University of Virginia Library

THE SUICIDE.

What a great thing it is to live a true life—true to ourselves,
true to God! And I am not sure but that the one truth always
includes the other. Here and there, treading along the dusty by-paths
and climbing over the barren heaths of life, we see,
elevating our faith in humanity, and throwing about our own
weak resolves the excellent beauty of a good example, men
and women whose lives are a continual praise and prayer.

As I look back on the way I have come, I see along the darkness
many faces shining with the glory and beauty which is
away above and beyond this world. Oh, Thou, whose best name
is Love, forgive me, that I have seen, and yet been so little
instructed; that I have heard, and yet trodden so falteringly!

A little way from the centre of Clovernook stands a lonesome
old house, supposed to be haunted. I know not as to
that; but if unquiet spirits are ever permitted, as some respite
of their ill, to slip from the shroud, or the deeper darkness
that is below the shroud, I remember no place which
would seem a more fitting habitation for them. Spiders have
made nests in the bushes, and nettles have covered up the
grass; the rose-vines are half living and half dead, half clinging
to the moss on the wall, and half choked together on the ground;
the wind, blowing as it listeth, has from time to time lopped
away the branches of the trees, and, with no hand to remove
them, they remain dangling earthward like skeletons: among
their dry forks are the nests of birds that would not build near
any other house.

And yet the house is not without an inhabitant; sometimes
through the cracked panes you may see the sweet face of a
little child, looking like a flower leaning from some cranny toward
the light; for whole hours together you may see it, the

pale cheeks, and the melancholy eyes, and the hair, black as
night, giving to the child's face a thoughtful maturity of expression
quite beyond her years. You would feel, I think, that
a strange if not a fearful history was involved in that little
life; it seems as if you saw away down the depths of the steadfast
eyes full fountains of tears. The dress of the little one is
simple, even rustic, and sometimes sadly unsuited to the season,
betraying that the careful hands of the mother have been folded
far away from its wants.

Oftenest when the twilight falls the child is at the window,
watching for the bats, as they turn blindly hither and thither,
or cling silently to the decaying trunks of giant trees; and at
that hour sometimes, but never at any other, the hand of an
old man rests on the locks of the orphan, and the head bows
down as beneath a weight; the prattle which it has been making
to itself is still, and the light of laughter grows dim in the
drooped eyes turning from the eyes which look down upon it.

It is a very sad thing to see them thus together—the baby
brow as if shrinking consciously from the crown of gray hairs.
I know not how it was, but some invisible and living thing
seemed standing between them. Often, as I passed the place,
I have lingered and dreamed, till of the whole scene my shut
eyes make pictures. I remember when the moonlight threw
less sombre shadows on the wall; I remember when the grass
was cut smoothly from the edges of the walks, overgrown now
till but a narrow and irregular path is left; and I remember
when among the flowers there was one fairer than they.

Poor Isabel! the grass about her grave is not trodden down
by feet that cannot stay away; and the low headstone is nameless,
but beside it the blue thistle blooms and dies, summer
after summer; for nature, at least, is never neglectful, and
never partial. The old man I have written of is her father;
and small wonder it is that he is weary and broken-hearted, for
he can only say,

Poor comfort enough for a desolate old man to keep about his
heart.

The smile of the little child who sits at his hearth cannot
shine into his heart; or if it does, it will never thaw the chill
cast there by the death of the mother—her loss by her more
than death.

It is only the old story.

On the mossy steps that come down among the lilacs she
used to sit, years ago, her pious father beside her, and as the
gray ashes gathered on the red embers of the sunset, she

Then there came a time when another sat between the father
and daughter; then she and the other, not the father, sat alone
—sometimes late into the unfriendly night. And all this while
the roses were not so bright as the cheek of Isabel, nor the
birds so gay as her songs. Ah me, that the sparkle on the surface
of the fountain should ever hide the coil of the serpent at
the bottom!

The summer waned and faded, and the chill rains broke up
the flowers; the insects crept under the falling leaves, and the
cattle stood all day near the stalls; and Isabel, as the night
came down, lingered restless and anxious at the window, her
eyes aching as they gazed into vacancy. So the days came and
went, and the nights, darker, and darker, and darker, settled
down over the world. The maple forest along the hill was like
a ridge of gold against the bottom of the sky, and the oaks
came out of the sharp frosts as if dipped in blood, and plenty
and glory contended in the orchards and the cornfields; but
Isabel did not sing as she had sung in other days. All her
household tasks were done as before, even more promptly and
perfectly, perhaps; but her step had lost its elasticity, and as
you looked on her you thought that she also should sing—

And here comes a dark chapter that I cannot write. Enough
that when the red fire-light shone through snow that drifted on
the pane, the house was very still—the step and voice and
smile and blithe laugh of Isabel were gone, all and forever.

