University of Virginia Library

44. CHAPTER XLIV.
A STONE FOR BREAD.

“And now, Beatrice,” said Mr. Chappelleford
one day in May, “my preparations are
complete; and as soon as you are ready, we
will begin our Western journey.”

“I am ready at any time,” said Beatrice, without
raising her eyes from the book upon her lap,
although she had not read a word in it for at
least an hour.

Mr. Chappelleford looked at her speculatively.

“My objection to most things has been,”
said he at length, “that you come to the end
of them before they make an end of you. I
was in hopes that you would not prove so
transitory. Are you going to disappoint
me?”

“What do you mean?” asked Beatrice, raising
her heavy eyes.

“I found you five years ago, young, inexperienced,
with a mind framed for powerful
exertion, and at that time utterly empty and
untrained. What little of life you had seen
had disappointed and outraged your preconceived
notions, for you had no ideas worthy
of the name, and you were just in the mood
to turn to something new, larger, and higher
than you had yet found. I gave you this new
pabulum in the form of knowledge, and
through the door of science led you into a
new and inexhaustible region of discovery and
attainment. You followed me with the docility
and naïve delight of a child, accepted all
that I offered with unhesitating faith, and
avowed yourself overjoyed in the exchange
you had made from the old routine existence
of most women—yes, and of most men, too—to
this higher plane, where only man, at his
farthest remove from the monkey, can hope to
dwell. Do you follow me, and do I speak the
truth?”

“Perfectly. And how do I now disappoint
you?” asked Beatrice faintly.

“By coming to the end of your growth, and
beginning the retrogressive process which, in
man, follows maturity. You have been to me
a fellow-thinker—you threaten to become only
a woman. I thought you were past the
mourning for lost lives; the speculating upon
future existence; the pondering of creeds and
dogmas, which have absorbed you during the
last month. You could and would have pursued
this course at twenty. After five years
of growth, I expected higher results.”

“How do you know my thoughts? I have
not expressed them,” asked Beatrice, flushing
scarlet; but Mr. Chappelleford replied only by
a contemptuous gesture.

“Womanish, womanish!” muttered he,
turning away.

“Well, but now that you have found me
out, give me at least some counsel, if you can—
some comfort,” cried Beatrice bitterly. “I
have met with a loss, with a grief, none the
less keen because inevitable. My parents
have passed from my sight, full of faith and
hope in a life beyond the grave. Your philosophy
and your science refuse to recognize
the validity of such hope; they coldly ask for
proof, and there is no proof. But can I believe
those holy lives ended in the six feet of
earth where the venerable bodies were laid?
And if not, where have they gone—where are
we going—what conditions await us—how
shall we prepare for them? Are not we wandering
blindly in the dark with the light behind
us? Have not we too soon despised the
simple faith of unlearned minds, and substituted
the pride of human intellect for the
voice of God within our hearts? O Mr.
Chappelleford! you are wiser and far more
learned than I, but are you sure that you are
not the blind leading the blind toward the
verge of a terrible precipice?”

The philosopher shaded his eyes with his
hand, and from beneath that screen, regarded
with attentive scrutiny the beautiful face of his
wife, pale, haggard, and almost ghastly with
emotion.

“I have not sufficiently considered your
youth,” said he at last. “All this must come,
and I suppose no theorizing can take the place
of actual experience. But it passes, as every
thing passes, great and small—every thing
but the eternal laws of Nature—and who is to
say that Nature itself has no limit? Perhaps
the colophon of what we call the Book of Nature
is Annihilation.”

“You do not answer me.”

“How can I? When a child comes to me,
crying for the stars, what am I to do with
him? Put him off for a while; and when he
is calm, explain to him what the stars really
are. I know of no better course.”

“But I am no child.”

“You talk like one.”

“Well, then, instruct me, educate me, answer
as gravely as I ask them, these questions
which torment my soul.”

“How can I answer rationally questions
which every reflecting mind answers to itself,
and in its own fashion? I can give you my
ideas, but I do not ask you to adopt them as
yours. Very wise men have been devotees—
even bigots; others as wise have been infidels,
as they are called. Take your own course;
but if you follow me, you will arrive at my
conclusions. I look about me, using first my
own eyes, my own brain, and afterward the
eyes and brains of other people. I see a vast
system called Nature—self-sustaining, immutable,
unsympathetic, irresponsible. It governs
men and things—creates, sustains, destroys, not
from motives of benevolence or of malevolence,
not to reward or to punish, but simply because
birth, death, life are its fundamental principles.
The acorn drops upon the earth, and is covered
by leaves and moss; it sprouts and grows
up into a promising tree; comes the north
wind and twists it off at the root; it dies and
becomes mould, wherein sprout other acorns.
Do the surrounding oaks cry: `Glory Hallelejah!
A miracle! a special dispensation!
a gift from Heaven!' when the oakling
sprouts; or do they abase themselves in the
dust when it dies, and demand of each other
why this terrible thing has happened, and
how they are to guard themselves against the
same fate? Nor do they waste time in inquiring
where the sap dried out of that dead
trunk has gone, or whether there may exist
some unknown limbo whither it has fled,
and become the ghost of its former self. The
oaks recognize and submit to the inevitable
law, simply because it is inevitable. Cannot
you be as wise?”

