The Bell of Saint Basil's

IT was a cold morning — for Virginia; and, as everybody knows, Virginia has a plenty of them. The frost bent the fennel so heavily that it lay over like fine silver-work upon the ground, where a flurry of snow skipped before the gusts. The wind itself was restless and ill-natured, like a wind that had got into the wrong climate by mistake, and was hurrying to go somewhere else. Ice lay in opaque sheets upon the pools and swamps, and the air stung. There was no sun. As early as seven o’clock the grayness of the sky took on a determined look, as that of a sky which meant business. One felt something of the same unreasonable resentment before it that one feels before a hard creditor, who would, on the whole, prefer to make one uncomfortable rather than give grace, but who is nevertheless entirely justifiable, and one knows it. If it was cold out-of-doors, it was colder within. When Virginia shivers, she is always taken by by surprise. She looks out through her half-built houses as if she were a soft brown-eyed girl in a gauze dress, protesting that she is cold, and wondering why.

The weather came in at the doors; the weather came in at the windows; the weather rushed in under the house; cracks in the walls welcomed it; crevices in the posts betrayed one to it; the wide chimneys, where the fires lay unlighted, gulped it in; the floors were flooded with it.

President Peyton’s eminently respectable if economical house seemed to keep swallowing little drafts, like a person with a sore throat, whom it hurts, but who can’t stop.

When President Peyton got out of his old-fashioned four-posted bed, that morning, pushing aside the curtains of chintz and mosquito-netting with a scholarly, aged hand, he hung his clothes over one arm, and went to find what the thermometer was before he put them on. The thermometer hung over the veranda roof, as it had for thirty years, — as it would for how many more ? — upon a rusty tack in the same spot, beneath the window-sill, in the southerly exposure.

“You’re letting in the cold, Mr. Peyton,” pleaded a vague feminine voice from behind the bed-curtains. “ I’m frozen to death. I 'm cold enough, Mr. Peyton, to — to — I 'm cold enough to — swear.”

“ Maria! ” ejaculated the old man severely.

“ Why, Mr. Peyton ! ” cried his wife. It was such an event when her husband called her Maria that the poor old lady was frightened. She had known it to happen but a few times in many years : once when he was very angry with her because she had burned a manuscript lecture of his by mistake ; and another time when they were in great trouble, but then he had said it so kindly that she had never forgotten it.

That had happened about this time of year, toward the last of January. She could not have told precisely when. She had the indifference or lapse of memory about dates that is apt to be characteristic of age. If life has been full, especially if life has been sad, what matters a day more or less? Sentiments, sensations, affections, grow more important; time, as we approach eternity, less. It dwindles away from us as the two-thousand-year-old heroine of a popular romance shrank to the size of a little ignoble animal when her hour came.

Their trouble had been sore at Mrs. Peyton’s heart for many weeks; it had eaten there like a fresh hurt made by the turning of an old barb. Her wound had never cicatrized. The nature of it made this impossible. She had sat alone a good deal at twilight, lately, crying in her rocking-chair by the light-wood fire, in the shadowy old parlor, before the President came in from the study, at precisely five minutes before six, and said, —

“ Mrs. Peyton, we will now dine.”

But she did not tell Mr. Peyton. Mr. Peyton had strange ways. He loved her, of course; it was the proper thing for husbands to love their wives; but though they had been married forty years, she stood in awe of him yet. When he went to Richmond, or even as far as Baltimore, on a journey, he always wrote to her. He began the letters, " My dear Mrs. Peyton,” and signed himself, “ Yours very truly.”

Maria Peyton had read her love story in a dead language, poor thing. A simple, feminine, cuddling woman, who would have let a man walk over her and been happy, if only he would have stroked her like a kitten now and then, she might as well have married the Classical Dictionary or Crabb’s Synonyms as the President of Saint Basil’s, in Chester, Virginia.

So she did not tell her husband when she cried or why. It was one of the President’s “ ways ” not to talk about their trouble. She wished he would. It might even, she thought, have been more bearable. If now and then she could have said, “Anthony, do you remember ? ” or, “ My dear, it was so many years ago, about this time ; " or, “ I did n’t mean to cry, but I was thinking of”— But she could do nothing of the kind. For twenty years the old man had not spoken of what befell them. He never tried to explain to her that this had become almost pathologically impossible. With any allusion to certain events a physical pain so deadly griped his heart that he avoided it, practically, as one would avoid a bayonet, though he was quite a healthy man. But he supposed women could not understand such things. Expression was their law. The reserve of manhood, the reticence of vigorous anguish, they knew not. It was the nature of their sex, he reasoned. It did not occur to him that his wife had achieved a silence sadder, because more unnatural, than his own. So, under the solemn arch of that massive grief, which should have sheltered a consolatory and compensatory oneness, these two stricken people walked apart.

