The Measure of a Man

"You are lovelier than on your bridal morning, most sweet Jane," he whispered. "What have you been doing to yourself?"

"Well, John," she laughed, "Mrs. Tracy sent me word she was going to call between four and five to give me a few points about the girls' sewing-class, and I thought I would at the same time give her a few points about dressing herself. You know she is usually a fright."

"I thought—perhaps—you had dressed yourself to please me."

"You are quite right, John. Your pleasure is always the first motive for anything I do or wear."

The dinner hour passed to such pleasant platitudes as John's description of the manner in which Greenwood broke up the radical meeting in the market-place; but in both hearts and below all the sweet intercourse there lay a sense of tragedy that nothing could propitiate or avert.

The subject, however, was not named till they were quite alone and the very house in its intense stillness appeared to be waiting and listening for the words to be spoken. John was about to speak them, but Jane rose suddenly to her feet and looking steadily at him said,

"John, what did your mother say about me this afternoon? I expect you to tell me every word."

"She would not talk about you in any way. She said she had given you her whole mind straight to your face and would do no backbiting. That is, as you know, mother's way."

"Well, John, I would rather have the backbiting. I like to be treated decently to my face. People are welcome to say whatever they like when I am not present to be annoyed by their evil suspicions."

"She told me to ask you what was said and I trust you will tell me."

"I will. You remember that I had a whole society of women in the parlors and I could only give you a short farewell; but I was much grieved to send you away with such a brooding sorrow in your heart. The next day I was putting the house in order and writing to you and I did not go out. But on the morning of the third day I determined to visit my mother and to call at Hatton Hall as I returned home.

"I did not have a pleasant visit at Harlow. Since mother has begun to save money, she has lost all interest in any other subject. I told her how affairs were between us, and though she had hitherto been rabidly in favor of no children she appeared that morning indifferent to everything but the loss of a brood of young chickens which some animal had eaten or carried off. On this subject she was passionately in earnest; she knew to a farthing the amount of her loss, and when I persisted in telling her how you and I had parted, she only reiterated in a more angry manner her former directions and assurances on this subject.

"After a very spare dinner she was more attentive to my trouble. She said it had become a serious question in nearly all married lives—"

"I deny that, Jane. The large majority of women, I am sure, when they marry do not hold themselves outraged and degraded by the consequences, nor do they consider natural functions less honorable than social ones. Money can release a woman from work, but it cannot release her from any service of love."

"Men forget very easily the physical sufferings of wives. I love our little Martha as well as, perhaps better than, you do, but I remember clearly that for nearly a whole year I endured the solitude, sickness, and acute suffering of maternity. And whatever else you do, you will never persuade me to like having children. And pray what kind of children will women bear when they don't want them?"

"Well, Jane, your question would stagger me, if I did not know that Nature often skips a generation, and produces some older and finer type."

"Highly civilized men don't want children. Lady Harlow told me so, John."

"Well then, Jane, highly civilized men are in no danger. They need not fear what women can do to them. They will only find women pleasant to meet and easy to leave. I saw many, many women in the London parks and shopping district so perverted as to be on friendly terms with dogs, and in their homes, with cats and cockatoos, and who had no affection for children—women who could try to understand the screams of a parrot, the barking of a dog, but who would not tolerate the lovely patois of the nursery. Jane, the salvation of society depends on good mothers, and if women decline to be mothers at all, it is a shameful and dangerous situation."

"Oh, no! Why should I, for instance, undertake the reformation of society? I wish rather to educate and reform myself."

"All right! No education is too wide or too high for a mother. She has to educate heroes, saints, and good workers. There would have been no Gracchi, if there had been no Cornelia; no Samuel, if Hannah had not trained him. The profession of motherhood is woman's great natural office; no others can be named with it. The family must be put before everything else as a principle."

"John," she said coaxingly, "you are so far behind the times. The idea of 'home' is growing antiquated, and the institution of the family is passing out of date, my dear."

"You are mistaken, Jane. Mother and home are the soul of the world; they will never pass. I read the other day that Horace Walpole thanked God that he came into the world when there were still such terms as 'afternoon' and 'evening.' I hope I may say I came when the ideas of 'home' and children' were still the moving principles of human society; and I swear that I will do nothing to sink them below the verge. God forbid!"

"John, I am not concerned about principles. My care is not for anything but what concerns ourselves and our home. I tell you plainly I do not desire children. I will not have any more. I will do all I can to make you honorable and happy. I will order and see to your house, servants, and expenditures. I will love and cherish and bring up properly our dear child. I will make you socially respected. I will read or write, or play or sing to your desire. I will above all other things love and obey you. Is not this sufficient, John?"

"No, I want children. They were an understood consequence of our marriage. I feel ashamed among my fellows–"

"Yes, I suppose you would like to imitate Squire Atherton and take two pews in church for your sons and daughters and walk up the aisle every Sunday before them. It is comical to watch them. And poor Mrs. Atherton! Once she was the beauty of the West Riding! Now she is a faded, draggled skeleton, carelessly and unfashionably dressed, following meekly the long procession of her giggling girls and sulky boys. Upon my word, John, it is enough to cure any girl of the marriage fever to see Squire Atherton and his friend Ashby and Roper of Roper's Mills and Coates of Coates Mills and the like. And if it was an understood thing in our marriage that I should suffer and perhaps die in order that a new lot of cotton-spinners be born, why was it not so stated in the bond?"

