Margaret a tale of the real and ideal, blight and bloom : including sketches of a place not before described, called Mons Christi |
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 | CHAPTER II. Margaret |  |
2. CHAPTER II.
MARGARET.—MR. EVELYN.—CHRIST.
We would come nearer to Margaret; we have kept too far
from her. What she denied to Mr. Anonymous, she will grant
to her readers, who, as a parent, have watched about her from
her babyhood,—a more intimate approximation. And if what
Isabel said be true, that she could bear the truth, she can certainly
bear to be looked at, a distinction not mortifying to most
young ladies. She denied that she had a heart; has she any?
If she has none, unlike most young ladies, in another respect
also she differs from many of her sex and age, she can make
good butter, which she did this very morning, churning it in
cellar which, if it possessed no other merit, boasted this at
least, that it was cold and free of flies. It has been intimated,
and may come up again for affirmation, that Margaret was
brought up on bread and cider and bean-porridge. This, however,
must not be taken too literally. The facts in the case
are these, sometimes the family kept a cow, and sometimes
they did not. But, to our purpose. This morning, after
churning and breakfast, she went out to a favorite spot, a little
below the house, on the Delectable Way, lying in the shade of
the eastern forest. If Bull followed, it was rather from habit
than necessity, since she was wont to go where she listed, unattended,
relying chiefly upon a pair of pretty strong arms, and
whatever defence against danger is to be found in not fearing
it. It is here, precisely in this morning retreat that we—by
we is meant her readers—propose to look at her. The place
she has chosen, characterized chiefly by forest association and
aspect, opens to the south, where are visible the Avernian hills,
and to the zenith, where is the everlasting sky. What of
sound she perceives, comes from the solitary crowing of a cock
in some distant hidden farm-yard, and the barking of a fox in
the deep lonely woods. She has also near her what might pass
for a music-box, in a bed of yellow brakes, inhabited by innumerable
crickets and grasshoppers, that keep up a perpetual
tuneful murmur, alternating like waves of the sea, or the wind
in a pine-tree. She holds in her hand a book, or rather her
arm lying on the ground the book lies there too, closed on her
fore-finger. The book, we shall see, is an old one, so very old
that its leathern back has changed into a polished mahogany
hue; it is in Latin, and the title anglicised reads, “The Marrow
of Theology, by William Ames,” a Dutchman. Not far
off down the hill, in a pasture of large white rocks and tall
star-flowering elecampane, are very contentedly feeding two
red cows. Whether she saw these or not, she looked at them,
and now her eye is directed upwards. What we see in the
sky is a group of clouds, massive and dense, with white tops,
dark cavernous sides, and broad bases deepening into a blueish
leaden color, and having their summits disposed as it were
about a common centre, thus forming a circular opening,
through which appear the boundless aerial fields of fairest
ultramarine. These peaks are like chalk-cliffs girding the
ocean, on which one would stand to look off into the sky-sea.
If we examine her eyes, those organs by which she communicates
with the exterior world, and through which whatever
itself, we shall discover that they have changed since her
Childhood. Then, those eyes perceived with briskness and
disposed of their objects with ease. The external world made
a rapid transition through them, enlivened and graced her
spirit, and then returned; and since material substances are
by this process transmuted into moral emotions, and the nerves
of the face are sympathetic throughout, a beautiful flower for
example, borne in on the optic nerve, would come out an
irradiation of joy generously spread over the whole countenance.
Now, a world has been created in her eyes; outward
objects no longer pass immediately through, but are caught
and detained, as it would seem, for inquisition. Some are
seen to sink with a sullen plunge into the dark waters of her
soul; some she seizes upon and throws out among the waste
things of the earth; others again get in by stealth, creep round
upon her nerves, come out and sit under the edge of her face,
and play their old pranks of beauty and joy; anon some fair
large object, that she suffers to pass, floods her spirit and
drowns out everything else; a full proportion of these objects,
it would appear, are assigned to the region of the Anagogical.
We cannot say that she is “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought,” yet her expression is subdued if it be not positively
sober, there is a mixed look of fervid aspiration and annoying
uncertainty about her. The clouds have shifted their places
and forms, the cows are quietly feeding, and she betakes herself
to her reading. She is interrupted by the echoing click
of iron horse-steps on the stones of the Delectable Way; the
cows look up, and so does she. Strangers in Livingston frequently
visited the Pond to survey the scene from Indian's
Head; they went up and down taking little notice of the inhabitants,
and with extreme consideration avoided laying upon
them the slightest burden of civility or attention; and Margaret,
accustomed to these transient manners, would have
suffered the present to pass as an ordinary instance, save that,
with a stranger man on horseback, she saw little Job Luce—
little he was though older than when she first knew him—on
the pommel of the saddle in the arms of the rider; and when
they were over against her in the road, Job caused the man to
stop. “That's it,” said Job, “that's the Pond.” “I don't
see any water,” replied the man, “nothing but a rock and a
woman.” “That's Margery,” reiterated the boy, “and that
is where she sits, and I find her there 'most always.” “Is she
the Pond?” asked his respondent. “She had always rather
flowers into her bonnet instead of ribbons, and likes to hear
the birds sing Sundays better than Zenas Joy, the new
chorister.”