The grief that was in the father's heart spoke not in words
or sighs, but it consumed his spirit and whitened his hair. It
seemed as if remorse were gnawing his passage to the grave;
for he had dealt hardly and harshly with his child; and when
his dim eyes lost trace of her wanderings, visions of her shaped
themselves very darkly; but he only listened to the winds, and
turned to the darkness for comfort, and not to the eyes or the
voice of another.

The world was the same, but the stars were swept out of
heaven. Wild blew the winds of the March morning, thawing
paths among the snow along the southern slopes, and nurturing
and wooing out of gloom the hardiest flowers; the red-bird and
the black-bird whistled among the yet bare boughs, for the clouds
that rain down beauty had not yet traveled along the meadows;
Winter was lingering in the lap of Spring. And the old homestead
looked sad. The little brown-bird that had built in the
lilac bush, summer after summer, for successive years, twittered
and chirped in melancholy sort about the old nest for a few
days, now flitting undeterminedly hither and thither, picking
fine moss and shreds, and now dropping them again, and chanting
a note of sorrow ill-suited to the time and the work. With
the first rain the old nest was beaten down quite past repairing,
and after an unusually mournful crying, the beautiful favorite
disappeared. The very smoke of the chimney seemed to come
up from a hearth where there was no cheerfulness—not drifting
off in graceful wreaths of blue, but black and heavy, hanging
on the hill-sides or settling to the ground. There was no step
about the flower-beds or in the garden, and no linen bleaching
white on the first grass.

The sunshine grows warmer, day by day, but the windows
of Isabel's chamber are fast shut, the fringe of the counterpane
is heavy with dust, and the pillow has been unprest for a long
while. Poor Isabel!

Sometimes the door opens, stealthily, as it were, and a gray-headed

man comes out, and sits down in the sun, or looks
earnestly about, as though for something or for some one he
does not see. If he walks by the wheat-fields, the blast of the
mildew is all the same as their beauty, for the light in his
old eyes in dim; and his step falls heavy, as though it were near
the last.
In all the world there is no soft voice of comfort him as he
goes chilled and wearied down into the grave. Why should
the waving harvest make him glad, or the spring rouse his pulses
to hope? All the beauty of this world, which God so pronounced
good, shines and blossoms in vain for that heart from
which the flowers of love have been beaten down till they have
no longer any life.

I said it was a March morning, that the winds were wild,
and that Isabel was gone—wherefore and whither there were
busy and reproachful tongues enough to tell. She has heard
her father say, with less of sorrow than of indignant passion,
“I am childless in my old age, for thou art but as a thorn in
my flesh!” And from all kindness and all pity, through the
moonless midnight, her steps have gone drearily and wearily.
And each is alone—father and child; and only the light of
eternity can dry up the great sea that has come in between
them.

Midway between the woodland and his house, walked the
father, musing of his daughter, and listening to the stirring of
the black-thorn boughs a little distance away—listening to their
stirring, but not once turning his eyes from the ground, else he
had seen the pale face and haggard form of a woman, crouching
from the sharp wind; not to shelter herself—there is no chill,
not even the terriblest of all, that she would shrink from; but
close in her bosom, and playing with the tangled hair that falls
down from her forehead, nestles a baby that has never felt a
March wind till now. “You, poor darling, at least, are innocent,”
she says; “surely he will love you and keep you.” And

her arms reach forward, and her voice says, “Father!” Brightly
over the world breaks the sunshine, and her sin seems darker
than it did among clouds; her arms fall helpless, and her lips
are hushed. So, under the boughs of the black-thorn, she
waits for the evening.

Toward sunset the air became more bitterly cold, and the
child moaned often, and looked up to its mother with a hungry
and appealing expression. And stilling the tumult of its sorrow
and pain with a voice low and earnest, but scarcely fond,
the woman waited and watched till the forked boughs of the
woodland seemed like dead brands among the fires of the
descending night; and the winds softened themselves, and
came down and mixed with her lullaby; and so the baby fell
asleep—for the last time in a mother's arms.

There seemed no twilight, but the day was gone at once, and
from under the muffling wings of night peered the stars, and
the moon, chilly and white, climbed among them, dropping her
icy splendors toward the earth. From the gable of the homestead
fell the dark-pointed shadow, and the hearth-light glimmered
through the window, soft and warm.

Folding close the sleeping child, toward the dark shadow and
the warm light the forlorn young mother bent her steps, and
struck presently in a deep path, or what had once been one—
for the grass had grown over its edges till it seemed little more
than a crack in the sod—when, pausing, she looked backward
and forward—forward toward the homestead, backward to the
woods, dismal as they should be if planted but to screen the
gates of that black world in which there is no hope. In other
days the path, so narrow now, had been wide enough for two.
After a little pause, she goes on again, slowly, and stooping
often to kiss the forehead of the little one sleeping in her arms.

