The Doctor she regarded with a naïve astonishment, slightly tinctured with apprehension. She knew he was very religious, and stretched her comprehension to imagine what he might be like. She thought of Bossuet’s sermons9 walking about under a Protestant coat, and felt vaguely alarmed and sinful in his presence, as she used to when entering under the shadows of a cathedral. In her the religious sentiment, though vague, was strong. Nothing in the character of Burr had ever awakened so much disapprobation as his occasional sneers at religion. On such occasions she always reproved him with warmth, but excused him in her heart, because he was brought up a heretic. She held a special theological conversation with the Abbé, whether salvation were possible to one outside of the True Church,—and had added to her daily prayer a particular invocation to the Virgin for him.
The French lessons, with her assistance, proceeded prosperously. She became an inmate in Mrs. Marvyn’s family also. The brown-eyed, sensitive woman loved her as a new poem; she felt enchanted by her; and the prosaic details of her household seemed touched to poetic life by her innocent interest and admiration. The young Madame insisted on being taught to spin at the great wheel; and a very pretty picture she made of it, too, with her earnest gravity of endeavor, her deepening cheek, her graceful form, with some strange foreign scarf or jewelry waving and flashing in odd contrast with her work.
“Do you know,” she said, one day, while thus employed in the north room at Mrs. Marvyn‘s,—“do you know Burr told me that princesses used to spin? He read me a beautiful story from the ‘Odyssey,’ about how Penelope cheated her lovers with her spinning, while she was waiting for her husband to come home;—he was gone to sea, Mary,—her true love,—you understand.”
She turned on Mary a wicked glance, so full of intelligence that the snowdrop grew red as the inside of a sea-shell.
“Mon enfant! thou hast a thought deep in here!” she said to Mary, one day, as they sat together in the grass under the apple-trees.
“Why, what?” said Mary, with a startled and guilty look.
“Why, what? petite!” said the fairy princess, whimsically mimicking her accent. “Ah! ah! ma belle! you think I have no eyes;—Virginie sees deep in here!” she said, laying her hand playfully on Mary’s heart. “Ah, petite!” she said, gravely, and almost sorrowfully, “if you love him, wait for him,—don’t marry another! It is dreadful not to have one’s heart go with one’s duty.”
“I shall never marry anybody,” said Mary.
“Nevare marrie anybodie!” said the lady, imitating her accents in tones much like those of a bobolink. “Ah! ah! my little saint, you cannot always live on nothing but the prayers, though prayers are verie good. But, ma chère,” she added, in a low tone, “don’t you ever marry that good man in there; priests should not marry.”
“Ours are not priests,—they are ministers,” said Mary. “But why do you speak of him?—he is like my father.”
“Virginie sees something!” said the lady, shaking her head gravely; “she sees he loves little Mary.”
“Of course he does!”
“Of-course-he-does?—ah, yes; and by-and-by comes the mamma, and she takes this little hand, and she says, ‘Come, Mary!’ and then she gives it to him; and then the poor jeune homme,10 when he comes back, finds not a bird in his poor little nest. Oh, c’est ennuyeux cela!”11 she said, throwing herself back in the grass till the clover-heads and buttercups closed over her.
“I do assure you, dear Madame!”——
“I do assure you, dear Mary, Virginie knows. So lock up her words in your little heart; you will want them some day.”
There was a pause of some moments, while the lady was watching the course of a cricket through the clover. At last, lifting her head, she spoke very gravely,—
“My little cat! it is dreadful to be married to a good man, and want to be good, and want to love him, and yet never like to have him take your hand, and be more glad when he is away than when he is at home; and then to think how different it would all be, if it was only somebody else. That will be the way with you, if you let them lead you into this; so don’t you do it, mon enfant.”
A thought seemed to cross Mary’s mind, as she turned to Madame de Frontignac, and said, earnestly,—
“If a good man were my husband, I would never think of another, —I wouldn’t let myself.”
“How could you help it, mignonne? Can you stop your thinking?”
Mary said, after a moment’s blush,—
“I can try!”
“Ah, yes! But to try all one’s life,—oh, Mary, that is too hard! Never do it, darling!”
And then Madame de Frontignac broke out into a carolling little French song, which started all the birds around into a general orchestral accompaniment.
This conversation occurred just before Madame de Frontignac started for Philadelphia, whither her husband had been summoned as an agent in some of the ambitious intrigues of Burr.
It was with a sigh of regret that she parted from her friends at the cottage. She made them a hasty good-bye call,—alighting from a splendid barouche with two white horses, and filling their simple best-room with the light of her presence for a last half-hour. When she bade good-bye to Mary, she folded her warmly to her heart, and her long lashes drooped heavily with tears.
After her absence, the lessons were still pursued with the gentle, quiet little Abbé, who seemed the most patient and assiduous of teachers; but, in both houses, there was that vague ennui,12 that sense of want, which follows the fading of one of life’s beautiful dreams! We bid her adieu for a season;—we may see her again.
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 white dove on her hand,—a year in which not 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 struggle. Somehow she never thought without 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 fringes of Nereid1 vestures, and gold and silver 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 Galilee2 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.”3 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 upward, under the pressure of mighty sorrows, 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.4 and Martin Luther,5 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.”6
So the voice of supplication, upheaving from that great heart, so childlike in its humility, rose 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 XXI
The Bruised Flax-Flower
THE next day broke calm and fair. The robins sang remorselessly in the apple-tree, and were answered by bobolink, oriole, and a whole tribe of ignorant little bits of feathered happiness that danced among the leaves. Golden and glorious unclosed those purple eyelids of the East, and regally came up the sun; and the treacherous sea broke into ten thousand smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, as unconsciously as if no form dear to human hearts had gone down beneath it. Oh! treacherous, deceiving beauty of outward things! beauty, wherein throbs not one answering nerve to human pain!
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