University of Virginia Library

38. CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE TRANSFIGURED.

The next morning rose calm and fair. It was
the Sabbath-day, — the last Sabbath in Mary's
maiden life, if her promises and plans were fulfilled.

Mary dressed herself in white, — her hands trembling
with unusual agitation, her sensitive nature divided
between two opposing consciences and two
opposing affections. Her devoted filial love toward
the Doctor made her feel the keenest sensitiveness
at the thought of giving him pain. At the same
time, the questions which James had proposed to
her had raised serious doubts in her mind whether
it was altogether right to suffer him blindly to
enter into this union. So, after she was all prepared,
she bolted the door of her chamber, and,
opening her Bible, read, “If any of you lack wisdom,
let him ask of God, that giveth to all men
liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given
him”; and then, kneeling down by the bedside,
she asked that God would give her some immediate
light in her present perplexity. So praying,

her mind grew calm and steady, and she rose
up at the sound of the bell, which marked that
it was time to set forward for church.

Everybody noticed, as she came into church that
morning, how beautiful Mary Scudder looked. It
was no longer the beauty of the carved statue,
the pale alabaster shrine, the sainted virgin, but a
warm, bright, living light, that spoke of some summer
breath breathing within her soul.

When she took her place in the singers' seat,
she knew, without turning her head, that he was
in his old place, not far from her side; and those
whose eyes followed her to the gallery marvelled
at her face there, —

for a thousand delicate nerves were becoming vital
once more, — the holy mystery of womanhood had
wrought within her.

When they rose to sing, the tune must needs
be one which they had often sung together, out
of the same book, at the singing-school, — one of
those wild, pleading tunes, dear to the heart of
New England, — born, if we may credit the report,
in the rocky hollows of its mountains, and whose
notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph
in their warbling wail, and in which different parts

of the harmony, set contrary to all the canons of
musical Pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic
effect, which a true musical genius would
not have failed to recognize. The four parts,
tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then
called, rose and swelled and wildly mingled, with
the fitful strangeness of an Æolian harp, or of
winds in mountain-hollows, or the vague moanings
of the sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary,
while her voice rose over the waves of the treble,
and trembled with a pathetic richness, felt, to her
inmost heart, the deep accord of that other voice
which rose to meet hers, so wildly melancholy,
as if the soul in that manly breast had come to
meet her soul in the disembodied, shadowy verity
of eternity. The grand old tune, called by our
fathers “China,” never, with its dirge-like melody,
drew two souls more out of themselves, and entwined
them more nearly with each other.

The last verse of the hymn spoke of the resurrection
of the saints with Christ, —

And as Mary sang, she felt sublimely upborne
with the idea that life is but a moment and love
is immortal, and seemed, in a shadowy trance, to
feel herself and him past this mortal fane, far over
on the shores of that other life, ascending with
Christ, all-glorified, all tears wiped away, and with
full permission to love and to be loved forever.
And as she sang, the Doctor looked upward, and
marvelled at the light in her eyes and the rich
bloom on her cheek; for where she stood, a sunbeam,
streaming aslant through the dusty panes
of the window, touched her head with a kind of
glory, and the thought he then received outbreathed
itself in the yet more fervent adoration
of his prayer.