Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes, yes!” assented Boynton restively.

  The office brothers and sisters had listened to Elihu with evident abeyance; only Sister Frances, by looks and tones, expressed herself unchanged to Boynton. As the time drew on toward evening, and Egeria seemed to need constant watchfulness, she offered to take his place at the infirmary, and to let him know if he was needed at any time during the meeting. This made it easy for him to go, and Sister Frances established herself in attendance upon the sick girl. She was not afterwards dislodged from her place in the infirmary. There were nurses whose duty it was to care for the sick, but Frances clung to her patient, not in defiance, but in a soft, elastic tenderness which served her as well.

  Dr. Boynton went to the family meeting, and remained profoundly attentive to the services with which the speaking was preceded. He saw the sisters seated on one side of the large meeting-room, and the brothers on the other, with broad napkins half unfolded across their knees, on which they softly beat time, with rising and falling palms, as they sang. The sisters, young and old, all looked of the same age, with their throats strictly hid by the collars that came to their chins, and their close-cropped hair covered by stiff wire-framed caps of white gauze; there was greater visible disparity among the brothers, but their heads were mostly gray, though a few were still dark with youth or middle life; on either side there was a bench full of sedate children.

  When the singing was ended, the minister read a chapter of the Bible, and one of the elders prayed. Then a sister began a hymn, in which all the family joined. At its close, a young girl rose and described a vision which she had seen the night before in a dream. When she sat down, the elders and eldresses came out into the vacant space between the rows of men and women, and, forming themselves into an ellipse, waved their hands up and down with a slow, rhythmic motion, and rocked back and forth on their feet. Then the others, who had risen with them, followed in a line round this group, with a quick, springing tread, and a like motion of the hands and arms, while they sang together the thrilling march which the others had struck up. They halted at the end of the hymn, and let their arms sink slowly to their sides; a number of them took the places of those in the midst, and the circling dance was resumed, ceasing, and then beginning again, till all had taken part in both centre and periphery; the lamps quivering on the walls, and the elastic floor, laid like that of a ball-room, responding to the tread of the dancers. When they went back to their seats, one woman remained standing, and began to prophesy in tongues.

  A solemn silence followed upon her ceasing, and then Brother Elihu rose, and said briefly that a friend from the world outside had a statement to make to the family, in the belief that he had arrived at central truths relating to spiritualism. He claimed to have been operating in a certain direction, with results as striking as they were unexpected. Elihu reminded them that as Shakers they had not been able to maintain a cordial sympathy with spiritualists in the world outside, who had too often abused to love of gain and the gratification of their pride and vanity the principle of spiritual communion originally revealed to Shakers. Yet they could not in reason refuse to hear the statement of this friend, who had, as it were, been providentially cast in their way, and who was apparently not moved by considerations of personal glory and profit, but who, from all he said, had the wish to remand the science into the keeping of Shakers, and to pursue his own investigations under their auspices. Elihu spoke with neatness and point; he added some cautionary phrases against too hasty judgment of the facts about to be offered them, and warned them to beware of self-deception and the illusions arising from love of the marvelous, whether in their own hearts or the hearts of others.

  Boynton could scarcely wait for him to have done. “I thank the brother,” he said, in rising, “for admonishing us to beware of self-deception; it is an evil which in an inquiry like this would prove fatal, — which does prove fatal wherever it mingles with religious impulse; it poisons, it palsies, religious impulse. I have always guarded against it with anxious care, and, though sometimes abused by the deceit of others, I have at least no cause to accuse myself of want of vigilance concerning my own impressions. I regarded with skeptical scrutiny the first developments of spiritualism. I had been bred in the strictest sect of the Calvinists, from which I had revolted to the opposite extreme of infidelity; I was a materialist, believing in nothing that I could not see, hear, touch, or taste. I rejected the notion of a Supreme Being; I derided the hypothesis of immortality. The interest which I had taken in mesmerism only intensified my contempt for the whole order of miracles, in all ages. I saw the effect of mind upon mind, of mind upon matter; but I saw that it was always the effect of earthly intellect upon earthly substance. I accounted even for the wonders performed by Christ and the Apostles by mesmerism, acting now upon the subjects of their cures and resuscitations, and now upon the imaginations of the spectators.

  “When the new phenomena were forced upon my attention by their prevalence in so many widely separated places, under so many widely differing conditions, I began to study them as the effect of mind upon inanimate matter. I did not suffer myself to suppose a spiritual origin for these phenomena, for I would not suppose spirits. I imported into this fresh field of research the strict and hard methods with which I had wrought in the old.

  “My wife died during the infancy of the daughter who is here with me now, the involuntary guest of your hospitality, and her death was attended by occurrences of a nature so intangible, so mysterious, so sacred, that I do not know how to shape them in words, but regarding which I may safely appeal to your own spiritual experience. In the moment of her passing I was aware of something, as of an incorporeal presence, a disembodied life, and in that moment I believed! I accepted the heritage which she had bequeathed me with her breath, and I dedicated the child to the study of truth under the new light I had received.

