She murmured something about Abraham’s bosom,
and the “time of salvation not being forever,”
as I tried to pass her. Then a half gesture that
she made stopped me. There was something more
she wished to say—to ask. She looked
up furtively. In her eyes I saw the “woman”
peering out through fear.
“Per’aps, sir.” she faltered, as
though lightning must strike her dead, “per’aps,
would you think, a drop of cold water, given in His
name, might moisten—?”
But I stopped her, for the foolish talk had lasted
long enough. “Of course,” I exclaimed,
“of course. For God is love, remember, and
love means charity, tolerance, sympathy, and sparing
others pain,” and I hurried past her, determined
to end the outrageous conversation for which yet I
knew myself entirely to blame. Behind me, she
stood stock-still for several minutes, half bewildered,
half alarmed, as I suspected. I caught the fragment
of another sentence, one word of it, rather—“punishment”—but
the rest escaped me. Her arrogance and condescending
tolerance exasperated me, while I was at the same time
secretly pleased that I might have touched some string
of remorse or sympathy in her after all. Her
belief was iron; she dared not let it go; yet somewhere
underneath there lurked the germ of a wholesome revulsion.
She would help “them”—if she
dared. Her question proved it.
Half ashamed of myself, I turned and crossed the hail
quickly lest I should be tempted to say more, and
in me was a disagreeable sensation as though I had
just left the Incurable Ward of some great hospital.
A reaction caught me as of nausea. Ugh!
I wanted such people cleansed by fire. They seemed
to me as centers of contamination whose vicious thoughts
flowed out to stain God’s glorious world.
I saw myself, Frances, Mabel too especially, on the
rack, while that odious figure of cruelty and darkness
stood over us and ordered the awful handles turned
in order that we might be “saved”—forced,
that is, to think and believe exactly as she thought
and believed.
I found relief for my somewhat childish indignation
by letting myself loose upon the organ then.
The flood of Bach and Beethoven brought back the sense
of proportion. It proved, however, at the same
time that there had been this growth of distortion
in me, and that it had been provided apparently by
my closer contact—for the first time—with
that funereal personality, the woman who, like her
master, believed that all holding views of God that
differed from her own, must be damned eternally.
It gave me, moreover, some faint clue perhaps, though
a clue I was unequal of following up, to the nature
of the strife and terror and frustrate influence in
the house. That housekeeper had to do with it.
She kept it alive. Her thought was like a spell
she waved above her mistress’s head.
That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my
door, and before I could answer, Frances stood beside
my bed. She had switched on the light as she
came in. Her hair fell straggling over her dressing
gown. Her face was deathly pale, its expression
so distraught it was almost haggard.
