Atlantic Monthly by - (the reading strategies book .txt) 📖

live! I couldn’t make neither head nor tail to it.” And she gathered up her Sunday things, which she had taken off in the parlour, with an air of offended piety that occasioned a general smile. Pendlam smiled with the rest.

“Well, Horatio, you next,—what did you think of my sermon?”

“I liked it.”

“Good! but give your reason.”

“Because you said nothing about the theatre. I was mortally afraid you would; for, d’ye see, you had a distinguished theatrical personage in your audience.”

“Indeed! I was not aware; who?”

“Miss Kellerton herself!”

“Is it possible?” Pendlam looked surprised, Susan interested, Mrs. D–- (with her Sunday things on her arm) amazed.

“She told me she was going to hear you, to show you that she could be quite as tolerant as yourself. She expects you to return the compliment, and go to her benefit.”

Poor Pendlam hardly knew what to say in his confusion. Susan spoke up,—

“Why didn’t you point her out to me? I have such a curiosity to see her.”

“It was to her I took off my hat, coming away from the church door.”

“To her!” broke forth Mrs. D–-, “to an actress! Horatio, I’m ashamed of you. You wouldn’t have caught me walking with you, if I had known!” She shook her Sunday things indignantly; and there was another general smile, as she took these representatives of her piety abruptly out of the room.

“Ail this is very interesting,” said Pendlam, recovering his equanimity. “I wonder what sort of a sermon I shall preach next Sabbath?”

We were invited to stay to luncheon. Horatio consented; but I declined, and took my leave, much to the gratification of Susan’s mother, no doubt.

Some months passed before I again saw Pendlam. Our next meeting was in the street. I observed him coming towards me with the peculiarly abstracted and intense expression which his face assumed under excitement.

“What now?” I asked.

“A little difficulty with my people,” he said, with a forced smile. “I have just come from a church meeting; it was terribly hot there!”

“No serious trouble, I hope?”

“O, no,—only, you will hardly be surprised to hear, my preaching has been somewhat too liberal for them.”

“Why, sir,” I cried, “if I remember right, you were for restoring the more rigorous and stringent forms of religion; drawing the rein and tightening the girth.”

“Most certainly! and do you not see? Step by step I worked back to the primitive and central principle, the soul of all religion. You know what that is. It is Love! This I have preached,” said Pendlam, his features suffused, his eyes glistening bright; “and this I shall continue to preach, while life lasts. Persecution cannot influence me. I know my duty, and I shall perform it, at all risks. You see where I am,” added Pendlam.

I was thrilled to admiration by his enthusiasm and heroic resolution. At the same time I saw him in that transitional state which is so full of peril to persons of certain temperaments, escaping into too sudden freedom and light from the walls of a narrow and gloomy belief; and I could not but smile, with mingled amusement and commiseration, at his singular step-by-step processes.

It was during the following autumn that Horatio and I one day looked in upon a reform meeting, held at the Melodeon. The audience was thin, the speakers numerous. The platform was crowded with male and female reformers, among whom I recognized our clerical friend Pendlam. A celebrated female orator sat down, and Pendlam stood up. The audience cheered a little; the platform cheered a good deal. He at first stammered and hesitated, not from want of thoughts, but from their pressure and multitude. They soon fused, however, and poured forth streams of fire, rather largely mixed with smoke.

“There is no other religion but Love,” declared the speaker. “And where Love is, there is Religion; in the Mohammedan, in the Mormon, in the savage,—I care not for names. And where Love is not, there Religion is not, though her image be preserved and clothed in all Christian forms. Theology and sects fall away from it; it is alone vital; it is eternal, it is unitary, it is God. Here I proclaim it to the world; here I announce to you and to all where I stand.”

This speech was reported along with others in the morning papers. It was not long before Pendlam had more church business to perplex him; and he soon withdrew from the pastorship of his troublesome flock. A number of these went with him; there was a schism in the church; and the following spring, a new society was formed, which gave Pendlam a call.

I also gave him a call, at his house. Changes had taken place since my last visit. I was shocked at Susan’s altered appearance. She had had an infant, and untold trouble along with it. The bloom of the bride was gone, and the finer permeating beauty of the happy mother had failed to replace it. Mrs. D–- was with her. This excellent lady received me with surprising politeness, and brought out the little Pendlam for my inspection.

“Is it possible, Susan, that this living, breathing, dimpled little wonder is yours?”

“I suppose it is,” said the blushing Susan.

“Where is its father?” I inquired, for John Henry had not yet appeared.

“It hasn’t got any father!” ejaculated Mrs. D–-, with grim sarcasm. “A man can’t be a reform-preacher, and a father too. His sermons, lectures, and conventions are of too much importance for him even to think of his wife and child.”

I looked to see poor Susan writhe with pain under these harsh words. But she merely heaved a sigh, and let fall a tear on the babe, which she had taken from its grandmother’s arms.

