University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
MY FATHER.

MY good reader, it must sometimes have fallen under your
observation that there is a class of men who go through
life under a cloud, for no other reason than that, being born with
the nature of gentlemen, they are nevertheless poor. Such men
generally live under a sense of the dissatisfaction and rebuke
of our good mother world; and yet it is easy to see all the
while that even a moderate competence would at any moment
turn their faults into virtues, and make them in everybody's
opinion model characters.

Now you know there are plants to whom poor soil or rich soil
seems to make no manner of difference. Your mullein and your
burdock do admirably on a gravelly hillside, and admirably in
rich garden soil. Nothing comes amiss with them. But take a
saffrano rose or a hyacinth and turn it out to shift for itself by
the roadside, and it soon dwindles and pines, and loses its color
and shape, till everybody thinks such a wretched, ragged specimen
of vegetation had better be out of the world than in it.

From all I remember of my poor father, he had the organization
and tastes of a scholar and a gentleman; but he was born the
son of a poor widow, who hardly knew from week to week where
the few hard-earned dollars were to come from which kept her
and her boy in the very plainest food and clothing. So she
thought herself happy when she apprenticed him to a paper-maker.
Thence he had fought his way up with his little boy
hands towards what to him was light and life, — an education.
Harvard College, to his eyes, was like the distant vision of the
New Jerusalem to the Christian. Thither he aspired, thither he
meant to go. Through many a self-denial, many an hour of
toil, — studying his Latin grammar by night in the paper-mill,
saving his odd pennies, and buying book after book, and treasuring

each one as a mine of wealth, — he went on, till finally he
gained enough of a standing to teach, first the common school,
and then the Academy.

While he was teacher of the Academy he made his first false
step, which was a false step only because he was poor, — he fell
in love with my mother. If he had been well to do in the world,
everybody would have said that it was the most natural and
praiseworthy thing possible. It was some extenuation of his
fault that my poor mother was very pretty and attractive, —
she was, in fact, one of my father's prettiest scholars. He saw
her daily, and so the folly grew upon him, till he was ready to
sacrifice his life's object, and consent to be all his days a poor
academy teacher in Oldtown, that he might marry her.

One must be very much of a woman for whom a man can
sacrifice the deepest purpose of his life without awaking to regret
it. I do not say that my father did so; and yet I could
see, from the earliest of my recollection, that ours was a household
clouded by suppressed regrets, as well as embarrassed by
real wants.

My mother was one of those bright, fair, delicate New England
girls who remind us of the shell-pink of the wood-anemone,
or the fragile wind-flower; and every one must remember
how jauntily they toss their gay little heads as they grow in their
own mossy dells, at the root of old oaks or beeches, but how
quickly they become withered and bedraggled when we gather
them.

My mother's gayety of animal spirits, her sparkle and vivacity,
all went with the first year of marriage. The cares of housekeeping,
the sicknesses of maternity and nursing, drained her
dry of all that was bright and attractive; and my only recollections
of her are of a little quiet, faded, mournful woman, who
looked on my birth and that of my brother Bill as the greatest
of possible misfortunes, and took care of us with a discouraged
patience, more as if she pitied us for being born than as if she
loved us.

My father seemed to regard her with a half-remorseful tenderness,
as he strove by extra reading and study to make up for the

loss of that education the prospect of which he had sacrificed
in his marriage. In common with a great many scholars
of that day and of this, he ignored his body altogether, and
tasked and strained his brain with night studies till his health
sank under it; and Consumption, which in New England stands
ever waiting for victims, took his cold hand in hers, and led him
quietly but irresistibly downward.

Such, to this moment, was my father's history; and you will
see the truth of what I have been saying, — that a modest little
property would have changed all his faults and mistakes into proprieties
and virtues.

He had been sick so long, so very long, it seemed to my child-mind!
and now there was approaching him that dark shadow so
terrible to flesh and heart, in whose dimness every one feels an
instinctive longing for aid. That something must be done for
the dying to prepare them for their last lonesome journey is a
strong instinct of every soul; and I had heard my mother pathetically
urging my father that morning to send for the minister.

“What good will it do, Susy?” had been his answer, given
with a sort of weary despondence; but still he had assented, and
I had gone eagerly to bring him.

I was, for my part, strong in faith. I wanted to do something
for my father, and I felt certain that the minister would know
what was the right thing; and when I set forth with him, in his
full panoply, — wig and ruffles and gold-headed cane, — I felt
somehow as if the ark of the covenant was moving down the
street to our house.

My mother met the minister at the door, with tears yet undried
in her eyes, and responded in the fullest manner to the somewhat
stately, but yet gracious, inquiries which he made as to my father's
health and condition, and thanked him for the kindly messages
and gifts of Lady Lothrop, which I had brought.

Then he was shown into the sick-room. My father was lying
propped up by pillows, and with the bright flush of his afternoon
fever on his cheeks. He was always a handsome man, fastidious
about his person and belongings; and as he lay with his long
thin hands folded together over the bed-clothes, his hair clinging

in damp curls round his high white forehead, and his large, clear
hazel eyes kindled with an unnatural brightness, he formed on
my childish memory a picture that will never fade. There was
in his eyes at this moment that peculiar look of deep suffering
which I have sometimes seen in the eyes of wounded birds or
dying animals, — something that spoke of a quiet, unutterable
anguish.