They had a boarder at the Peytons, and when the President and his wife came down to breakfast, that January morning, the boarder said it was very cold. She said she did n’t believe it was colder than this in New York. She was in the habit of saying this. She added that she had coughed all night, and that Abraham had not brought her half enough wood. This, too, was a familiar remark. Mrs. Peyton apologized, and said she would attend to it, but the President bowed politely, with a vague smile. He had ceased to give his attention to the conversational gifts of the Northern boarder, whom he regarded as, on the whole, the most depressing result of the late civil war. Who had ever heard of a Peyton keeping boarders ? Even when you reduced the devastation to the singular number, he could not regard a boarder as other than a social and sociological phenomenon, when coughing at his own distinguished table and complaining of the mattresses in his own hospitable guestroom from December until May. The boarder’s name, this year, happened to be Miss Sparker. But that was immaterial. Any name fitted the qualities which reproduced themselves from season to season, with that monotonous indifference to personification which the President thought not without interest as bearing upon the doctrine of the transmigration of the faculty or the partial soul. It was the only interesting thing he had ever found about the Northern boarder.

Breakfast was the least comfortable of the comfortless meals at the Peytons’, because the President had to hurry away to prayers. Mrs. Peyton helped him to his hominy with an anxious hand. Nothing annoyed the President like being late at college. She said it made him nervous. If she had been a rousing, spunky Northern wife, she would have said it made him unbearable. He never scolded brutally, for he was quite a gentleman ; he congealed, — that was all. A Boston sleet-storm might as well have spent the day in that house. Anthony Peyton’s sternness when displeasure befell him was something hardly less than terrible. His students used to know that. Scattered all over the South to-day are middle-aged men who tell each other college stories of the President, with a shrug in which a reminiscent shudder lingers sensibly still.

His wife had borne the full force of his nature in this respect meekly; it being hers to do so. Besides herself, there had been one other who had borne it, — according to nature, too.

“ You will wear your overcoat, Mr. Peyton, won’t you? ” pleaded Mrs. Peyton timidly, as the President pushed back his chair, and, bowing coldly to the two ladies, prepared to breast the bitter morning.

“ It is very cold,” sighed the Northern boarder, with an air of originality. “ It can’t be worse in New York. My chicken is burned, Mrs. Peyton. I ’ll have another cup of coffee, if you please. Now, our coffee in New York” —

“ And an umbrella, too ? ” entreated Mrs. Peyton. She followed the President out into the hall, leaving the boarder and Abraham to have it out. She stood, shivering, before her husband, a little, shrunken, white, cowed old lady, in a pale purple dress and white knit shawl. She had been a beauty once, and called “ spirited.” She felt an unwonted sadness and tenderness this morning. Old as she was, she wanted to be asked what ailed her, or even to be kissed.

“ You will take cold, Mrs. Peyton,” her husband said politely. " Return and entertain your guest.”

The college of Saint Basil’s, so far as it was materialized in the college buildings, stood a round half mile from the President’s house. A chapel and a couple of dormitories comprised the architectural effect; these were old and ruinous. Saint Basil’s was none of your high-schools, starting up like Christmas presents every year, and dubbing themselves colleges, as the boot-black or the barber lays claim to the title of Professor. So thought the President, as he drew his learned coat collar about his aged neck, and beat with the energy of a much younger man against the rising wind. He was apt to cultivate this thought on the way to prayers, on a chilly morning. He took some comfort in it, which was fortunate, for there was nothing else about Saint Basil’s that a man could take comfort in now. The sense of dignity is the easiest substitute for practical success, and the President of Saint Basil’s made the most of it.

As the college came in sight, he slackened his nervous pace a little. He had always done so in the historic days of the institution, when it had four hundred boys. He had liked to enter the chapel with the grand manner, while the students stood bareheaded, in rank, to let him precede them. He liked to do so now. It kept up the sense of reality which the unoccupied scholar fed within himself voraciously in these pantomimic days lest it starve, and an old man’s courage with it.

Saint Basil’s was not a cheerful specimen of architecture at best. It was particularly grim in that advancing storm. The old brick dormitories seemed to draw up their shoulders to keep warm. Here and there a shutter flapped on the closed and cobwebbed windows. The steps and doorways were deserted ; the campus behind lay silent in the lightly scattering snow. From the rusty college pump the handle was gone. The brick chapel, standing between the sombre dormitories like a clergyman between two unlighted pulpit lamps, regarded the President as if it were an intelligent tiling who understood him. Possibly it did, — no human creature as well. The chapel, too, was still. No smoke struggled from its chimneys, which leaned a little for lack of iron props. Upon the windows of the lecture-rooms up-stairs the blinds wore drawn ; many a slat was missing. Pray was the janitor late? No fires built ? What negligent underling had omitted to ring the bell for morning prayers ? The tongue of old Saint Basil’s mute ? Why did not her iron lips open to call her boys to chapel ? The boys ? Where were the boys ? Upon the broken rail-fence, singing college songs ? Behind the dormitories, jammed into a Sophomore rush? Waiting the old man’s coming, to burst into the college yell, “ Saint Ba-sil loved a pri-o-ress ? " Standing bareheaded, rank on rank, to greet their President, like the Southern gentlemen that they were ? See their young heads bowed with that graceful ease which gave Saint Basil her celebrated “ manner,” their indolent white hands passing the quick gesture of deference from the bare brow. Do you see the students ? Count the boys of Saint Basil’s. Call the roll. Where are the boys ?

