University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
“THE GRASS WITHERETH — THE FLOWER FADETH.”

Life passes, with us all, a day at a time; so it passed with
our friend Tom, till two years were gone. Though parted
from all his soul held dear, and though often yearning for
what lay beyond, still was he never positively and consciously
miserable; for, so well is the harp of human feeling strung,
that nothing but a crash that breaks every string can wholly
mar its harmony; and, on looking back to seasons which in
review appear to us as those of deprivation and trial, we can
remember that each hour, as it glided, brought its diversions
and alleviations, so that, though not happy wholly, we were
not, either, wholly miserable.

Tom read, in his only literary cabinet, of one who had
“learned in whatsoever state he was, therewith to be content.”
It seemed to him good and reasonable doctrine, and accorded
well with the settled and thoughtful habit which he had
acquired from the reading of that same book.

His letter homeward, as we related in the last chapter, was
in due time answered by Master George, in a good, round,
school-boy hand, that Tom said might be read “most acrost
the room.” It contained various refreshing items of home
intelligence, with which our reader is fully acquainted:
stated how Aunt Chloe had been hired out to a confectioner
in Louisville, where her skill in the pastry line was gaining
wonderful sums of money, all of which, Tom was informed,

was to be laid up to go to make up the sum of his redemption
money; Mose and Pete were thriving, and the baby was
trotting all about the house, under the care of Sally and the
family generally.

Tom's cabin was shut up for the present; but George expatiated
brilliantly on ornaments and additions to be made to it
when Tom came back.

The rest of this letter gave a list of George's school studies,
each one headed by a flourishing capital; and also told the
names of four new colts that appeared on the premises since
Tom left; and stated, in the same connection, that father and
mother were well. The style of the letter was decidedly
concise and terse; but Tom thought it the most wonderful
specimen of composition that had appeared in modern times.
He was never tired of looking at it, and even held a council
with Eva on the expediency of getting it framed, to hang up
in his room. Nothing but the difficulty of arranging it so
that both sides of the page would show at once stood in the
way of this undertaking.

The friendship between Tom and Eva had grown with the
child's growth. It would be hard to say what place she held
in the soft, impressible heart of her faithful attendant. He loved
her as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped
her as something heavenly and divine. He gazed on her
as the Italian sailor gazes on his image of the child Jesus, —
with a mixture of reverence and tenderness; and to humor
her graceful fancies, and meet those thousand simple wants
which invest childhood like a many-colored rainbow, was
Tom's chief delight. In the market, at morning, his eyes
were always on the flower-stalls for rare bouquets for her,
and the choicest peach or orange was slipped into his pocket
to give to her when he came back; and the sight that pleased

him most was her sunny head looking out the gate for his
distant approach, and her childish question, — “Well, Uncle
Tom, what have you got for me to-day?”

Nor was Eva less zealous in kind offices, in return. Though
a child, she was a beautiful reader; — a fine musical ear, a
quick poetic fancy, and an instinctive sympathy with what is
grand and noble, made her such a reader of the Bible as Tom
had never before heard. At first, she read to please her humble
friend; but soon her own earnest nature threw out its tendrils,
and wound itself around the majestic book; and Eva loved it,
because it woke in her strange yearnings, and strong, dim
emotions, such as impassioned, imaginative children love to
feel.

The parts that pleased her most were the Revelations and
the Prophecies, — parts whose dim and wondrous imagery,
and fervent language, impressed her the more, that she questioned
vainly of their meaning; — and she and her simple
friend, the old child and the young one, felt just alike about
it. All that they knew was, that they spoke of a glory to be
revealed, — a wondrous something yet to come, wherein their
soul rejoiced, yet knew not why; and though it be not so in
the physical, yet in moral science that which cannot be understood
is not always profitless. For the soul awakes, a trembling
stranger, between two dim eternities, — the eternal past,
the eternal future. The light shines only on a small space
around her; therefore, she needs must yearn towards the
unknown; and the voices and shadowy movings which come to
her from out the cloudy pillar of inspiration have each one
echoes and answers in her own expecting nature. Its mystic
imagery are so many talismans and gems inscribed with
unknown hieroglyphics; she folds them in her bosom, and
expects to read them when she passes beyond the veil.

At this time in our story, the whole St. Clare establishment
is, for the time being, removed to their villa on Lake
Pontchartrain. The heats of summer had driven all who
were able to leave the sultry and unhealthy city, to seek the
shores of the lake, and its cool sea-breezes.

