Reclaimed : the story of a parish

Contents

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I. The Solitude 5

II. The New Parson 10

I. The Solitude

A GREAT, oppressive silence rested over the extensive church parish — the silence and quietude of death. Dark and ominous, it brooded on the deep forests, the broad, desolate, pathless moors and marshes, where bogs and fens and quagmires lurked at every turn. A dense fog often rose out of the soggy lowlands, enveloping the region as in a dark veil. The early autumn nights frequently undid the work of all the toilsome days of spring and summer by bringing in the wake of the dismal mists from the swamps disastrous frosts which blighted the fields while the grain was still growing.

On the scattered farms and in sparse clearings the children of this great solitude toiled on in gloomy reticence. Men of few words were those who tilled the impoverished soil, their backs prematurely bent by too hard work. Women with silent tongues and heavy hearts went their daily round of monotonous toil. Mothers did not smile over the crib of their last-born — tired mothers, knowing, as they did, that this meant another mouth to feed and just so much added to their grueling household cares. The father of a newborn babe had no smile for the infant, and scarcely cast a glance in the direction of the cradle. Why should he? The little mite meant nothing to him until it could begin to give an account of itself.

Man and wife spoke little with one another, and were never known to exchange smiles. And why, indeed, should they? Life to them was one endless workaday grind. There was not the faintest tinge of holiday glamour about it; only work, work; no joy, and yet no very profound sorrow. For when should a mother smile, if not at her child’s cradle? And a wife who could note with indifference that her husband’s pulls at the rum bottle grew more frequent and indispensable as the years passed, and that he grew wild, depraved, and bestial by stages, what, forsooth, could cause such a one true sorrow?

Silence ruled everywhere in this desolate solitude. Only the rapids and falls of the river murmured and roared, and in the great silence the voice of the waters seemed like the cry of the wild, the pleading of all nature for redemption from the burden of men’s sins and crimes.

When in early spring the waters roared most fiercely, as they rushed foaming through the wilderness, like beasts of prey frothing at the mouth, the whole region was filled with the angry cry of the torrents for miles around. Then a sense of mute fear or dull anguish would sometimes grip these callous plodders ; — for an instant the women would drop their work and listen as if in dread of some unknown peril, while in those days the men bent more desperately to their task, or cheered their sinking spirits by consulting the pocket flask or the demijohn with greater frequency.

In the springtime roar the oldest inhabitants thought they heard woodland voices foretelling some dire disaster, or the hoarse and hollow laughter of the evil-minded spirits of the primeval forest. People who dwelt near bogs and quagmires would often be alarmed by uncanny noises and frightful shrieks from points where the green surface offered no firm foothold but yielded treacherously to the tread of man or beast, and where many who had gone astray on foggy days or dark nights had disappeared never to be seen or heard of again.

It was a God-forsaken parish, whose ill repute had spread far and wide throughout the province. People had many tales to tell of grewsome crimes committed in the depths of these forests, terrible acts of violence, man against man, which were never found out and never punished. It seemed as though this particular locality was beyond the reach of the arm of the law.

After the death of the old parson, it created not a little surprise when Dean Malm, a learned man and a powerful preacher, was named among the candidates at the coming pastoral election; for that able divine was held eligible to a much higher and more desirable place. Still he applied, with the result that he became the unanimous choice of the parish.

Of Dean Hans Malm sundry favorable reports had long been going the rounds of the neighborhood. It was reputed that his father was of an old peasant family and had with his own hands broken ground and worked up a farmstead in a barren and unpromising locality. The son of such a father would suit them best as pastor; so him they chose. And when afterward they saw him in the pulpit, a tall, imposing figure, they liked him from the very first. He impressed them. They wanted a real man in the pulpit, a man sprung from plain folk, yet risen far above them, a man with a serious mind, to whom they could look up with confident fellow feeling; and just such a man was Dean Malm.

When he preached his probation sermon, there happened something quite out of the ordinary. Every man and woman in the great church listened. They had to listen. He gripped them and held them bound with his fine voice and his plainspoken, homely eloquence; but his power over them was perhaps in greater measure the power of a man of men, who at once made them feel that he was one of them. He too had heard the voice of the solitude, the roar of the rapids; he too knew what life meant to the dwellers in the lone forest clearings; how long and dreary were their days of never ending toil. To ring in a holiday in the parish and attune the people’s minds to the voice of divine truth was his one wish. He would lighten the yoke, cheer the faint and burdened plodders, and turn their earthbound eyes towards the sun of life.