Meanwhile, Job lowered from the horse stood holding by
the snaffle, and insisting that the gentleman should dismount
likewise. His manifest anxiety brought Margaret also to the
spot. “That is Margery, do stop and see her—here, Margery,
is a billet from Isabel.”
“I overtook this little fellow on the way,” said the young
man, for such it proved to be, “and as he seemed but a sorry
traveller, I thought my horse could better do that office for
him.”
“Do stop and see Margaret, and I guess she will go with
you up the Head, you have been so good to me,” said Job,
with renewed earnestness.
“Won't you stop, Sir?” said Margaret. The young man
thus importuned left his horse among the trees, and walked
with Job and Margaret to the spot occupied by the latter.
“Since you have been so fairly introduced,” said he, addressing
Margaret, “I ought to make myself known, Charles
Evelyn—Judge Morgridge is my uncle—perhaps you are acquainted
with his daughter Susan?”
“I am not,” replied Margaret, “but I have heard my friend
Isabel Weeks speak of her. This is Job Luce, Mr. Evelyn,
one among the very few friends of whom I can boast in the
village.”
“He seems very much attached to you,” rejoined Mr.
Evelyn, “to walk so far, with his feebleness, to see you. He
said there was some one at the Pond who knew almost every
thing and loved him very much.”
“I do love Job, poor boy, he has but few to love him, and
his love for me produces a cyanosis, as Mr. Elliman, my old
Master, says, whereby we do not see things clearly, and so he
thinks very highly of me, as I know I do of him.”
“She knows Whippoorwill,” said Job, “and that is more
than the Parson does, if she don't go to Meeting.”
“I know nothing,” replied Margaret.
“Have you no home, no father or mother?” asked Mr.
Evelyn. “Do you live in these woods?”
“There is our house behind the trees yonder,” said Margaret;
“there are my father and mother; there is my brother
Chilion; I have books, a squirrel, a dog, flowers, a boat; the
trees, the water, the birds all are mine, only I do not understand
all.”
“The Master,” interposed Job, “said she understood Latin
as well as Hancock Welles who has gone to College.”
“Yes indeed,” rejoined Margaret, smiling, “I can say as
he did once, when pursuing me in the woods he was over-taken
by a bear, `Veni, vidi, victa sum.' I am lost in my
gains; every acquisition I make conquers me.”
“The vici,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “is a rare attainment. It
is easier to know than to be masters of our knowledge;—I
see from your book you are exploring an abstruse subject
through what some would regard an abstruse medium. Theology
is not always rendered plainer for being put in plain
English. Do you find it cleared up in Latin?”
“My Teacher,” answered Margaret, “says Latin is the
tongue of the learned; and so, most curiously, to convict me
for a fool as it would seem, he commends me to my studies
in it. I asked him some questions, and he gave me this book,
but not so much in the way of a reply, I ween, as a repulse.
I can construe the sentences, distinguish the supine in u;
but, the ideas—gramercy! I had as lief encounter a troop of
bull-beggars, or undertake to explain the secrets of the nostrummonger
that lives above us. I am caught by my own
fish, as brother Nimrod says, and dragged into an element
where I pant and flounder as any strange creature would in
ours.”
“Mammy says,” exclaimed Job, “it is because Margery is
proud, has a natural heart, and won't bend her will down, and
so she lost the School. But she isn't proud to me; she used to
lead me home all the way from school. Hester Penrose, the
other Ma'am, never would touch me or speak to me out of
school; and when we were there, she only spoke hard to me,
and whipped me, because I caught the grasshoppers that flew
in, and stopped to hear whippoorwill—I could hear it in the
windows. She wouldn't give me a ticket either, for all I got
my lessons well—Arthur Morgridge said I got them better
than he, and he had a ticket.”
“Your mother, Job,” said Margaret, “and Deacon Ramsdill
don't agree; he applauds me for having a nateral heart, as
he calls it, and says he hopes my will never'll be broke; he
says a man with a broken will is no better than a slunk calf.
But, of what we were speaking, Mr. Evelyn, are you familiar
with these ideas, these things, these what-nots? Or are you,
like all the rest, only a dainty, white handkerchief sort of a
traveller among the hills?”