  “That child has been my mesmeric subject almost from her birth, and all my endeavors have latterly been to her development as a medium of communication with the other world. She was naturally a child of gay and sunny temperament, loving the sports of children, and fond of simple, earthly pleasures. She showed great aptness for study, — she liked books and school; and the ordinary observer would have pronounced her a hopeless subject for psychological experiment. But I argued that if spirit was truly immortal it was immutable, and that a nature like hers, warm, happy, and loving, would have the same attraction for persons in one world as in another. The event proved that I was not mistaken; from the first, disembodied spirits showed a remarkable affinity for hers, and the demonstrations, though inarticulate and indefinite, were of the most unusual order. They frightened and disturbed her, and she did all that she could to escape from them. At different times, indeed, she effectually rebelled against my influence; and she was abetted in these periods of revolt by those who, after myself, were nearest and dearest to her. But in the end my influence always triumphed, for she loved me with the tender affection which her mother seemed to impart to her with the gift of her own life. I never appealed to this affection in vain, and I have seen her change from a creature of robust, terrestrial tendencies to a being of moods almost as ethereal as those of the spirits with which it has been my struggle to associate her.

  “Her health has not always borne the strain well, and but for my own sustaining strength it must have given way completely. The conditions amidst which we lived were all unfavorable. I will not enter upon the long story of my own misfortunes. By the insidious operation of the prevailing bigotry, public confidence in me was undermined; I lost my practice; I was reduced to dependence upon her kindred, who were the bitterest of my antagonists, and who resisted by every means in their power my purpose of taking her away from them, and attempting her development in other circumstances. But I prevailed, as I always prevailed when I made a final appeal to her affection. We came away, and entered upon the career, distasteful to us both, of public exhibitors. At first we met with great success in the small places
which we visited, and I was induced to try our experiment in Boston. Here, too, we made a good impression; but almost at the outset, We encountered an influence, an enmity, embodied in a certain individual, against which we were almost powerless. To this antagonism was added the paralyzing effect of fraud on the part of a medium who assisted at our principal séance.

  “I saw, upon reflection, that we could not hope to succeed in the atmosphere of a mercenary, professional mediumism; and I determined to retire again to our village, and lay once more, however painfully and slowly, the foundations of our experiment. I dreamed of forming about me a community of kindred spirits, in which our work should be done unhindered by the selfish hope of gain, and I armed myself with patience for years of trial and discouragement.

  “Brother Elihu will tell you how chance brought us together in the depot at Boston, and again at Ayer Junction; and I will not detain you with the history of the seeming disasters which have ended in our presence among the only people who have conceived of spiritism as a science, and practiced it as a religion. The mistake of a train going southward for a train going northward made us houseless and penniless wanderers; the cruel rapacity of a ruffian crowned our sufferings with a triumph surpassing my wildest hopes.”

  Dr. Boynton entered upon a circumstantial account of the strange occurrences at the Elm Tavern, and painted every detail with a vividness which had its effect upon his hearers. At the close, one of the sisters struck into a rapturous hymn, in which the others joined. He remained standing while they sang, and when their voices died away he continued in a low and grave tone: —

  “What I wish now is simply to be received among you without prejudice, and to be allowed to carry out my plan with the powerful help of your sympathetic and intelligent sphere. I do not ask to be received out of charity: I am a physician, and I offer you my professional services at need; I have strong arms, and I am willing to work in your shops and your fields. But I feel myself here in presence of the right conditions, and I would make any sacrifice, short of the sacrifice of selfrespect, to continue here. I am intensely disappointed that neither my investigations nor my usefulness to you can begin at once. My daughter, as you know, lies sick in your infirmary, and my first, my whole duty is to her. As soon as she is well again, you shall have my labor, and the world shall have my truth.”

  He sat down. One of the elders rose, and, coming forward, said, “The thanks of the family are due to the friend for what he has spoken. The meeting is dismissed.”

  The brothers and sisters dispersed to their dwelling-houses, and Boynton walked alone to the infirmary. He found Sister Frances with his daughter, who was wakeful and in a high fever.

  XIII.

  HER father watched over Egeria in her sickness with the mechanical skillfulness and the mental abstraction which the office sisters had seen in his treatment of her case from the first. He was at her bedside night and day while the danger lasted; he prepared the medicines himself and administered them with his own hand, and he waited their effect from hour to hour, almost from moment to moment, with anxious scrutiny. At the same time a second and more inward self in him remained at immeasurable remoteness. “I never see such doctorin’ or such nursin’,” said Sister Frances, in her daily report at the office; “but it don’t seem, somehow, as if he did it for her. I should say — and perhaps I should say more ‘n I ought if I did say it— ‘t he wanted her to get well, but ‘t he didn’t want her to get well on her own account; well, not in the first place. And still he’s just as kind and good! Well, it’s perplexin’.”

  “I can’t see,” said Rebecca, carefully, “as we’ve got any call to judge him, as long as he does his duty by her.”

  “That’s just where it is, Rebecca,” answered Frances. “It does seem as if there was somethin’ better than duty in this world. I d’ know as there is, nor what it is; but it does seem as if there might be.”