Seek them in their ruined cottonfields, in their shattered homes, in hard, unaccustomed manly toil at industries strange to their ancestry, and to their training, and to their State. Seek them in sunken, nameless graves on the banks of the Potomac, at Antietam, at Gettysburg. Find them beneath letters of marble and crosses of flowers on Decoration Day, at Richmond. Saint Basil’s boys have gone beyond the urging voice of the chapel bell. Saint Basil cannot call her roll to-day. The ancient college, patronized by an English king, honored by the English Church, once graced by a faculty representing the scholarship of Virginia, long the Alma Mater of her " family,” if not always the educator of her eminent men. Saint Basil’s, the pride of the proud, the fetich of the ignorant, now become the anecdote of collegiate history, had met the fate common to other interesting facts in the South. She existed “ before the war.” Saint Basil was, in short, a college without a boy. She had kept her ancient name, her distinguished President, her college buildings, her extended real estate, her chartered rights, and to some extent her invested endowments. What she had not kept was her students. Virginians spoke of the college as they do of the corn-fields, the mansions, the very chickens ; nay, the moon in the heavens : " Oh, you ought to have seen it before the war! ”

The President of Saint Basil’s passed through the ranks of invisible boys, with a stately step. It might have been touching to a delicate observer to see that the old man lifted his hat as he did this. It seemed like the response of a gentlemanly ghost to the deference of spirits. Nevertheless, he shivered like a live man as he put the huge key in the lock of the chapel door. How unmannerly the cold was that day ! If he had expected such weather, he would have asked the trustees to provide a janitor and a fire for the daily flummery through which the aged President was expected to pass, that the college might retain her charter and he his office. Once a day, for the space of time covered by the college terms, the President of Saint Basil’s officially visited her deserted halls. There, he summoned the invisible institution to order, and conducted, for the instruction of its unseen youth, the service for morning prayers.

This fact, perhaps the only instance of its kind in modern collegiate history, is not, as one would suppose, widely known. Chester is a remote village, not yet promoted to the scale of a Southern health resort, and the cogs of life’s wheels turn slowly there. The Northern tourist is still too few, and usually too feeble or too feminine, to cultivate an interest in so classical a local legend, and reporters are a race unknown. The Chester native is so familiar with the sight of the old man toiling over at half past seven every morning to the silent college, with a key in his trembling hands, that one has long since ceased to pay attention to the circumstances; or says indifferently,

“ There ’s the President going over to prayers.

Sometimes, an intellect more original than the average, perhaps the telegrapher or a railroad man, ventures the added and daring comment,

“ They ought to have given him a janitor. They 've nothing else to do with their money.”

Now, in fact, the President had refused the janitor. Possibly he had some sort of pride in the matter; preferring to do something which struck him as obvious toward the desert of that salary which he drew quarterly from the board of trustees representing the existence and honor of the institution. Really, the honor of the institution was the main point in his scholastic and unmercenary mind. So it had come about that the President rang the bell of Saint Basil’s every morning, with his own aged hands.

Had it ever been so cold at college before ? The old man stamped off the light snow in the dusty vestibule, with a sigh. He had been an ambitious man in his day, looking forward to an old age of honored and honorable activity. He had not thought to become a fussy, idle old man, dressing by the thermometer. He had expected to be busily eminent for his scholarship, and in correspondence with the scholars of other institutions and sister States, — entertaining them at Commencements. He had thought to be widely known, too, and feared by students for his remarkable discipline. He had never expected the boys to love him. But they had always obeyed.

He looked drearily about the deserted building as he lifted his hands to the bellrope. Who was there to obey him now ? Other thoughts appealed to his mind, which wandered from the students, as it often did, — too often did. But these, as he never shared them, he bore best when he was alone.

Ring! Rang! Clang! The college bell clashed upon the frosty air, with which it harmonized by the hardest. It was a rusty old bell, and its call was a little cross that morning. It spoke imperiously, severely, like a bell that had always had its own way, and could not understand why nobody answered it.

Ring ! Ring ! Such a thing ! Who ever heard of such a thing? Noise! Noise! Boys! Boys! Call! Call them all! Tell — tell! Saint Basil’s bell! Saint Basil — yes ! Loved — a -prioress ! Make a noise — boys ! Where are the boys ? Who dares ? Not come to prayers ? Come to PRAYERS !

The last authoritative cry clashed over the iron lips, and ceased. When they opened again, they opened gently, like a stern soul grown sad. Appealingly the bell began to toll : —

Roll — toll. Tell the whole. Call them all. Call the roll! Toll — toll. Fought and bled. Count the dead. Boys — boys ! Stop life’s noise. Come back, boys ! Rest — rest. Peace is best. Here is rest. Home is best. Stay — stay ! Come to-day ! Come and pray ! Stay and pray ! Oh — stay! Oh — pray !

