University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
A WINTER OF THE HEART.

GOD'S love, Christ's peace, the presence of the Comforter,
— such are the solaces of afflicted saints. The unsanctified
heart cannot repose in these, and submissively
accept its pain. Still it is not without its helpers. The
sun which shines on the evil and the good, and the rain
which falls on the just and the unjust, are types of many
blessings common to all the children of Earth. Time
with healing on its wings, and work crowding hard upon
work, soothe the heaviest griefs or drive them away by
force, and thus God in his providence shows mercy even
to the unthankful and the evil. “What can time do for
me?” cries the sufferer in his first agony. “Will not
the cause of my sorrow continue forever the same?”
Vain questions, which time alone can answer, but which
it does answer day by day, as the heart becomes used
to its burden, then feels it lightened, perhaps at last
altogether shakes off the load.

But even time is but half a power bereft of its coadjutor,
work. “I will work no more!” is the rebellious resolve;

“I will merely fold my hands and weep.” But necessity
presses at first as a cruel taskmaster, then wears the
aspect of a friend, and at last proves itself a deliverer.
And so even earthly agencies beneficently triumph over
pain, and the head bowed low by the storm is raised
again to meet the sunshine.

Let us see what these provisions of mercy have done
for Angie.

Winter changed to spring. The months went heavily,
— still they went. They brought occupation with them
too — plenty of it; for sickness was added to poverty, and
labor to anxiety, in the farm-house of Mr. Cousin. Old
Happy Boose fell ill and died; and in nursing the faithful
servant and performing the household drudgery besides,
Angie had little rest by night or day. She went through
her tasks, indeed, like a machine — but like a machine,
she never faltered nor complained. That Angie was able
thus automatically to pursue the round of every-day duty,
her usefulness unimpaired by the terrible shocks she had
sustained, only confirmed what was evidenced in the first
stages of the conflict, that the necessity for action is the
parent of self-control, and thus the preserver alike of reason
and of health. But for the absolute demands that were
made upon her that winter in her home, Angie's excitable
temperament might have become so wrought upon that
her career would have ended in wasting disease or
madness. As it was, God gave her earthly work to do,
and her physical powers of endurance were brought out,
and her senses maintained in their rightful equilibrium.

Thus the hardening process commenced during the frosts
of Christmas, and by spring she was inured to her lot.
Inured but not reconciled. There is one thing which time
and work have no power to put to flight. For I dare not
say that remorse can thus be banished or set aside. It is
subject to a contrary law from that which rules in all
other forms of anguish. Earth and its agencies have no
mission here. Only Heaven's touch can heal this inner
smart, and Angie's remorse burned on.

She had come too near to sin to escape its retribution.
Great crimes had overshadowed her with their horror,
and a vague sense of participation in them had taken
possession of her, and would not be driven away. Conscience
was ever pointing down the gulf in which a soul
had perished, and accusing her of having hurried it on to
its doom. True, the crime was his, but it was she who
had sharpened the instrument for the deed; she who had
lit the fires of jealousy and desperation in which he had
hardened himself for acts of violence and blood. True,
she had only trifled with a loving heart, as thousands
trifle daily, and never wake to any consciousness of wrong,
far less of actual crime. But only in the light of
fatal consequences do we see the power of our own
misdeeds. Angie's eyes were opened, and she saw
what she had done, — saw more than she had done, — for
imagination lent itself to memory and aggravated every
offence. Volumes could never detail the windings of her
mind as it roamed through all the passages of the past,
rehearsing the devotion, the tenderness, the patience of

years on George's part; the tyranny, the petulance, the
caprice on hers; and speculating as to their possible bearing
on the young man's character and destiny, her reflections
always ending in a cold shudder as she recalled the
ill-timed scorn, the bitter reproaches, the mocking laugh
into which she had been betrayed on the night of the
ball, and which had, as she felt assured, put the finishing
stroke to the young man's fate.

But though time and toil were no antidote to this
poisoned sting, which always lay in wait for her peace
of mind, they in some degree controlled its action and
modified its influence upon her outward life. Goethe
relates a fanciful story of an adventurous barber, who,
for the sake of an alliance with a princess of the pygmy
race, consented to a transformation from his own manly
proportions to those of the minutest dwarfs. The process
of contraction, which was simultaneous with the assumption
of a magic ring, consisted of one terrible wrench
which threatened to tear him limb from limb, after which
he found himself dwarfed indeed, and subject to the
unimagined, and, as they proved, unendurable conditions
of his new lot, but free from the first agony of
his metamorphose.

