University of Virginia Library

41. XLI.

IN the winter of 1838-39, Adèle, much to the delight
of Dr. Johns, avowed at last her wish to join herself
to the little church-flock over which the good parson
still held serenely his office of shepherd. And as she
told him quietly of her desire, sitting before him there
in the study of the parsonage, without urgence upon
his part, it was as if a bright gleam of sunshine
had darted suddenly through the wintry clouds, and
bathed both of them in its warm effulgence. The
good man, rising from his chair and crossing over to
her place, touched her forehead with as tender and loving
a kiss as ever he had bestowed upon the lost
Rachel.

He had seen too closely the development of her
Christian faith to disturb her with various questionings.
She rejoiced in this; for even then, with all the calm
serenity of her trust, it was doubtful if her answers
could have fully satisfied the austerities of his theological
traditions. Nay, she doubted, even, if the exuberance
of her spirits would not sometimes, in days to
come, bound over the formalities of his Sunday observance,

and startle a corrective glance; but withal she
knew her trust was firm, and on this had full repose.
Even the little rosary, so obnoxious to the household
of the parsonage, was, by its terrible association with
the death-scene of Madame Arles, endeared to her tenfold;
and she could not forbear the hope that the poor
woman, at the very last, by that clinging kiss upon the
image of Christ, told a prayer that might give access to
His abounding mercy.

Nor did Adèle seek to comprehend in their entireness
all those wearisome dogmatic utterances which
were familiar to her tongue, and which she could understand
might form the steps to fullness of belief for
the rigorous mind of the Doctor: for herself there was
other ladder of approach, in finding which the emotional
experiences of Reuben had been of such signal
service.

To Reuben himself those experiences brought a temporary
exhilaration, but as yet no peace. He has a
vague notion creeping over him, with fearfully chilling
effect, that his sensibilities have been wrought upon
rather than his reason; a confused sense of having
yielded to enthusiasms, which, if they once grow cool,
will leave him to slump back into a mire worse than
the old. Therefore he must, by all possible means,
keep them at fever-heat. A dim consciousness, however,
possessed him, that, for the feeding of the necessary

fires, there would be needed an immense consumption
of fuel, — such stock as an ordinary experience
could hardly hope to supply. By degrees, this consciousness
took the force of conviction, and he became
painfully sensible of his own limitations. There was a
weary, matter-of-fact world to struggle with, in whose
homely cares and interests he must needs be a partner.
He could not wear the gyves of a Gabriel on the
muddy streets of life, or carry the ecstatic language of
praise into the world's talk: if he could, he would be
reckoned insane, and not unjustly, since sanity is, after
all, but a term to express the average normal condition
of mind. He looked with something like envy upon
the serene contentment of Adèle. He lived like an ascetic;
he sought, by reading of all manner of exultant
religious experience, to keep alive the ferment of the
autumn. “If only death were near,” he said to himself,
“with what a blaze of hope one might go out!”
But death was not near, — or, at least, life and its perplexing
duties were nearer. The intensity of his convictions
somehow faded, and they lost their gorgeous
hue, under the calm doctrinal sermons of the parson.
If the glory of the promises and the tenderness of
Divine entreaty were to be always dropping mellifluously
on his ear, as upon that solemn Sunday of the
summer, it might be well. But it is not thus; and
even were the severe quiet of the Ashfield Sundays
lighted up by the swift and burning words of such fiery
evangelism, yet six solid working-days roll over upon
the heel of every Sunday, — in which he sees good
Deacon Tourtelot in shirt-sleeves driving some sharp
bargain for his two-year-old steers, or the stout Dame
hectoring some stray peddler by the hour for the fall
of a penny upon his wares, and wonders where their
Christian largeness of soul is gone. Is the matter real
to him? And if real, where is the peace? Shall he
consult the good Doctor? He is met straightway with
an array of the old catechismal formulas, clearly stated,
well argued, but brushing athwart his mind like a dusty
wind. The traditional dislikes of his boyhood have
armed him against all such, cap-a-pie. In this strait,
he wanders over the hills in search of loneliness, and a
volume of Tillotson he carries with him is all unread.
Nature speaks more winningly, but scarce more helpfully.

Adèle, with a quick eye, sees the growing unrest,
and, with a great weight of gratitude upon her heart,
says, timidly, —

“Can I help you, Reuben?”