At last she is in the shadow of the gable, and just before
her glimmers the light of the curtainless window. The night
lies cold and bleak around her; and stealthily as if she were a
murderess, she approaches, and peers, hesitating, through the
pane.

All the old familiar things meet her eye: so still she is, so
hushed the very beating of her heart, that she hears the chirp

of the cricket answer the ticking of the clock; the embers
make red shadows on the wall, and she sees the desolate father,
sitting sad and stern. Suddenly across his face there passes a
softer expression, and her heart throbs quick. His eyes turn
toward a picture of herself that hangs opposite the window,
and her eyes follow his. “He thinks of me piteously, at
least,” she says. “I will go in, and say I have sinned against
Heaven and in his sight.” Closer and closer, obeying the wild
sad impulse, she presses her face to the glass, when, all at
once, her reviving energies are paralyzed, and her fluttering
hopes struck dead. A steady hand reverses the fair, girlish face
of the picture, toward the wall; then the man turns, and for a
moment the eyes of the two meet; and eagerly, yearningly, the
child bends forward; but the father shrinks away. It was but
for a moment, yet that was all too much. The overstrung
nerves gave way; and, laying the baby at her feet, with a
moan, that had in it, “My God, I am forsaken!” she walked
blindly and deafly back the path which she had come; for she
did not hear the voice that called after her, again and again,
“Isabel, Isabel!”

How often, in our impetuous anxiety, we fail of the good
which a little calmness and patience would have won! The
day after Chatterton terminated his miserable life, there came
a man into the city inquiring for him, with all he had prayed
for.

In the heart of the woods the path I have spoken of terminated
beside a deep and sluggish pool, fringed now with jagged
and sharp splinters and points of ice, but the middle waters
were unfrozen, and bore up little islands of moss and dead
leaves; and across these black waters, in the wild winds of the
days and the nights that followed, streamed over the white face,
that, after a time, came up, as if still pressing toward the light,
the long tresses of the woman who had been so wretched.

Now, beneath the mossy mound hard by, she is decently
asleep, nor turns for the moaning of the night wind, nor for the
step of the little child that sometimes, in summer, walks there,
gathering flowers and singing to herself.

If there be one prayer more than another that we need

always in our hearts, it is the one He taught us, “Lead us not
into temptation.” How many, treading in as straight a path,
and with as firm a step, perhaps, as ourselves, worn and weary
with the toils of the long and hard way, beckoned aside into
what seemed some cool and sheltered place of rest, have been
lost forever. Vain, henceforth, are all their struggles; darkly
between them and the confidence of the world, between them
and all friendships and sympathies, and most of all, between
them and their own self-respect, rises evermore the shadow of
the tempter they have followed.

Is not this a retribution terrible enough—that men and
women should pause from their own vocations, and, with
haughty words and withering looks, measure the distance between
themselves and the fallen, even when their own way has
been kept with feeble and faltering steps, and when the very
error they so despise, has shone up like a light revealing the
hideous darkness into which they else would have gone? It is
of the erring I speak, now, and not of the criminal. The soul
may be darkened from its original beauty, yet still it is precious,
else in heaven there would not be such joy over sinners
that repent.

If we have kept our robes from the dust, and our hands and
our hearts clean, surely we can afford to be charitable and merciful
towards those who have not; but even if so, we are ever
subject to vanity, and the best and worthiest man or woman
has reason to cry, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!” before
the Searcher of hearts. Mercifulest of all, when the wicked
woman was brought before him, was he who was without
sin, saying, “Neither do I condemn thee.”

One little act of kindness, which says to a degenerate brother,
“I am also a man,” and, consequently, no less exposed to temptation,
will do more for the building up of a ruinous humanity,
than all the fiery-tipped arrows that ever went hissing from
indignant hands.

I have little charity for that self-righteousness which mingles
with its abhorrence of error no pity for the erring. Breathings
of denunciation fill the world, chilling “that best warmth that
radiates from the heart, where Love sits brooding over an

honest purpose,” and darkening the great light that is continually
round about us. We leave the wretched to “uncomforted
and friendless solitude,” where, within the fiery circle of
evil thought, “the soul emmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed
by sights of evermore deformity.”

There is less depravity in the world than we are apt to
imagine, and I doubt not but there is something good in almost
every nature, which the leaves of kindness might reach, and so
the whole man be regenerated.

I began this chapter by allusion to the beauty of true lives;
and if she of whom I have written had died ere the flowers of
love were ever made heavy with tears, her life would have been
an example of loveliness. God over all, blessed forever!
grant that one wild shadow swept not into nothingness all the
light.