“I have dabbled a little in a good many matters,” replied
you, more than as likely as not it will be found our troubles
are not dissimilar, only it sometimes results that difficulties of
this sort once fairly stated are dispelled; the attempt to give
them form annihilates them—they pass away in the breath that
pronounces them.”
“A fine prospect, indeed!” responded Margaret. “I shall
be able to discharge the Universe at a whiff! But soberly,
here is the source of all my perplexity, a quid and a quis.
The book, as you see, discusses without satisfying the case.
It is `Quid sit Deus,' or `Quis sit Deus,' what is God, or,
who is God. He, that is the Master, says I did not put the
question right, at first, and, nulla vestigia retrorsum, I have
been going wrong ever since. We have quis'd and quid'd
it together, till my brain whirls and my mind aches. Who is
God? I will ask. `Do you intend,' he replies, `entity or
form? If the former, then you should say, What is God; if
the latter, then your language is correct. Language has its
rules as well as that whereto it applies. Informal language
on formal subjects is altogether contrary to Logic.' Good
Heavens! say I, I don't know which I mean. `Then do not
talk until you know what you are talking about; let us finish
this game of backgammon.' To complete my distress he has
given me this book! There is one pretty thing in it, the
little boy with a girlish face in the frontispiece. He is holding
up a big book before the door of some temple. Would
the book would remove, then we could enter the mysterious
place. Alack-a-day! `Where there's a secret there must be
something wrong,' good Deacon Ramsdill says, and I believe
it.”
“Look here,” said Mr. Evelyn, “Father Ames touches
fairly on these topics. `Quid sit Deus, nemo potest perfecte
definire,' what God is we cannot perfectly define; but `Quis
sit explicant,' who he is his attributes sufficiently make
known.”
“Read another page,” said Margaret, `I Tim. vi. 16,
Lucem habitans inaccessam, &c.' What is referred to there
seems very mystified indeed. The only Tim that I am acquainted
with is our neighbor's horse.”
“Don't speak so—you astonish me. That,” said Mr.
Evelyn, “is language addressed by the Apostle Paul to a
young man whose name was Timothy. `God dwelleth in the
light which no man can approach unto.”'
“I did not intend any harm,” replied Margaret. “I had
the Parson are always bringing in some name, Aristotle,
Moses, Scotus, Paul or somebody, whom they make responsible
for what they say, and commit themselves to nothing, laughing
and smoking in the mean time. They are both as `amfractuous'
as he says I am, and as `anagogical' as our little
friend Job.”
“I don't know what that means,” said the boy, “but I do
know Whippoorwill, and that I shall die of it. But Margery
don't believe the Parson, and she won't read the Bible.”
“My troth!” exclaimed the young man. “There are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my
philosophy, and more in Livingston than I had imagined.
Did you never read the Bible?”
“No,” replied Margaret. “The Master has endeavored
that I should never see one, and the first book he put into my
hand when I asked him about God was Tooke's Pantheon.
There was a great book marked Holy Bible on the outside at
Deacon Ramsdill's; there were some singular pictures in it,
and some singular reading, but not of a nature to tempt me
to look far into it. Only I remember laughing outright when
I came to something just like what Pa calls his Bible, and the
good Deacon took the book away. Pa's Bible is some leaves
of a book hanging by a string on the chimney, and consists of
names beginning with Adam and ending with Duke Magdiel,
and he always uses it he says when he christens his children.
It is suspended, also, you must know, directly over his rumbottle,
and he says he reads his Bible when he drinks his rum.
That is our Bible.”
“Mammy gave you a Testament once,” said Job.
“The Master took it away,” replied Margaret. “He said
I was not old enough to understand it, or something of that
sort.”
“She doesn't go to Meeting either,” added Job.
“Do you not indeed?” asked the young man.
“It is not quite true that I never go,” said Margaret.
“I have been to a Camp Meeting and Parson Welles's
Meeting.”
“Only once,” said Job.
“I could hardly wish to go a second time. Everything was
turned topsy-turvy; flowers became an abomination; for walking
the streets one was liable to be knocked down; people had
on gay dresses and sepulchral faces; no one smiled; the very
air of the Green grew thick and suffocating; sin lurked in
most beautiful and pleasant parts of my life became a sudden
wickedness; the day was cursed, and I was cursed, and all
things were cursed. I was glad to get out of it, and escape
to the Pond once more, and breathe in brightness and love
from our own skies. No, we never go here; Pa was put in
the stocks for hunting his cow one Sabbath, and he swears we
shall not go. I frighten you, Sir, and you will have me put in
Jail right off?”
“If I am frightened,” said the young man, “I can hear all
you have to say, and would much prefer you should not interrupt
yourself.”