“No, thank you, Adèle. I understand you; I 'm in
a boggle, — that 's all.”

The father, too, at a hint from Adèle, (whose perceptions
are so much quicker,) sees at last how the matter
stands.

“Reuben,” he says, “these struggles of yours are
struggles with the Great Adversary of Souls. I trust,
my son, you will not allow him to have the mastery.”

It was kindly said and earnestly said, but touched
the core of the son's moral disquietude no more than
if it were the hooting of an owl. Yet, for all this,
Reuben makes a brave struggle to wear with an outward
calm the burden of the professions he has made,
— a terrible burden, when he finds what awful chasms
in his faith have been overleaped by his vaulting Quixotic
fervor. Wearily he labors to bridge them across,
with over-much reading, there in the quiet study of the
parsonage, of Newton and Tillotson and Butler; and
he takes a grim pleasure (that does not help him) in
following the amiable argumentation of Paley. It
pains him grievously to think what humiliation would
possess the old Doctor, if he but knew into what crazy
currents his boy's thoughts were drifting over the pages
of his beloved teachers. But a man cannot live a deceit,
even for charity's sake, without its making outburst
some day, and wrecking all the fine preventive barriers
which kept it in.

The outburst came at last in the quiet of the Ashfield
study. Reuben had been poring for hours — how
wearily! how vainly! — over the turgid dogmas of one
of the elder divines, when he suddenly dashed the book
upon the floor.

“Confound the theologies! I 'll have no more of
them!”

The Doctor dropped his pen, and stared as if a serpent
had stung him.

“My son! Reuben! Reuben!”

It was not so much the expression that had shocked
him, as it was the action and the defiance in his eye.

“I can't help it, father. It 's the Evil One, perhaps.
If it be, I 'll cheat him, by making a clean breast of it.
I can't abide the stuff; I can't see my way through
it.”

“My son, it is your sin that blinds you.”

“Very likely,” says Reuben.

“It was not thus with you three months ago, Reuben,”
continues the Doctor, in a softened tone.

“No, father, there was a strange light around me in
those days. It seemed to me that the path lay clear
and shining through all the maze. If Death had
caught me then, I think I could have sung hosannas
with the saints. It was a beautiful dream. It 's faded
dismally, father, — as if the Devil had painted it.”

The old man shuddered, and lifted his hands, as he
was wont to do in his most earnest pleas at the Throne
of Grace.

“The muddle of the world and the theologies has
come in since,” continued Reuben, “and the base professions
I see around me, and the hypocrisies and the

cant, have taken away the glow. It 's all a weariness
and a confusion, and that 's the solemn truth.”

The Doctor said, measuredly, (as if the Book were
before him,) —

“`Some seeds fell upon stony places, where they had
not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because
they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was
up, they were scorched; and because they had no root,
they withered away.' Reuben! Reuben! we must
agonize to enter into the strait gate!”

“It 's a long agony,” said Reuben; and he rose and
paced back and forth for a time; then suddenly stopping
before the Doctor, he laid his hand upon his shoulder,
(the boy was of manly height now, and overtopped
the old gentleman by an inch,) — “Father, it grieves
me to pain you, — indeed it does; but truth is truth. I
have told you my story; but if you wish it, I will live
outwardly as if no such talk had passed. I will respect
as much as ever all your religious observances,
and no person shall be the wiser.”

“I would not have you practice hypocrisy, my son;
but I would not have you withdraw yourself from any
of the appointed means of grace.”

And at this Reuben went out, — out far upon the
hills, from which he saw the village roofs, and the
spire, and the naked tree-tops, the fields all bare and
brown, the smoke of a near house curling lazily into

the sky; and the only sound that broke the solemn
stillness was the drumming of a partridge in the woods
or the harsh scream of a belated jay.

Never had Reuben been more kind or attentive to
the personal wants of the old gentleman than on the
days which followed upon this interview. There was
something almost like a daughter's solicitude in his
watchfulness. On the next Sunday the Doctor preached
with an emotion that was but poorly controlled, and
which greatly mystified his people. Twice in the afternoon
his voice came near to failing. Reuben knew
where the grief lay, but wore a composed face; and as
he supported the old gentleman home after service,
he said, (but not so loudly that Adèle could hear, who
was tripping closely behind,) —

“Father, I grieve for you, — upon my soul I do;
but it 's fate.”