“But man is different from an oak. He is
the chief and crown of creation. All this
system operates for his use and benefit.”

“If he goes along with it, it does; if he
goes contrary to it, he gets run over and
smashed. Make a ship, and the ocean will
float it and the wind propel it; throw yourself
into the water bodily, and the sea will drown
you; go up in a balloon, and the wind will
carry you to the Mountains of the Moon, and
dash you to pieces there. People talk of governing
Nature, and they talk rubbish; the
most they can do is to submit to her laws,
and preserve their own devices subject to those
laws—never forgetting that one of the principal
of them is ultimate transmutation of
every form of material in her laboratory, man
among the rest.”

“But what is the end? For what purpose
is all this vast machinery put in motion?
Who created Nature, and for what, and what
is the grand result?' asked Beatrice wearily.

“Asking for the stars again? Your questions
are too childish, but I will try to answer
them. The end? There is none, but the necessity
of some form of existence. The purpose?
Nature knows no purpose, but simply
superadds effect upon cause because such sequence
is inevitable under her laws. Who created
her and her laws? She herself is Creator
and Eternal. And the grand result? The
perfect unison of man with Nature. Through
the ages, he is learning to understand and cooperate
with her more and more, to `flash the
lightnings, weigh the sun,' as some one of
these rhymsters has it, to work with her, and
in measuring his wishes by her will, gain her
powerful assistance instead of her fatal antagonism.
The grand result, as I fancy, will
be an earth where man is at last supreme,
where he will create and destroy life, rule the
seasons, sway the elements, command all the
forces of Nature—but always, mind you, subject
to her laws—and where, indeed, he shall
at last deserve the name of a god. You see,
child, I too indulge in dreams sometimes although
I do not often expose the weakness.”

“But in that millennium will the souls and
hearts of men also rise to the godlike level
of their minds? Will perfect happiness reign
then upon the earth?”

“I thought you had abandoned that senseless
cry. Happiness? It is the content of
fools. A wise man finding himself at the
highest attainable point of knowledge and
power, sees beyond him a thousand yet inaccessible
summits, and understands that effort,
like attainment, is limitless and eternal. No
man ever in the past has said, no man in the
future shall say: `I have conquered, I have finished!'
And until then I cannot conceive of
what you call happiness.”

“And there is no world beyond this, you
think?”

“Wait, my dear, until this one has been
thoroughly explained before you invite me to
another. When some one has verified Speke's
discovery of the Nile, and brought home
Franklin's remains from the North Pole, and
thoroughly surveyed the region about the
Southern one, then we will climb the Mountains
of the Moon, and so up to Paradise.”

“I ask for bread, and you give me a stone,”

murmured Beatrice, her head drooping upon
her breast.

“I try to give you common-sense, but—”
and Mr. Chappelleford constrained himself
to finish the sentence by nothing more uncourteous
than a smile. Presently, however,
he resumed in his ordinary tone:

“As I was saying, Beatrice, I am now ready
to go to the West, and think you will enjoy
going with me. Certainly your assistance
will be most valuable to me, and important
to the report I am to make. You know you
entered into those matters in France and Switzerland
con amore, and fairly silenced the Parisian
savans, who could not hold their own
at all in the arguments they tried to sustain
against you.”

Beatrice smiled faintly, and raised her head
with an air of interest.

“If I can help you, I am very glad to go to
the West,” said she.

“You can help me very much. Bassthwaite
was telling me a few days ago of some
fossil remains found in a coal-bed somewhere
in the western part of Pennsylvania, which I
am sure will interest you. By the way, the
mine is owned and carried on by a man named
Brent, who I believe to be your old lover.
Do you know whether he lives in that part of
the country?”

“No; I have no idea. I have not heard of
him since our marriage,” replied Beatrice unmoved.

“I asked your uncle, who was present, and
he thought that this was the man. Marston
Brent, I think he is called.”

“The Mr. Brent I knew was called Marston.”

“No doubt the same. Your uncle said
that some one in Milvor had been inquiring
this Brent's present abiding-place and circumstances
of Mrs. Bliss, and the result was
to ascertain that he lived in Pennsylvania,
and was engaged in coal-mining.”

“I dare say. I wonder if he really married.”

“That I did not hear, but I shall certainly
go to him for information and assistance in
this fossil business. Would you like to go
there with me, or have you any sentimental
objections to meeting him?”

“Not any at all. On the contrary, I have
a curiosity to see Marston Brent again, and
find whether he has changed as much as I.”

And Beatrice drooped her head again with
a weary sigh.

Her husband looked keenly at her.

“Come then,” said he. “Even a relapse
into sentiment will be better than this maudlin
condition. We will go to visit Marston
Brent, and his coal-mine and his wife.”