“I was young then, and these are old impressions which
have grown perhaps somewhat sour by keeping, and I might
not feel just so now. At the Camp Meeting—have you ever
been to one? Well, I need not recount that. The Preacher
I never could forgive, only he was so kind to me when I was
lost in the woods. That was the pink of what the Master
calls Puppetry, a hornet's nest of Harlequins, Saints bacchantizing.
When I told the Master of some of my accidents on
these holy occasions, for in one instance I liked to have been
sent to Jail, and in another, to have been crushed to death,
`Ne sutor ultra crepidam,' said he, `you are a shoemaker's
daughter; mind your own business, and stay at home next
time;' so I did. Nimrod once took me to an Ordination at
Dunwich, where the Leech, who contrives to be everywhere,
accompanied us. It was more like training-day than anything
else. The town was full of people and soaking in rum. At
the Church I was wedged in an impassible drift, but managed
somehow to crawl out like a stream of water through their
legs and feet. The Widow found means to introduce herself
and me with her to the dining-hall. Such things were enacted
there as would not disgrace the bar-room at No. 4. Pa when
he is drunk has far better manners than those sanctiloquent
Wigs exhibited. It was altogether the richest specimen of
`deific temulency,' you ever beheld. The side-boards were
emptied half a dozen times, tobacco-smoke choked the air,
and to finish the play one grey old Punch with inimitable
gravity said grace at the close. The exercises of the day
were rounded off by a Ball in the evening, and that was the
best of the whole, save that the ministers were not there to
give the occasion the zest of their jokes and laughter—I supposed
at the time they were in a state of aquacœlestification,
and could not dance. But Oh! Oh! Oh! Job, dear Job, I
poor things!”
This exclamation was followed by tears that fell drenchingly
and hot on the face of the boy whom she clasped in her
arms. Job turned up his mild blue eye to her and said,
“Margaret, Whippoorwill sings, and Job don't cry; I swing
over the brook when the boys teaze me, and the bubbles take
away the pain; I hear a pewee in the woods, Margaret, that
sings when the whippoorwill is gone. I love you too, Margaret,
and Job's love is good, the little Mabel says. If there
were no innocent hearts, there would be no white roses, Isabel
says.”
Fa, la, la, la, lal, de,”
both sung,
Fa, la, la, la, lal, de;
The other flew after, then there was none,
Fa, la, la, la, lal, de;
And so the poor stone was left all alone,
Fa, la, la, la, lal, de.”
“Now, Job,” she said, “we will go and get comfrey root
for Chilion's drink, and burdock leaves for drafts to draw
out all pains. We shall detain the gentleman.”
“The detention is rather on my part,” said Mr. Evelyn.
“Yet I am truly unwilling to have you go.”
“I shall only offend you if I stay,” said she.
“I have learned,” he replied, “never to be offended with
any human being.”
“Then you are the strangest of all human beings, though
I agree with you, and find myself small place for offence
Androides furentes create a sensation of the ridiculous more
than anything else.”
“You seem,” continued he, “to be sincere, however mistaken;
and I am not a little interested in what you say.”
“Are you sincere?” she asked. “Are you not simulacrizing?
Yet, I wrong you, Sir, I wrong myself. It confesses
itself within me, that you are in earnest.”
“That is Whippoorwill,” said Job.
“It is the voice of nature,” said the young man.
“I am not,” added Margaret, “so brook-like as I used to
disturbed my little joyous babble. The beauties
and sweetnesses, the freedom and health that surround me
do not so perfectly satisfy me. I have not much of the `acquiescentia
cordis' of which Father Ames speaks. My
squirrel, Dick, has been rolling about his cage these many
years, and is contented with it as ever. I, forsooth, must
explore the cupboard whence my food comes, dig into the
well-head whence my water flows, anatomatize the hand that
caresses me. There seems to be something above the people
in the village, something over their heads, what they talk to,
and seem to be visited by occasionally, particularly Sundays,
making them solemn and stiff like a cold wind. Is it God?
What is God? Who is God? Heigh ho hum — let me not ask
that question. Is it Jupiter or Ammon? Is it a star? Or is
it something in the state of the weather? Going to Meeting
Sundays, the Master calls a septenary ague universal in these
countries. Yet the matter is deep and penetrating as it is
anagogical.”
“Why do you not speak with the people,” said Mr. Evelyn,
“and discover the nature of their emotions and thoughts?”
“My sooth! I had rather lie here on the grass and read the
Medulla, dig roots, card and spin, clean dye-tubs, pick geese,
draw chickens, or even go for rum—anything, anything. Vox
populi vox Dei, he says, but it must have a very strange voice.