  Boynton’s efforts were bent not only to Egeria’s escape from danger, but to her immunity from suffering, so far as he could avert it; and to this end he often used his mesmeric power with what appeared good effect. The rending headache yielded to the mystical passes made above her throbbing temples, or over her eyes that trembled with the hot pain; or perhaps it was only the touch of the physician’s wise fingers that soothed them, and brought her the deep, strange sleep. But after the crisis of the fever, and when the convalescence began, the influence, whatever it was, ceased to relieve. It fretted instead of strengthening the girl in her climb up toward health, as her father was quick to perceive. He desisted, and he did not talk with her of the schemes and hopes that preoccupied him. He scarcely talked of them at all, though now and then, when he met Elihu, it was clear that he had not relinquished them in the slightest measure. The Shaker wondered at the self-control with which he cast them into such complete abeyance, and could not forbear suggesting at one of their encounters, “Your daughter’s sickness is quite a little cross to your patience, Friend Boynton.”

  “Yes, yes,” returned the other, intensely; “but it is not the first time I have had to use patience. The end is worth waiting for, and, as Humphrey said when we first talked of it, the end can wait for us; the truth will keep. I am sure of the result. But nothing can be done till she is perfectly well again.”

  “Yee,” said Elihu; a the young woman’s welfare is more precious than any proof she could give us of the existence of spirits. We know that they exist already.”

  They did not speak of Boynton’s union with the family; that question shared the suspense in which the great problem, to the solution of which Shakerism had been only a means in his mind, was left. But he had taken his place in the community like one of them. There were reasons in the condition of the only suit of clothing which he brought from the world outside why he should continue to dress in the Shaker garb; but it is probable that he would have preferred to wear it, even if the skill of the family tailoress could have rehabilitated the wreck of his secular raiment; and he was faithful in his attendance at all the religious meetings, both those held in the family-house and those opened to the public, with the advancing spring, in the meeting-house. He did not take an active part in the worship. Once, when asked to speak, he said briefly that for the present he had nothing to add to his first statement; and during the marching and singing he sat quietly in a corner, opposite a sister on the women’s side, whose extreme stoutness had long excused her from dancing before the Lord. In the mean time he had treated several slight cases of sickness which occurred in the family; and he had drawn all the teeth in the head of a young sister much tormented with toothache, and long emulous of the immunity enjoyed by most of the other sisters through their full sets of artificial teeth. He had also, in his moments of disoccupation, and during his watches beside Egeria, made a profound study of the history and doctrine of Shakerism; and he grew into general liking with the family at large, whose knowledge of his devotion to his daughter did not search motive so jealously or fantastically as that of Sister Frances, and who thought him a marvel of vigilance and skill.

  April had passed, and May had worn away to its last weeks before the girl could sit up in an easy-chair, and with pillowed head look out on the landscape. Sometimes, after the favorable change in her fever began, she had asked, in the mellowing afternoons, to have her window opened to let in the rich, pungent odors of the burning refuse of the gardens, — the last year’s withered vines and stalks, which the boys had raked into large piles, and fired in the field below the infirmary. She could hear, from where she lay, the snap and crackle of the flames; and once, when Sister Frances returned after a moment in which she had left the sick girl alone, she found that Egeria had dragged herself across the bed to where she could see the fire, upon which she was gloating with rapture. Frances spoke to her; she replaced her pillow, and after a long look at the Shakeress she broke into tears. The watchers with her in these early days of her convalescence always found her awake at dawn, when the robins and orioles and sparrows were wea
ving that fabric of song which seems to rise everywhere from the earth to the low-hovering heaven.

  “It’s like the singin’ of spirits, ain’t it?” said one of the sisters who saw the transport with which she silently listened, her large eyes wide and her lips open.

  “No!” cried the girl, almost fiercely. “It’s like the singing of the birds at home.”

  “Seemed as if she hated the spirits, as you might say,” the Shakeress commented to the office sisters. It was the first time that any of them had heard Egeria mention her former home, for even in the fever her ravings had been of experiences in Boston unintelligible to them. But they had all noted the passion with which, when her recovery began, she turned to the natural world. She asked for the wild flowers, and day by day demanded if it were not yet time for the anemones, the columbines, the dog-tooth violets. If the spring lingered, or at times turned backward, nothing could rouse her from the dejection into which she fell, till the sun began to shine and the birds began to sing again. It was felt in the family to be foolish, or worse, but none of the Shakers could come home through field or wood without staying to pluck some token of the season’s advance for the sick girl, who was longing so restlessly to go out and find the summer for herself. Her bed was decked with boughs of wilding bloom; on the shelves and window-sills the sylvan and campestral flowers gave their delicate colors and faint fragrances in whatever prim jug or sober vase the community could spare from its service. Something, surely, must be wrong about all this ministering to a love that might be said to savor of earthly vanities, but the most anxious of the nunlike sisters could not determine upon the sin; and while they wondered in just what sort they should deal with the elusive evil, a visiting brother from another community arrived to pronounce it no evil, but an instinct, wholesome as the harmless things themselves. Upon this, one of them brought and laid at Egeria’s bedside a rug which she had worked with the pattern of a grape-vine, and which for five years she had kept fearfully hidden away in her closet, from compunction for its likeness to a graven image.