AN INTERRUPTED NIGHT

By

ISABELLA M. ALDEN ("Pansy")

Author of "The Fortunate Calamity," "Esther Reid," "Wise and Otherwise," "Three People," "Four Girls at Chautauqua," etc.

With a Foreword by GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PHILADELPHIA & LONDON 1 9 2 9

Copyright, 1929, by J. B. Lippincott Company Printed in the United States of America

FOREWORD

AS LONG ago as I can remember there was always a radiant being who was next to my mother and father in my heart, and who seemed to me to be a sort of a combination of fairy godmother, heroine, and saint. I thought her the most beautiful, wise, and wonderful person in my world, outside of my home. I treasured her smiles, copied her ways, and listened breathlessly to all she had to say, sitting at her feet worshipfully whenever she was near; ready to run any errand for her, no matter how far.

I measured other people by her principles and opinions, and always felt that her word was final. I am afraid I even corrected my beloved parents sometimes when they failed to state some principle or opinion as she had done.

When she came on a visit the house seemed glorified because of her presence; while she remained, life was one long holiday; when she went away it seemed as if a blight had fallen.

Her eyes were dark and had interesting twinkles in them that children loved; her hair was long and dark and very heavy, dressed in two wide braids that were wound round and round her lovely head in smooth coils, fitting close like a cap, but when it was unbraided and brushed out, it fell far below her knees and was like a garment folding her about. How I adored that hair and longed to have hair just like it! How I even used in secret to tie an old brown veil about my head and let it fall down my back, and try to see how it would feel to have hair like that.

She had delicate features and a wonderful smile. Nobody else in the world looked just as lovely as did she. But once I found a picture of Longfellow's Evangeline in a photograph album, in exquisite classic profile, and thought it was her likeness. She was like that—if you have that old faded photograph somewhere in an old album with quaint clasps. She was wonderful!

And she was young, gracious, and very good to be with.

This radiant creature was known to me by the name of "Auntie Belle," though my mother and my grandmother, called her "Isabella!" Just like that! Even sharply sometimes when they disagreed with her—"Isabella!" I wondered that they dared. I sometimes resented it.

Later I found that other people had still other names for her. To the congregation of which her husband was pastor she was known as "Mrs. Alden." It seemed to me too grownup a name for her and made her appear more stately and sedate than she really was. I remember resenting it that these strange people should seem to have rights in her. She was mine. What were they?

But when a little later my world grew larger, and knowledge increased, I found that this precious aunt of mine did not belong entirely to us as I had supposed. She had another world in which she moved and had her being when she went from us from time to time; or when at certain hours in the day she shut herself within a room that was sacredly known as a "study," and wrote for a long time, while we all tried to keep still; and in this other world of hers she was known as "Pansy." It was a world that loved and honored her, a world that gave her homage and flowers, and wrote her letters by the hundreds each week.

It was not long, too, before I had learned to preen myself like a young peacock because I "belonged" to her, and I am afraid I felt a superior pity and contempt for the thousands of other children who read her paper called "The Pansy" which she edited, but who did not "belong" to her. They could only write letters to her, while I could often be with her every day, sometimes for weeks, and could talk with her all I pleased.

As I grew still older and learned to read I devoured her stories chapter by chapter. Even sometimes page by page as they came hot from the typewriter; occasionally stealing in for an instant when she left the study, to snatch the latest page and see what happened next; or to accost her as her morning's work was done, with: "Oh, have you finished another chapter?"

And often the whole family would crowd around, leaving their work when the word went around that the last chapter was finished and it was going to be read aloud. And now we listened, breathless, as she read, and made her characters live before us. They were real people to us, as real as if they lived and breathed before us.

She was at the height of her popularity just then, and the letters that poured in at every mail were overwhelming. Asking for her autograph and her photograph, begging for pieces of her best dress to sew into patchwork; begging for advice how to become a great author; begging for advice on every possible subject, from how to get the right kind of a husband, to how to stop biting one's nails.

And she answered them all!

It was a Herculean task. Sometimes she let us help her when she was very much rushed, but usually she kept her touch on every letter that went out—and they were thousands.

Then there was the editorship of "The Pansy," a young people's paper which was responsible for more thousands of letters from the children who had joined the Pansy Society, and who wrote to her about their faults and how to give them up, "For Jesus' Sake," which was their motto.

Sometimes I look back on her long and busy life and marvel what she has accomplished.

She was a marvelous housekeeper, knowing every dainty detail of her home to perfection; able to cook anything in the world just a little better than anybody else—except my mother and her—; able to set fine stitches in patches and darning that were works of art; able to make even dishwashing fun!

Sometimes when we were all together for a season, visiting, or during the winters we spent in Florida and lived together, it fell to her part and mine to do the dinner dishes together every night, and we raced, she washing, I wiping and putting away; making a record each night and trying to beat it the next. And such good, good times as we had together, my beloved aunt and I, as we worked with a will and left the kitchen immaculate for the next morning. Oh, she was a wonderful housekeeper!

