University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.
BREAKING THE NEWS.

Dominie Van Zandt was a man whose doctrine
was as hard as the nether millstone, and whose heart
was as soft as the lily-cup that floats in the sun just
above the mill-wheel, and knows nothing about the
grinding process that is going on below.

As the dominie drove past the tavern in his `shay,'
steeling himself, as he best could, with the thought of
sin, judgment, and endless perdition, he might have been
mistaken for the awful and willing messenger of doom.
As he stood at the cottage door, and knocked, his pit-a-pit
touch sounded as if he feared rousing the inmates
rather than as if he craved admittance.

Angie opened the door. He thanked her by laying
his hand kindly on her head. A gentle benediction —
her head too! — a spot on which thunderbolts of blame
and retribution ought rather to fall! and he knew it.
What business had he to leave a blessing there instead?

How it awed her — poor girl! and added to her fright
at seeing the dominie.

He passed into the kitchen. The two old women

were sitting opposite each other at the two sides of the
fireplace. He saluted them with his old-fashioned
courtesy, and took a chair, which Angie placed for him
between them.

Then he coughed, — coughed badly; it was severe
weather for old men, even robust old men, like him;
why shouldn't he cough, and blow his nose, and
stammer, and cough again?

Margery sat staring at him like one petrified. Hannah's
head was obstinately turned away. Each believed
herself the object of his visit. Margery felt as the
victim of some secret and gnawing cancer might feel,
who sees in every new comer the expected surgeon, and
suspects that he has a sharp knife in his pocket. Hanhah
had already known something of his practice, for he
had made one professional visit to the cottage since
Baultie's death, and finding her in a vindictive state of
mind, had exercised his gifts in her behalf by warning
her of a wrath more mighty than her own, of which he
assured her she had plainly been made the subject in the
late signal event in her household — a style of reasoning
which had only served to harden her the more. This
wrath which he spoke of was the same with which
she had threatened Polly Stein; but it was quite another
thing to have the arm of terror raised against herself,
so that she now turned her back upon him, offended and
obdurate. Neither of these old women knew how tender
the dominie could be when he felt himself off duty.

“My visit to-day is to you, ma'am,” were his opening

words, addressed to Margery. Hannah edged round in
her chair at this; Margery clung to the arms of hers.

“My errand is a painful one, ma'am, very; your son
George —” here he faltered. Hannah bent forward
eagerly, Margery only stared with glassy eyes — “has
met with a sad fate.”

At this there was a bound from the further side of the
kitchen, and two young, strong arms were flung round
Margery, who involuntarily relaxed her hold upon the
arms of her chair, and accepted the living support thus
afforded her. Standing with George's mother pressed to
her bosom, her form branced up to meet the shock, and a
dilated eye that for the moment put fate at defiance,
Angie awaited the next word.

“Once have I spoken, twice, also, hast thou heard it,”
said the minister, “that power belongeth unto God.
Truly the Lord's hand is heavy upon this house. The
voice of his warning has but yesterday been heard on the
mountain-top,” — and he waved his hand solemnly in the
direction of Hannah; “and now,” fixing his eye sympathetically
on Margery; “the sea has given up its dead.
Your son's been missing, I hear, for this ten days, ma'am.
Still I am afraid it will be a great shock, when I tell you
that they've found —” here the minister faltered.

“Found what?” screamed Hannah, whose ear had
caught her nephew's name, and an allusion to some
discovery, and whose quick eye saw that the minister
hesitated, and that her sister-in-law had no courage to
bid him proceed.

“His body!” — spoken impressively, and in a tone
meant for deaf as well as hearing ears.

As he uttered the fatal words, — before he uttered
them even — when they had merely framed themselves
visibly on his lips, — Angie's arms were loosened from
their embrace of Margery; all the fibres of her body,
so strained an instant before, suddenly slackened, and as
if smitten by the thunderbolt, whose stroke she was
deemed to merit, she sank down, down to the very floor,
giving utterance to no sound — simply sliding lower and
lower, until her knees touched the hearth at Margery's
feet. She east one look upward at the agonized features
of the mother, met an answering look, which none but
she could understand, then buried her face in the old
woman's lap, and two withered hands were crossed on
the bowed head.

