Roland had ever seen in Minton. There was no table, only one dilapidated chair and a low wooden stool. On a shake-down on the floor lay the slender form of a young woman, nearly covered by an old shawl which did not quite conceal her poor and shabby attire. There was scarcely any fire in the rusty little stove. On an old trunk near the window were an evidently much-used box of water-colors, a few brushes, and a card or two, with flower designs painted sketchily, yet with some spirit;—objects so much out of keeping with the rest of the apartment that they at once attracted the eye. The young woman, who eagerly pushed the shawl aside and looked up the moment the door opened, was evidently very ill indeed. Her face was slightly flushed, though the room was far from warm, and her labored breathing told Mr. Alden's experienced ear that it was a severe case of bronchitis.
The little girl ran up to her mother at once, throwing her arms around her neck with a passionate clasp. Then in answer to the eager inquiring eyes that met hers, she explained:
"Here's a minister, Mammy! That one wouldn't come—but he did! So now you'll be better—won't you?"
As the mother remained for a moment in the child's close embrace, Roland, absorbed as he was in the distressing scene, could not help thinking that it was very evident whence the latter had derived her unusual type of beauty. The mother had the same dark rings of clustering curls—tangled now with the restless tossing of illness; the same large liquid eyes of dark gray, under long, dark lashes; the same exquisite curves of mouth and chin, even though suffering—physical and mental—had dimmed a beauty that must once have been bewitching. But the eyes had a restless, pining look; and now, all at once, the fevered flush ebbed away, leaving her deadly pale, while she seemed to struggle for breath, unable to speak.
Mr. Alden rushed to her assistance, and raised her a little, with difficulty detaching the clinging arms of the child; then, glancing around the room, his quick eye fell on a small flask that stood in a corner cupboard, otherwise empty enough. He motioned to Roland, who followed his glance, and brought him the flask. Mr. Alden seized a cup that stood near containing a little water, and, pouring into it some of the spirits that the flask contained, put it to her lips. She drank it down eagerly, and then lay back on the pillow, in a sort of exhausted stupor.
"She must have medical attendance at once," said Mr. Alden. "She is dying from neglect and exhaustion. I suppose you don't know any doctor near?"
"No," said Roland, "I am a stranger here as yet."
"Then I must go for my friend, Blanchard. Or stay—it won't do to leave this poor woman alone with that child! She might have died just now. And you'll make better time than I should. I'm sure you won't think it too much trouble to take a note to Doctor Blanchard, and to pilot him here."
Roland willingly assented. Mr. Alden tore a leaf out of his note-book, on which he hastily wrote a few lines, addressed it to his friend, and handed it to Roland, who hurried off at his customary "railroad pace," leaving Mr. Alden in charge of the scarcely conscious patient and the frightened child.
CHAPTER II.
A TWILIGHT REVERIE.
After his unceremonious dismissal of his unwelcome visitors, Mr. Chillingworth betook himself once more to the quiet sanctum into which no profane foot ever intruded. The fire was blazing brightly now, lighting up, with its warm glow, the stately ordered rows of books that lined the walls, and the two or three fine engravings which Mr. Chillingworth's fastidious taste had selected to relieve their monotony. A charming etching of Holman Hunt's picture, "The Hireling Shepherd," opposite the fireplace, came out distinct in the warm light that just touched another of the "Light of the World," by the same painter, above the mantel. Mr. Chillingworth threw himself luxuriously into his easy-chair by the fire, to enjoy this twilight hour of meditation, when, the dull winter day shut out, his thoughts could roam freely in that realm of religious speculation which was most congenial to his mind. He wanted to complete the particular train of thought which had been flowing so successfully when he had been interrupted by Roland Graeme. He took the unfinished page that he had been writing, and held it in the glow of the firelight, so that he might read again the last completed sentences, and so recall the thoughts with which he had intended to follow them. The subject of the sermon was, the opposition of the religion of Christ to the easy-going, selfish materialism of the age. And the last sentences he had written ran thus:—
"Men often labor under the delusion that Christianity is an easy religion. Its Founder taught another lesson. The palm is to be won, only in the blood and dust of the battle; the battle with sin, with the world, aye, hardest of all, with self! The warp and woof of the 'white raiment' are the incarnadined hues of self-denial and self-sacrifice, which, collected and fused by the prismatic power of love, blend in the dazzling purity of light itself."
Mr. Chillingworth did not feel quite satisfied with this illustration, though he had been delighted with it while in the glow of composition. Now it seemed to him a trifle confused, and he tried to think it out—for of all things he disliked mere vague and glittering rhetoric in pulpit oratory. But, somehow, his mind refused to stick to the point, and insisted in slipping off perpetually into the reverie which the dreamy influences of twilight and firelight are so apt to foster. There was nothing uncomfortable or self-reproachful in his reflection. No thought of the earnest young man he had repulsed, or of the child to whom he had refused to listen, troubled him in the least. Mr. Chillingworth was a conscientious man, and he had not done anything contrary to his own sense of right. He was simply protecting himself from the profitless invasion of time dedicated to important work, by matters that lay outside of his sphere. This, at least, is how he would have put it, had any one ventured to argue the point with the dignified Mr. Chillingworth.
But his mind this evening seemed caught by some hidden link of association, operating sub-consciously as such things often do, and was thereby carried off to scenes and events long left behind. Mr. 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 bliss of solitude."
The picture was one of an old-fashioned English garden, sweet with pinks and lavender, bright with early roses and laburnum, framed in by walls clustered over with masses of glossy ivy, by stately old cedars, and, beyond these, by blue, wooded hills, soft-tinted in the dreamy hue of an English June. And the centre of the vision he saw might have served as an illustration for Tennyson's "Gardener's Daughter":
"But the full day dwelt on her brows and sunned
Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe-bloom,
And doubled his own warmth against her lips,
And on the bounteous wave of such a breast
As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade,
She stood, a sight to make an old man young."
For a few minutes, Mr. Chillingworth closed his eyes and yielded himself without stint to the overpowering
