University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
OLD SOPHY CALLS ON THE REVEREND DOCTOR.

The two meeting-houses which faced each
other like a pair of fighting-cocks had not flapped
their wings or crowed at each other for a considerable
time. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather had
been dyspeptic and low-spirited of late, and was
too languid for controversy. The Reverend Doctor
Honeywood had been very busy with his benevolent
associations, and had discoursed chiefly
on practical matters, to the neglect of special
doctrinal subjects. His senior deacon ventured
to say to him that some of his people required to
be reminded of the great fundamental doctrine
of the worthlessness of all human efforts and motives.
Some of them were altogether too much
pleased with the success of the Temperance Society
and the Association for the Relief of the
Poor. There was a pestilent heresy about, concerning
the satisfaction to be derived from a good
conscience, — as if anybody ever did anything

which was not to be hated, loathed, despised and
condemned.

The old minister listened gravely, with an inward
smile, and told his deacon that he would attend
to his suggestion. After the deacon had gone,
he tumbled over his manuscripts, until at length
he came upon his first-rate old sermon on “Human
Nature.” He had read a great deal of hard
theology, and had at last reached that curious
state which is so common in good ministers, —
that, namely, in which they contrive to switch
off their logical faculties on the narrow side-track
of their technical dogmas, while the great freight-train
of their substantial human qualities keeps
in the main highway of common-sense, in which
kindly souls are always found by all who approach
them by their human side.

The Doctor read his sermon with a pleasant,
paternal interest: it was well argued from his
premises. Here and there he dashed his pen
through a harsh expression. Now and then he
added an explanation or qualified a broad statement.
But his mind was on the logical side-track,
and he followed the chain of reasoning
without fairly perceiving where it would lead
him, if he carried it into real life.

He was just touching up the final proposition,
when his granddaughter, Letty, once before referred
to, came into the room with her smiling
face and lively movement. Miss Letty or Letitia
Forrester was a city-bred girl of some fifteen or

sixteen years old, who was passing the summer
with her grandfather for the sake of country air and
quiet. It was a sensible arrangement; for, having
the promise of figuring as a belle by-and-by, and
being a little given to dancing, and having a
voice which drew a pretty dense circle around
the piano when she sat down to play and sing,
it was hard to keep her from being carried into
society before her time, by the mere force of mutual
attraction. Fortunately, she had some quiet
as well as some social tastes, and was willing
enough to pass two or three of the summer
months in the country, where she was much
better bestowed than she would have been at
one of those watering-places where so many half-formed
girls get prematurely hardened in the vice
of self-consciousness.

Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome,
hearty, and high-strung a young girl to be a
model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic
pattern which is the classical type of certain excellent
young females, often the subjects of biographical
memoirs. But the old minister was
proud of his granddaughter for all that. She
was so full of life, so graceful, so generous, so
vivacious, so ready always to do all she could for
him and for everybody, so perfectly frank in her
avowed delight in the pleasures which this miserable
world offered her in the shape of natural
beauty, of poetry, of music, of companionship,
of books, of cheerful coöperation in the tasks of

those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could
not find it in his heart to condemn her because
she was deficient in those particular graces and
that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes
noticed in feeble young persons suffering from
various chronic diseases which impaired their
vivacity and removed them from the range of
temptation.

When Letty, therefore, came bounding into the
old minister's study, he glanced up from his manuscript,
and, as his eye fell upon her, it flashed
across him that there was nothing so very monstrous
and unnatural about the specimen of congenital
perversion he was looking at, with his
features opening into their pleasantest sunshine.
Technically, according to the fifth proposition of
the sermon on Human Nature, very bad, no
doubt. Practically, according to the fact before
him, a very pretty piece of the Creator's handiwork,
body and soul. Was it not a conceivable
thing that the divine grace might show itself in
different forms in a fresh young girl like Letitia,
and in that poor thing he had visited yesterday,
half-grown, half-colored, in bed for the last year
with hip-disease? Was it to be supposed that
this healthy young girl, with life throbbing all
over her, could, without a miracle, be good according
to the invalid pattern and formula?