They listened, breathless, spellbound, rapt in wonder. It seemed to their benighted minds like the first streak of a new dawn.

II. The New Parson

Shortly after Dean Malm’s election to this charge, the old tumble-down parsonage was torn down, and a new, stately manse was reared as a home for the new minister. True, he was one of them, that they maintained; yet he was their leader and bore himself with a dignity that called for a house somewhat better than the rest in order to be in full keeping. He was such a tall, grand man; so his doors must be a little higher. His face was light and his disposition cheerful; so his windows ought to be a litttle wider. And for a man with such a big heart the rooms should be made spacious and ample; so the new manse was built accordingly. Expecting much of him, the parishioners gave with a round hand towards his domestic comfort.

When he moved into this new home, radiant with manly pride and happiness, and turned it over to his blushing young bride, there appeared to be and end of the deathlike quietude that had pervaded this secluded parish

II from time out of mind. The people welcomed the twain as the accepted messengers of spring and sunshine, and there was no end of hurrahing for the happy pair, and other modes of rejoicing to make them welcome. More or less consciously, the whole parish sensed the coming of a new and better time.

They were waiting with open and expectant hearts, and the parson and his wife met them more than halfway. The two had come to them with open hands and hearts, with a will to turn darkness into light, to make the wilderness to bloom like a garden.

The young parson was a man of common stock, of popular leanings, but he might never have become a minister but for receiving through the young woman who afterwards became his wife his predestined call. He would doubtless have become a scientist, had not she given his mind a different turn by guiding him into the sunlit paths of true life, filling his soul with visions of the way of the Master and the will to follow in His steps. To do so was to take from' the Master’s hand and give to his fellow men — a perpetual receiving and distributing of heavenly gifts. It meant to penetrate to the very depths of the human mind, to study the true inwardness of the human heart, to take seriously the words of the poet, “The proper study of mankind is man”, and to dedicate his life to the service of mankind and of God.

The two newcomers saw with clear eyes the true condition of the parish. They understood the gloom, the silence, the poverty of the people; they knew why the women had grown cold, and were lacking in sympathy and love for their near ones ; why the appetite of the men was debased and their thirst for strong drink year by year grew all the harder to appease. The drift was but natural, and there were no forces at work to stem the downward tide.

The pastor and his young wife looked at their bright new home with smiling eyes, as if it had been the unlooked for gift of some miserly old uncle. They threw the doors wide ajar to their parishioners, observing with joy how well pleased their frequent visitors seemed to be. The parson could talk understandingly with all who came, now about their daily work or neighborly disagreements, now about their bodily ailments or mental afflictions. He was familiar with all the ins and outs of the life of the country folk, — that they quickly discovered. And when conversation along these lines lagged, he would tell them about his own father and his forbears, who had been farmers for generations back, great workers and masterly farmers at that.

All this inspired confidence. If any other “gentleman” had acted as did the parson, the peasants would have met his confidential approaches with stubborn suspicion. But this man, who spoke so openly and with such manifest pride in his peasant origin, in him they had implicit faith.

Then there was his kind, sweet young wife, who received the peasantry most heartily, chatted pleasantly with them, and proved a most charming hostess to all comers. She was a sweet and refined little person of delicate mold and light, ethereal presence, and a cast of countenance so attractive and soulful that these children of the backwoods lingered long and often in abstract admiration of it. When they took her slender hand in greeting, they pressed it gently and with seeming hesitation, as if in fear of crushing it.

There was something about this little woman’s very person suggestive of an irradiation of light and purity. Her eyes sparkled starlike, and every feature of her face reflected the emotions of a noble, tender heart. Now that she devoted herself wholly to the task of giving the people of her husband’s parish an impression of light and purity, she seemed in some mysterious way to give out light and exhale purity from her very person.

Many a visitor returned home remembering little of what had been said, but bearing a most vivid recollection of a pair of eyes with a bright and tender twinkle in them, and of a subtle brightness that was somehow imparted to them, cheering and illuminating their joyless selves. There was one thing more they could not forget. That was her music. She would often play for her guests and callers, and hearing her play was the chief charm about their visits; in fact, to many it seemed the supreme moment of their life. If she failed to convey in words her sympathy with some visitor who came to confide to the parson’s wife her joy or sorrow, she possessed the great art of interpreting in tones her profoundest and tenderest feelings. With her music she exerted a resistless power over them. With that fairy wand she was able to waft them at will higher and higher, into supernal realms far above this groveling life and the cares that infest the day. Was that realm heaven? Thus many of them began to wonder.