The voice of Saint Basil’s reached so far and said so much that morning that it was especially noticed in the neighborhood. A negro, driving in to market with sweet potatoes and ducks, spoke of it to a stranger who was strolling through the village. He said de ole bell was kind o’ peart dat mornin’; ’peared like she 'd toted some ob her boys back. The stranger said Yes; that he had been listening to it, and asked what it was rung for and who rang it. For he had understood, he sidd, that the college was closed years ago.

The President rang conscientiously for eight minutes, according to college law. When the time was honorably up, the trembling rope fell from the trembling hand, and swung off into the air. The last cry pealed and echoed from Saint Basil’s throat, and died away : —

Pray — pray ! Oh, stay, stay ! Oh, pray ! Come pray !

The President entered the deserted chapel with uncovered head. The chill struck him heavily that morning, as he walked up the long aisle between the wooden pews, whittled jagged with boy’s initials ; he knew some of them by heart, from such long acquaintance. There was one deep, naughty cut in the oaken railing before the very chancel, — A. P. the letters ran; he glanced at them as he ascended the steps with bowed head, and took his strange, solitary position behind the reading desk. He looked the learned man he was as he stood there in the dim and empty chapel; and this became him, for Saint Basil was the scholar among the saints, as her President used to remind the boys. Yet, that January morning, he seemed a very desolate, cold old man, and one would have thought less of his LL. D. than of his aching fingers, or perhaps his aching heart. The empty benches stretched before him, row on row, a silent, mocking audience. Their invisible occupants came thronging in. The boys of Saint Basil’s were still enough now. No need to give them long marks for inattention, President Peyton. Will you rusticate them, sir, for sticking pins in each other at recitation ? Suspend them for humming " Saint Basil loved a pri-oress ” while you pray ? Write letters of complaint to the silent home of the most rebellious ghost among them ! Expel that reckless lad — that one yonder in the front pew — he who had the yellow curls and the saucy eyes; the beautiful fellow! The wildest of the lot always, — up to every trick Saint Basil’s ancient halls had ever known ; bubbling to the brim with frolic ; maddened by severity, melted by tenderness, spoiled by either, spoiled by both ; shining with the glory of eternal youth; handsome, defiant, daring, splendid — Expel that spirit! Mr. President, expel that spirit if you can !

“ Almighty and most merciful Father,” began the President of Saint Basil’s. His voice resounded through the empty chapel like a younger man ’s, strong and firm and fine. He read the prayer uncommonly well; he always had. He slighted nothing of its solemn import now. If any one of Saint Basil ’s boys had happened in to chapel, whether in the spirit or the flesh, he would have been proud of the old President, as he always was.

“ We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,” prayed the solitary man. “ We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. . . . But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The chapel door stirred in the strengthening wind ; or perhaps a broken blind gave way, or the step of one of the ghostly boys hit a hymn-book fallen from the seat just then ? But the President of Saint Basil’s was used to spiritboys; he so often fancied strange sounds in the chapel that he had trained himself to notice none of them. With his white head bowed and reverently lowered eyes, the old man solemnly read on : —

“ And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake ; That we may hereafter lice a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.”

“ Amen ! ” responded a living voice from the empty pews.

The figure of the President, bowed over the Prayer-Book, stirred visibly, but did not start. He had lived too many times in imagination through some such scene as this to suffer himself to express surprise. If any of Saint Basil’s boys returned, — and why should not Saint Basil’s boys return? —they should find the institution prepared to receive them with the dignity which became her. Should her ancient halls bow and smirk, like a mushroom college without a student ? If her boys had been scattered for a week’s recess, or had but gone to William and Maty’s for a ball-match, the President might have received the startling incident which now befell him with as grand a carelessness. Yet in truth it shook him to the soul.

When he raised his gray head, it could have been seen that he trembled, and that his countenance had become very pale. Had any person been observing him — But no one was. His cool, intellectual gray eye — a little feverish spark burning within it — traversed the length of the chapel before it rested upon the figure of a man in one of the back pews, near the door. The man was kneeling upon one of the old prayercushions ; his head was bowed ; his face was hidden in his hands ; he did not speak nor stir.

President Peyton closed his PrayerBook, and slowly descended the chancel steps. His mind was in a tumult strange to its scholastic peace. He was prepared to get out his old examination papers, nonchalantly, as if it were a matter of course. Saint Basil’s should not appear as if she did not matriculate new students any day. He saw himself already going home to tell Mrs. Peyton and the Northern boarder that he should lecture to the Freshman class at half past three. He lifted his white head. His stately figure straightened. The stoop of age rose out of his fine shoulders, and his eye turned strong and young. He walked with great official dignity down the broad aisle, and stopped before the kneeling stranger.

