University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.
SURPRISES.

Mrs. Scudder kissed her daughter, and left her.
After a moment's thought, Mary gathered the long
silky folds of hair around her head, and knotted
them for the night. Then leaning forward on her
toilet-table, she folded her hands together, and
stood regarding the reflection of herself in the
mirror.

Nothing is capable of more ghostly effect than
such a silent, lonely contemplation of that mysterious
image of ourselves which seems to look out
of an infinite depth in the mirror, as if it were
our own soul beckoning to us visibly from unknown
regions. Those eyes look into our own
with an expression sometimes vaguely sad and
inquiring. The face wears weird and tremulous
lights and shadows; it asks us mysterious questions,
and troubles us with the suggestions of our
relations to some dim unknown. The sad, blue
eyes that gazed into Mary's had that look of calm
initiation, of melancholy comprehension, peculiar

to eyes made clairvoyant by “great and critical”
sorrow. They seemed to say to her, “Fulfil thy
mission; life is made for sacrifice; the flower must
fall before fruit can perfect itself.” A vague shuddering
of mystery gave intensity to her reverie.
It seemed as if those mirror-depths were another
world; she heard the far-off dashing of sea-green
waves; she felt a yearning impulse towards that
dear soul gone out into the infinite unknown.

Her word just passed had in her eyes all the
sacred force of the most solemnly attested vow;
and she felt as if that vow had shut some till
then open door between her and him; she had a
kind of shadowy sense of a throbbing and yearning
nature that seemed to call on her, — that
seemed surging towards her with an imperative,
protesting force that shook her heart to its depths.

Perhaps it is so, that souls, once intimately related,
have ever after this a strange power of
affecting each other, — a power that neither absence
nor death can annul. How else can we
interpret those mysterious hours in which the
power of departed love seems to overshadow us,
making our souls vital with such longings, with
such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings,
that a little more might burst the mortal
bond? Is it not deep calling unto deep? the free
soul singing outside the cage to her mate beating
against the bars within?

Mary even, for a moment, fancied that a voice
called her name, and started, shivering. Then the
habits of her positive and sensible education returned
at once, and she came out of her reverie
as one breaks from a dream, and lifted all these
sad thoughts with one heavy sigh from her breast;
and opening her Bible, she read: “They that trust
in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion, which cannot
be removed, but abideth forever. As the
mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord
is round about his people from henceforth, even
forever.”

Then she kneeled by her bedside, and offered
her whole life a sacrifice to the loving God who
had offered his life a sacrifice for her. She prayed
for grace to be true to her promise, — to be faithful
to the new relation she had accepted. She
prayed that all vain regrets for the past might be
taken away, and that her soul might vibrate without
discord in unison with the will of Eternal
Love. So praying, she rose calm, and with that
clearness of spirit which follows an act of uttermost
self-sacrifice; and so calmly she laid down
and slept, with her two hands crossed upon her
breast, her head slightly turned on the pillow, her
cheek pale as marble, and her long dark lashes
lying drooping, with a sweet expression, as if
under that mystic veil of sleep the soul were seeing
things forbidden to the waking eye. Only the

gentlest heaving of the quiet breast told that the
heavenly spirit within had not gone whither it was
hourly aspiring to go.

Meanwhile Mrs. Scudder had left Mary's room,
and entered the Doctor's study, holding a candle
in her hand. The good man was sitting alone in
the dark, with his head bowed upon his Bible.
When Mrs. Scudder entered, he rose, and regarded
her wistfully, but did not speak. He had something
just then in his heart for which he had no
words; so he only looked as a man does who
hopes and fears for the answer of a decisive question.

Mrs. Scudder felt some of the natural reserve
which becomes a matron coming charged with a
gift in which lies the whole sacredness of her own
existence, and which she puts from her hands with
a jealous reverence. She therefore measured the
man with her woman's and mother's eye, and said,
with a little stateliness, —

“My dear Sir, I come to tell you the result of
my conversation with Mary.”