And yet there were mysteries in human nature
which pointed to some tremendous perversion of
its tendencies, — to some profound, radical vice

of moral constitution, native or transmitted, as
you will have it, but positive, at any rate, as the
leprosy, breaking out in the blood of races, guard
them ever so carefully. Did he not know the
case of a young lady in Rockland, daughter of
one of the first families in the place, a very beautiful
and noble creature to look at, for whose
bringing-up nothing had been spared, — a girl
who had had governesses to teach her at the
house, who had been indulged almost too kindly,
— a girl whose father had given himself up to
her, he being himself a pure and high-souled
man? — and yet this girl was accused in whispers
of having been on the very verge of committing
a fatal crime; she was an object of fear
to all who knew the dark hints which had been
let fall about her, and there were some that believed
— Why, what was this but an instance
of the total obliquity and degeneration of the
moral principle? and to what could it be owing,
but to an innate organic tendency?

“Busy, grandpapa?” said Letty, and without
waiting for an answer kissed his cheek with a
pair of lips made on purpose for that little function,
— fine, but richly turned out, the corners
tucked in with a finish of pretty dimples, the
rose-bud lips of girlhood's June.

The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter.
Nature swelled up from his heart in a wave
that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle to his
eye. But it is very hard to be interrupted just as

we are winding up a string of propositions with
the grand conclusion which is the statement in
brief of all that has gone before: our own starting-point,
into which we have been trying to back
our reader or listener as one backs a horse into
the shafts.

“Video meliora, proboque, — I see the better,
and approve it; deteriora sequor, I follow after
the worse; 'tis that natural dislike to what is
good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted selfishness,
totally insensible to the claims of” —

Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss
Letty.

“Do come, if you can, grandpapa,” said the
young girl; “here is a poor old black woman
wants to see you so much!”

The good minister was as kind-hearted as if
he had never groped in the dust and ashes of
those cruel old abstractions which have killed
out so much of the world's life and happiness.
“With the heart man believeth unto righteousness”;
a man's love is the measure of his fitness
for good or bad company here or elsewhere.
Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so
many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human
heart, with Divine love in it, beats with the same
glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand
tribes!

The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and
laid the Quarto Cruden on it. He rose from his
desk, and, looking once more at the young girl's

face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to
himself that she was a little angel, — which was
in violent contradiction to the leading doctrine of
his sermon on Human Nature. And so he followed
her out of the study into the wide entry
of the old-fashioned country-house.

An old black woman sat on the plain oaken
settle which humble visitors waiting to see the
minister were wont to occupy. She was old, but
how old it would be very hard to guess. She
might be seventy. She might be ninety. One
could not swear she was not a hundred. Black
women remain at a stationary age (to the eyes
of white people, at least) for thirty years. They
do not appear to change during this period any
more than so many Trenton trilobites. Bent up,
wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long upper-lip, projecting
jaws, retreating chin, still meek features,
long arms, large flat hands with uncolored palms
and slightly webbed fingers, it was impossible not
to see in this old creature a hint of the gradations
by which life climbs up through the lower natures
to the highest human developments. We cannot
tell such old women's ages because we do not
understand the physiognomy of a race so unlike
our own. No doubt they see a great deal in each
other's faces that we cannot, — changes of color
and expression as real as our own, blushes and
sudden betrayals of feeling, — just as these two
canaries know what their single notes and short
sentences and full song with this or that variation

mean, though it is a mystery to us unplumed
mortals.

This particular old black woman was a striking
specimen of her class. Old as she looked, her
eye was bright and knowing. She wore a red-and-yellow
turban, which set off her complexion
well, and hoops of gold in her ears, and beads of
gold about her neck, and an old funeral ring upon
her finger. She had that touching stillness about
her which belongs to animals that wait to be
spoken to and then look up with a kind of sad
humility.

“Why, Sophy!” said the good minister, “is
this you?”

She looked up with the still expression on her
face. “It's ol' Sophy,” she said.