In those fanciful flights on the wings of harmony, they thought they saw endless space, heard celestial music, saw divine light, felt a foretaste of eternal rest and peace. Those who heard that music could never forget it. Its strains followed them to their homes; they rang through the solitude and silence of the forest; they sounded again when the winds picked the strings of the woodland harps ; they enlivened the dull monotony of the daily round, and quickened the sluggish pulse of the inner life. With such music ringing in the ears, it was not quite so easy to put the bottle to one’s mouth, or to curse and quarrel in the home. When they felt tempted to do that, they had a mysterious sensation as of tender eyes watching them or pure ears listening near. Was it angels sent to guard them, or was it the subtle influence of the fairylike little woman in the parsonage that hovered about?

The burdens of life seemed to have been lightened. Father and mother began to talk things over together. On Sundays there was a pretty general attendance at church, making it the great day of the week. Formerly there had been no real holiday in the parish. People began to gather at the church on Sundays for other purposes besides hearing Dean Malm preach ; there they met their friends, heard the latest news, and had a chance to shake hands with the parson and his wife.

Which of the two was most admired by the people it were hard to tell. Both were highly esteemed, and the love and kindness they dispensed among their people came back to them in the form of gratitude, this they felt particularly when surrounded by the throng of churchgoers on Sunday mornings.

The spring that followed the advent of the new minister at the parish was one of unusual charm and delight. The song of the rapids ran in a different key; the sun beamed down over the region more benignly than ever before; the air of the forest was surcharged with sweet fragrance, and who had ever heard the birds in such a riot of song?

Up to this time no one but the head of the family had ever been known to visit the parson ; but from now on there were frequent occasions for bringing some little gift or favor to the parsonage, and who but the goodwife herself should make the presentation ?

Thus is came about that the mistress of the house, too, had dealings with the manse, and established heretofore unknown relations with the parson and his wife, the latter now giving the lion’s share of attention to the good housewives whose generosities were literally heaped upon her household. She talked sympathetically with them about i6

their children, dwelling fondly upon the great blessing of motherhood and the high responsibility of right bringing up. Her warm words and intelligent outlook upon woman’s true mission in life aroused within them something which had lain dormant before, that part of the motherly instinct known as kindness.

This little gentlewoman of the manse had come like a mother to them all, and however generous their own material favors to her, she seemed to give them, out of the largeness of her heart, greater things in return. In consequence, her visitors would ofttimes depart with grateful tears lurking under the lashes and a distinct inner sensation that life, after all, was worth the living, and that the dismal days of lovelessness were past. Toil and cares and heartaches would always be theirs as a matter of course, but they could now see it all in a brighter light.

Nevertheless, when she sat in the living room playing to herself there stole into her music at times a subtle something which her husband was unable to understand, while still reacting to it with a shuddering sense of agony. Such chords he had never heard before, he thought. Granted that they were both overjoyed with expectation of a coming event, yet her strange, distraught harmonies seem to open a gap between them.

“How now, little wifie? You are well, I trust,” he would then interrupt.

“Oh — indeed, Hans, I am too happy for words”, came the half-whispered reply, while she fondly inclined her slightly flushed cheek to his shoulder and her tender eyes avoided his.

“May I not look at you, then?” he demanded as he gently turned her face upward and looked squarely into her eyes. There he saw reflected a world of purity and bliss, and back of it all an ominous expression, the meaning of which was strange to him.

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III. Life for Life

Ascension Day had come — a day of joy in all nature, when buds were bursting into blossom, the sap was rising and stirring vegetation to new life, and the spring birds were voicing the joy of life in matutinal song. The great church was thronged with parishioners come to worship, a thing which by now had become a habit with them. Parson Malm, alert with a secret expectation, put more heart and hope into his preaching than ever before, inspired in no small part by the radiant face of his wife before him. At times he seemed to forget all those around him and address his words to her alone.

As they walked across the church lawn, Dean Malm heard an echo of his sermon repeated behind him. “And His face did shine as the sun, and his garments became white as the light.” As he looked into his wife’s face, he was prompted to apply the words to her, such was the exultation that radiated from her countenance. A look of dismay followed soon after, and the parson, who understood, would have given much at that moment to have his wife at home.

It was but a little way to the parsonage, ordinarily; to-day the distance seemed endless. His little wife bore up bravely and had a greeting and a cheerful word for all who spoke, but at the front steps her strength gave out.

