The Story of Waitstill Baxter. Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith
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hours of complete silence even more than her periods of reminiscence.
“He spoke as if the Lord of Hosts had given him inspiration; as if the angels were pouring words into his mouth just for him to utter,” replied Mrs. Boynton. “Your father was spell-bound, and I only less so. When he ceased speaking, the child’s mother crossed the room, and swaying to and fro, fell at his feet, sobbing and wailing and imploring God to forgive her sins. They carried her upstairs, and when we looked about after the confusion and excitement the stranger had vanished. But we found him again! As Elder Cochrane said: ‘The prophet of the Lord can never be hid; no darkness is thick enough to cover him!’ There was a six weeks’ revival meeting in North Saco where three hundred souls were converted, and your father and I were among them. We had fancied ourselves true believers for years, but Jacob Cochrane unstopped our ears so that we could hear the truths revealed to him by the Almighty!—It was all so simple and easy at the beginning, but it grew hard and grievous afterward; hard to keep the path, I mean. I never quite knew whether God was angry with me for backsliding at the end, but I could not always accept the revelations that Elder Cochrane and your father had!”
Lois Boynton’s hands were now quietly folded over the knitting that lay forgotten in her lap, but her low, thrilling voice had a note in it that did not belong wholly to earth.
There was a long silence; one of many long silences at the Boynton fireside, broken only by the ticking of the clock, the purring of the cat, and the clicking of Mrs. Boynton’s needles, as, her paroxysm of reminiscence over, she knitted ceaselessly, with her eyes on the window or the door.
“It’s about time for Rod to be coming back, isn’t it?” asked Ivory.
“He ought to be here soon, but perhaps he is gone for good; it may be that he thinks he has made us a long enough visit. I don’t know whether your father will like the boy when he comes home. He never did fancy company in the house.”
Ivory looked up in astonishment from his Greek grammar. This was an entirely new turn of his mother’s mind. Often when she was more than usually confused he would try to clear the cobwebs from her brain by gently questioning her until she brought herself back to a clearer understanding of her own thought. Thus far her vagaries had never made her unjust to any human creature; she was uniformly sweet and gentle in speech and demeanor.
“Why do you talk of Rod’s visiting us when he is one of the family?” Ivory asked quietly.
“Is he one of the family? I didn’t know it,” replied his mother absently.
“Look at me, mother, straight in the eye; that’s right: now listen, dear, to what I say.”
Mrs. Boynton’s hair that had been in her youth like an aureole of corn-silk was now a strange yellow-white, and her blue eyes looked out from her pale face with a helpless appeal.
“You and I were living alone here after father went away,” Ivory began. “I was a little boy, you know. You and father had saved something, there was the farm, you worked like a slave, I helped, and we lived, somehow, do you remember?”
“I do, indeed! It was cold and the neighbors were cruel. Jacob Cochrane had gone away and his disciples were not always true to him. When the magnetism of his presence was withdrawn, they could not follow all his revelations, and they forgot how he had awakened their spiritual life at the first of his preaching. Your father was always a stanch believer, but when he started on his mission and went to Parsonsfield to help Elder Cochrane in his meetings, the neighbors began to criticize him. They doubted him. You were too young to realize it, but I did, and it almost broke my heart.”
“I was nearly twelve years old; do you think I escaped all the gossip, mother?”
“You never spoke of it to me, Ivory.”
“No, there is much that I never spoke of to you, mother, but sometime when you grow stronger and your memory is better we will talk together.—Do you remember the winter, long after father went away, that Parson Lane sent me to Fairfield Academy to get enough Greek and Latin to make me a schoolmaster?”
“Yes,” she answered uncertainly.
“Don’t you remember I got a free ride down-river one Friday and came home for Sunday, just to surprise you? And when I got here I found you ill in bed, with Mrs. Mason and Dr. Perry taking care of you. You could not speak, you were so ill, but they told me you had been up in New Hampshire to see your sister, that she had died, and that you had brought back her boy, who was only four years old. That was Rod. I took him into bed with me that night, poor, homesick little fellow, and, as you know, mother, he’s never left us since.”
“I didn’t remember I had a sister. Is she dead, Ivory?” asked Mrs. Boynton vaguely.
“If she were not dead, do you suppose you would have kept Rodman with us when we hadn’t bread enough for our own two mouths, mother?” questioned Ivory patiently.
“No, of course not. I can’t think how I can be so forgetful. It’s worse sometimes than others. It ‘s worse to-day because I knew the Mayflowers were blooming and that reminded me it was time for your father to come home; you must forgive me, dear, and will you excuse me if I sit in the kitchen awhile? The window by the side door looks out towards the road, and if I put a candle on the sill it shines quite a distance. The lane is such a long one, and your father was always a sad stumbler in the dark! I shouldn’t like him to think I wasn’t looking for him when he’s been gone since January.”
Ivory’s pipe went out, and his book slipped from his knee unnoticed.
His mother was more confused than usual, but she always was when spring came to remind her of her husband’s promise. Somehow, well used as he was to her mental wanderings, they made him uneasy to-night. His father had left home on a fancied mission, a duty he believed to be a revelation given by God through Jacob Cochrane. The farm did not miss him much at first, Ivory reflected bitterly, for since his fanatical espousal of Cochranism his father’s interest in such mundane matters as household expenses had diminished month by month until they had no meaning for him at all. Letters to wife and boy had come at first, but after six months—during which he had written from many places, continually deferring the date of his return-they had ceased altogether. The rest was silence. Rumors of his presence here or there came from time to time, but though Parson Lane and Dr. Perry did their best, none of them were ever substantiated.
Where had those years of wandering been passed, and had they all been given even to an imaginary and fantastic service of God? Was his father dead? If he were alive, what could keep him from writing? Nothing but a very strong reason, or a very wrong one, so his son thought, at times.
Since Ivory had grown to man’s estate, he understood that in the later days of Cochrane’s preaching, his “visions,” “inspirations,” and “revelations” concerning the marriage bond were a trifle startling from the old-fashioned, orthodox point of view. His most advanced disciples were to hold themselves in readiness to renounce their former vows and seek “spiritual consorts,” sometimes according to his advice, sometimes as their inclinations prompted.
Had Aaron Boynton forsaken, willingly, the wife of his youth, the mother of his boy? If so, he must have realized to what straits he was subjecting them. Ivory had not forgotten those first few years of grinding poverty, anxiety, and suspense. His mother’s mind had stood the strain bravely, but it gave way at last; not, however, until that fatal winter journey to New Hampshire, when cold, exposure, and fatigue did their worst for her weak body. Religious enthusiast, exalted and impressionable, a natural mystic, she had probably always been, far more so in temperament, indeed, than her husband; but although she left home on that journey a frail and heartsick woman, she returned a different creature altogether, blurred and confused in mind, with clouded memory and irrational fancies.
She must have given up hope, just then, Ivory thought, and her love was so deep that when it was uprooted the soil came with it. Now hope had returned because the cruel memory had faded altogether. She sat by the kitchen window in gentle expectation, watching, always watching.
And this is the way many of Ivory Boynton’s evenings were spent, while the heart of him, the five-and-twenty-year-old heart of him, was