“Why,” said the Doctor, “I did not believe
you could walk so far as this to save the Union.
Bring Sophy a glass of wine, Letty. Wine's
good for old folks like Sophy and me, after walking
a good way, or preaching a good while.”

The young girl stepped into the back-parlor,
where she found the great pewter flagon in
which the wine that was left after each communion-service
was brought to the minister's
house. With much toil she managed to tip it so
as to get a couple of glasses filled. The minister
tasted his, and made old Sophy finish hers.

“I wan' to see you 'n' talk wi' you all alone,”
she said presently.

The minister got up and led the way towards

his study. “To be sure,” he said; he had only
waited for her to rest a moment before he asked
her into the library. The young girl took her
gently by the arm, and helped her feeble steps
along the passage. When they reached the
study, she smoothed the cushion of a rocking-chair,
and made the old woman sit down in it.
Then she tripped lightly away, and left her alone
with the minister.

Old Sophy was a member of the Reverend
Doctor Honeywood's church. She had been put
through the necessary confessions in a tolerably
satisfactory manner. To be sure, as her grandfather
had been a cannibal chief, according to the
common story, and, at any rate, a terrible wild
savage, and as her mother retained to the last
some of the prejudices of her early education,
there was a heathen flavor in her Christianity,
which had often scandalized the elder of the
minister's two deacons. But the good minister
had smoothed matters over: had explained
that allowances were to be made for those who
had been long sitting without the gate of Zion,
— that, no doubt, a part of the curse which descended
to the children of Ham consisted in
“having the understanding darkened,” as well
as the skin, — and so had brought his suspicious
senior deacon to tolerate old Sophy as
one of the communion of fellow-sinners.

— Poor things! How little we know the

simple notions with which these rudiments of
souls are nourished by the Divine Goodness! Did
not Mrs. Professor come home this very blessed
morning with a story of one of her old black
women?

“And how do you feel to-day, Mrs. Robinson?”

“Oh, my dear, I have this singing in my head
all the time.” (What doctors call tinnitus aurium.)

“She's got a cold in the head,” said old Mrs.
Rider.

“Oh, no, my dear! Whatever I'm thinking
about, it's all this singing, this music. When I'm
thinking of the dear Redeemer, it all turns into
this singing and music. When the clark came to
see me, I asked him if he couldn't cure me, and
he said, No, — it was the Holy Spirit in me, singing
to me; and all the time I hear this beautiful
music, and it's the Holy Spirit a-singing to
me.” —

The good man waited for Sophy to speak; but
she did not open her lips as yet.

“I hope you are not troubled in mind or body,”
he said to her at length, finding she did not speak.

The poor old woman took out a white handkerchief,
and lifted it to her black face. She
could not say a word for her tears and sobs.

The minister would have consoled her; he was
used to tears, and could in most cases withstand
their contagion manfully; but something choked
his voice suddenly, and when he called upon it,

he got no answer, but a tremulous movement of
the muscles, which was worse than silence.

At last she spoke.

“Oh, no, no, no! It's my poor girl, my darling,
my beauty, my baby, that's grown up to be a
woman; she will come to a bad end; she will do
something that will make them kill her or shut
her up all her life. Oh, Doctor, Doctor, save her,
pray for her! It a'n't her fault. It a'n't her fault.
If they knew all that I know, they wouldn' blame
that poor child. I must tell you, Doctor: if I
should die, perhaps nobody else would tell you.
Massa Venner can't talk about it. Doctor Kittredge
won't talk about it. Nobody but old Sophy
to tell you, Doctor; and old Sophy can't die
without telling you.”

The kind minister soothed the poor old soul
with those gentle, quieting tones which had carried
peace and comfort to so many chambers of
sickness and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened
by the trials laid upon them.

Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and
proceeded to tell her story. She told it in the low
half-whisper which is the natural voice of lips oppressed
with grief and fears; with quick glances
around the apartment from time to time, as if she
dreaded lest the dim portraits on the walls and
the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her
words.