St. Clare's villa was an East Indian cottage, surrounded by
light verandahs of bamboo-work, and opening on all sides into
gardens and pleasure-grounds. The common sitting-room
opened on to a large garden, fragrant with every picturesque
plant and flower of the tropics, where winding paths ran
down to the very shores of the lake, whose silvery sheet of
water lay there, rising and falling in the sunbeams, — a picture
never for an hour the same, yet every hour more beautiful.

It is now one of those intensely golden sunsets which
kindles the whole horizon into one blaze of glory, and makes
the water another sky. The lake lay in rosy or golden
streaks, save where white-winged vessels glided hither and
thither, like so many spirits, and little golden stars twinkled
through the glow, and looked down at themselves as they
trembled in the water.

Tom and Eva were seated on a little mossy seat, in an
arbor, at the foot of the garden. It was Sunday evening, and
Eva's Bible lay open on her knee. She read, — “And I saw
a sea of glass, mingled with fire.”

“Tom,” said Eva, suddenly stopping, and pointing to the
lake, “there 't is.”

“What, Miss Eva?”

“Don't you see, — there?” said the child, pointing to the
glassy water, which, as it rose and fell, reflected the golden
glow of the sky. “There 's a `sea of glass, mingled with
fire.'”

“True enough, Miss Eva,” said Tom; and Tom sang —

“Where do you suppose new Jerusalem is, Uncle Tom?”
said Eva.

“O, up in the clouds, Miss Eva.”

“Then I think I see it,” said Eva. “Look in those
clouds! — they look like great gates of pearl; and you can see
beyond them — far, far off — it 's all gold. Tom, sing about
`spirits bright.'”

Tom sung the words of a well-known Methodist hymn,

“Uncle Tom, I 've seen them,” said Eva.

Tom had no doubt of it at all; it did not surprise him in
the least. If Eva had told him she had been to heaven, he
would have thought it entirely probable.

“They come to me sometimes in my sleep, those spirits;”
and Eva's eyes grew dreamy, and she hummed, in a low
voice,

“Uncle Tom,” said Eva, “I 'm going there.”

“Where, Miss Eva?”

The child rose, and pointed her little hand to the sky; the
glow of evening lit her golden hair and flushed cheek with a
kind of unearthly radiance, and her eyes were bent earnestly
on the skies.

“I 'm going there,” she said, “to the spirits bright, Tom;
I'm going, before long.”

The faithful old heart felt a sudden thrust; and Tom
thought how often he had noticed, within six months, that
Eva's little hands had grown thinner, and her skin more
transparent, and her breath shorter; and how, when she ran or
played in the garden, as she once could for hours, she became
soon so tired and languid. He had heard Miss Ophelia speak
often of a cough, that all her medicaments could not cure;
and even now that fervent cheek and little hand were burning
with hectic fever; and yet the thought that Eva's words
suggested had never come to him till now.

Has there ever been a child like Eva? Yes, there have
been; but their names are always on grave-stones, and their
sweet smiles, their heavenly eyes, their singular words and
ways, are among the buried treasures of yearning hearts. In
how many families do you hear the legend that all the goodness
and graces of the living are nothing to the peculiar
charms of one who is not. It is as if heaven had an especial
band of angels, whose office it was to sojourn for a season
here, and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they
might bear it upward with them in their homeward flight.
When you see that deep, spiritual light in the eye, — when the
little soul reveals itself in words sweeter and wiser than the
ordinary words of children, — hope not to retain that child; for
the seal of heaven is on it, and the light of immortality looks
out from its eyes.

Even so, beloved Eva! fair star of thy dwelling! Thou
art passing away; but they that love thee dearest know it not.

The colloquy between Tom and Eva was interrupted by a
hasty call from Miss Ophelia.

“Eva — Eva! — why, child, the dew is falling; you
must n't be out there!”

Eva and Tom hastened in.

Miss Ophelia was old, and skilled in the tactics of nursing.
She was from New England, and knew well the first guileful
footsteps of that soft, insidious disease, which sweeps away so
many of the fairest and loveliest, and, before one fibre of life
seems broken, seals them irrevocably for death.

She had noted the slight, dry cough, the daily brightening
cheek; nor could the lustre of the eye, and the airy buoyancy
born of fever, deceive her.

She tried to communicate her fears to St. Clare; but he
threw back her suggestions with a restless petulance, unlike
his usual careless good-humor.