And so they met the shock. In a silence, awful, stony,
unbroken by word or cry, they sustained themselves
under this new crisis — sustained each other, too; for
the young arms that infolded the old frame, and would
have shielded it if they could, and the old hands that
dropped protectingly on the young head, were the seals
to a league of mutual support and faith as solemn as if
confirmed by an oath.

And that was all. They asked no questions. They
had no need to ask any; they saw it all; — the desperation,
the guilt, the flight, the remorse, the madness, the
suicide. All but the last act of the drama had been lived
over by them already. Hearts that had almost ceased

to beat at the awful dread that he might some day venture
to return; souls that had trembled at their own
vital union with his soul, wandering, living, and yet lost;
eyes that had looked, night and day, on a vision of prisons,
scaffolds, and his strangled corpse; ears that had
rung with the world's hiss, and his despairing cry, —
what was there left that could strike horror into such?
Nothing but the fulfilment of their worst fears. Certainly
not the cold, watery grave with its secrecy, its
silence, and its long repose.

True, there was the added crime of self-destruction.
But what of that? Justice had condemned him already.
the strictest creed could do no more, they thought; or
rather, did they think at all? could they? These two
poor women had not the moral courage to balance
against the horrors of discovery the ray of hope life
might yet offer to his soul, and so bargain for shame
that repentance might ensue. They had not logic
enough to calculate thus, nor Christian faith and fortitude
enough bravely to meet and bear God's will in any
case. In this moment of dread they could only take
counsel of their fears, and with a sense of relief mingling
with their agony, forget to re-condemn the criminal,
while assenting to the whisper of their timid hearts,
“better death than betrayal.”

So they bore up wonderfully, as people say. Hannah
Rawle and the dominie never said so, though; not, at least,
in any congratulatory sense. They wondered, nevertheless,
each in a characteristic way, and came to wholly
diverse conclusions, satisfactory to neither.

“Murder!” was the emphatic asseveration with
which Hannah atoned for every body's else silence after
the first announcement.

The dominie shook his head, at the same time watching
Margery, not Hannah, for the effect of his words.

“Not murder? Accident, then! Good Lud! how did
it happen?”

Again the dominie shook his head, still anxiously
measuring with his eye the mother's power of endurance,
as well as that of Angie, who had risen and stood
beside Margery, rigid and calm. Hannah, also, shot a
glance at them, an indignant glance. “Are those women
made of stone?” she thought. “Don't they care what's
become of the boy? Has nobody but me any interest in
this matter?” and she proceeded with her questioning.

And so, by a few vehement queries, she extracted all
that the minister knew, stabbing Margery and Angie
with her eyes between whiles, and condemning them for
what she thought their unnatural want of feeling.

Want of feeling! As if Hannah knew what torture
may precede palsy! what a winter of grief torpor may
betoken! O, the presumption of those who dare to
fathom other souls, to take the measure of another's
grief, to weigh human woe! They know as much about
it, perhaps, as Hannah knew of the meaning of those
glazed, tearless eyes, those mute, uncomplaining lips,
that rigid, patient posture, and no more!

How much the minister knew about it, it is impossible
to say. It astonished him, for he had never witnessed

such an instance before in all his round of pastoral duty.
But he knew enough to respect it. It reacted on him,
too, like a spell, putting to flight all his harsh dogmas,
checking his preconceived condemnation of the crime he
had come hither to stigmatize as the unpardonable sin of
Scripture; silencing his warning against the spiritual contagion
that mere sympathy with the poor criminal might
involve; humbling the pride of the preacher, who presumes
to sit in judgment; in a word, lifting his theology,
at a bound, to a level with his heart.

Gossip gained nothing from the report of Dominie Van
Zandt. “They took it very quietly: they said nothing,”
was all that curiosity could extract from him; and
when, on Sunday next, an unusually large congregation
assembled in anticipation of a hot vindication of the
truth, that repeated applictions in a household are signal
proofs of God's relentless anger against those predestined
to wrath, many were disappointed at the meekness of
his text, — “I was dumb; I opened not my mouth, because
thou didst it.”

For the first time in his life the good man found
nothing to say, in vindication of God's wrath, or in condemnation
of man's guilt. Impressed and awed by a
vague sense of mystery, he could only exclaim to himself,
or to others, “How unsearchable are his judgments, and
his ways past finding out.”