It was not one of those conversations which a
third person can report minutely, unless by that

miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers of
stories made out of authors' brains. Yet its main
character can be imparted in a much briefer space
than the old black woman took to give all its
details.

She went far back to the time when Dudley
Venner was born, — she being then a middle-aged
woman. The heir and hope of a family which
had been narrowing down as if doomed to extinction,
he had been surrounded with every care and
trained by the best education he could have in
New England. He had left college, and was
studying the profession which gentlemen of leisure
most affect, when he fell in love with a young
girl left in the world almost alone, as he was.
The old woman told the story of his young love
and his joyous bridal with a tenderness which had
something more, even, than her family sympathies
to account for it. Had she not hanging over her
bed a paper-cutting of a profile — jet black, but
not blacker than the face it represented — of one
who would have been her own husband in the
small years of this century, if the vessel in which
he went to sea, like Jamie in the ballad, had not
sailed away and never come back to land? Had
she not her bits of furniture stowed away which
had been got ready for her own wedding, — two
rocking-chairs, one worn with long use, one kept
for him so long that it had grown a superstition
with her never to sit in it, — and might he not
come back yet, after all? Had she not her chest

of linen ready for her humble house-keeping, with
store of serviceable huckaback and piles of neatly
folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed
so white against her black face was taken, for that
she knew her eyes would betray her in “the
presence”?

All the first part of the story the old woman
told tenderly, and yet dwelling upon every incident
with a loving pleasure. How happy this
young couple had been, what plans and projects
of improvement they had formed, how they lived
in each other, always together, so young and fresh
and beautiful as she remembered them in that one
early summer when they walked arm in arm
through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in the
garden, — she told of this as loath to leave it and
come to the woe that lay beneath.

She told the whole story; — shall I repeat it?
Not now. If, in the course of relating the incidents
I have undertaken to report, it tells itself,
perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of
producing a painful impression on some of those
susceptible readers whom it would be ill-advised
to disturb or excite, when they rather require to
be amused and soothed. In our pictures of life,
we must show the flowering-out of terrible
growths which have their roots deep, deep underground.
Just how far we shall lay bare the unseemly
roots themselves is a matter of discretion
and taste, in which none of us are infallible.

The old woman told the whole story of Elsie,

of her birth, of her peculiarities of person and disposition,
of the passionate fears and hopes with
which her father had watched the course of her
development. She recounted all her strange ways,
from the hour when she first tried to crawl across
the carpet, and her father's look as she worked her
way towards him. With the memory of Juliet's
nurse she told the story of her teething, and how,
the woman to whose breast she had clung dying
suddenly about that time, they had to struggle
hard with the child before she would learn the accomplishment
of feeding with a spoon. And so
of her fierce plays and fiercer disputes with that
boy who had been her companion, and the whole
scene of the quarrel when she struck him with
those sharp white teeth, frightening her, old Sophy,
almost to death; for, as she said, the boy
would have died, if it hadn't been for the old
Doctor's galloping over as fast as he could gallop
and burning the places right out of his arm.
Then came the story of that other incident, sufficiently
alluded to already, which had produced
such an ecstasy of fright and left such a nightmare
of apprehension in the household. And so
the old woman came down to this present time.
That boy she never loved nor trusted was grown
to a dark, dangerous-looking man, and he was under
their roof. He wanted to marry our poor
Elsie, and Elsie hated him, and sometimes she
would look at him over her shoulder just as she
used to look at that woman she hated; and she,
old Sophy, couldn't sleep for thinking she should
hear a scream from the white chamber some night
and find him in spasms such as that woman
came so near dying with. And then there was
something about Elsie she did not know what to
make of: she would sit and hang her head sometimes,
and look as if she were dreaming; and she
brought home books they said a young gentleman
up at the great school lent her: and once she
heard her whisper in her sleep, and she talked as
young girls do to themselves when they're thinking
about somebody they have a liking for and
think nobody knows it.