The hygeian gibberish of the Leech is not half so bad; nor
that stupendous word, honorificability, he used to make me
spell, half so unintelligible. It all runs of sins and sinners,
the fall and recovery, justification and election, trinity and
depravity, hell and damnation—they have an idiosyncrasy of
phrases, just as the Free-Masons have, and Tony the Barber
and Joyce Dooly the Fortune-teller have; then there are experiences
and exercises, ah's and oh's, sighs and laments, as
if we were about to be burned up—and indeed they say we
are, at least our family; and Pa laughs so about it all, and the
Master while he seems to join in with it, only turns it to
ridicule. Isabel says she is growing tired of it, though she is
not apt to complain of anything, and has already been admonished
against keeping company with the wicked Indian, as
they call me. She says that those they call sinners are some
of the best people in the world, that theological distinctions
do not conform to anything that exists in nature. The Master
says that piety is the art of concealing one's original character,
and that church-members are those who have attained
you would say. I have `polylogized' quite long enough. Are
you a student for the `sacred ministry,' a class of young
men in whose behalf the Dutchman says he has prepared his
Marrow?”
“No, I am not. But the subjects to which you refer
possess a value that engages all professions and all minds. I
have a Bible in my pocket, or a part of one.”
“What! Are you bibbleous too?”
“Bibliopalous, you mean.”
“No, bibbleous. When one comes to our house with a
flask of Old Holland, or a bottle of rum, we say he is bibbleous,
and has a bible in his pocket. Pardon me. I am unbridled
as the winds. You seem to be drawing upon me, and
I give way here within, till every, the most transient, feeling
escapes.”
“I know what it is to become the sport of impulses, and
will not condemn you for that.”
“Speak, Sir, and I will listen quietly. I can trim myself to
patience when it is necessary.”
“You have heard of the Saviour of the world, Jesus
Christ?”
“Yes, till I am sick of the name. It sounds mawkish in
my ears.”
“You do shock me now,” said Mr. Evelyn with some feeling.
“You cause me grief and astonishment.”
“I pray you have mercy upon me, Sir! What have I
done? Your look frightens me.”
“That you should speak so of him who to my soul is most
precious.”
“I am sorry to have distressed you.”
“You have distressed one who is dearer to me than my own
life.”
“Speak that name again.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“What, my own Beautiful One? Christ—yes—that is his
name. I had almost forgotten it. I have thought only of
him. The name is associated with whatever is distasteful in
the world. It is Christ, Jesus Christ. Is he not beautiful?”
“He is described as fairer than the sons of men.”
“And you, Sir, know him and love him, and your innermost
sense is alive to him? You are the first one who ever
showed a deep natural sensibility to that One. I have distressed
you and him through you, and myself in him! There-in
turned her face away.
“It is Whippoorwill,” said Job to Mr. Evelyn. “Don't
speak now.”
That gentleman waiting awhile in silence, was obliged, by
direct enforcement, to renew the conversation.
“Tell me,” said he, “what is the meaning of this? Here
is a greater mystery to me than all this strange world can
offer to you. By what secret affinities are you bound to him
who is my Life? How have you come to know him in this
heart-felt manner? Like Nathaniel has he seen you under
the fig-trees?”
“No,” said Margaret, turning herself, and speaking with
composure, “it was under those trees yonder in what we call
Diana's Walk.”
“What, that you literally saw him?”
“No, it was a dream. He, the Beautiful One, called
Christ, filled one of the dreams of my childhood. He spoke
to me, he took my hand, he kissed me, he blest me.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was some years ago. Its remembrance fades, then
brightens again. Sometimes it bubbles up within me like a
spring, sometimes it spreads away into a deep calm surface
like the Pond. It haunts me like a cloud white and soft. In
my sensibilities it lies and stirs me up to weeping. Forgive
me a thousand times that I should have been so wanton!
When you spoke of him in such a way, I was suddenly
flooded with emotion such as I cannot describe. Isabel and
Job know of it, but they do not precisely answer to my feelings.
Indeed at the moment you came up I was endeavoring
to form out of the clouds some likeness to what I had seen,
the One himself, the Cross, the Dove; I gazed into the
heights of the blue sky for some Apparition. I beguile the
uncertainties of my thought by the creations of my fancy.
But That comes not, and the clouds veil over those infinite
distances. He said if I loved, I should know. I do love,
how little I know.”
“But do, if it pleases you, give me the particulars of your
dream.”
She repeated what is already in the possession of the
reader, and recounted some things of her several dreams.
“But,” said she, as the conversation went on, “I thought this
was for myself alone. It has been kept in my own life. Is
he, Christ, great, is he general? You, Sir, seem to know and
him. He has been a strange beautiful flower in my garden,
and so he exists in yours. What do these things mean?”
“Your question raises,” said he, “a long train of reflection.
Let us be seated, and we will go over the matter with
that care which it deserves.”
“No, indeed,” replied Margaret, “I would not trouble you
to that extent now. Job promised for me to go upon the Head
with you, and it is time to start—I must be at home and help
about the dinner.”
