 | CHAPTER XX.
TIDINGS FROM OVER SEA. The minister's wooing |  |
20. CHAPTER XX.
TIDINGS FROM OVER SEA.
The summer passed over the cottage, noiselessly
as our summers pass. There were white clouds
walking in saintly troops over blue mirrors of sea, —
there were purple mornings, choral with bird-singing,
— there were golden evenings, with long, eastward
shadows. Apple-blossoms died quietly in
the deep orchard-grass, and tiny apples waxed and
rounded and ripened and gained stripes of gold
and carmine; and the blue eggs broke into young
robins, that grew from gaping, yellow-mouthed
youth to fledged and outflying maturity. Came
autumn, with its long Indian summer, and winter,
with its flinty, sparkling snows, under which all
Nature lay a sealed and beautiful corpse. Came
once more the spring winds, the lengthening days,
the opening flowers, and the ever-renewing miracle
of buds and blossoms on the apple-trees around
the cottage. A year had passed since the June
afternoon when first we showed you Mary standing
under the spotty shadows of the tree, with the
many outward changes have been made in the relations
of the actors of our story.
Mary calmly spun and read and thought; now
and then composing with care very English-French
letters, to be sent to Philadelphia to Madame de
Frontignac, and receiving short missives of very
French-English in return.
The cautions of Madame, in regard to the Doctor,
had not rippled the current of their calm, confiding
intercourse; and the Doctor, so very satisfied
and happy in her constant society and affection,
scarcely as yet meditated distinctly that he needed
to draw her more closely to himself. If he had a
passage to read, a page to be copied, a thought to
express, was she not ever there, gentle, patient, unselfish?
and scarce by the absence of a day did
she let him perceive that his need of her was becoming
so absolute that his hold on her must
needs be made permanent.
As to his salary and temporal concerns, they
had suffered somewhat for his unpopular warfare
with reigning sins, — a fact which had rather reconciled
Mrs. Scudder to the dilatory movement
of her cherished hopes. Since James was gone,
what need to press imprudently to new arrangements?
Better give the little heart time to grow
over before starting a subject which a certain
womanly instinct told her might be met with a
certain heart-sinking of Mary's look and tone the
night she spoke with her about James; she had an
awful presentiment that that tone of voice belonged
to the things that cannot be shaken. But
yet, Mary seemed so even, so quiet, her delicate
form filled out and rounded so beautifully, and
she sang so cheerfully at her work, and, above all,
she was so entirely silent about James, that Mrs.
Scudder had hope.
Ah, that silence! Do not listen to hear whom
a woman praises, to know where her heart is! do
not ask for whom she expresses the most earnest
enthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew
well, whose name she never speaks, — if she seem
to have an instinct to avoid every occasion of its
mention, — if, when you speak, she drops into
silence and changes the subject, — why, look there
for something! just as, when going through deep
meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before
you, you may know her nest is not there, but far
off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup,
through which she has crept with a silent flutter
in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little falsehood
before you.
Poor Mary's little nest was along the sedgy
margin of the sea-shore, where grow the tufts of
golden rod, where wave the reeds, where crimson,
green, and purple seaweeds float up, like torn
shells lie on the wet wrinkles of the sands.
The sea had become to her like a friend, with
its ever-varying monotony. Somehow she loved
this old, fresh, blue, babbling, restless giant, who
had carried away her heart's love to hide him in
some far-off palmy island, such as she had often
heard him tell of in his sea-romances. Sometimes
she would wander out for an afternoon's stroll on
the rocks, and pause by the great Spouting Cave,
now famous to Newport dilettanti, but then a sacred
and impressive solitude. There the rising tide
bursts with deafening strokes through a narrow
opening into some inner cavern, which, with a
deep thunder-boom, like the voice of an angry lion,
casts it back in a high jet of foam into the sea.
Mary often sat and listened to this hollow noise,
and watched the ever-rising columns of spray as
they reddened with the transpiercing beams of the
afternoon sun; and thence her eye travelled far,
far off over the shimmering starry blue, where sails
looked no bigger than miller's wings; and it
seemed sometimes as if a door were opening by
which her soul might go out into some eternity, —
some abyss, so wide and deep, that fathomless
lines of thought could not sound it. She was no
longer a girl in a mortal body, but an infinite
spirit, the adoring companion of Infinite Beauty
and Infinite Love.
As there was an hour when the fishermen of
Galilee saw their Master transfigured, his raiment
white and glistening, and his face like the light,
so are there hours when our whole mortal life
stands forth in a celestial radiance. From our
daily lot falls off every weed of care, — from our
heart-friends every speck and stain of earthly infirmity.
Our horizon widens, and blue, and amethyst,
and gold touch every object. Absent friends
and friends gone on the last long journey stand
once more together, bright with an immortal glow,
and, like the disciples who saw their Master floating
in the clouds above them, we say, “Lord, it
is good to be here!” How fair the wife, the husband,
the absent mother, the gray-haired father,
the manly son, the bright-eyed daughter! Seen in
the actual present, all have some fault, some flaw;
but absent, we see them in their permanent and
better selves. Of our distant home we remember
not one dark day, not one servile care, nothing
but the echo of its holy hymns and the radiance
of its brightest days, — of our father, not one hasty
word, but only the fulness of his manly vigor and
noble tenderness, — of our mother, nothing of mortal
weakness, but a glorified form of love, — of our
brother, not one teasing, provoking word of brotherly
freedom, but the proud beauty of his noblest
hours, — of our sister, our child, only what is fairest
and sweetest.