“I will speak to Mr. Pendlam,” she said, as she hastily left the room.

“I am glad you have come,” said Mrs. D–-, bitterly, seating herself on the sofa. “I am glad to see any person enter this house, who isn’t all eaten up with the evils of society. I have heard about the evils of society till I’m heartily sick of them. People that come to see Pendlam don’t generally talk about anything else. It’s the ruin of him, as I tell Susan; I never in this world can be reconciled to his leaving his church.”

Mrs. D–- became confidential, and abused her daughter’s husband in a style which did not argue much for the peace of his household during that energetic lady’s visits. Her indignation against him had quite swallowed up her old cherished resentment against myself. She soon went so far as to insinuate a regret that Susan had not married a man of solid sense and some mental ballast, (meaning me,) instead of a hotheaded reformer.

Susan reentered. “Mr. Pendlam is very busy; but he will come down presently.”

She sighed, and took a seat. Mrs. D–- continued her abuse of her son-in-law, in her daughter’s presence,—which I thought in very bad taste, to say the least. Susan uttered not one word in her husband’s defence, but simply sat and sighed. I defended and praised him; for which act of friendship I earned not one look of gratitude from her, and only contempt and sneers from her mother.

I was glad when Pendlam appeared. He was looking care-worn and toil-worn; his expression had grown more intense than ever. His face lighted up a little at sight of me; but it was some minutes before his mind seemed capable of extricating itself from its abstractions, and meeting me upon social grounds.

“You will excuse me. I am heartily rejoiced to see you. I was hard at work. Just pass your hand over my forehead; it will relieve the pressure upon my brain. My mission is now fully revealed to me; everything is reform, reform. I have been led here step by step. Your magnetism is very soothing. The old crumbling walls of creeds and conventionalities are to be swept away, and their foundations subjected to the plough and the harrow. I am in the harness. I have no motive for concealment; I tell you frankly where I stand,” said Pendlam. Another long sigh from Susan. Mrs. D–- tossed her contemptuous chin, and expressed scorn in divers significant ways.

“I should want to conceal a little, if I was in your place,” she remarked, cuttingly.

“Truth is truth; it can harm only those who are in error,” said Pendlam.

“It certainly hasn’t done you a very great amount of good.” Another toss of the contemptuous chin.

“On the contrary, it has done me incalculable good,” answered the son-in-law, with a smile.

“Oh! you consider it good, then, to be cut off from the church,—to give up a good situation and sure salary,—to lose the respect of everybody whose respect is worth having!”

“If I have done all this for the truth’s sake, it is good,”—the reformer’s face kindled with enthusiasm,—“and I for one find it good.”

“Perhaps you do, but I know who don’t. I believe reform, like charity, begins at home. You talk of your duty to humanity; I believe the first duty is to one’s own family. I don’t think much of that man’s mission to the world, who forgets his own wife and child.”

Horatio had previously told me, what I could hardly believe, that Mrs. D–- was accustomed to abuse her son-in-law in this way, in the presence of strangers. Susan did nothing but sigh. Pendlam smiled, as if he was used to it.

“I need a little such invective occasionally, to refresh my zeal,” he said, with provoking meekness. “It shows me where I am. It assures me that I am fighting the good fight. I do not blame my good mother; she is worldly-minded, and sees things from her stand-point. Neither she nor Susan can perceive anything but loss and disgrace, in the change from the handsome, fashionable church, where I used to preach, to the naked hall where our new society holds its meetings. Very natural for people upon their plane. But I view things from another stand-point, to which I have been led step by step; and I have simply to be true to my own revealed mission.”

“Mission! revealed! step by step! planes and stand-points!” exclaimed Mrs. D–-, rising in great disgust. “For my part, I believe in common sense; I don’t know any other plane or stand-point, and I don’t believe Providence ever intended we should have any other. There, you have my opinion!” And with a violent gesture, as if throwing her opinion from her, and shutting our little party into the room with that formidable object, she swept out, slammed the door after her, and rustled remorselessly up stairs.

“Persons upon her plane are very much to be pitied,” observed Pendlam, quietly.

Susan began to cry, and the scene became so painful to me, that I made haste to shake hands with the ill-mated couple, say a few soothing words, and take leave of them. From that time, I saw Pendlam occasionally, but avoided the house. It was a peculiarity of his impressible nature, to imbibe, unconsciously to himself, the sentiments of powerful persons with whom he came in contact, retain and revolve them in his intellect, until they reappeared as his own original convictions. He now went with reformers, and carried with him their atmosphere. To hear him talk, you would have thought universal reorganization at hand. I said I avoided the house; but one day Horatio came to me with a doleful face, backing a petition that I would go and talk with Susan.

“There has been an explosion! The old woman is gone; she has declared open, internecine war against Pendlam.”

“I thought she had declared that some time ago, good Horatio!”

“Ah, but now she is trying to get his wife