The Uncalled

Margaret, his wife. They could not forget that he was born and lived the first years of his life on the “mean” street, when it was a mean street; and when any obstinate old fossil was told of the youth’s promise, he would shake his head, as who should say, “What good can come out of that Nazareth?”

But the young man went his way and heeded them not. He knew what they were saying. He knew what they were thinking, even when they held his hand and smiled upon him, and it filled him with a spirit of distrust and resentment, though it put him bravely on his mettle. While he was a man, and in the main manly, sometimes he was roused to an anger almost childish; then, although he did not want to be a preacher at all, he wished and even prayed to become a great one, just to convince the old fools who shook their heads over him. To his ears had crept, as such tales will creep, some of the stories of his parents’ lives, and, while he pitied his mother, there was a great fierceness in his heart against his father.

But as in the old days when Miss Prime’s discipline would have turned all within him to hardness and bitterness Eliphalet Hodges stood between him and despair, so now in this crucial time Elizabeth was a softening influence in his life.

As the days came and went, he had continued to go to see her ever since the night when he had stood with her at the gate and felt the bitterness of her lack of sympathy; but all that had passed now, and unconsciously they had grown nearer to each other. There had been a tacit understanding between them until just a few weeks before. It was on a warm spring evening: he had just passed through her gate and started towards the house, when the opening chords of the piano struck on his ear through the opened window and arrested him. Elizabeth had a pleasant little voice, with a good deal of natural pathos in it. As the minister’s daughter, the scope of her songs was properly, according to Dexter, rather limited, but that evening she was singing softly to herself a love-song. The words were these:

If Death should claim me for her own today,
And softly I should falter from your side,
Oh, tell me, loved one, would my memory stay,
And would my image in your heart abide?
Or should I be as some forgotten dream,
That lives its little space, then fades entire?
Should Time send o’er you its relentless stream,
To cool your heart, and quench for aye love’s fire?

I would not for the world, love, give you pain,
Or ever compass what would cause you grief;
And oh, how well I know that tears are vain!
But love is sweet, my dear, and life is brief;
So, if some day before you I should go
Beyond the sound and sight of song and sea,
’T would give my spirit stronger wings to know
That you remembered still and wept for me.

She was alone in the room. The song was hardly finished when Brent stepped through the window and laid his hand over hers where they rested on the keys.

“Why do you sing like that, Elizabeth?” he said, tremulously.

She blushed and lowered her eyes beneath his gaze, as if she already knew the words that were on his lips, or feared that her soul lay too bare before him.

“Why do you think of death?” he asked again, imprisoning her hands.

“It was only my mood,” she faltered. “I was thinking, and I thought of the song, and I just sang it.”

“Were you thinking of anyone in particular, Lizzie?”

Her head drooped lower until her face was hidden, but she did not answer. A strange boldness had come to him. He went on: “I listened as you were singing, and it seemed as if every word was meant for me, Lizzie. It may sound foolish, but I⁠—I love you. Won’t you look at me and tell me that I am right in thinking you love me?” She half raised her face to his and murmured one word. In it were volumes; he bent down and kissed her. It was the first time he had ever kissed a girl. He did it almost fearfully. It was a kiss in which reverence struggled with passion.

“You are to be my little sweetheart now, and I am to be in your thoughts hereafter when you sing; only we don’t want any more such songs as this one. I don’t want to ‘remember still and weep for you,’ I want to have you always by me and work for you. Won’t you let me?”

Elizabeth found her tongue for a moment only, but that was enough for her lover. A happy light gleamed in his eyes: his face glowed. He was transfigured. Love does so much for a man.

From that time forward, when he was harassed by cares and trouble, he sought out Elizabeth, and, even though he could seldom tell her all that was in his heart, he found relief in her presence. He did not often speak of his trials to her, for, in spite of his love for her, he felt that she could not understand; but the pleasure he found in her company put sweetness into his life and made his burdens easier to bear.

Only once had a little shadow come between them, and the fact that so little a thing could have made a shadow shows in what a narrow, constrained atmosphere the two young people lived. Young Brent still had his half-day position in the store, and when the employees of a rival establishment challenged Daniels’s clerks to a game of baseball, he was duly chosen as one of the men to uphold the honour of their house upon the diamond.

The young man was not fossilised. He had strength and the capacity for enjoyment, so he accepted