This is to life the true ideal, the calm glass,
wherein looking, we shall see, that, whatever defects
cling to us, they are not, after all, permanent,
and that we are tending to something nobler
than we yet are; — it is “the earnest of our inheritance
until the redemption of the purchased
possession.” In the resurrection we shall see our
friends forever as we see them in these clairvoyant
hours.
We are writing thus on and on, linking image
and thought and feeling, and lingering over every
flower, and listening to every bird, because just
before us there lies a dark valley, and we shrink
and tremble to enter it.
But it must come, and why do we delay?
Towards evening, one afternoon in the latter
part of June, Mary returned from one of these
lonely walks by the sea, and entered the kitchen.
It was still in its calm and sober cleanness; —
the tall clock ticked with a startling distinctness.
From the half-closed door of her mother's bedroom,
which stood ajar, she heard the chipper of
Miss Prissy's voice. She stayed her light footsteps,
and the words that fell on her ear were
these: —
“Miss Marvyn fainted dead away; — she stood
it till it came to that; but then she just clapped
both hands together, as if she 'd been shot, and
fell right forward on the floor in a faint!”
What could this be? There was a quick, intense
whirl of thoughts in Mary's mind, and then
came one of those awful moments when the
powers of life seem to make a dead pause and
all things stand still; and then all seemed to fail
under her, and the life to sink down, down, down,
till nothing was but one dim, vague, miserable
consciousness.
Mrs. Scudder and Miss Prissy were sitting, talking
earnestly, on the foot of the bed, when the
door opened noiselessly, and Mary glided to them
like a spirit, — no color in cheek or lip, — her
blue eyes wide with calm horror; and laying her
little hand, with a nervous grasp, on Miss Prissy's
arm, she said, —
“Tell me, — what is it? — is it? — is he —
dead?”
The two women looked at each other, and then
Mrs. Scudder opened her arms.
“My daughter!”
“Oh! mother! mother!”
Then fell that long, hopeless silence, broken
only by hysteric sobs from Miss Prissy, and answering
ones from the mother; but she lay still
and quiet, her blue eyes wide and clear, making
an inarticulate moan.
“Oh! are they sure? — can it be? — is he
dead?” at last she gasped.
“My child, it is too true; all we can say is.
`Be still, and know that I am God!'”
“I shall try to be still, mother,” said Mary
with a piteous, hopeless voice, like the bleat of a
dying lamb; “but I did not think he could die!
I never thought of that! — I never thought of it!
— Oh! mother! mother! mother! oh! what shall I
do?”
They laid her on her mother's bed, — the first
and last resting-place of broken hearts, — and the
mother sat down by her in silence. Miss Prissy
stole away into the Doctor's study, and told him
all that had happened.
“It's the same to her,” said Miss Prissy, with
womanly reserve, “as if he 'd been an own
brother.”
“What was his spiritual state?” said the Doctor,
musingly.
Miss Prissy looked blank, and answered mournfully,
—
“I don't know.”
The Doctor entered the room where Mary was
lying with closed eyes. Those few moments
seemed to have done the work of years, — so
pale, and faded, and sunken she looked; nothing
but the painful flutter of the eyelids and lips
showed that she yet breathed. At a sign from
Mrs. Scudder, he kneeled by the bed, and began
to pray, — “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place
in all generations,” — prayer deep, mournful,
upheaving like the swell of the ocean, surging
towards an Almighty heart.
The truly good are of one language in prayer.
Whatever lines or angles of thought may separate
them in other hours, when they pray in extremity,
all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles
V. and Martin Luther, two great generals of
opposite faiths, breathed out their dying struggle
in the self-same words.
There be many tongues and many languages
of men, — but the language of prayer is one by
itself, in all and above all. It is the inspiration
of that Spirit that is ever working with our spirit,
and constantly lifting us higher than we know,
and, by our wants, by our woes, by our tears, by
our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us, with
mightier and mightier force, against those chains
of sin which keep us from our God. We speak
not of things conventionally called prayers, — vain
mutterings of unawakened spirits talking drowsily
in sleep, — but of such prayers as come when
flesh and heart fail, in mighty straits; — then he
who prays is a prophet, and a Mightier than he
speaks in him; for the “Spirit helpeth our infirmities;
for we know not what we should pray for
as we ought; but the Spirit itself maketh intercession
for us, with groanings which cannot be
uttered.”
So the voice of supplication, upheaving from
with a wisdom and a pathos beyond what he
dreamed in his intellectual hours; it uprose even
as a strong angel, whose brow is solemnly calm,
and whose wings shed healing dews of paradise.
| CHAPTER XX.
TIDINGS FROM OVER SEA. The minister's wooing | |