The Settler

DENUNCIATION

A molten sun was smouldering in the ashes of day when, the following evening, Helen with Mrs. Glaves, drove up to the gospel-tent. It still lacked half an hour of meeting-time, so, while her companion joined the early arrivals who were passing time by holding a service of song inside, Helen remained in the buckboard and watched the sunset, observed herself by a group of remittance-men and a scattering of settler youths who sprawled near by on the grass.

Enthralled, she scarcely saw them; had eyes only for the ruby sun that stained the prairies with amber incandescences, the ribbed glories of the fiery cloud pillars that seemed to uphold the darkling vault above. As the orb slid into his blankets of rose and gold, shy stars peeped down at the violet shadows that crawled slowly up the slopes and knolls; over all fell the hush of evening.

It was one of the moments when the Riddle of Infinity, Puzzles of Time, Space, Eternity appear as concrete though unthinkable realities; weigh down and oppress the soul with a sense of its insignificance. Against the black-blue vault the stars loomed as worlds; she could see beyond, around them. Through vast voids planets were rushing on their courses; suns with attendant systems swung on measured arcs obedient to – what? … A thin minor, querulous plaint stole out on the hush:

"Poor crawling Worm of Earth,

A Child of Sin am I – "

It was an honest attempt at the riddle, but its incongruity, futile insufficiency caused her to shrug with sudden annoyance. She wondered if, somewhere in planetary space, other "pinches of sentient dust" were equally afflicted with a sense of their central importance in the scheme of things. The apologetic whine spoiled the sunset; she impatiently turned to watch the arrivals – the wagons, buck-boards, horsemen – that were streaming in on every trail.

"How are you, Mrs. Carter?"

It was Danvers, Molyneux's old pupil. An honest lad and merry, she always liked him, and now made him welcome to the seat beside her, and laughed at his fire of chaff. Indicating Cummings, whose ovine expression had sustained no diminution since the day he bearded the general manager, he remarked: "He's great, Mrs. Carter; puts it all over Henry Irving. And there's the sky pilot! What a Jovelike port!"

There was, of course, little wit and less humor in his chaff, but his intentions were honorable, so, ignoring the sour looks of the arriving settlers, she gave him smiling attention up to the moment they entered the tent together, and so prepared the way for what followed. For though, going in, she left levity without, her modest and devout bearing could not mitigate her offence in allying herself with the English Ishmael. It was aggravated, moreover, by her remaining with him in close proximity to the remittance crowd on the back benches. Thereafter nothing could save her; she remained a target for sour glances throughout the service.

This was on the usual pattern – rousing hymns, prayer, testimony, and exhortation – then when groans and ejaculations testified to the spiritual temperature, the evangelist, a stout man of bull-like build, proceeded to cut off yards of the "undying worm," and to measure bushels of the "fire that quencheth not" for the portion of such as refused to view the problems of Infinity through aught but his own wildly gleaming spectacles. His discourse, indeed, bristled with those cant terms which, while entirely devoid of meaning, are still eminently conducive of religious hysteria, and his efforts were the more successful because of the absence of the Probationer, a thoughtful young fellow whose rare common-sense could be depended upon to prevent religious emotion from degenerating into epilepsy.

Lacking his wholesome presence, the evangelist paced the platform under the yellow lantern-light, stretching long, black arms, hovering over the people like some huge, dark bird as he pleaded, threatened, thundered, launching his fiery periods on a groaning wave of "amens" and "hallelujahs." As he went on, painting heaven and hell into his lurid scheme of things, sighs and exclamations grew in volume, flooding feeling pulsed through the audience, wild settler youths, who had come to scoff, exchanged uneasy glances on the back benches, sure sign of a coming stampede.

This was the psychological moment, and, skilled in his trade, the revivalist pounced upon it. Stilling the groaning chorus with upheld hand, he solemnly invited all who were not against the Lord Jesus to stand, an old revival trick and one which now, as always, turned. For, as before said, the plains were not yet infected with the leprosy of agnosticism, and, Episcopalians to a man, even the Englishmen were not willing to pose as the open enemies of God.

Once standing and pilloried in the public eye, it was but a question of minutes until the back benches began to yield up penitents. One by one the settler youths were gathered into the mourning bench, until at last Helen stood alone with the Englishmen.

"Come ye! Come ye to the Lord!" The preacher pleaded, but, haughty and coldly constrained, the remittance-men ignored the invitation; and so, for the space of a thunderous hymn of praise, gnostic civilization and the fervid frontier faced each other across the middle benches. From that dramatic setting anything might come. Moment, feeling, atmosphere, all pointed to the event that came to pass as the hymn died.