The shock with which Angie had been thrust from the
heights of vanity and self-satisfaction to the depths of
conscious degradation and remorse, was an experience
of the moral nature not unlike that which the unfortunate
barber suffered in the flesh. As in his case,
too, though her after condition was one of helplessness

and torment, the wrench she had endured in the transformation
proved but temporary. As day after day
passed on, her first bewilderment and horror gave
place to a dull and settled misery. She became accustomed
to the thought of Geordie as lost, — eternally
lost; of herself, as in the same hopeless state; of the
past, as a burden from which there was no escape, and
of the future, as promising nothing but a continuation
of pain. She whose moral mirror had heretofore reflected
a gay figure, flaunting in holiday finery, recognized
herself through the dirt and rags in which self-contempt
had clothed her; she, who had danced through
life with Hope for her partner, now sat down with
Despair for her sole companion. And she became used
to the Cinderella garb, — used to the sad companionship,
— or if habit failed to inure her to them, hard work
came to its assistance. The cold perspiration, the
momentary palsy of the heart which sometimes stole
over, or seized upon her in her hours of deep despondency,
were sure to be speedily dispelled by the
demand for her services here, there, and every where.
In constant attendance upon her father, the household,
and Happy Boose, she had little leisure to take the
gauge of her own lot, real or imaginary, and even
remorse found its best solace at the wash tub, the
oven, the kitchen hearth, the mop and broom, and the
sick bed of the old negress.

If there was any virtue in the half-sullen submission,
the enforced drudgery, the compelled self-contempt,

which at present constituted the chief features
of Angie's life, it did not manifest itself outwardly.
Whatever change there was in her was apparently a
change for the worse. She still had a word of encouragement
for old Hap, a constrained smile for her
father, a helping hand to spare now and then for the
two old women at the cottage; but the grace, the
beauty, the charm that hung around her former life
had all been swept away by the blast, and no new
virtues had yet blossomed in their place. The seeds
might be there, but there is no sweetness, no beauty
in seeds, and besides they lie a long while under ground.
It was winter with her yet, and her life was very desolate
and bare, — poor thing!

Her father scarcely noticed the change, neither did
old Hap. The one was ailing, depressed, and nervous
himself from the effect of recent events, — what else
could he expect from her? — and the other was dying,
groaning her old life away in mortal pain; and every
other agony was but a dim reflection of her own. It
was too dark in the farm-house that winter for shadows
to be seen any where.

Nor were there any observers from the outside world.
So engrossing were Angie's duties, so utter her seclusion,
that from Christmas time until spring she never
went further from home than the Widow Rawle's cottage,
a daily visit to which, usually paid at sundown,
was less a recreation than a religious rite, so painful
were her associations with the place and its inmates.

And in spite of the curiosity felt concerning her, the
undertaker, who went some time in April to take the
measure for Happy's coffin, was the first among the
village gossips who could boast of having had a glimpse
of Angie since Geordie made away with himself. Most
of the neighbors had kept aloof; at first, “from principle,”
they said, to show their opinion of her; later,
perhaps, from shame; we will hope so, for shame's
sake. Even the village doctor had not obtained an
entrance. Old Hap's case was of too hopeless a nature
for his skill, and besides Hap had no faith in
him, was skilled, as she affirmed, “in yarbs,” and chose
to doctor herself.

Spring-time, which brings back the birds, turns the
grass green, and coaxes the flowers out into the sunshine;
Spring, which pays for all that winter costs, and settles up
Nature's account with man; — spring-time brought release
to old Happy, and the price of all her pain was peace.

But the winter of poor Angie's life had not yet made a
spring for her. All was cold, hard, dark in the soil of
her stricken heart. No seed of hope had sprouted there,
no ray of sunshine, melting the winter snow, had diffused
its moisture through the dry crust that enshrouded her
soul in gloom.

