The Voice / by Margaret Deland; illustrated by W.H.D. Koerner.

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

  "Sometimes," she said.

  "I do not mean," he said, hesitatingly, "to speak uncharitably, but we all know that Episcopacy is the handmaid of Papistry."

  "Do we?" Philly asked, with grave eyes.

  "Yes," said Mr. Fenn. "But even if Dr. Lavendar's teachings are defective," -- Mary plucked at his sleeve, and sighed loudly; "(no, Mary!) -- even if his teachings are defective, he is a good man according to his lights; I am sure of that. Still, do you think it well to attend a place of worship when you cannot follow the pastor's teachings?"

  "I love him. And I don't listen to what he says," she excused herself.

  "But you should listen to what ministers say," the shocked young man protested -- "at least to ministers of the right faith. But you should not go to church because you love ministers."

  Philippa's face flamed. "I do not love -- most of them."

  Mary, leaning against the girl's knee, looked up anxiously into her face. "Do you love brother?" she said.

  They were a pretty pair, the child and the girl, sitting there on the porch with the sunshine sifting down through the lacy leaves of the two big locusts on either side of the door. Philippa wore a pink and green palm-leaf chintz; it had six ruffles around the skirt and was gathered very full about her slender waist; her lips were red, and her cheeks and even her neck were delicately flushed; her red-brown hair was blowing all about her temples; Mary had put an arm around her and was cuddling against her. Yes, even Mary's brother would have thought the two young things a pretty sight had there been nothing more serious to think of. But John Fenn's thoughts were so very serious that even Mary's question caused him no embarrassment; he merely said, stiffly, that he would like to see Miss Philippa alone. "You may wait here, Mary," he told his little sister, who frowned and sighed and went out to the gate to pull a handful of grass for the roan.

  Philippa led her caller to her rarely used parlor, and sat down to listen in silent pallor to his exhortations. She made no explanations for not coming to his church regularly; she offered no excuse of filial tenderness for her indifference to her father's mistaken beliefs; she looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, then out of the window at the big roan biting at the hitching- post or standing very still to let Mary rub his silky nose. But John Fenn looked only at Philippa. Of her father's heresies he would not, he said, do more than remind her that the wiles of the devil against her soul might present themselves through her natural affections; but in regard to her failure to wait upon the means of grace he spoke without mercy, for, he said, "faithful are the wounds of a friend."

  "Are you my friend?" Philly asked, lifting her gray eyes suddenly.

  Mr. Fenn was greatly confused; the text-books of the Western Seminary had not supplied him with the answer to such a question. He explained, hurriedly, that he was the friend of all who wished for salvation.

  "I do not especially wish for it," Philippa said, very low.

  For a moment John Fenn was silent with horror. "That one so young should be so hardened!" he thought; aloud, he bade her remember hell fire. He spoke with that sad and simple acceptance of the fact with which, even less than fifty years ago, men humbled themselves before the mystery which they had themselves created, of divine injustice. She must know, he said, his voice trembling with sincerity, that those who slighted the offers of grace were cast into outer darkness?

  Philly said, softly, "Maybe."

  "'Maybe?'

  Alas, it is, certainly! Oh, why, why do you absent yourself from the house of God?" he said, holding out entreating hands. Philippa made no reply. "Let us pray!" said the young man; and they knelt down side by side in the shadowy parlor. John Fenn lifted his harsh, melancholy face, gazing upward passionately, while he wrestled for her salvation; Philly, looking downward, tracing with a trembling finger the pattern of the beadwork on the ottoman before which she knelt, listened with an inward shiver of dismay and ecstasy. But when they rose to their feet she had nothing to say. He, too, was silent. He went away quite exhausted by his struggle with this impassive, unresisting creature.

  He hardly spoke to Mary all the way home. "A hardened sinner," he was thinking. "Poor, lovely creature! So young and so lost!" Under Mary's incessant chatter, her tugs at the end of the reins, her little bursts of joy at the sight of a bird or a roadside flower, he was thinking, with a strange new pain -- a pain no other sinner had ever roused in him -- of the girl he had left.