Leaping upon a bench, and so adding its height to unusual tallness, a woman pointed a warning hand at the unbelievers. Thin, family-worn, and naturally cadaverously yellow, she was now flushed with the fever of delirium. "In that day," she screeched, "the Tares shall be separated from the Wheat and cast with the grass into the oven!" Then, while her finger indicated man after man, she raised the grewsome hymn:

"'I heard the Sinners Wailing, Wailing, Wailing,
I heard the Sinners Wailing on that Great Day!'"

Travelling around the benches, her skinny finger finally fastened on Helen, and, as the lugubrious refrain came to an end, she burst forth in tremendous paraphrase: "Beware ye of the Scarlet Woman! Avoid ye, for her portals lead down to Death; her feet take hold of Hell!"

The silence of paralysis followed. So still it was that a mosquito's thin whine sounded through the tent, the tinkle of a cow-bell came in from far pastures, a dog could be heard barking a long way off. Swinging from the tent-pole, a circle of lanterns lit dark, flushed faces, and thus, for the space of a long breath, Helen faced the virago, the one glowering, malignant, the other pale with astonishment, mutely indignant. She was not confused. On the contrary, thought and vision were surprisingly clear; she noted Mrs. Glaves's shocked look, the vindictive settler faces, the Englishmen's blank expressions.

"We had better go. May I drive home, Mrs. Carter?" Danvers, the witless, the foolish, rose to the situation.

Low-pitched, his voice yet carried to every ear, as did her clear reply:

"After the service is over."

It was defiance as well as answer, and as she threw it in the lowering face of the congregation, her glance fixed on the evangelist who, till then, had stood, mouth open, hand arrested midway of a gesture, a bearded, spectacled effigy of ridiculous surprise. Starting under her pale scorn, he flushed, looked for a second through shining, bewildered glasses, then strode forward and seized the virago's arm.

"Sister, sister! Judge not that ye be not judged!" Then, himself again, he swept a pudgy hand over the benches. "Sit down, all! Brother Cummings will lead in prayer."

It mercifully happens that sudden calamity carries its own anæsthetic in that it blinds, confuses, destroys feeling, numbs the faculties that ought to register its importance. Under Helen's unnatural calmness she was dimly conscious of a sick excitement, but this was unrelated with her thought. She saw and sensed as usual; was aware of curious backward glances, the sympathy of the Englishmen at her side; heard every word of Cummings's sputtering prayer, the following hymn and benediction; only her mind refused commerce with these things. Divorced from the present, it juggled the terms of an equation in that day's lesson up to the moment that the remittance-men came crowding about Danvers' rig after the meeting.

Aside from their looseness and general inefficiency, the lads were brave enough, and though some of them had won or lost bets on her reputation, winners were no more eager than losers to avenge the insult that had been provoked by her association with themselves.

"Just say the word, Mrs. Carter," Danvers pleaded, "and we'll lick the crowd."

"And put a head on the preacher," young Poole added, sinfully licking his chops.

From the darkness that enveloped the press of rigs and wagons rose jeering voices, sneers, laughter, the conscious cackle of scandal. Several times she heard her own name. There was provocation and to spare, but though a word would have started a racial riot, she desired only solitude, to flutter home like a wounded bird to its nest.

"No, no!" she answered them. "Take me home! Only take me home!"

Arrived there, she flew to her own room leaving Danvers to enlighten the trustee. Lying face down on her bed, she heard the rumble of their conversation, Jimmy's violent reflections upon revivals particular and general, his wife's whimpering protests when she returned. His growl extended far into the night, and when it was finally extinguished by a robust snoring, the girl was afflicted with a sense of lost companionship; thereafter she had to suffer it out by herself.

There would be more pain than profit in describing her reflections, agonizings. Sufficient to know that a knife in the breast hurts a woman less than a stab at her reputation, and her thought was none the sweeter for the knowledge that she had drawn the blow by giving way to her pique. Her resolve as expressed next morning to Jimmy Glaves is of more concern.

She had turned impatiently from Mrs. Glaves's tearful apologies, but when the old trustee laid a kindly hand on her shoulder, as she passed him in the garden on her way to school, she gave him honest eyes.

"Now, you ain't to bother. 'Twas on'y Betsy Rodd, the old harridan. Nobody minds her."

But she shook her head in accordance with her resolution to face truth. "She was expressing what was in everybody's minds. I know it, and though I didn't intend it, I'm partly to blame, for their suspicion." Her mouth drew thin and firm as she finished. "I shall live it down."