Yes, and a marvelous pastor's wife! She took the whole parish into her life and gave herself to the work. She was not a modern minister's wife, who only goes to teas and receptions, and plays bridge and attends to the social end of life, never bothering about the church. She was the real old-fashioned kind, who made calls on all the parishioners with her husband, knew every member intimately, cared for the sick, gathered the young people into her home making both a social and religious center for them with herself as leader and adviser; grew intimate with each one personally and led them to Christ; became their confidante; and loved them all as if they had been her brothers and sisters. She taught the Primary class—and incidentally the mothers of the Primary class. She quietly and unobtrusively managed the Missionary Society and the Ladies' Aid, not always as its executive officer, often keeping quite in the background. She became the dear friend of every woman in the church without making any of them jealous. She was beloved, almost adored of them all.

She was a tender, vigilant, wonderful mother, such a mother as few are privileged to have, giving without stint of her time and her strength and her love and her companionship.

Even while she was quite young, when I was a small child she began to go out into the world, to speak in public, to read her stories, to lead Primary Sunday School Conferences, and, as I grew older and developed a delight in drawing, she sometimes took me along to do her blackboard work for her, at which privilege I swelled with pride. She was much in demand in those days, and I remember the awe with which I regarded her as one of the great ones of the earth, who was paid large sums to tell other people the best ways of teaching, and to read her fascinating stories. How I loved her and hung upon her every word and smile. How proud I was to belong to her! And am still.

All these things she did, and yet wrote books! Stories out of real life, that struck home and showed us to ourselves as God saw us; that sent us to our knees to talk with Him.

With marvelous skill she searched hearts, especially of the easy-going Christian, whether minister or layman, young and old, and brought them awake and alive to their inconsistencies. She wove her stories around their common, everyday life, till all her characters became alive and real to those who read. They still live within our memories like people we have known intimately and dwelt among. Ester Reid and Julia Reid, the Four Girls at Chautauqua, Mrs. Solomon Smith. I almost expect to meet some of them in Heaven.

Perhaps she wrote more and better because she was doing so eagerly in every direction. Her public, her church, her family, her home.

I wish I might paint you a picture of that home as I knew it; of my home, its counterpart; of the years the two families spent much time together as one family. The days were one long dream. Hard work? Yes, but good fellowship. Everybody working together with a common aim, and joy in the work and the fellowship!

And the evenings! Oh, those evenings, the crown of the days, the time to which we all looked forward as to a goal when our work was done! Those evenings are bright spots in my youth. Especially the evenings of the years we all spent together in Florida, when the sun went down sharply and the light went velvet black at evening, until the great tropical moon came out. Those long evenings when the soft dense darkness shut us in to a cheerful supper table, and, after we had hustled through the dishes, we all gathered in the big sitting-room around the open fire for family worship. Yes, we were as old-fashioned as that! We had family worship both morning and evening. And I am not of those modern ones who tell such things to scoff at them and say how sick they got of religion because of it, and lay to that their present indifference to God and the Bible. I look back to those times as the most precious, the most beautiful, the most powerful influence that came into my life. I thank God for a family that worshipped Him morning

and evening and gave me an early knowledge and love for the Bible and the things of the Kingdom. Either my uncle or my father would conduct the little service, and often the one or the other of them would say to my dear aunt: "You read the chapter to-night, Belle," just because she was such a beautiful reader and we all loved to listen to her. At other times, we would recite verses, all around, a verse apiece, and then kneel in a circle for the prayer.

Oh, those prayers of the years that made my life inevitably acquainted with God, and the Lord Jesus, so that I never could be troubled by the doubts of to-day, because I know Him, "whom to know is life eternal." I cannot be thankful enough for those prayers, and that sacred time of worship every day that brought me into His very Presence.

And then the evening that followed!

We would all get our work, sewing or drawing, painting or knitting, or embroidery. My father, and my uncle would each take his particular chair in a shaded corner, and a book would be brought out. It was always a book that had been selected with great care, usually a story, now and again a great missionary book but more often a good novel. And this aunt would usually do the reading. Sometimes my aunt and my mother took turns reading. They both were remarkable readers, and knit close in spirit since early childhood. For two, sometimes three beautiful hours we reveled in the book. Reluctantly, when the word went forth that it was time to stop, we folded up our work and went to bed—sometimes pleading for just another chapter—now and then actually staying up breathless till all hours to finish some great climax. We always went off to rest with a bright eagerness for the morrow and the evening, and the story again—or a new one if we had finished one.

So we read the works of George Macdonald—we loved the Scotch, and our readers knew how to put the burr of the dialect upon their tongues—Ian Maclaren, Barrie—much of Dickens, some of Scott, Björnson, William Dean Howells, Jean Ingelow's few matchless novels, Frank Stockton, with his charming absurdities and a host of other writers whose stories seem to have become submerged and forgotten in this day of modern literature. But I look back to those stories as my meeting time with the great of the earth. How real the Bonnie Brier Bush and all its quaint true people were! How tender and strong was the Marquis of Lossie and Sir Gibbie! How I thrilled over the "Men of the Moss Hags," "Ben Hur," "The Virginian," "Jane Eyre." I mention them at random. It is my ambition to some day possess in a special set of shelves, every one of those wonderful stories that thrilled me so when I was young. Oh, don't try to tell me I would not care for them now! I do. They were real books, books that do not change because they told of human life as it

is really lived in hearts. They may need to be furnished with a few electric lights and radios and airplanes and automobiles to make them up-to-date, but otherwise you will not find them out of tune with life as it is to-day, except that they are perhaps too clean and wholesome to be natural to-day.