“Fate, Reuben?” said the Doctor, but with a less
guarded voice, — “fate? God only is fate!”

The Doctor was too much mortified by this revelation
of Reuben's present state of feeling to make it
the subject of conversation, even with Miss Eliza, and
much less with the elders of his flock. To Squire
Elderkin, indeed, whose shrewd common sense he
had learned to value even in its bearings upon the
“weightier matters of the law,” he had dropped some
desponding reflections in regard to the willful impetuosity

of his poor son Reuben, from which the shrewd
Squire at once suspected the difficulty.

“It 's the blood of the old Major,” he said. “Let it
work, Doctor, let it work!”

From which observation, it must be confessed, the
good man derived very little comfort.

Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidante in
these latter secrets of the study, cannot, however, fail
to see that Reuben's constancy to the Doctor's big
folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old
boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under
the reserve which has grown out of his later experiences.
She has hopes from this — true to her keen
worldly wisdom — that the abandoned career of the
city may yet win his final decision. But her moral
perceptions are not delicate enough to discover the
great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She
ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from
sharp sense of duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious
reflections, which set his whole moral nature on edge.
Nor is this the limit of her blindness: perceiving, as
she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans
with respect to himself and Adèle, she thinks to further
the matter by dropping hints of the rare graces
of Adèle and of her brilliant prospects, — assuring
him how much that young lady's regard for him has
been increased since his conversion, (which word has

to Reuben just now a dreary and most detestable
sound,) and in a way which she counts playful, but
which to him is agaçant to the last degree, she forecasts
the time when Reuben will have his pretty
French wife, and a rich one.

Left to himself, the youth would very likely have
found enough to admire in the face and figure and
pleasantly subdued enthusiasm of Adèle; but the
counter-irritant of the spinster's speech drove him
away on many an evening to the charming fireside of
the Elderkins, where he spent not a few beguiling
hours in listening to the talk of the motherly mistress
of the household, and in watching the soft hazel eyes
of Rose, as they lifted in eager wonderment at some of
his stories of the town, or fell (the long lashes hiding
them with other beauty) upon the work where her
delicate fingers plied with a white swiftness that teased
him into trains of thought which were not wholly
French.

Adèle has taken a melancholy interest in decking
the grave of the exiled lady, which she has insisted
upon doing out of her own resources, and thus has
doubled the little legacy which Madame Arles had
left to the outcast woman and child with whom she
had joined her fate, and who, with good reason, wept
her death bitterly. Hour upon hour Adèle pondered
over that tragic episode, tasking herself to imagine

what message the dying woman could have had to
communicate, and wondering if the future would ever
clear up the mystery. To the good Doctor it seemed
only a strange Providence, by which the religious
convictions of Adèle should be deepened and made
sure. And in no way were the results of those convictions
more beautifully apparent than in the efforts
of Adèle to overcome her antipathies to the spinster.
It is doubtful, indeed, if a bolder challenge can be
made to the Christian graces of any character whatever
than that which demands the conquest of social
prejudices which have grown into settled aversion.
With all the stimulus of her new Christian endeavor,
Adèle sought to think charitably of Miss Eliza. Yet it
was hard; always, that occasional cold kiss of the spinster
had for Adèle an iron imprint, which drove her
warm blood away, instead of summoning it to response.

For her, Miss Eliza's staple praises of Reuben, and
her adroit stories of the admiration and attachment
of Mrs. Brindlock for her nephew, were distasteful
to the last degree. Coarse natures never can learn
upon what fine threads the souls of the sensitive are
strung.

Adèle felt a tender gratitude toward Reuben, which
it seemed to her the boisterous affection of the spinster
could never approach. She apprehended his spiritual
perplexities more keenly than the austere aunt, and

saw with what strange ferment his whole nature was
vexed. Had he been a brother by blood, she could not
have felt for him more warmly. And if she ever allowed
herself to guess at a nearer tie, it was not to
Miss Eliza that she would have named the guess, —
not even, thus far, to herself. As yet there was a ripe
fullness in her heart that felt no wound, — at least no
wound in which her hope rankled. Whether Reuben
were present or away, her songs rose, with a sweeter, a
serener, and a loftier cheer than of old under the roof
of the parsonage; and, as of old, the Doctor laid down
his book and listened, as if an angel sang.