"My dear Jane, the trial to which you propose to subject me, I cannot discuss tonight. You have said all I can bear at present. It has been a long, long, hard day. God help me! Good night!" Then he bowed his head and slowly left the room.

Jane was astonished, but his white face, the sad, yonderly look in his eyes, and the way in which he bit his lower lip went like a knife to her heart.

She sat still, speechless, motionless. She had not expected either his prompt denial of her position or its powerful effect on him physically. Never before had she seen John show any symptoms of illness, and his sudden collapse of bodily endurance, his evident suffering and deliberate walk frightened her. She feared he might have a fit and fall downstairs. Colonel Booth had found his death in that way when he heard of his son's accident on the railway. "All Yorkshiremen," she mused, "are so full-blooded and hot-blooded, everything that does not please them goes either to their brains or their hearts—and John has a heart." Yes, she acknowledged John had a heart, and then wondered again what made him so anxious to have children.

But with all her efforts to make a commonplace event of her husband's great sorrow, she did not succeed in stifling the outcry in her own heart. She whispered to it to "Be still!" She promised to make up for it, even to undo it, sometime; but the Accuser would not let her rest, and when exhaustion ended in sleep, chastised her with distracting, miserable dreams.

John walked slowly upstairs, but he had no thought of falling. He knew that something had happened to the Inner Man, and he wanted to steady and control him. It was not Jane's opinions; it was not public opinion, however widespread it might be. It was the blood of generations of good men and good women that roused in him a passionate protest against the destruction of their race. His private sense of injustice and disloyalty came later. Then the iron entered his soul and it was on this very bread of bitterness he had now to feed it; for on this bread only could he grow to the full stature of a man of God. His heart was bruised and torn, but his soul was unshaken, and the hidden power and strength of life revealed themselves.

First he threw all anger behind him. He thought of his wife with tenderness and pity only. He made himself recall her charm and her love. He decided that it would be better not to argue the fatal subject with her again. "No man can convince a woman," he thought. "She must be led to convince herself. I will trust her to God. He will send some teacher who cannot fail." Then he thought of the days of pleasantness they had passed together, and his heart felt as if it must break, while from behind his closed eyelids great tears rolled down his face.

This incident, though so natural, shocked him. He arrested such evident grief at once and very soon he stood up to pray. So prayed the gray fathers of the world, Terah and Abram, Lot and Jacob; and John stood at the open window with his troubled face lifted to the starlit sky. His soul was seeking earnestly that depth in our nature where the divine and human are one, for when the brain is stupefied by the inevitable and we know not what to abandon and what to defend, that is the sanctuary where we shall find help for every hour of need.

What words, wonderful and secret, were there spoken it is not well to inquire. They were for John's wounded heart alone, and though he came from that communion weeping, it was

—as a child that cries,
But crying, knows his Father near.

Nothing was different but he sat down hushed and strengthened, and in his heart and on his lips the most triumphant words a man or woman can utter, "Thy Will be done!" Then there was a great peace. He had cast all his sorrow upon God and left it with God. He did not bring it back with him as we are so ready to do. It was not that he comprehended any more clearly why this sorrow and trial had come to darken his happy home, but Oh, what matters comprehension when there is faith! John did not make inquiries; he knew by experience that there are spiritual conditions as real as physical facts. The shadows were all gone. Nothing was different,

—yet this much he knew,
His soul stirred in its chrysalis of clay,
A strange peace filled him like a cup; he grew
Better, wiser and gladder, on that day:
This dusty, worn-out world seemed made anew,
Because God's Way, had now become his way.

Then he fell into that sleep which God gives to his beloved, and when he awoke it was the dayshine. The light streamed in through the eastern windows, there was a robin singing on his window sill, and there was no trouble in his heart but what he could face.

His business was now urging him to be diligent, and his business—being that of so many others, he durst not neglect it. Jane he did not see. Her maid said she had been ill all night and had fallen asleep at the dawning, and John left her a written message and went earlier to the mill than usual. But Greenwood was there, busily examining bales of cotton and singing and scolding alternately as he worked. John joined him and they had a hard morning's work together, throughout which only one subject occupied both minds—the mill and cotton to feed its looms.

In the afternoon Greenwood took up the more human phase of the question. He told John that six of their unmarried men had gone to America. "They think mebbe they'll be a bit better off there, sir. I don't think they will."

"Not a bit."

"And while you were away Jeremiah Stokes left his loom forever. It didn't put him out any. It was a stormy night for the flitting—thunder and lightning and wind and rain—but he went smiling and whispering,

"There is a land of pure delight!"

"The woman, poor soul, had a harder journey."

"Who was she?"

"Susanna Dobson. You remember the little woman that came from Leeds?"

"Yes. Loom forty. I hope she has not left a large family."

"Nay, if there had been a big family, she would varry likely hev been at her loom today"—then there were a few softly spoken words, and John walked forward, but he could not forget how singularly the empty loom had appealed to him on that last morning he had walked through the mill with Greenwood. There are strange coincidences and links in events of which we know nothing at all—occult, untraceable altogether, material, yet having distinct influences not over matter but over some one mind or heart.