“Hans, you will carry me in, won’t you?” she begged; “I can’t walk another step”.

He turned and looked at her face again. The radiance was now gone; all that remained was agonized pallor. —

During the next few days the news went the rounds of the parish that there were no longer two at the parsonage — there were four, the new arrivals being two little cherubs, a boy and a girl, both with the starlike eyes of their mother.

Man and wife about the parish would exchange mysterious smiles as they talked over the good news. The mothers would look tenderly at their last-born, with a feeling akin to that of the happy young mother in the parsonage. They would smile inwardly in recalling all her kind words and her all-embracing love. Why, this little woman had been a mother long ere this, a mother to all of these wayward children of the backwoods!

But now she had been blessed with children of her own flesh and blood, doubly blessed. And why not doubly? For she had spoken to them more fervently than anyone else about this very thing — the blessedness of parenthood and true home life. In many a home the mothers’ eyes were dimmed with tears of solicitude for the dear little woman, every thought of whom they were wont to supplement with an informal prayer — “God bless her”.

It was a day of rejoicing for the entire parish when the glad news spread from the parsonage. But it was to be followed by days of grief and sad disappointment, for next came a message that the mother’s benign eyes were closed, — her kind heart was stilled in death. On the day when that message came, no one did a hand’s turn of work, not a plow was put in the ground, not an ax was swung, — all were steeped in gloom. People spoke in a hushed voice, if speak they must; beyond that the whole parish was wrapped in a great, mysterious silence. No one talked about these events; all seemed to be pondering them in their own minds. The men would stand at the windows as if expecting word that the message of death was not true. The women tended their little ones with the same tenderness they felt for the infants of that young mother who had loved them so; who had put into their simple lives that which could not be spoken, nor assayed, nor yet requited.

But the old folk who sat in the ingle nooks, the knowing ones who understood more than the younger generation, claimed to hear the mocking laughter of the Lady of the Woods and to perceive mystic sounds from the moors foreboding evil. There had been no mistake, — the parson’s wife was dead. It was as if the sun in the heavens had suddenly grown dark, or the bounteous promises of spring had been undone by a killing frost.

It was a remarkable procession that followed the parson’s wife to the grave. First came the parson himself, bowed, yet tall, his serious face more stern and gloomy than ever before. Then followed relatives of the deceased, fine folks from the city, in deep mourning apparel and with floods of tears. After them, the whole congregation in mourning, men, women, and children, people from the secluded crofts in the forest clearings, and from the little huts around the moors, many of them being without holiday clothes, yet anxious to come and show deference to her who had passed from them, to see her casket, and to mourn beside her grave.

There was silence, there was grief which found no voice, profound beyond comprehension. A harp was shattered whose tones had set the mute strings of many another harp in sympathetic vibration. These had begun to sound in one grand accord, ever louder and stronger, when the leading instrument was so suddenly hushed. Its chords stilled forever, all music seemed to have died out of the world.

In the house of mourning all spoke in a half whisper as if in fear of waking one who sleeps. And when Miss Rosa came to take charge of the house, the rule was established as a matter of good form that thenceforward none but subdued voices should be heard in the rooms which had heretofore resounded with laughter and music.

The parson himself locked his wife’s piano; no one should ever be permitted to use it after her.

With her the music had gone out of his life ; there was now nothing left to him but stern duty, work, and solitude. He sat alone in his study, alone with his memories. No one disturbed him needlessly ; with a reverence mingled with timidity the people looked up to this lonely man, so prematurely turning gray. He fought hard to seem the same as before, but those who came to him saw the great void, and hesitated to come again.

Thus sat Dean Malm alone with his heart’s grief, reviewing his past life again and again, reveling in selfcontemplation, and growing blind to the outer world as he kept peering into his own inwardness. Ever and anon his thoughts reverted to her who had left him a lone and grief-stricken man. Her words had been so few to the last, as she had lain on her bed pale and white, with eyes closed. When spoken to, she had opened her eyes and looked into his with infinite depth and tenderness, but with a far-away expression, as if she saw something beyond him, an all-absorbing vision which caused his person to vanish from her sight.

“Hans”, she had whispered to him once, “I see the springtime coming, — spring and sunshine for you and all those in your charge here. Spring is coming”, she repeated with assurance, — “even though belated.”

“Abide with me, dear heart; then there is spring and sunshine,” he entreated.