My father had been not only a scholar, but a thinker, — one of
those silent, peculiar natures whose thoughts and reasonings too
often wander up and down the track of commonly received opinion,
as Noah's dove of old, without finding rest for the sole of
their foot. When a mind like this is approaching the confines
of the eternal unknown, there is often a conflict of thought and
emotion, the utterance of which to a receptive and sympathizing
soul might bring relief. Something there was of intense yearning
and inquiry in the first glance he threw on the minister, and
then it changed to one of weary languor. With the quick spiritual
instincts of that last dying hour, he had seen into the soul of
the man, — that there was nothing there for him. Even the
gold-headed cane was not the rod and staff for him in the dark
valley.

There was, in fact, something in the tranquil, calm, unpathetic
nature of that good man, which rendered him peculiarly inapt to
enter into the secret chamber of souls that struggle and suffer
and doubt. He had a nature so evenly balanced, his course in
life had been so quiet and unruffled, his speculations and doubts
had been of so philosophical and tranquil a kind, that he was
not in the least fitted to become father confessor to a sick and
wounded spirit.

His nature was one that inclined to certain stately formalities
and proprieties; and although he had, in accordance with his station
in the Congregational church, put from him the forms of the
Church of England, and was supposed to rely on the extemporaneous
movements of the hour, his devotional exercises, nevertheless,
had as much a stereotype form as if they had been printed
in a book. We boys always knew when the time for certain
familiar phrases and expressions would occur in his Sunday

morning prayer, and exactly the welcome words which heralded
the close of the afternoon exercise.

I remember now, as he knelt by my father's bedside, how far
off and distant the usual opening formula of his prayer made the
Great Helper to appear. “Supremely great, infinitely glorious,
and ever-blessed God,” it said, “grant that we may suitably
realize the infinite distance between us, worms of the dust, and
thy divine majesty.”

I was gazing earnestly at my father, as he lay with his bright,
yearning, troubled eyes looking out into the misty shadows of the
eternal world, and I saw him close them wearily, and open them
again, with an expression of quiet endurance. The infinite distance
was a thing that he realized only too well; but who should
tell him of an infinite nearness by which those who are far off
are made nigh?

After the prayer, the minister expressed the hope that my
father would be resigned to the decrees of infinite wisdom, and
my father languidly assented; and then, with a ministerial benediction,
the whole stately apparition of ghostly aid and comfort
departed from our house.

One thing, at all events, had been gained, — my father had
had the minister and been prayed with, and nobody in Oldtown
could say that everything had not been properly done, according
to the code of spiritual etiquette generally established.
For our town, like other little places, always kept a wide-awake
eye on the goings and doings of her children. Oldtown had had
its own opinion of my father for a great while, and expressed
it freely in tea-drinkings, quiltings, at the store, and at the tavern.
If Oldtown's advice had been asked, there were a hundred
things that he did which would have been left undone, and a
hundred things done which he did not do. Oldtown knew just
whom he ought to have married instead of marrying my mother,
and was certain he could have had her too. Oldtown knew just
how and when he might have made himself a rich man, and
did n't. Oldtown knew exactly when, how, and why he caught
the cold that set him into a consumption, and what he ought to
have taken to cure it, and did n't. And now he was, so to speak,

dying under a cloud, just as Oldtown always knew he would.
But one thing was certain, and Oldtown was glad to hear of it, —
he was n't an infidel, as had been at different times insinuated,
for he had had the minister and been prayed with; and so, though
he never had joined the church, Oldtown indulged some hope for
his hereafter.

When the minister was gone, my father said, with a weary
smile: “There, Susy dear, I hope you are satisfied now. My
poor child,” he added, gently drawing her to sit down by him,
and looking at her with the strange, solemn dispassionateness
of dying people, who already begin to feel that they are of another
sphere, — “my poor dear little girl! You were so pretty
and so gay! I did you a great wrong in marrying you.”

“O, don't say that Horace,” said my mother.

“It 's true, though,” said my father. “With a richer and more
prosperous man, you might have been blooming and happy yet.
And this poor little man,” said my father, stroking my head, —
“perhaps fate may have something better in store for him. If I
had had but the ghost of a chance, such as some men have, —
some who do not value it, who only throw it away, — I might
have been something. I had it in me; but no one will ever
know it now. My life is a miserable, disgusting failure. Burn
all my papers, Susy. Promise me that.”

“I will do just what you say, Horace.”

“And, Susy, when I am gone, don't let all the old gossips of
Oldtown come to croak and croon over me, and make their stupid
remarks on my helpless body. I hate country funerals. Don't
make a vulgar show of me for their staring curiosity. Death is
dreary enough at best, but I never could see any sense in aggravating
its horrors by stupid funeral customs. Instead of dressing
me in those ghostly, unnatural grave-clothes that people seem to
delight in, just let me be buried in my clothes and let the last
look my poor children have of me be as natural and familiar as
possible. The last look of the dead ought to be sacred to one's
friends alone. Promise, now, Susy,” he said earnestly, “promise
to do as I say.”

“O Horace, I do promise, — I promise to do all you say. You
know I always have.”

“Yes, poor dear child, you have; you have been only too
good for me.”

“O Horace, how can you say so!” and my poor mother fell on
my father's neck in a paroxysm of weeping.

But his great, bright eyes gathered no tears; they were fixed
in an awful stillness. “My darling, you must not,” he said
tenderly, but with no answering emotion. “Calm yourself.
And now, dear, as I am sure that to-morrow I shall not be with
you, you must send for your mother to be with you to-night.
You know she will come.”

“Father,” said I earnestly, “where are you going?”

“Where?” said he, looking at me with his clear, mournful
eyes. “God knows, my son. I do not. It ought to be enough
for me that God does know.”