She made a little pause, — and the Doctor stood
before her as humbly as if he had not weighed
and measured the universe; because he knew,
that, though he might weigh the mountains in
scales and the hills in a balance, yet it was a far
subtiler power which must possess him of one
small woman's heart. In fact, he felt to himself

like a great, awkward, clumsy mountainous earthite
asking of a white-robed angel to help him up
a ladder of cloud. He was perfectly sure, for the
moment, that he was going to be refused; and he
looked humbly firm, — he would take it like a
man. His large blue eyes, generally so misty in
their calm, had a resolute clearness, rather mournful
than otherwise. Of course, no such celestial
experience was going to happen to him.

He cleared his throat, and said, —

“Well, Madam?”

Mrs. Scudder's womanly dignity was appeased;
she reached out her hand, cheerfully, and said, —

“She has accepted.”

The Doctor drew his hand suddenly away,
turned quickly round, and walked to the window,
— although, as it was ten o'clock at night and
quite dark, there was evidently nothing to be seen
there. He stood there, quietly, swallowing very
hard, and raising his handkerchief several times to
his eyes. There was enough going on under the
black coat just then to make quite a little figure
in a romance, if it had been uttered; but he belonged
to a class who lived romance, but never
spoke it. In a few moments he returned to Mrs.
Scudder, and said, —

“I trust, dear Madam, that this very dear friend
may never have reason to think me ungrateful for
her wonderful goodness; and whatever sins my

evil heart may lead me into, I hope I may never
fall so low as to forget the underserved mercy of
this hour. If ever I shrink from duty or murmur
at trials, while so sweet a friend is mine, I shall
be vile indeed.”

The Doctor, in general, viewed himself on the
discouraging side, and had berated and snubbed
himself all his life as a most flagitious and evil-disposed
individual, — a person to be narrowly
watched, and capable of breaking at any moment
into the most flagrant iniquity; and therefore it
was that he received his good fortune in so different
a spirit from many of the lords of creation in
similar circumstances.

“I am sensible,” he added, “that a poor minister,
without much power of eloquence, and commissioned
of the Lord to speak unpopular truths,
and whose worldly condition, in consequence, is
never likely to be very prosperous, — that such an
one could scarcely be deemed a suitable partner
for so very beautiful a young woman, who might
expect proposals, in a temporal point of view, of a
much more advantageous nature; and I am therefore
the more struck and overpowered with this
blessed result.”

These last words caught in the Doctor's throat,
as if he were overpowered in very deed.

“In regard to her happiness,” said the Doctor,
with a touch of awe in his voice, “I would not

have presumed to become the guardian of it, were
it not that I am persuaded it is assured by a
Higher Power; for `when He giveth quietness,
who then can make trouble?' (Job, xxxiv. 29.)
But I trust I may say no effort on my part shall
be wanting to secure it.”

Mrs. Scudder was a mother, and had come to
that stage in life where mothers always feel tears
rising behind their smiles. She pressed the Doctor's
hand silently, and they parted for the night.

We know not how we can acquit ourselves to
our friends of the great world for the details of
such an unfashionable courtship, so well as by giving
them, before they retire for the night, a dip into
a more modish view of things.

The Doctor was evidently green, — green in his
faith, green in his simplicity, green in his general
belief of the divine in woman, green in his particular
humble faith in one small Puritan maiden,
whom a knowing fellow might at least have manœuvred
so skilfully as to break up her saintly
superiority, discompose her, rout her ideas, and
lead her up and down a swamp of hopes and fears
and conjectures, till she was wholly bewildered and
ready to take him at last — if he made up his mind
to have her at all — as a great bargain, for which
she was to be sensibly grateful.

Yes, the Doctor was green, — immortally green,
as a cedar of Lebanon, which, waving its broad

archangel wings over some fast-rooted, eternal old
solitude, and seeing from its sublime height the
vastness of the universe, veils its kingly head with
humility before God's infinite majesty.