His thin lips had opened to address the young man, but they closed silently and cautiously.

It was not a boy who knelt in Saint Basil’s at morning prayers that day. It was a middle-aged man. He seemed to be rather a poor man, or at least he was shabbily dressed. Of his face, persistently hidden in his hands, nothing could be seen. This gave the more prominence to the shape of his head, which was good, though a little weak in the frontal lobes, and to his abundant curling hair, well marked with gray.

Now, when the President had drawn his stately steps to a halt before the kneeling man, he perceived that the worshiper was sobbing.

At this unexpected sight the old man retreated immediately. With great delicacy he forbore even to remain in the chapel, but, passing quickly out, stood in the vestibule, uncertain and distressed. He waited there for some moments, but the visitor did not show himself. The President, perplexed, pushed open the faded baize doors softly and looked in. The kneeling figure in the deserted chapel remained immovable. Only its hands had stirred, and these were thrown over the railing of the pew in front, and knotted together as if they had been wrung.

“ Sir,” said the President, himself much agitated, “I am an officer of Saint Basil’s. Can I serve you in any way ? ”

At the sound of his voice the distress of the stranger made itself more manifest. An audible sob — the terrible sob of a man no longer young — shook the air.

“ My dear sir !” cried the President, quite forgetting himself. But the weeping man lifted one of his clasped hands, and waved the speaker away with a gesture so piteous and so imperious that it was impossible to disregard it. President Peyton bowed and left the chapel, hat in hand.

He went out into the storm, and wandered about for a little while, greatly moved and uncertain what to do. The stranger did not come out, and it grew very cold. The old man felt chilled to the heart. He decided that he would go home and think the matter over, and get warm, and then return.

His wife met him when he came in, lifting her little, pinched, sad old face cautiously to see how his moral thermometer stood. It annoyed him that she looked afraid of him, and he did not tell her, as he had meant to do, what had happened at the college. He sat down by the study fire alone, and tried to dry his feet; but he was restless, and could not stay. In a few minutes he started out again, saying nothing to anybody. Miss Sparker called from the top of the stairs to ask what the thermometer was, and to say that it was ten degrees lower in New York, and Mrs. Peyton cackled anxiously about the halls ; but he shut the front door with a succinctness which in a less distinguished man would have been called a slam.

When he got back to the college, he was wet through and dismally cold. The chapel was empty. The man was gone. The President locked the chapel door, with a sigh, and went home and changed his stockings and put his feet in mustard water.

He told his wife, in the course of the day, what had happened, for he could not, as the phrase goes, “ get over ” it. The incident rose like a mountain in the eventless life of age, and solitude, and idleness. Never since the war had Saint Basil’s come so near to a student. The President was bitterly disappointed. He was piqued that his wife shared so little of his official regret. Yet, in her way, she was more agitated by the circumstance than he.

“ Mercy ! Who cares a wild orange for the college! ” cried Mrs. Peyton, with unwonted spirit. “ What I’m thinking of is the poor man. What possessed you, Mr. Peyton, not to bring him home to dinner? Poor fellow, in that old barn of a dirty chapel, all by himself, — crying, — and just look at it snow! I ’m surprised at you, Mr. Peyton ! ”

President Peyton regarded his wife with the helplessness of a larger intellect confounded by the inadequacy of a lower. He remembered that kneeling figure, that cruel sob, that piteous, imperious wave of the hand, — a gesture which no man could have disobeyed. He felt that women could not understand certain phases of the superior delicacy of his own sex. But this consciousness practically did nothing toward putting him right with Mrs. Peyton ; who seemed to have the moral advantage over him all day. And the worst of it was that she told the boarder.

President Peyton retired to his study and locked the door, and there he spent the afternoon.

His uncomfortable thoughts took long and painful paths ; these crossed a waste country, deviously, reaching nowhither. His memories returned upon the thinker like lost travelers. To what end, — oh, to what bitter end ?

The old man rose, and paced his study restlessly. The high bookcases regarded him — mute friends, who knew the value of sympathetic silence. Over in a corner, between the English Poets and the German Metaphysics, the dictionaries stood, piled one above the other, — Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Spanish, French, — upon an old dictionary-holder, home-made. The President’s accustomed eye had not rested with speculation upon the dictionaryholder for many a day. Now, walking gloomily to and fro, he Stopped before it, standing with his hands behind him, and moodily regarded the rude thing. With a certain ferocity he began to shove the lexicons about; tossed them over each other, and off upon the threadbare carpet. The dictionary-holder, revealed to the full light, seemed to shrink, as flesh would before a blow. It was a child’s wooden high-chair.

Mrs. Peyton knocked at the study door while the President stood among his fallen dictionaries, and, moved by some unexpected impulse, he let her in. She had been crying. She apologized for troubling her husband.

“ I — I 'm so sorry, Mr. Peyton, to interrupt you, but I 've been thinking ” —

At this moment her eyes fell upon the scattered lexicons, and then upon the little old high-chair. Her face worked pitifully, but she did not cry any more; she seldom did before her husband.

