第15章

The Lint-scraping and Bandage-making Union.

At length I have acted my severest part:

I feel the woman breaking in upon me, And melt about my heart: My tears will flow.

-- Addison.

Rachel Bond's will had carried her triumphantly through a terrible ordeal--how terrible no one could guess, unless he followed her to her room after the interview and saw her alone with her agony.

She did not weep.Tears did not lie near the surface with her.The lachrymal glands had none of that ready sensitiveness which gives many superficial women the credit of deep feeling.But when she did weep it was not an April shower, but a midsummer tempest.

Now it was as if her intense grief were a powerful cautery which seared and sealed every duct of the fountain of tears and left her eyes hot and dry as her heart was ashes.

With pallid face and lips set until the blood was forced from them, and they made a thin purplish line in the pale flesh, she walked the floor back and forth, ever back and forth, until a half-stumble, as she was turning in a dreary round, revealed to her that she was almost dropping from exhaustion.

She had thought her love for Harry had received its death-blow when her pride in him had been so rudely shattered.But this meeting, in which she played the part set for herself with a brave perfection that she had hardly deemed possible, had resurrected every dear memory, and her passion sprung into life again to mock and jeer at her efforts to throttle it out of existence.With him toppling from the pedestal on which her husband must stand, she had told herself that there was naught left but to roll a great stone against the sepulcher in which her love must henceforth lie buried, hopeless of the coming of any bright angle to unseal the gloomy vault.Yet, despite the entire approval given this by her judgment, her woman's heart cried bitterly for a return of the joys out of which the beauty had fled forever.

Hours passed in this wrestle with pain.How many she did not know, but when she came forth it was with the composure of one who had fought the fight and won the victory, but at a cost that forbade exultation.

---

There was one ordeal that thus far she had not been called upon to endure.From the day on which she had donned her sable robes to that of Harry's return no one had ventured to speak his name in her presence.Even her father and mother, after the first burst of indignation, had kept silence in pity for her suffering, and there was that in her bearing that forbade others touching upon a subject in her hearing that elsewhere was discussed with the hungry avidity of village gossips masticating a fresh scandal.

But she could not be always spared thus.She had not been so careful of the feelings of less favored women and girls, inferior to her in brightness, as to gain any claim for clement treatment now, when the displacement of a portion of her armor of superiority gave those who envied or disliked her an unprotected spot upon which to launch their irritating little darts.

All the sewing, dorcas and mite societies of the several churches in Sardis had been merged into one consolidated Lint-Scraping and Bandage-Making Union, in whose enlarged confines the waves of gossip flowed with as much more force and volume as other waves gain when the floods unite a number of small pools into one great lake.

In other days a sensational ripple starting, say in the Episcopalian "Dorcas," was stilled into calmness ere it passed the calm and stately church boundaries.It would not do to let its existence be even suspected by the keen eyes of the freely-censorious Presbyterian dames, or the sharp-witted, agile-tongued Methodist ladies.

And, much as these latter were disposed to talk over the weaknesses and foibles of their absent sisters in the confidential environments of the Mite Society or the Sewing Circle, they were as reluctant to expose these to the invidious criticisms of the women of the other churches as if the discussed ones had been their sisters in fact, and not simply through sectarian affiliation.Church pride, if nothing else, contributed to the bridling of their tongues, and checking the free circulation of gossip.

"Them stuck-up Presbyterian and Episcopalian women think little enough on us now, the land knows," Mrs.Deborah Pancake explained to a newly-received sister, whom she was instructing in elementary duties."There's no use giving 'em more reason for looking down upon us.We may talk over each other's short-comings among ourselves, private like, because the Bible tells us to admonish and watch over each other.But it don't say that we're to give outsiders any chance to speak ill of our sisters-in-Christ."And Mrs.Euphrosyne Pursifer remarked to the latest agreeable accession to the parish of St.Marks, with that graceful indirection that gave her the reputation in Sardis of being a feminine Talleyrand:

"Undoubtedly the ladies in these outside denominations are very worthy women, dear, but a certain circumspection seems advisable in conversing with them on subjects that we may speak of rather freely among ourselves."The rising fervor of the war spirit melted away most of these barriers to a free interchange of gossip.With the first thrill of pleasure at finding that patriotism had drawn together those whom the churches had long held aloof came to all the gushing impulse to cement the newly-formed relationship by confiding to each other secrets heretofore jealously guarded.Nor should be forgotten the "narrative stimulus" every one feels on gaining new listeners to old stories.

It was so graciously condescending in Mrs.Euphrosyne Pursifer to communicate to Mrs.Elizabeth Baker some few particulars in which her aristocratic associates of St.Marks had grieved her by not rising to her standard of womanly dignity and Christian duty, that Mrs.Baker in turn was only too happy to reciprocate with a similar confidence in regard to her intimate friends of Wesley Chapel.