She finished her long story at last. The minister
had listened to it in perfect silence. He sat
still even when she had done speaking, — still,
and lost in thought. It was a very awkward
matter for him to have a hand in. Old Sophy
was his parishioner, but the Venners had a pew
in the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house.
It would seem that he, Mr. Fairweather, was the
natural adviser of the parties most interested.
Had he sense and spirit enough to deal with such
people? Was there enough capital of humanity
in his somewhat limited nature to furnish sympathy
and unshrinking service for his friends in an
emergency? or was he too busy with his own
attacks of spiritual neuralgia, and too much occupied
with taking account of stock of his own
thin-blooded offences, to forget himself and his
personal interests on the small scale and the large,

and run a risk of his life, if need were, at any
rate give himself up without reserve to the dangerous
task of guiding and counselling these distressed
and imperilled fellow-creatures?

The good minister thought the best thing to do
would be to call and talk over some of these matters
with Brother Fairweather, — for so he would
call him at times, especially if his senior deacon
were not within earshot. Having settled this
point, he comforted Sophy with a few words of
counsel and a promise of coming to see her very
soon. He then called his man to put the old
white horse into the chaise and drive Sophy back
to the mansion-house.

When the Doctor sat down to his sermon
again, it looked very differently from the way it
had looked at the moment he left it. When he
came to think of it, he did not feel quite so sure
practically about that matter of the utter natural
selfishness of everybody. There was Letty, now,
seemed to take a very unselfish interest in that
old black woman, and indeed in poor people generally;
perhaps it would not be too much to say
that she was always thinking of other people.
He thought he had seen other young persons
naturally unselfish, thoughtful for others; it
seemed to be a family trait in some he had
known.

But most of all he was exercised about this
poor girl whose story Sophy had been telling.
If what the old woman believed was true, — and

it had too much semblance of probability, —
what became of his theory of ingrained moral
obliquity applied to such a case? If by the visitation
of God a person receives any injury which
impairs the intellect or the moral perceptions, is
it not monstrous to judge such a person by our
common working standards of right and wrong?
Certainly, everybody will answer, in cases where
there is a palpable organic change brought about,
as when a blow on the head produces insanity.
Fools! How long will it be before we shall learn
that for every wound which betrays itself to the
sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations
that cripple, each of them, some one or
more of our highest faculties? If what Sophy
told and believed was the real truth, what prayers
could be agonizing enough, what tenderness could
be deep enough, for this poor, lost, blighted, hapless,
blameless child of misfortune, struck by such
a doom as perhaps no living creature in all the
sisterhood of humanity shared with her?

The minister thought these matters over until
his mind was bewildered with doubts and tossed
to and fro on that stormy deep of thought heaving
forever beneath the conflict of windy dogmas.
He laid by his old sermon. He put back a pile
of old commentators with their eyes and mouths
and hearts full of the dust of the schools. Then
he opened the book of Genesis at the eighteenth
chapter and read that remarkable argument of
Abraham's with his Maker, in which he boldly

appeals to first principles. He took as his text,
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
and began to write his sermon, afterwards so
famous, — “On the Obligations of an Infinite
Creator to a Finite Creature.”

It astonished the good people, who had been
accustomed so long to repeat mechanically their
Oriental hyperboles of self-abasement, to hear
their worthy minister maintaining that the dignified
attitude of the old Patriarch, insisting on
what was reasonable and fair with reference to
his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful
to his Maker, and a great deal manlier
and more to his credit, than if he had yielded the
whole matter, and pretended that men had not
rights as well as duties. The same logic which
had carried him to certain conclusions with reference
to human nature, this same irresistible logic
carried him straight on from his text until he arrived
at those other results, which not only astonished
his people, as was said, but surprised himself.
He went so far in defence of the rights of
man, that he put his foot into several heresies, for
which men had been burned so often, it was time,
if ever it could be, to acknowledge the demonstration
of the argumentum ad ignem. He did not
believe in the responsibility of idiots. He did
not believe a new-born infant was morally answerable
for other people's acts. He thought a
man with a crooked spine would never be called
to account for not walking erect. He thought,