She went up to the high-chair, and began to rub it tenderly with her handkerchief.

“ It needed dusting.” was all she said.

The two old people looked at each other. An embarrassed silence fell between them. Each heart beat violently to one thought, upon which the lips of both were sealed.

He had been a dear little fellow, — their only son, their only child. Everybody called him so. He was such a handsome boy ! His beauty ruined him, perhaps. It is easier to punish an ugly child. His mother never could withstand him ; he rode over her inert feminine being as he drove his pony over the Southern sand. This was her nature, and motherhood does not change, but only develops nature. The boy’s father was severe enough to make up for it; he reasoned that he must make up for it, thus seeking justification for his nature, which turned to harshness, given a certain amount of provocation, as water does to ice, given thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. The child had lived the life of a thermometer, alternately plunged in the snow and held down the register. It would not be exaggerating the case to say that his boyhood was one panorama of civil war. His home was a battlefield, neither more nor less. Scene upon scene rolled by before the averted eyes of these desolate old parents. — what hot words, what threats, what tears, what fears, what rebellion, mistake, and anguish ! See defiance turning to sullenness, and mischief grown disgrace! Poor boy, — oh, poor boy ! . . .

If the President could have forgotten one bitter word, one icy rejoinder, any of those terrible conflicts when authority and dependence clashed, when the personal sense of power wrought parental love into a vulgar weapon ; one of the hours when he had struck home or struck down; one of the moments when the child had writhed, or threatened, or fulfilled a threat! But he had never forgotten. If she could forget one of the pitiful scenes when she hung like a shield between the sword of his father’s anger and the bosom of the boy’s blame ; the nights when she helped him upstairs, too sore a sight for any eye but his mother’s to fall on and forgive ; the times when she dismissed a servant, or wore a shabby dress, or suffered for suitable food, that she might save money to pay his debts ; the hours when he laid his beautiful head upon her knee and cried like a very little fellow, and said he would never, never do so any more, and asked her to forgive him, and she stroked his curls, and wound them round her finger, and kissed them, and said, “You’ll be a good boy now, Tony, won’t you ? ”

Forgive him ? She would have poured her soul and body into a crucible, and boiled them down to one red draught for the boy to drink, if so she might have given him a pleasure that she should have denied him, or purity that she had not educated in him. Forget ? She sometimes wished she could, or wondered if there are worlds where mothers can.

When the terrible time came, when the boy committed the unpardonable sin, whatever it was, — she had almost forgotten what, there seemed so many, and that one looked to her so easy to forgive, — when his father expelled him, just as if he had been anybody else’s son, — more quickly, she thought; with a hotter purpose, with less mercy, with a colder rage, — she had clung to her husband, and twined her arms about his neck, wishing he loved to have them there, and unclasped them, for she felt he did not, and dragged herself down from his heart to his knees, nay, to his feet, where she lay sobbing and prostrate, a piteous maternal figure, and pleaded for the boy.

“ Mrs. Peyton,”the President had said. “ we will not discuss the subject any further.”

And so it had happened. She came home from marker, one day, with Juno before her carrying the basket (there was venison in the basket, that day, and celery, and Juno was cross and disrespectful), and she was very tired, and went into the study to lie down on the sofa, for the President was at lecture; and there, pinned upon the green sofacushion. — she had covered it since with black cut from one of the boy’s old coats, — there she had found his little note:—

DEAR MOTHER (it ran),Father has expelled me, and I hate him. Tell him I 've gone to the devil, and say yourprayers for me when you can conveniently. I ’m sorry to make you feel badly, but I won’t stand it.

Your loving son.

ANTHONY PEYTON.

“ I ’m sorry to disturb you,” repeated Mrs. Peyton, that January afternoon, when she had dusted the high-chair. “ Shall I put back the lexicons ? ”

“ Allow me,” said her husband courteously ; “ they are heavy for a lady.”

When the little chair was covered out of sight, both of the old people drew long breaths: they felt better. They had lived alone together, now, for twenty years. It sometimes did seem a pity that they could not give each other more comfort.

“ I wanted to say,” began the wife timidly, “I came in to tell you — that I — that I can’t forget him. for the life of me ! ”

“ Forget whom, Mrs. Peyton ? ” demanded the President, with a hot flush upon his withered cheek.

“Why, that man in the college ! ”

“ Oh! Yes. Ah. Indeed. Yes. To tell you the truth, my dear, I — I can’t myself. It was a very painful circumstance.”