There were frequent times when this beloved aunt, around whom we all seemed in those days to center, was called away to deliver an address, or to conduct a conference, or to furnish an evening's entertainment in some distant place; but when she returned from one of these trips we all gathered around to hear her tell her experiences, for we were always sure of stories. She saw everything, and she knew how to tell with glowing words about the days she had been away so that she lived them over again for us. It was almost better than if we had been along because she knew how to bring out the touch of pathos or beauty or fun, and her characters were all portraits. It listened like a book.

It was on one of these occasions that she told on her return from a trip, the story of this book. I remember it as if it were but yesterday, though the whole thing happened many years ago, for modern as this story is, the main part of it happened, really happened, to her personal knowledge, over thirty-five years ago.

It was told to her by a woman who was so well-known all over our country at that time that if I were to name her you could not help but remember how active she was in Woman's Suffrage and W. C. T. U. work, besides several other notable reforms and organizations. She was a brilliant public speaker, much in demand, and a great worker for young girls. She recounted this story to my aunt as a recent personal experience, and gave her permission to use it in a story (after a suitable interval of time of course, and without the original names.)

The story was written in brief form and appeared several years after its happening in a periodical as a short serial; but it is now appearing in book form for the first time. The dear author, after an interval of several years, during which on account of ill health and a feeling that her work was done, has taken up her pen once more. But at what odds! She is now eighty-seven years old and confined to her bed, the result of a fall and a broken hip. In the intervals of pain she has been elaborating and preparing this story for book form.

And now, because the manuscript was to have been in the hands of the publisher long ago, and because pain has held her in its grip for an unusually long period of weeks lately, leaving her unfit for work for the present, she has trusted me with the task of putting it into final shape. This story seems to me peculiarly fitting as a message for this present time.

I approach the work with a kind of awe upon me that I should be working on her story!

If, long ago in my childhood, it had been told me that I should ever be counted worthy to do this, I would not have believed it. Before her I shall always feel like the little worshipful child I used to be.

I recall a Christmas long ago when I was just beginning to write scraps of stories myself, with no thought of ever amounting to anything as a writer. Her gift to me that year was a thousand sheets of typewriter paper; and in a sweet little note that accompanied it she wished me success and bade me turn those thousand sheets of paper into as many dollars.

It was my first real encouragement. The first hint that anybody thought I ever could write, and I laughed aloud at the utter impossibility of its ever coming true. But I feel that my first inspiration for story-telling came from her, and from reading her books in which as a child I fairly steeped myself.

So I beg the leniency of her readers of to-day as I approach the task that is set before me. I know I shall have hers. My one hope is that I shall not in any way mar the message of this true and thrilling tale, that certainly is needed in this day and generation. I trust that she may soon be well enough to write once more, herself, another tale as good if not better.

Let me tell you a secret. I happen to know that this wonderful little brave aunt of mine is at work on the story of her younger years. She calls it "Yesterdays." I have had the pleasure of reading a few of the earlier chapters where she tells of her childhood and her young womanhood; the quaint things that happened to her; the dear home in which she lived; the great people of other days whom she knew intimately and with whom she grew up.

I pray she may be spared with strength to finish her story of her "Yesterdays," and many more beside.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

AN INTERRUPTED NIGHT

CHAPTER I

THE train had limped along all the afternoon with engine trouble, and now at evening the passengers learned that they were two hours behind schedule and still losing time.

Mrs. Dunlap put away her writing materials and sat up with a sigh to look about her. It began to look as if she might be going to miss her connections unless relief from this state of things came soon.

She had just finished correcting the last galley of her new book which was to come out that fall; she had gone over the notes for her new addresses she was on her way to make at several appointed places; she had finished reading her magazine from cover to cover; she had even written a couple of letters to friends; and here she was with time on her hands! An almost unheard of thing for this busy woman. Not many hours of leisure came her way, and when one did, it filled her almost with dismay at the enforced waste of time.

Off in the west a thread of crimson still lingered on the horizon, but it soon faded into a line of pale amber and then disappeared. The lights of the train blared out and shut the travelers into the narrow confines of the car, and Mary Dunlap leaned back in her seat and fell to studying her fellow passengers.

The usual mother with many children who had been the usual noisy nuisance all the afternoon, had subsided into quiet for the time being; the mother and the littlest baby being asleep, the rest occupied with a picture book some thoughtful traveler had donated.

The personnel of the car had changed somewhat during the afternoon. Several people had got out at the stations along the way and others had come in. Among the latter were the two people who occupied the seat directly in front of Mary Dunlap, and before she realized it, she was thoroughly absorbed in studying them, her interest caught by the singularly pure and lovely outline of the young woman's face, in profile.