if the crook was in his brain, instead of his back,
he could not fairly be blamed for any consequence
of this natural defect, whatever lawyers or divines
might call it. He argued, that, if a person inherited
a perfect mind, body, and disposition, and
had perfect teaching from infancy, that person
could do nothing more than keep the moral law
perfectly. But supposing that the Creator allows
a person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted
organic tendency, and then puts this person into
the hands of teachers incompetent or positively
bad, is not what is called sin or transgression of
the law necessarily involved in the premises? Is
not a Creator bound to guard his children against
the ruin which inherited ignorance might entail
on them? Would it be fair for a parent to put
into a child's hands the title-deeds to all its future
possessions, and a bunch of matches? And are
not men children, nay, babes, in the eye of Omniscience?
— The minister grew bold in his questions.
Had not he as good right to ask questions
as Abraham?

This was the dangerous vein of speculation in
which the Reverend Doctor Honeywood found
himself involved, as a consequence of the suggestions
forced upon him by old Sophy's communication.
The truth was, the good man had
got so humanized by mixing up with other people
in various benevolent schemes, that, the very
moment he could escape from his old scholastic
abstractions, he took the side of humanity instinctively,

just as the Father of the Faithful did,
— all honor be to the noble old Patriarch for insisting
on the worth of an honest man, and making
the best terms he could for a very ill-conditioned
metropolis, which might possibly, however,
have contained ten righteous people, for whose
sake it should be spared!

The consequence of all this was, that he was
in a singular and seemingly self-contradictory
state of mind when he took his hat and cane and
went forth to call on his heretical brother. The
old minister took it for granted that the Reverend
Mr. Fairweather knew the private history of his
parishioner's family. He did not reflect that there
are griefs men never put into words, — that there
are fears which must not be spoken, — intimate
matters of consciousness which must be carried,
as bullets which have been driven deep into the
living tissues are sometimes carried, for a whole
lifetime, — encysted griefs, if we may borrow
the chirurgeon's term, never to be reached, never
to be seen, never to be thrown out, but to go into
the dust with the frame that bore them about
with it, during long years of anguish, known only
to the sufferer and his Maker. Dudley Venner
had talked with his minister about this child of
his. But he had talked cautiously, feeling his
way for sympathy, looking out for those indications
of tact and judgment which would warrant
him in some partial communication, at least,
of the origin of his doubts and fears, and never
finding them.

There was something about the Reverend Mr.
Fairweather which repressed all attempts at confidential
intercourse. What this something was,
Dudley Venner could hardly say; but he felt it
distinctly, and it sealed his lips. He never got
beyond certain generalities connected with education
and religious instruction. The minister
could not help discovering, however, that there
were difficulties connected with this girl's management,
and he heard enough outside of the
family to convince him that she had manifested
tendencies, from an early age, at variance with
the theoretical opinions he was in the habit of
preaching, and in a dim way of holding for truth,
as to the natural dispositions of the human
being.

About this terrible fact of congenital obliquity
his new beliefs began to cluster as a centre, and
to take form as a crystal around its nucleus.
Still, he might perhaps have struggled against
them, had it not been for the little Roman Catholic
chapel he passed every Sunday, on his way
to the meeting-house. Such a crowd of worshippers,
swarming into the pews like bees, filling all
the aisles, running over at the door like berries
heaped too full in the measure, — some kneeling
on the steps, some standing on the side-walk,
hats off, heads down, lips moving, some looking
on devoutly from the other side of the street!
Oh, could he have followed his own Bridget,
maid of all work, into the heart of that steaming

throng, and bowed his head while the priests intoned
their Latin prayers! could he have snuffed
up the cloud of frankincense, and felt that he
was in the great ark which holds the better half
of the Christian world, while all around it are
wretched creatures, some struggling against the
waves in leaky boats, and some on ill-connected
rafts, and some with their heads just above water,
thinking to ride out the flood which is to sweep
the earth clean of sinners, upon their own private,
individual life-preservers!

Such was the present state of mind of the
Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, when his clerical
brother called upon him to talk over the questions
to which old Sophy had called his attention.