  He knew that his arguments had not moved her. "I believe," he thought, the color rising in his face, "that she dislikes me! She says she loves Dr. Lavendar; yes, she must dislike me. Is my manner too severe? Perhaps my appearance is unattractive." He looked down at his coat uneasily.

  As for Philly, left to herself, she picked up a bit of sewing, and her face, at first pale, grew slowly pink. "He only likes sinners," she thought; "and, oh, I am not a sinner!"

  CHAPTER II

  AFTER that on Sabbath mornings Philippa sat with her father, in the silent upper chamber. At first Henry Roberts, listening -- listening -- for the Voice, thought, rapturously, that at the eleventh hour he was to win a soul -- the most precious soul in his world! -- to his faith. But when, after a while, he questioned her, he saw that this was not so; she stayed away from other churches, but not because she cared for his church. This troubled him, for the faith he had outgrown was better than no faith.

  "Do you have doubts concerning the soundness of either of the ministers -- the old man or the young man?" he asked her, looking at her with mild, anxious eyes.

  "Oh no, sir," Philly said, smiling.

  "Do you dislike them -- the young man or the old man?"

  "Oh no, father. I love -- one of them."

  "Then why not go to his church? Either minister can give you the seeds of salvation; one not less than the other. Why not sit under either ministry?"

  "I don't know," Philippa said, faintly. And indeed she did not know why she absented herself. She only knew two things: that the young man seemed to disapprove of the old man; and when she saw the young man in the pulpit, impersonal and holy, she suffered. Therefore she would not go to hear either man.

  When Dr. Lavendar came to call upon her father, he used to glance at Philippa sometimes over his spectacles while Henry Roberts was arguing about prophecies; but he never asked her why she stayed away from church; instead, he talked to her about John Fenn, and he seemed pleased when he heard that the young man was doing his duty in making pastoral calls. "And I -- I, unworthy as I was!" Henry Roberts would say, "I heard the Voice, speaking through a sister's lips; and it said: Oh, sinner! for what, for what, what can separate, separate, from the love. . . . Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing." He would stare at Dr. Lavendar with parted lips. "I heard it," he would say, in a whisper.

  And Dr. Lavendar, bending his head gravely, would be silent for a respectful moment, and then he would look at Philippa. "You are teaching Fenn's sister to sew?" he would say. "Very nice! Very nice!"

  Philly saw a good deal of the sister that summer; the young minister, recognizing Miss Philippa's fondness for Mary, and remembering a text as to the leading of a child, took pains to bring the little girl to Henry Roberts's door once or twice a week; and as August burned away into September Philippa's pleasure in her was like a soft wind blowing on the embers of her heart and kindling a flame for which she knew no name. She thought constantly of Mary, and had many small anxieties about her -- her dress, her manners, her health; she even took the child into Old Chester one day to get William King to pull a little loose white tooth. Philly shook very much during the operation and mingled her tears with Mary's in that empty and bleeding moment that follows the loss of a tooth. She was so passionately tender with the little girl that the doctor told Dr. Lavendar that his match-making scheme seemed likely to prosper -- "she's so fond of the sister, -- you should have heard her sympathize with the little thing! -- that I think she will smile on the brother," he said.

  "I'm afraid the brother hasn't cut his wisdom te
eth yet," Dr. Lavendar said, doubtfully; "if he had, you might pull them, and she could sympathize with him; then it would all arrange itself. Well, he's a nice boy, a nice boy; -- and he won't know so much when he gets a little older."

  It was on the way home from Dr. King's that Philippa's feeling of responsibility about Mary brought her a sudden temptation. They were walking hand in hand along the road. The leaves on the mottled branches of the sycamores were thinning now, and the sunshine fell warm upon the two young things, who were still a little shaken from the frightful experience of toothpulling. The doctor had put the small white tooth in a box and gravely presented it to Mary, and now, as they walked along, she stopped sometimes to examine it and say, proudly, how she had "bleeded and bleeded!"

