetic vein into which he often relapsed, when not spurred on by his dominant philanthropic impulse, if Kitty had only been some simple rustic Phyllis, and Hermann a corresponding Corydon, what a charming bright pair of Arcadian lovers they would have made to figure in a pretty poetic idyl. What a pity, he thought, that we cannot always live in Arcadia! ”

“ She could never fill a hall, but Chillingworth, entre nous, seems to admire her immensely."
"I have seen her," said Roland, carelessly. "She has a fine face, whatever her voice may be." And the Madonna-like vision rose again before him.
"Yes, she has a noble air, 'presence,' as you say, but she can't compare with Miss Farrell for looks. She is an exquisite creature, herrlich schöne she looked that evening."
"Take care of yourself, Waldberg," said Roland, looking up with a smile, at his animated face. "She is not fair for you." ”

“ Chillingworth had lived so completely in a world of his own, so apart from the ordinary human life about him, that he himself did not know the needs of his own people, the points at which their selfishness was strongest, the absolute blank that lay between what they professed to believe and its natural development in the practice of daily life,—a gap, that, as we have seen, unhappily existed in his own life. ”

“ Roland, knowing something of the taste of his hearers, passed lightly and rapidly over the sadder scenes of the last part of the story, touching them a little, however, by the fate of "Tiny Tim," in whom he centred the interest of the story. Then, after a glance at the gloomy churchyard, where the remorseful miser beholds his own grave, he hastened to the cheerful reality of Christmas Present, of the delight of Scrooge as he sees himself once more possessed of the possibilities of life, and of the heart to generously use them. ”

“ And then, with a fastidious sense of honor, she checked a thought that seemed like ungenerous treachery to her hospitable entertainers. Only,—if poor Lizzie Mason could have had a share of the superfluous luxury, how good it would have been for her!
Mr. Chillingworth, too, both puzzled and disappointed her. His eloquent altruistic appeals—his exaltation of the high Christian ideal—so stirred her enthusiastic nature that she felt herself irresistibly drawn toward the man who could so well express the idealism of Christianity. ”

“ What a noble man that father of yours must have been! I should like to know more of him. But come, Miss Blanchard, I see you are trying to make up your mind whether you're on Miss Harley's side or mine, and I don't want you to give judgment against me! Suppose you give us a little music, you and Miss Farrell. Can't we have a few airs from the Messiah, now? It would be such a good finish to the week's work—just what I need to put me in tune for to-morrow's duty!"
Nora colored a little at his thought-reading, but at once rose to comply with the request, which Miss Harley warmly endorsed. ”

“ Nevertheless, Nora scanned the benches eagerly, till she espied Lizzie and Nellie and Jim, and then the gathering was interesting to her, at least. As for Roland, wherever men and women with human hearts were gathered, there was interest for him, and to Mr. Alden each meeting here was part of an intensely interesting experiment, freighted, in his mind, with wider, more weighty issues than were present to the minds of any one else present—even of his own Grace, who, with her instinctive divination, could, in her simple way, sympathize with him more fully than any one else there. ”

“ Chillingworth tried to speak to her of the hope that it is the minister's privilege to set before dying eyes, but his attempts seemed to himself weak and impotent. He had lived so long in a world of ideals and abstractions, that he had, in a great measure, lost the realizing sense of the simple gospel truths, so familiar to him from infancy. Reality seemed to have gone out of the things he had so long believed, and he sometimes wondered whether he had believed at all—whether he were not himself drifting into the position of an agnostic. ”

“ And she turned toward them, as they passed, a pretty, pert face, beneath a mass of elaborately frizzed hair, and a very tawdry hat.
"Those poor girls!" Miss Blanchard remarked, as soon as they were out of hearing. "How little real interest or pleasure there must be in their lives! How it makes one wish that we, who have so many pleasant things in ours, could do something to brighten theirs!"
"Yes, indeed," replied Roland. "I've often thought about that, and people do try more than they did—in that way. ”

“ Two children completed the party; a tiny girl in a mass of white embroidery, playing with a pet terrier on the hearth-rug, and a small boy with an aureole of reddish curls, who sat on Miss Blanchard's knee, thoughtfully gazing into the fire.
"Oh!" exclaimed the fair young lady, as she handed her empty cup to the young man who was waiting for it. "Did you hear, Nora, about my cousin, Janie Spencer?"
"What about her, Kitty? Is she engaged, too?"
"Oh, dear no! nothing, so common! Something you'll say is a great deal better! ”