“Where is the cake for Egeria?” said Job.
“I guess she will have to be content with the grasshopper-music,
or she may lie down in the shade as the cows do,” answered
Margaret. “I did not tell you, Sir,” she added, “that
this spot is consecrated to the Nymph whom the old Roman
was wont to visit, and when we go away we sometimes leave a
cake or piece of bread both as an oblation and for her dinner,
and, will you believe it, Sir, when I return, it is all gone.”
They proceeded towards the eminence called the Head.
Seeing Chilion moving leisurely in the direction of the water,
Job importuned to go and sail with him, and Margaret with
Mr. Evelyn went up the hill.
“How very beautiful this is!” said the young gentleman,
“here, there, and everywhere.”
“Look down into this water,” said Margaret, standing on the
rock that overhung the Pond, “if your brain is steady enough.
This the Master calls Exclamation Point.—I have wished
to drop into that splendid cloud-flowing abyss, and perhaps I
shall be missing one of these days, and you will know where
to find me. You are sober—well, look off into the mountains
yonder. That is Umkiddin. You will not blame a passion I
cherish for climbing that sunny height, and laying hand and
heart in the downy Blue.”
“No I could not.—But see that point of rock around which
the water bends, with a great tree overshadowing the distance.
So I admire a river, not so much in its expanse and full-tide,
as in the turns and angles, where it loses itself within green
shores and sinks away under the shade of cliff and forest.”
“ `Loses itself'!” replied Margaret, repeating the word with
some emphasis. “There you have it again. Lost, gone, vanishing,
unreachable, inappropriable, anagogical!—I used to sit
here in my merry childhood and think all was mine, the earth
and the sky. I ate my bread and cider and fed the ants and
flies. Through me innumerable things went forth; the loons
the Sun went down at my bidding, and my jocund heart kindled
the twilight. It now flies away like a bird, and I cannot get
near enough to put any salt on its tail. Then I owned so much
my losses were of no account, and though I could not reach
the bottom of the Pond, I saw the heavens in it, and myself
sailing above them. In the darkest night, with our red tartarean
links, Chilion and I have rowed across the Pond, and sniggled
for eels, and so we conquered the secrets of those depths.
I have cried too in my day, I have an unkind brother and a
profligate father, and what with the wretchedness of those I
love and their wickedness, my own heart has been duly tortured
and these swollen veins have been bled with weeping; but
I seem also to have lost the power of tears. Those, like the
days of good Queen Bess, are gone, and how shall they be recovered!”
“Have you no faith?” asked Mr. Evelyn.
“ `Faith'! That sanctiloquent word! That is what the
Widow Luce dins me with.”
“Faith; trust, confidence, repose, seeing the invisible, relying
upon the spiritual, having an inner impersonal inhabitancy.
In that alone I am happy and sustained. Would you
were thus happy.”
“I wish I were—But faint heart never won fair lady. I do
not quite give over—I am happy, none more. In the same moment
that I am worried I am at rest. How is this? What
many-colored streams flow through us, blood-red, and woolly-white!
Are we divided off like sheep, has each feeling its
fold? Through our skies sail two sets of clouds, one to the
North, one to the South? Even now while I speak all I feel, there
is more in me than I can ever speak of. What Harmony circumscribes
the whole? In what are Pain and Pleasure One?—
I will not ask you, I am happy. Greater simpleton than I am
if I were not. Much I have lost, much remains, more comes.
My dreams have a place within me; and all the books I have
read. My home is every year more beautiful, the trees more
suggestive, the birds more musical, the bees more knowing.
Roots grow in new ways every Summer, and snow falls in new
forms every Winter. There is more in churning than most
people think of. Time is regenerative, and new births occur
every hour. The gritty Earth, alumen and silex spring up in
dream-like beauty. I have also many and improving visitations,
and much select company. I told you of Egeria; then
there is Diana's Walk in the woods, and close upon the edge of
Nine Muses. Brother Chilion is our Apollo. In the house we
have St. Crispin for the shoemaker, and St. Catharine for the
spinner; Bull is our Cerberus. Brother Hash the Master calls
Priapus; the Leech we call Dea Salus, and the road to her
house has received from the Master the name of Via Salutaris.