  "Will you tell brother the doctor said I behaved better than the circus lion when his tooth was pulled?"

  "Indeed I will, Mary!"

  "An' he said he'd rather pull my tooth than a lion's tooth?"

  "Of course I'll tell him."

  "Miss Philly, shall I dream of my tooth, do you suppose?"

  Philippa laughed and said she didn't know.

  "I hope I will; it means something nice. I forget what, now."

  "Dreams don't mean anything, Mary."

  "Oh yes, they do!" the child assured her, skipping along with one arm round the girl's slender waist. "Mrs. Semple has a dream-book, and she reads it to me every day, an' she reads me what my dreams mean. Sometimes I haven't any dreams," Mary admitted, regretfully, "but she reads all the same. Did you ever dream about a black ox walking on its back legs? I never did. I don't want to. It means trouble."

  "Goosey!" said Miss Philippa.

  "If you dream of the moon," Mary went on, happily, "it means you are going to have a beau who'll love you."

  "Little girls mustn't talk about love," Philippa said, gravely; but the color came suddenly into her face. To dream of the moon means -- Why! but only the night before she had dreamed that she had been walking in the fields and had seen the moon rise over shocks of corn that stood against the sky like the plumed heads of Indian warriors! "Such things are foolish, Mary," Miss Philly said, her cheeks very pink. And while Mary chattered on about Mrs. Semple's book Philippa was silent, remembering how yellow the great flat disk of the moon had been in her dream; how it pushed up from behind the black edge of the world, and how, suddenly, the misty stubble-field was flooded with its strange light: -- "you are going to have a beau!"

  Philippa wished she might see the book, just to know what sort of things were read to Mary. "It isn't right to read them to the child," she thought; "it's a foolish book, Mary," she said, aloud. "I never saw such a book."

  "I'll bring it the next time I come," Mary promised.

  "Oh no, no," Philly said, a little breathlessly; "it's a wrong book. I couldn't read such a book, except -- except to tell you how foolish and wrong it is."

  Mary was not concerned with her friend's reasons; but she remembered to bring the ragged old book with her the very next time her brother dropped her at Mr. Roberts's gate to spend an hour with Miss Philippa. There had to be a few formal words between the preacher and the sinner before Mary had entire possession of her play- mate, but when her brother drove away, promising to call for her later in the afternoon, she became so engrossed in the important task of picking hollyhock seeds that she quite forgot the dream-book. The air was hazy with autumn, and full of the scent of fallen leaves and dew-drenched grass and of the fresh tan-bark on the garden paths. On the other side of the road was a corn-field, where the corn stood in great shocks. Philly looked over at it, and drew a quick breath, -- her dream!

  "Did you bring that foolish book?" she said.

  Mary, slapping her pocket, laughed loudly. "I 'most forgot! Yes, ma'am; I got it. I'll show what it says about the black ox --"

  "No; you needn't," Miss Philly said; "you pick some more seeds for me, and I'll -- just look at it." She touched the stained old book with shrinking fingertips; the moldering leather cover and the odor of soiled and thumb-marked leaves offended her. The first page was folded over, and when she spread it out, the yellowing paper cracked along its ancient creases; it was a map, with the signs of the Zodiac; in the middle was a single verse:

  Mortal! Wouldst thou scan aright

  Dreams and visions of the night?

  Wouldst thou future secrets learn

  And the fate of dreams discern?

  Wouldst thou ope the Curtain dark

  And thy future fortune mark?

  Try the mystic page, and read

  What the vision has decreed.

  Philly, holding her red lip between her teeth, turned the pages:

  "Money. To dream of finding money; mourning and loss.

  "Monkey. You have secret enemies.

  "Moon." (Philippa shivered.) "A good omen; it denotes coming joy. Great success in love."

  She shut the book sharply, then opened it again. Such books sometimes told (so foolishly!) of charms which would bring love. She looked furtively at Mary; but the child, pulling down a great hollyhock to pick the fuzzy yellow disks, was not noticing Miss Philly's interest in the "foolish book." Philippa turned over the pages. Yes; the charms were there! . . .