Even in its exterior aspect spring looked less promising
than usual this year at the Cousin farm. The old Frenchman,
so far from recovering his elasticity of spirits and
of limb in proportion as the genial season advanced,
seemed to droop and wither under its influence. He was

no longer able to potter about the place and plan schemes
of improvement and profit, which, however chimerical in
themselves, and however imperfectly carried out, were at
least more promising than utter neglect. What if his
vineyards had proved a failure, except as they afforded
him grapes enough one favorable year to treat his neighbors
to a little very bad wine of his own manufacture?
What if his fields of peppermint and spearmint had never
produced enough oil to pay the cost of his mint still?
What if his flock of sheep, imported from France, had
dwindled down to a few pet lambs of Angie's? What
if every year found him more and more out of pocket,
and with the farm more and more embarrassed and mortgaged?
Practically speaking, these things were ruinous,
but experimental farming is always hopeful; there is a
healthy excitement in novelty; and in riding the annual
hobby, and snuffing future harvests, there was forgetfulness
for the sanguine Frenchman of his long arrears of
indebtedness, and blindness to the poverty which would
otherwise have been staring him in the face. This year,
for the first time, he was without a scheme. It was a
bad sign.

At last, just as the summer days were at the longest,
the farmers, the hardest worked at haying, and their
women folks kept busiest in kitchen and dairy, just at the
season when nobody had leisure to be interrupted with
any body's else concerns, the dormant curiosity of the
neighborhood as to “how things were goin' on at Cousinses,”
was suddenly aroused, and had, moreover, a chance

to be gratified. There had been a death up at the farm-house
in the night! the old gentleman himself had been
called away! he was to be buried to-morrow; and after
that, of course, there must be a general breaking up, for
every thing was going to rack and ruin up there. So
ran the gossip.

The general breaking up, thus looked forward to,
could, of course, be nothing else than the unearthing of
poor Angie, the only victim left to suffer from the coming
chaos. With her last protector gone, it was but too
evident that the poor refugee would at length be driven
from her hiding-place, and compelled to face the light.

Day after day the careless passers-by had seen Mr.
Cousin sitting in the sun at his door-way, his limbs swathed
in flannel, and his camlet coat wrapped round his shoulders,
looking out vacantly on his untilled fields, and shivering in
spite of the summer's heat. Some said old Cousin was
getting gouty; they reckoned his habits were bad; others
that he was lazy, he had never been good for much. Nobody
suspected that a death-chill had got into his bones,
and that his last day's work on earth was done. It was
known that the farm-boy had taken himself off weeks before,
that the one-eyed horse had been seized by Jock the
miller in payment for grain, and that the pig had gone
to offset the butcher's account; it was even whispered
that the farming tools had either been stolen or sold off the
place, and that the old “equipage,” now sported by Farmer
Rycker, had been bargained for with Angie for a
song. But, no one knew — no, they never knew — for

even death and the funeral did not reveal that, — how
Angie had plotted and planned to keep starvation from
the door; how, when every thing else that could be disposed
of was gone, she had made her way to New York
and back on foot, and had obtained as the price of the
three silver tea-spoons and her mother's wedding-ring,
money enough to purchase a few necessaries; and how,
when some weeks later the means were again wanting to
obtain medicine for the sick man, she had cropped off her
own beautiful hair — every lock of it — and sent it secretly
to the wig-maker in Broadway, who made and
dressed Mr. Cousin's wigs, and who had once offered her
a handsome sum for her jetty curls, little suspecting that
the time would ever come when she would bring her
mind to parting with them. No, and they never knew
the bitter relief it brought to the poor girl's pain as she
looked on her dead father's face, to reflect how next to
impossible it would have been for her to keep him alive
with nourishment, even if she could have baffled disease,
and how dreadful a thing it would have been to him to
have outlived the gentleman and died a pauper.

Had they known all this at Stein's Plains, there were
kind-hearted people among them who would have been
stirred to sympathy and action in behalf of Angie and
her father. As it was, many, remembering what a genial,
social nature the old man had, and what a kind word for
every body, felt a pang of mortification and regret that he
should have passed away without their neighborly intervention
or knowledge. Most of them were satisfied,

however, with the reflection “he must have gone off
sudden at last, or we should ha' heard on't sartin; and
anyhow, people that didn't come to meetin', and lived
as close as mice in a cheese, couldn't expect the neighborhood
to keep account of their doins'.” Finally, all
reassured their consciences with the resolve to make
amends for past neglect, “by puttin' aside every thing
else that was pressin' an' drivin' at this season o' year,
an' makin' a pint of attendin' the funeral.”