He took a chair beside his wife, as he said this ; an action unusual with him. She drew her own a little nearer to him, involuntarily, perhaps. They looked at each other drearily. Her blue lips trembled. Suddenly her composure forsook her, and her uncontrolled voice broke into a heart-moving wail : —r

“ Oh, Mr. Peyton, Mr. Peyton! Don’t you scold me, for I can’t help it, I can’t, to save my soul! If you ’d only got the poor fellow — or just found out what he was crying for — or asked him to come over and get warm — or, or — or something ! For the Lord knows, Mr. Peyton, it’s what we’d go on our knees to beg anybody else to do for — to do by ” —

“MARIA!” cried President Peyton in a terrible voice. “ For God’s sake, hush ! ”

“ I won’t hush,” protested the old lady, with incredible courage. “ I won’t be still, Anthony ! You are my husband, and you were his father, and you shall listen to me ! My trouble is your trouble and your sorrow is my sorrow, and your ways ought to be my ways, or my ways ought to be yours, and they ’re not, and it is n’t right! I’m worn out with it — living so — never a word — not to speak his name, any more than if we’d never had a child — and he perhaps — Oh, I know he’s dead ! I know. I know he’s dead! I have n’t gone crazy — I’ve got it all clear in my head. I ’ve gone over it and over it nights. I would n’t have you think I think he’s living, Mr. Peyton. But if he hadn’t died—wandering about: in cold weather; crawling into damp churches; crying before people — but Tony never cried before anybody but me. . . . Oh, Mr. Peyton. Mr. Peyton! It is n’t for you and me ever to let a stranger go by without our gates. Supposing he were cold, or even hungry, Anthony — and homesick, and sorry, and felt sick — and somebody took him in. Oh, blessings on those people, wherever in this awful World they are, who took our darling in ! ”

“ Maria ! Maria ! ” repeated the President helplessly. He could not get beyond this unaccustomed word ; he dwelt upon it in a kind of delirium. He was extremely agitated, and looked about him pitifully, like a man whose mind was leaving him. “I will go and find him,” he said appealingly. “ Shall I go and find the man, Maria? Will that please you ? ”

“ You ’ll take cold,” sobbed the old lady, whose mind had flopped to the practical and inexorable surface of things the more heavily for its unusual imaginative flight. “ You know you did n’t put on your thick ones this morning.”

But the President had already left her. Before she could gather herself to withstand him he was well out into the storm and far down the solitary street; beating about Heaven knew whither, to find the Lord knew what.

Now the Northern boarder was an idle woman, and diverted by the trifles which lease the tenements of empty minds. She sat at her window a great deal of the time, many hours of the vacant day. Whatever went on in the streets of Chester — nothing ever had gone on in Chester, to be sure — Miss Sparker was foredoomed to see. Her large, calm, vague face, with its two little pats of gray curls on either side, gazed from the windows of the Presidential guest-room with patient and mysterious persistence.

Miss Sparker sat at her window that afternoon. She had sat there since half past two o’clock. An unfinished afghan lay across her knee. An uncut magazine lay across the afghan. It was now well on toward five, very cold without and growing dark. The snow had blown on, but the wind held. The streets of Chester were dim and dreary. Miss Sparker did not light her lamp, that she might the better watch the few disconsolate figures that struggled up and down the road. It was time to put fresh light-wood on the discouraged fire, but Miss Sparker had become so much occupied that she forgot the fire, and sat on rigidly, with her face pressed to the window-pane.

“ There ! ” cried Miss Sparker suddenly. “ He ‘s coming again ! ” She spoke so loud that Mrs. Peyton, drying her eyes in the study, heard the Northern boarder’s voice, and went into the hall to see what she wanted.

“ Mrs. Peyton ! ” called Miss Sparker, in evident excitement. " Are you there ? Come up here — quick ! ”

“Just look at that man ! ” she added eagerly, when the old lady panted up to ask if Abraham or Juno had neglected anything. " No - that man — there !

That man who’s been hanging about this house half the afternoon.”

“ I don’t see any man at all,” protested Mrs. Peyton, beginning to tremble. " I must get my spectacles.”

“ Why, yes, you do ! ” insisted the boarder, with explosive Northern energy. “ Who needs spectacles to see a man ? Over there—behind the live-oak—by the northeast corner of the fence! Them ! ... I told you so! That man has been haunting this place like a burglar for two hours. It has been very interesting. First he came up, and I thought he was going to ring the gatebell. Then he changed his mind, and walked away. Then he came back on the other side of the street, and kind of sidled over and hung his head. Then he cleared out again. By and by he came up, and held up his head, and sort of made for the house, as if he’d do it if he died for it. And then the President came out. So the fellow gave him a look and put for it, and hid behind the live-oak, and scooted down Chester Street, and I thought that was the end of him. But I thought I’d look a little longer, it was so interesting; and now there, Mrs. Peyton, as true as you live he’s going away ! He’s given it up, and he’s going away for good. He must be very wet. He seems cold, too. . . . Mrs. Peyton ! Mrs. Peyton ! ”

But Mrs. Peyton bad gone. With one little aged quaver of a cry, she had leaped down the stairs like a very young woman, dashed wide open the door, swung the hall light full in front of it, and, pausing only to pull her white knit shawl over her gray head, run straight out into the street.

There she stood uncertain, shaking like a person in a mortal chill. Out in the growing dark she could see nothing. The figure had vanished. She made her way along the fence and round behind the live-oak, where she spread out her searching hands. No one was there.

