37. CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE DELUGE.
THE indescribable deluge! But, after all, the worst
of anything of that sort is the moment before it
begins. A plunge-bath, a tooth-pulling, an amputation,
and a dress-party are all worse in anticipation
than in the moment of infliction. Julia, as she stood
busily sticking a pin in the window-sash, waiting for her mother
to begin, wished that the storm might burst, and be done with it.
But Mrs. Anderson understood her business too well for that.
She knew the value of the awful moments of silence before beginning.
She had not practiced all her life without learning the
fine art of torture in its exquisite details. I doubt not the black-robed
fathers of the Holy Office were leisurely gentlemen, giving
their victims plenty of time for anticipatory meditation,
laying out their utensils quietly, inspecting the thumb-screw
affectionately to make sure that it would work smoothly, discussing
the rack and wheel with much tender forethought, as
though torture were a sweet thing, to be reserved like a little
girl's candy lamb, and only resorted to when the appetite has
been duly whetted by contemplation. I never had the pleasure
of knowing an inquisitor, and I can not certify that they were of
this deliberate fashion. But it “stands to nature” that they were.
For the vixens who are vixens of the highest quality, are always
deliberate.
Mrs. Anderson felt that the piece of invective which she
was about to undertake, was not to be taken in hand unadvisedly,
“but reverently, discreetly, and in the fear of God.”
And so she paused, and Julia fumbled the tassel of the window-curtain,
and trembled with the chill of expectation. And
Mrs. Abigail continued to debate how she might make this,
which would doubtless be her last outburst before the day of
judgment, her masterpiece—worthy song of the dying swan.
And then she hoped, she sincerely hoped, to be able by this
awful coup de main to awaken Julia to a sense of her sinfulness.
For there was such a jumble of mixed motives in her mind, that
one could never distinguish her sincerity from her hypocrisy.
Mrs. Anderson's conscience was quite an objective one. As
Jonas often remarked, “she had a feelin' sense of other folkses
unworthiness.” And the sins which she appreciated were generally
sins against herself. Julia's disobedience to herself was
darker in her mind than murder committed on anybody else
would have been. And now she sat deliberating, not on the
limit of the verbal punishment she meant to inflict—that gave
her no concern—but on her ability to do the matter justice.
Even as a tyrannical backwoods school-master straightens his long
beech-rod relishfully before applying it.
Not that Mrs. Anderson was silent all this time. She was
sighing and groaning in a spasmodic devotion. She was “seeking
strength from above to do her whole duty,” she would have
told you. She was “agonizing” in prayer for her daughter,
and she contrived that her stage-whisper praying should now and
then reach the ears of its devoted object. Humphreys remained
seated, pretending to read the copy of “Josephus,” but watching
the coming storm with the interest of a connoisseur. And while
he remained Jonas determined to stay, to keep Julia in countenance,
and he beckoned to Cynthy to stay also. And Samuel
Anderson, who loved his daughter and feared his wife, fled
like a coward from the coming scene. Everybody expected Mrs.
Anderson to break out like a fury.
But she knew a better plan than that. She felt a new device
come like an inspiration. And perhaps it was. It really
seemed to Jonas that the devil helped her. For instead of breaking
out into commonplace scolding, the resources of which she
had long since exhausted, she dropped upon her knees, and
began to pray for Julia.
No swearer ever curses like the priest who veils his personal
spites in official and pious denunciations, and Mrs. Anderson had
never dealt out abuse so roundly and terribly and crushingly, as
she did under the guise of praying for the salvation of Julia's
soul from well-deserved perdition. But Abigail did not say perdition.
She left that to weak spirits. She thought it a virtue
to say “hell” with unction and emphasis, by way of alarming
the consciences of sinners. Mrs. Anderson's prayer is not reportable.
That sort of profanity is too bad to write. She
capped her climax—even as I have heard a revivalist pray for a
scoffer that had vexed his righteous soul—by asking God to convert
her daughter, or if she could not be converted to take her
away, that she might not heap up wrath against the day of wrath.
For that sort of religious excitement which does not quiet the
evil passions, seems to inflame them, and Mrs. Anderson was not
in any right sense sane. And the prayer was addressed more to
the frightened Julia than to God. She would have been terribly
afflicted had her petition been granted.
Julia would have run away from the admonition which followed
the prayer, had it not been that Mrs. Anderson adroitly
put it under cover of a religious exhortation. She besought
Julia to repent, and then, affecting to show her her sinfulness,
she proceeded to abuse her.
Had Julia no temper? Yes, she had doubtless a spice of her
mother's anger without her meanness. She would have resisted,
but that from childhood she had felt paralyzed by the utter uselessness
of all resistance. The bravest of the villagers at the foot
of Vesuvius never dreamed of stopping the crater's mouth.
But, happily, at last Mrs. Anderson's insane wrath went a little
too far.
“You poor lost sinner,” she said, “to think you should go to
destruction under my very eyes, disgracing us all, by running
over the country at night with bad men! But there's mercy
even for such as you.”
Julia would not have understood the full meaning of this aspersion
of her purity, had she not caught Humphreys's eye. His
expression, half sneer, half leer, seemed to give her mother's saying
its full interpretation. She put out her hand. She turned
white, and said: “Say one word more, and I will go away from
you and never come back! Never!” And then she sat down and
cried, and then Mrs. Anderson's maternal love, her “unloving
love,” revived. To have her daughter leave her, too, would be a
sort of defeat. She hushed, and sat down in her splint-bottomed
rocking-chair, which snapped when she rocked, and which seemed
to speak for her after she had shut her mouth. Her face settled
into a martyr-like appeal to Heaven in proof of the justice of her
cause. And then she fell back on her forlorn hope. She wept
hysterically, in sincere self-pity, to think that an affectionate
mother should have such a daughter!
Julia, finding that her mother had desisted, went to her room.
She did not exactly pray, but she talked to herself as she paced
the floor. It was a monologue, and yet there was a conscious
appeal to an invisible Presence, who could not misjudge her, and
so she passed from talking to herself to talking to God, and that
without any of the formality of prayer. Her mother had made
God seem to be against her. Now she, like David, protested her
innocence to God. She recited half to herself, and yet also to
God—for is not every appeal to one's conscience in some sense
an appeal to God?—she recited all the struggles of that night
when she went to August at the castle. People talk of the consolation
there is in God's mercy. But Julia found comfort in
God's justice. He could not judge her wrongly
Then she opened the Testament at the old place, and read
the words long since fixed in her memory. And then she—
weary and heavy laden—came again to Him who invites, and
found rest. And then she found, as many another has found,
that coming to God is not, as theorists will have it, a coming once
for a lifetime, but a coming oft and ever repeated.
Jonas and Cynthy Ann retired to the kitchen, and the former
said in his irreverent way, “Blamed ef Abigail ha'nt got more
devils into her'n Mary Magdalene had the purtiest day she ever
seed! I should think, arter a life with her fer a mother, the bad
place would be a healthy and delightful clime. The devil a'n't
a patchin' to her.”
“Don't, Jonas; you talk so cur'us, like as ef you was kinder
sorter wicked.”
“That's jest what I am, my dear, but Abigail Anderson's
wicked without the kinder sorter. She cusses when she's aprayin'.
She cusses that poar gal right in the Lord's face.
Good by, I must go. Smells so all-fired like brimstone about
here.” This last was spoken in an undertone of indignant
soliloquy, as he crossed the threshold of Cynthy's clean kitchen.