  Instructions for making dumb-cake, to cut which reveals a lover: "Any number of young females shall take a handful of wheaten flour --" That was no use; there were too many females as it was!

  "To know whether a man shall have the woman he wishes." Philippa sighed. Not that. A holy man does not "wish" for a woman.

  "A charm to charm a man's love." The blood suddenly ran tingling in Philly's veins. "Let a young maid pick of rosemary two roots; of monk's-hood --" A line had been drawn through this last word, and another word written above it; but the ink was so faded, the page so woolly and thin with use, that it was impossible to decipher the correction; perhaps it was "mother- wort," an herb Philly did not know; or it might be "mandrake"? It looked as much like one as the other, the writing was so blurred and dim. "It is best to take what the book says," Philly said, simply; "besides, I haven't those other things in the garden, and I have monk's-hood and rosemary -- if I should want to do it, just for fun."

  "Of monk's-hood two roots, and of the flower of corn ten threads; let her sleep on them one night. In the morning, let her set them on her heart and walk backwards ten steps, praying for the love of her beloved. Let her then steep and boil these things in four gills of pure water on which the moon has shone for one night. When she shall add this philter to the drink of the one who loves her not, he shall love the female who meets his eye first after the drinking thereof. Therefore let the young maid be industrious to stand before him when he shall drink it." "There is no harm in it," said Philly.

  CHAPTER III

  "SOMEBODY making herb tea and stealing my business?" said William King, in his kindly voice; he had called to see old Hannah, who had been laid up for a day or two, and he stopped at the kitchen door to look in. Henry Roberts, coming from the sitting-room to join him, asked his question, too:

  "What is this smell of herbs, Philippa? Are you making a drink for Han- nah?"

  "Oh no, father," Philly said, briefly, her face very pink.

  William King sniffed and laughed. "Ah, I see you don't give away your secrets to a rival," he said; and added, pleasantly, "but don't give your tea to Hannah without telling me what it is."

  Miss Philippa said, dutifully, "Oh no, sir." But she did not tell him what the "tea" was, and certainly she offered none of it to old Hannah. All that day there was a shy joyousness about her, with sudden soft blushes, and once or twice a little half-frightened laugh; there was a puzzled look, too, in her face, as if she was not quite sure just what she was going to do, or rather, how she was going to do it. And, of course, that was the difficulty. How could she "add the philter to the drink of one who loved her not"?

  Yet it came about simply enough. John Fenn had lately felt it borne in upon him that it was time to make another effort to deal with Henry Roberts
; perhaps, he reasoned, to show concern about the father's soul might touch the daughter's hardened heart. It was when he reached this conclusion that he committed the extravagance of buying a new coat. So it happened that that very afternoon, while the house was still pungent with the scent of steeping herbs, he came to Henry Roberts's door, and knocked solemnly, as befitted his errand; (but as he heard her step in the hall he passed an anxious hand over a lapel of the new coat). Her father, she said, was not at home; would Mr. Fenn come in and wait for him? Mr. Fenn said he would. And as he always tried, poor boy! to be instant in season and out of season, he took the opportunity, while he waited for her father and she brought him a glass of wine and a piece of cake, to reprove her again for absence from church. But she was so meek that he found it hard to inflict those "faithful wounds" which should prove his friendship for her soul; she sat before him on the slippery horsehair sofa in the parlor, her hands locked tightly together in her lap, her eyes downcast, her voice very low and trembling. She admitted her backslidings: she acknowl- edged her errors; but as for coming to church -- she shook her head:

  "Please, I won't come to church yet."

  "You mean you will come, sometime?"

  "Yes; sometime."

  "Behold, now is the accepted time!"

  "I will come . . . afterwards."

  "After what?" he insisted.

  "After --" she said, and paused. Then suddenly lifted bold, guileless eyes: "After you stop caring for my soul."