The cross-path to the Village he calls Via Dolorosa, on account
of a dangerous pass in the brook; and that, (the brook) from the
same cause he says, because he got into trouble going over it,
he calls Kedron, though I do not understand anything about that
name. Religion he says is an anagogical parenthesis, because
it must be spoken in a lower tone of voice. No. 4 I called
Avernus, and the road to it Descensus Averni, but, coming up,
he would have it that it was The Delectable Way. The Head
is called Mons Bacchi, but our cistern I call Temperance. The
Hours dance round me in snow flakes, Naiads and Dryads
inhabit our woods and water; in one of my haunts I can
show you the Three Graces. That Island with a large elm in
the centre is Feronia's, where I often go. Narcissus grows in
my garden, Daphnis in the woods. The Head I told you the
Master called Bacchus' Hill, and sometimes our whole region
goes by that name, and the Pond he says he has no doubt is
the reappearance of the river Helicon into which some fabled
Orpheus was changed, and whose waters were a long time
hidden under ground; so we sometimes call our place the Lake
of Orpheus. To which Divinity we are on the whole consecrated,
I hardly know; but for my part, I prefer the musical,
to the tippling God. Then the fair Lady of my dreams sometimes
still comes to me with her pale beautiful face. I have
also one at the Widow's, but whether she be a phantom or a
reality I know not, a girl like myself, also pale, sad and beautiful,
whose smile is an enchantment, even if I know not her hidden
self.—Am I not happy?”
“It may be so,” answered he, “but in a manner different
from the world.”
“Another word that I do not understand! What mean you
by the world?”
“People about you, men and women in general.”
“If you mean the villagers, the No. 4's, Breaknecks and
Snakehills, I know I differ some from them. They drink rum,
which I do not; they are unkind one with another, which for
the life of me I never could be. Their Anagogics indeed I
wholly fail to comprehend, their Sabbaths, Meetings, Catechizing,
Freemasonry, Trainings, Politics, Courts, Jails and all
that.”
“Your Religion is so different from theirs.”
“Bless me, I have no religion; and Bull defend me from
theirs! Albeit, as Deacon Ramsdill says, we must eat a peck
of dirt before we die, and perhaps I must make mine out
in some of their religion!—I have offended you; it is just as I
told you I should do, if you talked with me.”
“I repeat, that you cannot offend me, only you must allow
what you say to make me somewhat thoughtful. You said you
wanted to clamber up the blue mountain yonder, and are ready
even to leave your pretty Pantheon for that acquisition. That
is Religion even if you had not thought it.”
“No, never would I leave my `pretty Pantheon,' as you call
it. But I should like to thrust my fingers between those two
blues, that of the hill and of the sky. There Christ has come
to me; in celestial skyey softness has that vision appeared.
No one like the Beautiful One has ever visited my dreams, my
thoughts, my aspirations; and I have nothing about me I dare
call Christ. There is sometimes a cloud that stretches from
Umkiddin to the Moon when it rises, like a turkey's tail-feather—whence
comes it? to what serene eternal bird does it
belong? is it part of the wing of Christ under whose shadow I
may lie? is it the trail of the beautiful Goddess, Venus?—I
know not.—No, I cannot leave my Pantheon, and I long for
what I have not; and that is religion, you say. Your definition
differs somewhat from my Tutor's, and by it, I am quite religious!
ha, ha. Prithee, tell me Sir, who are you? Are not
you `the world'?”
“A sorry part of it, I fear; yet removed enough from it
neither to drink rum nor disturb the peace of others. I do keep
the Sabbath, and go to Church; I do not say the Catechism,
or belong to any train-band. Most people, I confess, are degraded
by their piety; I do believe there is a worship that purifies
and ennobles.”
“You confound and delight me both. I know not what to
say. The horn is blowing for dinner, and I am glad something
befalls to put an end to the perplexity.—Won't you stay
and have your dinner with us? I will introduce you to my
home, family, dog, squirrel and spinning-wheel.”
“I am engaged at the Village—May I have the pleasure of
seeing you again, Miss Hart?”
“Miss Hart!”
“That is your name, I believe.”
“Yes—only I was never called it before, it sounds strange.
If I do not give you more pain than pleasure, you are welcome
Can you break flax?”
“I fear I should bungle at it.”
“Then I fear Ma would not like you. If you could help me
get cotton grass or thistle down, I should be glad to see you.
I would not pain a toad, I hope I shall not you.—Where is the
Bible you spoke of, if it does not make me laugh to ask you.”
“You shall have it if you will promise me not to laugh
when you read it.”
“I never made a promise in my life; only I will try.”
“It is not the whole Bible, it is the New Testament, so
called. I hope it will please you.”
“I don't know. `A clouted shoe hath oft-times craft in it,'
Deacon Ramsdill says, and there may be some good in the
Bible.”
“We have had fine luck,” said Job, coming from the boat
as they descended the hill. “Six white perch, four eel-pouts,
six shiners and a pickerel.”
“You shall carry some to your mother,” replied Margaret,
“and mind you give Whippoorwill a taste.—There is my Apollo,
not so fair perchance as his namesake, but he is as good. He
is lame you see withal, and in that resembles his great prototype;
and this stone of my heart becomes melodious when he
plays.—Mr. Evelyn, Chilion.”
“How do you do, Sir.”
