Chapter XXXV: An Old Woman’s Passion

All this time Clara Anderson lived on smitten by the miasma of that growing slander. Her work fell off, and she did not know why. The few friends that visited her grandmother seemed to avoid the house. When Judge Lane, or any of his family, drove by, they took the farthest edge of the street, and turned their heads aside, as if contagion lay in the old house, and half the people in the village were ready to follow his example.

Mrs. Vose, who worked in all the better class houses, came home more weary of heart than of limb, for to her this cruel gossip came in its coarsest form.

“They ought to know it,” she would say, “then something could be done; but I haven’t the nerve to speak; besides, it seems to me as if Clara had lost courage somehow. Poor thing! she looks frost-bitten—all her color gone—all the vim dashed out of her. Nobody sends her work now-a-days. She’s always mending up old dresses, sitting there so white and gloomy by the window. Things can’t go on this way. She must have work or they’ll starve out.”

After pondering over these things in her mind a day or two, the good woman sought an opportunity when Clara was away from home, and went to spend an hour with the grandmother.

The old woman had her sharp points of character, and was not always an agreeable companion while gliding down her last decade of life. It was more difficult for her to express tenderness than feel it, and no one who knew her well ever wondered whence Clara got her indomitable pride.

Sitting in her easy-chair withered and bent as she appeared when Mrs. Vose went in, you might have supposed that this great passion, like all others, had died out of her, but that idea would have been given up at once, when Mrs. Vose, with much faltering, began her cruel story of the scandal. Then the black eyes filled with keen fire. The bent figure upreared itself, that head crowned with snow was held firmly erect, and both withered hands were pressed on the arms of that huge old chair.

The old woman was fully alive now.

“You have done right to tell me this, Betsey Vose. I am the person who should hear of it; you, an old friend to me and mine, would have been treacherous not to bring it here. Yes, Betsey, it is a blow that makes me reel; but I thank you for it.”

“I didn’t tell because I believed one word of it,” said the little washerwoman, wiping her eyes.

“Believe! of course you didn’t. Haven’t you known us all your life?”

Here an old brazen-face clock that stood in the corner of the room wheezed out four in the afternoon.

The old woman stood up half a foot taller than she had been in the morning.

“Betsey Vose, you will find a black silk bonnet in that closet, and a shawl. I haven’t had either of ’em on in three years; bring them out for me.”

Mrs. Vose brought the bonnet and the shawl.

The old woman took the bonnet from her hand, went up to the looking-glass and crowned her white hair with it, tying the strings in a bow under the chin, and smoothing it out daintily.

“Now put the shawl on my shoulders, Betsey; then tell your son to bring up the horse, and put Clara’s side-saddle on him.”

“Why, Mrs. Anderson, you don’t mean to ride?”

“Betsey Vose, I do mean to ride! Tell Ben to bring up the horse!”

Mrs. Vose went at once.

Directly that old lady came out of the front door, and walked toward the horse-block where Ben stood holding Clara’s horse by the bit.

“My goodness, marm, you don’t mean to try this beast? It ain’t safe, now, I tell you.”

Mrs. Anderson mounted the horse-block; sat down on the saddle, settled the short alpaca dress, and took the bridle from Ben.

“Cut me a switch from that lilac-bush, he may need mastering,” she said, sharply. “That’ll do; now go home and keep that tongue of yours between your teeth. Do you hear?”

“It don’t seem to me as if I did, or see either,” said Ben, watching the old woman as she rode away. “What on ’arth is up now, I wonder?”

In the centre of the village, opposite the most important meeting-house in the place, stood a white house well shaded, and comfortable in all its aspects. The occupant was the pastor of the flock that assembled in that steepled edifice, of which Judge Lane was a conspicuous member.

To this house Mrs. Anderson rode, looking neither to the right nor left, though an object of general curiosity, for she had not been to church in years, and her appearance on horseback was a wonder to every one who saw her on the road.

The old woman dismounted easily at the horse-block, tied her bridle to the iron-ring there, and entered the front door which stood ajar, without knocking.

The parlor door was also ajar, and she went through, remembering that the minister’s study opened from that room.

Here the sound of voices disturbed her: she wished to see her pastor alone, and some one was with him talking earnestly.

The old woman resolved to wait, and sat down on the nearest chair.

“You are too charitable, minister. I al’ays thought so—but being no talker, say it only to your face—but it’s a fact!”

“I am doubtful of these facts; there must be proof before I help to wound the feelings of a helpless, and, for ought I know, irreproachable young lady.”