A shadow flitted across her countenance, and she lay a long while silent. Then her features lit up with a sublime

light. Mlill

“Hans, my own,” she faltered, arid it was with some difficulty he caught her words, “there has been something in my life, — in our life — which has borne me up, a' great, bright, beautiful something; a sweet harmony seemed to surround me at all times. There is no name for it, — words fail me to describe it, it is so pure, so sacred. In music alone I was at all able to interpret it. Dearest, when you shall have learnt to know that great thing, then springtime shall have come into your life.”

He studied and pondered her words, but their meaning remained hidden. Unable to find a solution, he abandoned contemplation and threw himself into the parish work with full energy. But he made no headway. It was like beating with bare fists upon copper gates locked against him. While all had been bright and pleasant in his home, he had succeeded without great effort, as though some one had gone before him and made a way. Now all doors seemed closed to him.

He seized upon study and research as a last recourse against despair.

IV. After Twenty Years

The only two-story house in the parish was the parsonage. The homes in the district were generally poorly built ; a low dwelling house, a straw-thatched, sway-backed barn, and one or two rickety little outhouses, that was all. No need of expertness to see that the soil was being but poorly tilled, yielding little, or their would have been signs of thrift and prosperity at least in places. Nor was it necessary to interview the parishioners to find out that their inner life was in keeping with this outward decay. A look at the parish schoolhouse was enough, for it was the poorest structure for miles around, leaning on props like a cripple on his crutches, sagging, leaky, and sadly out of repair. And if you made an inspection of the ancient church, with its walls covered with decades of dust, where they were not denuded in patches of fallen plastering, and the interior sparsely lit up by the dim, thick-glazed, cloistral windows, you no longer wondered at what you had seen about the parish. All things were in full keeping. Not even the fact that but one grave in the cemetery was being well kept gave cause for wonder. Any . stranger would have surmised that some one from the parsonage slept there.

And if you approached that grave and read the inscription on the stone, you found that it was the resting place of the parson’s wife. She had now slept there for twenty years, and among all these dead hers was the only name preserved for posterity.

It was with a sense of oppression one walked about in this city of unknown dead. These people, who permitted the grass to grow tall on the graves of their departed ones, who gave not so much as a flower in tribute to those claimed by death, even at a time when all nature was abloom, — what sort of people could they be? And furthermore, what manner of man was Dean Malm, their leader and spiritual adviser?

The huge white manse loomed bright but solitary in its squalid surroundings. A stranger could not but stop and wonder why a parish which so sadly neglected its sanctuary and which allowed the schoolhouse to go to ruin, should have erected so stately a home for its pastor. The explanation must be found in the man who dwelt in those spacious rooms.

From the village street the great manse looked deserted and forbidding, the doors all closed, the shades drawn, and no sound of human voice to be heard.

But anyone who had the courage to approach the forbidding facade, step inside the gate, and follow the graveled walk across the lawn, pass the clear, well-kept macadamized space in front of the house, and mount the high steps to the front door would be met there and shown through the vestibule into a cozy anteroom by a prim little woman who in a subdued voice announced that the parson would be found in the adjoining study. Meanwhile her eyes would scrutinize the visitor from head to foot, and woe unto him who in wet weather had failed to wipe his footwear clean on the door mat or who attempted to walk in to the parson without removing his overcoat.

The parishioners were all well aware of the little housekeeper’s unrelenting watchfulness, and they tried as best they could to meet her minutest requirements. No one made any attempt to see the parson without first having donned his Sunday best, and the visitors tried with varying success to put on an urbane air and walk with the same genteel noiselessness as the hostess when approaching the parson’s door. They all knew of these meticulous requirements and hampering formalities, — all but the parson himself. Had he known, he would doubtless have put an end to Miss Rosa’s finical code of manners, for her system was admirably designed to widen the chasm which had opened between the shepherd and his flock in the course of years. As it was, no one sought the parson, save in extreme need.

Dean Malm and his daughter Harriet devoted themselves almost entirely to their books. When at the death of his wife the parson closed the door between himself and the outer world, and steeped himself in study, then the great chasm began to form between pastor and people. Those who at first had looked up to the stricken man with reverential sympathy became estranged by his aloofness and soon grew cold and indifferent. But his studies had been unable to satisfy his inner wants. In the course of years the children, Axel and Harriet, had grown up. He had personally attended to their early education by giving them their primary schooling in the home. In his daughter alone he discovered his own youthful enthusiasm for the great poets, his interest in history, and his thirst for general knowledge.