● ● ● gratitude for what she had done for Ellen did not extend to their accepting her as the bearer of a new gospel. In the first flood of wonderment at being well again, the girl herself willingly accompanied her aunt back to Taunton, but that was soon enough to be reversed.
The family presumably paid Ellen’s expenses, but Mrs. Patterson’s financial state was at its lowest. In a kindly letter a day or two after her return Mrs. Ellis of Swampscott sent her a gift of two dollars and offered to buy some of the crockery she had left with the Newhalls if it would help her. She also issued an invitation to her to come and stop with them for a while and have a rest, but Mrs. Patterson was unable to accept because she lacked the train fare.81
Moreover, everything was going wrong in the Crafts household. Here, as at Tilton, provincial conservatism and the demands of a new prophetic force were in conflict. From the outset Mrs. Crafts, an uneducated and commonplace young woman, had viewed with unease the potential threat to the small certainties of her life. Like her husband, she had been a spiritualist; but unlike her husband, she was unwilling to give up the neighborly gossip of table-rapping spirits. Nor can she have been very happy about the financially precarious career on which Crafts had embarked; she belonged to the workaday world that believes a cobbler should stick to his last.
Ellen’s arrival seems to have precipitated a crisis. The young lady, a typical member of the Baker “aristocracy” of Sanbornton Bridge, doubtless felt a certain dismay at the household. Her aunt wished her to have continued treatments from Crafts in order to establish her health on a firm basis and then worried about the influence he was exerting over her. Mrs. Patterson wrote Martha Pilsbury one of those “distracted” letters of which Abigail Tilton had complained, and Ellen shortly afterwards returned to Sanbornton, repudiating once and for all her aunt, her healing, and the whole episode.82
At that point the Taunton venture was abandoned. Crafts and his wife returned to East Stoughton sometime in August, and Mrs. Patterson went to the Winslows in Lynn. It seemed a hapless ending to a brave beginning; yet it taught the teacher that while people were ● ● ●
81 Mary Baker Patterson to Martha Baker Pilsbury, July 1867, L11154, MBEL.
82 Mary Baker Patterson to Martha Baker Pilsbury, July 1867, L11154, MBEL.