“Quite well, at your service, Sir,” replied Chilion.
“What springal is that, has kept you from helping me?”
said Brown Moll, coming to the window with a tray full of hot
potatoes, which she was pealing, as Mr. Evelyn and Job turned
down the road.
“A fox after the goslin, hey?” said Hash, who with his
father arrived at the same moment. “I saw you on the
Head.”
“I guess he has lain out over night,” said Pluck. “He
looks soft and glossy as your Mammy's flax of a frosty morning.—Now
don't take pet, Molly dear.”
“She swells like a soaked pea,” added the old woman.
“What's the matter, husy? I should think he had been rubbing
your face with elm leaves.”
“Never mind, Molly,” interposed her father. “Better to
play at small game than stand out. You are the spider of the
woods. Spin a strong web; you are sure to catch something.”
“She looks as if she had been spun, colored and hung out
to dry,” said her mother.
“Gall darn it!” exclaimed Hash. “I smell potatoes. Give
us some dinner.”
“Speaking of spinning,” said Pluck, when the others were
gone in, “you know how to use the wheel-pin—keep the thread
taught and easy in your fingers, mind the spindle, then buzz
away like Duke Jehu;—only if he is a dum spot of a Lawyer
or a Priest, weave him into a breeches-piece, and I'll wear
him, I be blown if I don't; and when he is past mending, I'll
hang him up for a scare-crow, blast him!”
After dinner, Margaret took her boat and went to the Island
called Feronia's, remarkable for its great elm. She threw herself
on a bed of mosses under the shade of the tree. “Patience,
Silence, Feronia, Venus, O Mother God! help thy child!”
she said, or ejaculated with herself. “I, Icarus, with waxen
wings, am melted by the light into which I fly! I, Eurydice,
am in Hell; my Orpheus bore me out a little ways, left me,
and I am caught back again! How cold I grow! Let me lie
in the sun. Dear clouds, sweet clouds! let me shine and be
dissolved with you! Oh Christ—Relent thou iron soul of the
skies, and speak to me!—My little boat, where is the glad,
bird-child you used to carry? Still the same, the oar, the
seat; the water the same, rocks, woods; waves sing their eternal
lullaby, box-berries keep their unchanging red, shadows
embrace me as if my heart were free.—How I twattled, skurried!
`Miss Hart'! Miss Pan, Miss Bacchus, rather. Now
I grow hot again. Who, what am I? Quis, Quid! God and
I alike anagogical. Who or what is he? Let me get it right
this time. Who is Mr. Evelyn? His What is what? What
is his Who? The What! Lucem inaccessam, light inapproachable.
Rose too the same.—How kind his words, how
gentle his voice, how mild his looks, how benign and forbearing
in all things! And yet sanctiloquent, and yet so different
from others! What is `the World'? Is he it? Is he like
me? Why am I not it? I will see how this matter looks in
the water, let me quench my hot limbs.” Drifting along in
her boat, she bent over the water, “Molly dear,” said she, “is
that you? Your face is red and feverish. Go to the Widow's
and get some balm tea.—Can't you keep cool down there?
The sun shines there as well as here! Your hair wants combing,
your dress is disordered, Neptune's sea-dogs would be
ashamed of you.” She left her boat and clothes on the shore,
and immersed herself in the grateful water. She returned
to the island; she said, “I will lie down under the tree;
sleep is better than knowledge, a bed kinder than God, the
given us wherein we find ourselves and all things? Pardon
me, Sir.” She slept a long time, and awoke, refreshed and
regulated, resolute but subdued; with an even hand and
quiet temperature she rowed homewards, and went about such
duties as domestic necessity or customary requisition imposed.
In the evening she went to see Rose, and while she had
made no mention of Mr. Anonymous, she found she had much
to say of Mr. Evelyn. Rose embraced her with a silent summer-like
tranquillity, and kissed her lips fervently, which was
nearly all the response she made. She shone out if at all like
the Moon through dark clouds, that are only the darker for
the brightness behind them. “Death,” said, she, diverging
into a train of thought seemingly suggested by what Margaret
related, “Death will soon end all. In the grave we shall lie
and the beauty and strength of existence shall perish with us.
I only ask, Margaret, that I may be buried side by side with
you. The worm shall devour the fairest visions and the most
dismal forebodings, alike; decay shall feed sweetly upon your
ruddiness and vigor, your nobleness and benignity. A princely
offering are we to Annihilation. I murmur not, I dread not,
with the serenity of angelic love I submit to the all-o'ersweeping
Fate. In your arms to lie, with you to die, I smile as I
sink into the eternal rest. Yet, live on Margaret, while you
may, fill your golden cup, it will never be too late to drink it,
even if death seizes you in the act.”
| CHAPTER II. Margaret | |