He has gone to bed now, — simple old soul! —
first apologizing to Mrs. Scudder for having kept
her up to so dissipated and unparalleled an hour
as ten o'clock on his personal matters.

Meanwhile our Asmodeus shall transport us to
a handsomely furnished apartment in one of the
most fashionable hotels of Philadelphia, where
Colonel Aaron Burr, just returned from his trip to
the then aboriginal wilds of Ohio, is seated before
a table covered with maps, letters, books, and papers.
His keen eye runs over the addresses of
the letters, and he eagerly seizes one from Madame
de Frontignac, and reads it; and as no one
but ourselves is looking at him now, his face has
no need to wear its habitual mask. First comes
an expression of profound astonishment; then of
chagrin and mortification; then of deepening concern;
there were stops where the dark eyelashes
flashed together, as if to brush a tear out of the
view of the keen-sighted eyes; and then a red
flush rose even to his forehead, and his delicate
lips wore a sarcastic smile. He laid down the
letter, and made one or two turns through the
room.

The man had felt the dashing against his own

of a strong, generous, indignant woman's heart
fully awakened, and speaking with that impassioned
vigor with which a French regiment charges in
battle. There were those picturesque, winged words,
those condensed expressions, those subtile piercings
of meaning, and, above all, that simple pathos, for
which the French tongue has no superior; and for
the moment the woman had the victory; she
shook his heart. But Burr resembled the marvel
with which chemists amuse themselves. His heart
was a vase filled with boiling passions, — while his
will, a still, cold, unmelted lump of ice, lay at the
bottom.

Self-denial is not peculiar to Christians. He
who goes downward often puts forth as much
force to kill a noble nature as another does to
annihilate a sinful one. There was something in
this letter so keen, so searching, so self-revealing,
that it brought on one of those interior crises in
which a man is convulsed with the struggle of
two natures, the godlike and the demoniac, and
from which he must pass out more wholly to the
dominion of the one or the other.

Nobody knew the true better than Burr. He
knew the godlike and the pure; he had felt its
beauty and its force to the very depths of his
being, as the demoniac knew at once the fair
Man of Nazareth; and even now he felt the
voice within that said, “What have I to do with

thee?” and the rending of a struggle of heavenly
life with fast-coming eternal death.

That letter had told him what he might be, and
what he was. It was as if his dead mother's
hand had held up before him a glass in which he
saw himself white-robed and crowned, and so
dazzling in purity that he loathed his present self.

As he walked up and down the room perturbed,
he sometimes wiped tears from his eyes, and then
set his teeth and compressed his lips. At last his
face grew calm and settled in its expression, his
mouth wore a sardonic smile; he came and took
the letter, and, folding it leisurely, laid it on the
table, and put a heavy paper-weight over it, as if
to hold it down and bury it. Then drawing to
himself some maps of new territories, he set himself
vigorously to some columns of arithmetical
calculations on the margin; and thus he worked
for an hour or two, till his mind was as dry and
his pulse as calm as a machine; then he drew the
inkstand towards him, and scribbled hastily the
following letter to his most confidential associate,
— a letter which told no more of the conflict that
preceded it than do the dry sands and the civil
gossip of the sea-waves to-day of the storm and
wreck of last week.

When Burr had finished this letter, he had actually
written himself into a sort of persuasion of
its truth. When a finely constituted nature wishes
to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself.
Evil is never embraced undisguised, as evil, but
under some fiction which the mind accepts and
with which it has the singular power of blinding
itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing
on one's self is an essential preliminary to
imposing on others. The man first argues himself
down, and then he is ready to put the whole
weight of his nature to deceiving others. This
letter ran so smoothly, so plausibly, that it produced
on the writer of it the effect of a work of

fiction, which we know to be unreal, but feel to
be true. Long habits of this kind of self-delusion
in time produce a paralysis in the vital nerves of
truth, so that one becomes habitually unable to
see things in their verity, and realizes the awful
words of Scripture, — “He feedeth on ashes; a
deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot
deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in
my right hand?”