"Course you will!" he heartily agreed. "That's my brave girl!" But his face darkened after she had passed on, and he slowly wagged a grave head as he plied his hoe in the garden.

For he knew the difficulty, impossibility of the task she had marked out for herself. Of Scotch descent, dogmatic, wedded to convention, intense clannishness reinforced in the settlers bitter morality, racial hatred, the condemnation of sin. With them the offence of the fathers was visited upon the children to the fourth generation. It was remembered, for instance, against Donald Ross that his great-grandfather had died a drunkard, and the fact had limited his choice of a wife; the daughters of Hector MacCloud took inferior husbands because their grandmother had been born on the easy side of the knot. Handing such cold charity around among themselves, what mercy were they likely to extend to the suspected stranger within their gates? Jimmy was still wagging his head when, half an hour later, the Probationer reined in at the end of the garden.

Hearing of the scandal on the Lone Tree trail, the young man had turned aside to express his sorrow, and now listened patiently while the trustee drew invidious parallels between the religious movement then proceeding and his own misfit horticulture. "You see them?" Removing his pipe from between his teeth, he waved it at some half-dozen straggling apple-shoots. "Hardiest variety of Siberian crabs. Professor at the gove'nment experimental station warranted 'em to grow at the north pole. Remind me of your revival, they do."

"Why? Don't they grow?" The Probationer smiled.

"Grow? I should swan! four feet every summer, an' freeze off to the roots every winter – jes' like your converts. Get all het up at meetings, blossom with grace, then comes the backsliding, the frost, an' nips the leafage. Where's the sense of it?"

Now the Probationer had his own doubts. Having turned a prentice hand at revival work, he was painfully familiar with its characteristic phenomena – first, hot enthusiasm, slow cooling, obstinate adherence to the form after the spirit has fled, finally the reaction which would leave his people less charitable, not quite so kindly, a little poorer in the things which make for the kingdom of Christ on earth. He had tried to be a real shepherd to his flock – to upraise by precept, example, counsel, and admonition. Avoiding dogma, he had brought them together irrespective of cult and creed on the broad basis of love and a common humanity, and just when he was beginning to expect fruit from that liberal sowing, this bitter theologian, the revivalist, had been loosed upon him. And this was first fruit of his work!

Jimmy's illustration coincided exactly with his own experience, yet fealty to his Church demanded some sort of defence. "Isn't an annual growth better than none?" he asked. "The green shoots certainly improve the appearance of your garden."

Jimmy blew a derisive cloud over the few cabbages, two sickly cauliflowers, a bed of onions, salvage from worms and spring frost of half an acre's planting. "But you don't get results. One sound cabbage is worth an acre of sick saplings; a cheerful sinner discounts a hundred puckered saints. I'm scairt as the black knot has got inter that orchard o' yourn, sir?"

"I'm afraid so," the young fellow sadly agreed. "Well, I must try and prune it out."

"I'd advise the axe," Jimmy grimly commented. "An' begin with Betsy Rodd."

Sorrowing, the Probationer drove on to the school, where a very cold young lady answered his call at the door. A slant of sunshine struck in under the porch twining an aureole about her golden head, creating an auriferous nimbus for her shapely figure. Standing there, so cold and pale, she might have passed for a statue of purity, and the Probationer, being young and still impressionable albeit engaged, wondered that any should have dared to doubt her. Thawing when he mentioned Ruth, she froze again as soon as he touched, apologetically, upon the event of the night before.

"If religion strips them of common charity, they would be better without it," she answered his apology, and turned but a cold ear to his plea for his people.

"They were altogether subject to emotion, incapable of a reasoned rule of life," he said. "With the fear of God removed from their hearts, they would drop to unmentionable levels, to say nothing of the hope and consolation religion brought to sweeten their hard lives."

But he made little headway. "I don't doubt they are not quite so bad as they would like to be. But there, let us drop the subject. Won't you come in and examine the children?"

From this conversation it will be seen that her resolve to "live it down" was not exactly founded upon grounds that would appeal to a professor of ethics; yet her attitude was very natural, and not so deplorable as would at first appear. Was she so much to blame? Hardness breeds hardness, opposition its like. Fire flies from the impact of rock and iron. Always like begets like, heredity applies to mental forces. Moreover, injured pride has stiffened more weak spines and given better results than the command to turn the other cheek; the desire to "show people" lies at the root of many a bravery. Lastly, once rehabilitated socially, softness comes later to the injured member, increasing in ratio to the respect of his or her community. And so it would have been with Helen – with a different people.