“ Mrs. Peyton, Mrs. Peyton, are you crazy ” called the Northern boarder. Her window went up with a bang.

Come in this minute, or you ‘II get your death ! The fellow is n’t worth it — at your age !”

“ Miss Sparker! ” cried Mrs. Peyton, with unexampled authoritativeness, and she cried at the top of her feeble voice. " I am the mistress of my own house, and you are my guest. I command you — I command you, for God’s sake, to keep still. . . . If there is anybody here, Miss Sparker, anybody, anybody who wants the shelter of my roof or the comfort of my home, he is welcome to it with all my heart and soul, and I ’ve come out to say so. Is there anybody here ? ” she added, in a soft and brooding tone.

No answer reached her ; and then, without another moment’s hesitation, she stretched out both her arms as far as she could into the dusk, and quietly said: —

“ Tony ? Are you there ? ”

“ Tony ! Tony, dear ! ”

“ Is it you, Tony ? Don’t be afraid, Tony. Your father sha’n’t find fault with you ... if you 'll only come home. It’s warm at home. It ’s very pleasant.”

“ If it is you, Tony,”she said, more gently still, " I should n’t think you ‘d keep your mother waiting .in the wet. like this. You were always careful of your mother — and good to her. Tony. I ’m afraid it is n’t he. I thought perhaps it was. Tony ? Mother’s boy ! Mother’s sonny boy ! Tony ! ”

Now, as she held herself thus, a piteous pleading figure in the dark, stretching out her empty arms, they closed suddenly, shaken and awed ; for a miserable man, ragged, weather-stained, and wet, had walked straight into them and put his face upon her neck.

She led him into the house without one word. She took his hand, and he let her, as if he had been a very little boy.

She led him into the bright hall, where the lamp was set, and closed the door, and took off his shabby overcoat and rusty hat and hung them on the hat-tree, as if they had hung there every night for all these twenty years.

“ I 'll have Juno dry these wet things, dear,”she said quietly. She took him into the study, quite naturally, and got him down before the fire ; threw on more light-wood, knelt upon the hearth, and lifted his ragged, soaking feet upon the fender.

“ We ’ll get off the shoes and stockings right away, Tony,” she said. " There, dear ! There ! Nice to be home again, is n’t it ? ”

They were sitting just so, when the old man came back, drenched and disconsolate. He pushed open the study door, with his hat in his hand.

“ Maria,” he began, " I could n’t find the man. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’ve been all over the village after him. But ” —

Then and there his eyes fell upon the shabby, middle-aged figure shrinking in his study-chair.

His wife held those soiled bare feet against her purple dress, and washed them as she knelt, and dried them. She kissed them, too, and laid her aged face upon them, and patted them with her thin hands.

“ Your father is here. Tony,” she said. " He is very glad to see you. He is standing right behind your chair. He wants to tell you how glad he is. Let him kiss you, Tony. It will comfort him.”

The two men obeyed her like two disembodied spirits who did not know what else to do but to obey the supreme moral power of the situation.

No one spoke till afterward, and then the mother said, quite easily, that she would go and see to Tony’s supper.

She ordered them after this like children, and neither man gainsaid her.

“ Anthony,” she said authoritatively, as soon as she could get the President into the hall alone, " do as I bid you, for once in all our lives. Don’t you ever — don’t you ever ask him a single question ! It does n’t make any difference what he ’s done. It is n’t any matter where he’s been. If he wants to tell, let him. If he does n’t, we ’ll never bother him — we 'll never ask him — never! ”

And they never did. They took him home and cherished him, and said no word, and let him keep his silence, as he chose. It was his own.

He slept that night in his own room and in his old bed. In the night he was heard pacing up and down, and his mother went to him, and remained with him for a time and quieted him.

He came to breakfast with them, next morning, by his own desire ; a timid, shaken man. abashed and strange. That was the Northern boarder’s hour. Then, indeed, she was the comfort of the family ; for she talked about the weather in New York till the subject glowed with vivacity, and took upon itself a supreme value never known in conversational history before. This made Miss Sparker very happy.

When breakfast was over and the President went to prayers, he was surprised, and perhaps embarrassed, to see that a silent figure followed him. It looked shabby, and bowed, and sad.

“ I thought I might help you ring the bell, father,” was all he said. It was the first time he had directly addressed his father. The old man answered, “ Thank you, my son,” and they went to college side by side. The storm was over, and the day had melted, fair and warm. The sun would have blinded them if the snow had not sunk away.

The younger man pulled at the bellrope sturdily, and Saint Basil’s voice rang far and wide: —

Stay — pray! Home — to-day. To God — we pray. Home — to stay !

Then they went into the chapel together, and Anthony Peyton took his old seat, and knelt upon the dusty prayercushion, and bowed his head upon his hands, while the President of Saint Basil’s read: —

“And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake ; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life. To thy glory of thy holy Name. Amen.”

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.