“If Judge Lane is satisfied, it is enough for me. He went to see her in the spirit of a Christian father, and how did she receive him? rudely, sir; impudently as if it had been some common man picked up out of the street. He was ready to do anything to save his son, and get her out of the place; but she defied him—defied him, sir!”

“Judge Lane has a son who has met with the severest censure for conduct in which this young lady can have had no share; he should remember that, and be gentle in his condemnation of others. Judge Lane may not be altogether blameless in this matter himself.”

“Hush! hush!” said a voice the old lady knew as that of a deacon in the congregation, with imploring caution. “Don’t let anybody but me hear you say such a thing! Just think how much the Judge gives the church every year: if he heard of your talking so he’d join the Baptists before the week’s out.”

“That threat would not influence me, Mr. Jones! Heaven knows I pity the father, but I pity that poor girl and her grandmother also.”

“Poor girl! Why, you fairly make my hair stand on end—take care how you put a cushion under sinners and ease the way of the transgressor. That girl, why, I sometimes think she’s possessed like the folks in the New Testament, minister. She’s drove Edward Lane to ruin, and now she can’t let him alone—going after him the way she does, it’s outrageous. It’s a scandal to the town.”

“I cannot see my duty clear,” sighed the minister; “I have wrestled and prayed, but I don’t get any light.”

“She don’t belong to us,” urged the deacon: “she seldom sits under your preaching.”

“Are we to confine our efforts to do good to the members of our church?” inquired the clergyman, in a reproachful voice. “Christ did not teach that, brother Jones.”

The deacon was silent; possibly that was a novel view of the case to him and he had no answer ready out of his theological wisdom.

“Well,” he exclaimed, resolutely, more savage perhaps from his discomfiture, “unless her grandmother’ll turn her out of doors the old woman ought to be churched—that’s my opinion, and I ain’t afraid to have it known. Besides, the fact is, between ourselves, nothing less’ll pacify Judge Lane; if neither the law nor the church can help him get rid of her, what is he to do? No church member of ours ought to harbor her.”

“It is a measure I would not take. Urge a grandmother to desert her orphan child—the idea is monstrous!”

“You don’t pretend to stand up for the girl’s goodness, I suppose?”

“That is impossible, I fear. Still harsh measures toward her, or her old grandmother, I do oppose.”

“Just take into consideration the things people say. There can’t be so much smoke without some fire.” Here the deacon ran glibly over the various reports, and each false word fell on that old woman’s ear like sparks of fire.

“I have heard it all,” said the minister. “Poor creature; who can tell what her temptations have been?”

“I tell you she ought to be sent out of the town—it’s wrong to leave her here,” persisted the deacon.

“I hope you’ll never be the one, to suggest a measure like that.”

“No—I shan’t; but I shouldn’t be the one to say no if anybody proposed it. You can’t put it in any other way and satisfy the Judge.”

As the words left his lips the door opened, and when the two men looked up they saw before them a thin old woman, with ghastly wrinkled face, and eyes sharp with fire. They recognised the grandmother of the girl whose faults they had been canvassing.

The deacon shrank back in absolute fear, and the minister himself was powerless under the gaze of those keen eyes.

For several moments after her appearance the two men sat staring at her, the deacon quite pale and horror-stricken, as if half inclined to believe that some supernatural warning had been sent in rebuke of his uncharitableness, the minister more tranquil but greatly troubled.

“I am an old woman, minister, and you, Deacon Jones—a very old woman, and if age, or poverty, or both together, can make a woman helpless, I am the oldest one of the poorest and most helpless of your whole congregation. But old, poor, weak, as I am, the great God whom you pretend to serve, Deacon Jones, and whom you do serve, my pastor, has given me strength to come here, and the power to rebuke all that you have been saying of my grandchild. I have not seen her since this vile slander was told to me; I do not need to question her. Hasn’t she worked like a bound slave that I might be lifted above want, and out of the reach of church charity? Hasn’t she given up her books, her youth, everything that a girl loves, to stay with me, a lone old woman who has outlived all her friends, and who was oftener cross than kind to her? Is this the girl you want me to turn out of doors, Deacon Jones? Is this the girl that I am to be brought up before the church about? I tell you, my pastor, no angel among all those that will greet you in Heaven will be of nobler or purer spirit than my granddaughter, Clara Anderson!”

Before either of these men could answer this outburst of passionate remonstrance the old woman that uttered it was gone.

Without help, and lifted out of her infirmities by a miracle of will, she had mounted her horse and rode in a sharp trot through the village, regardless of the wondering faces peering at her from doors and windows, and of the gaping school-children who paused by the wayside to see her pass. The old woman had not been outside of her own small domain for years. No child in that village remembered seeing her in the street before, and older persons watched her wonderingly, as if a ghost were flitting by them.