“Don't be croaking, Cousin, — I hate it!” he would say;
“don't you see that the child is only growing. Children
always lose strength when they grow fast.”

“But she has that cough!”

“O! nonsense of that cough! — it is not anything. She
has taken a little cold, perhaps.”

“Well, that was just the way Eliza Jane was taken, and
Ellen and Maria Sanders.”

“O! stop these hobgoblin' nurse legends. You old hands
got so wise, that a child cannot cough, or sneeze, but you see
desperation and ruin at hand. Only take care of the child,
keep her from the night air, and don't let her play too hard,
and she 'll do well enough.”

So St. Clare said; but he grew nervous and restless. He
watched Eva feverishly day by day, as might be told by the
frequency with which he repeated over that “the child was
quite well” — that there was n't anything in that cough, — it
was only some little stomach affection, such as children often

had. But he kept by her more than before, took her oftener
to ride with him, brought home every few days some receipt
or strengthening mixture, — “not,” he said, “that the child
needed it, but then it would not do her any harm.”

If it must be told, the thing that struck a deeper pang to
his heart than anything else was the daily increasing maturity
of the child's mind and feelings. While still retaining all
a child's fanciful graces, yet she often dropped, unconsciously,
words of such a reach of thought, and strange unworldly
wisdom, that they seemed to be an inspiration. At such
times, St. Clare would feel a sudden thrill, and clasp her in
his arms, as if that fond clasp could save her; and his heart
rose up with wild determination to keep her, never to let
her go.

The child's whole heart and soul seemed absorbed in works
of love and kindness. Impulsively generous she had always
been; but there was a touching and womanly thoughtfulness
about her now, that every one noticed. She still loved to
play with Topsy, and the various colored children; but she
now seemed rather a spectator than an actor of their plays,
and she would sit for half an hour at a time, laughing at the
odd tricks of Topsy, — and then a shadow would seem to pass
across her face, her eyes grew misty, and her thoughts were
afar.

“Mamma,” she said, suddenly, to her mother, one day,
“why don't we teach our servants to read?”

“What a question, child! People never do.”

“Why don't they?” said Eva.

“Because it is no use for them to read. It don't help
them to work any better, and they are not made for anything
else.”

“But they ought to read the Bible, mamma, to learn God's
will.”

“O! they can get that read to them all they need.”

“It seems to me, mamma, the Bible is for every one to
read themselves. They need it a great many times when
there is nobody to read it.”

“Eva, you are an odd child,” said her mother.

“Miss Ophelia has taught Topsy to read,” continued Eva.

“Yes, and you see how much good it does. Topsy is the
worst creature I ever saw!”

“Here 's poor Mammy!” said Eva. “She does love the
Bible so much, and wishes so she could read! And what will
she do when I can't read to her?”

Marie was busy, turning over the contents of a drawer, as
she answered,

“Well, of course, by and by, Eva, you will have other
things to think of, besides reading the Bible round to servants.
Not but that is very proper; I 've done it myself, when I had
health. But when you come to be dressing and going into
company, you won't have time. See here!” she added,
“these jewels I 'm going to give you when you come out. I
wore them to my first ball. I can tell you, Eva, I made a
sensation.”

Eva took the jewel-case, and lifted from it a diamond necklace.
Her large, thoughtful eyes rested on them, but it was
plain her thoughts were elsewhere.

“How sober you look, child!” said Marie.

“Are these worth a great deal of money, mamma?”

“To be sure, they are. Father sent to France for them.
They are worth a small fortune.”

“I wish I had them,” said Eva, “to do what I pleased
with!”

“What would you do with them?”

“I 'd sell them, and buy a place in the free states, and take
all our people there, and hire teachers, to teach them to read
and write.”

Eva was cut short by her mother's laughing.

“Set up a boarding-school! Would n't you teach them
to play on the piano, and paint on velvet?”

“I 'd teach them to read their own Bible, and write their
own letters, and read letters that are written to them,” said
Eva, steadily. “I know, mamma, it does come very hard on
them, that they can't do these things. Tom feels it, —
Mammy does, — a great many of them do. I think it 's
wrong.”

“Come, come, Eva; you are only a child! You don't
know anything about these things,” said Marie; “besides,
your talking makes my head ache.”

Marie always had a head-ache on hand for any conversation
that did not exactly suit her.

Eva stole away; but after that, she assiduously gave
Mammy reading lessons.