“It is only Alice Archer. She always comes late.”
Finally the long prayer was ended, and the congregation sat down, and the weary children— who are always restless during prayers, and had been for nearly half an hour twisting and turning, and standing first on one foot and then on the other, and hanging their heads over the backs of the pews, like tired colts looking into neighbouring pastures—settled suddenly down, and subsided into something like rest.
The sermon began,—such a sermon as had never been preached, or even heard of before. It brought many tears into the eyes of the pastor’s friends, and made the stoutest hearts among his foes quake with something like remorse. As he announced the text, “Yea, I think it meet as long as I am in this tabernacle to stir you up, by putting you in remembrance,” it seemed as if the apostle Peter himself, from whose pen the words first proceeded, were calling them to judgment.
He began by giving a minute sketch of his ministry and the state of the parish, with all its troubles and dissensions, social, political, and ecclesiastical. He concluded by thanking those ladies who had presented him with a black silk gown, and had been kind to his wife during her long illness;—by apologizing for having neglected his own business, which was to study and preach, in order to attend to that of the parish, which was to support its minister,—stating that his own short-comings had been owing to theirs, which had driven him into the woods in winter and into the fields in summer;—and finally by telling the congregation in general that they were so confirmed in their bad habits, that no reformation was to be expected in them under his ministry, and that to produce one would require a greater exercise of Divine power than it did to create the world; for in creating the world there had been no opposition, whereas, in their reformation, their own obstinacy and evil propensities, and self-seeking, and worldly-mindedness, were all to be overcome!
VIII.
When Mr. Pendexter had finished his discourse, and pronounced his last benediction upon a congregation to whose spiritual wants he had ministered for so many years, his people, now his no more, returned home in very various states of mind. Some were exasperated, others mortified, and others filled with pity.
Among the last was Alice Archer,—a fair, delicate girl, whose whole life had been saddened by a too sensitive organization, and by somewhat untoward circumstances. She had a pale, transparent complexion, and large gray eyes, that seemed to see visions. Her figure was slight, almost fragile; her hands white, slender, diaphanous. With these external traits her character was in unison. She was thoughtful, silent, susceptible; often sad, often in tears, often lost in reveries. She led a lonely life with her mother, who was old, querulous, and nearly blind. She had herself inherited a predisposition to blindness; and in her disease there was this peculiarity, that she could see in Summer, but in Winter the power of vision failed her.
The old house they lived in, with its four sickly Lombardy poplars in front, suggested gloomy and mournful thoughts. It was one of those houses that depress you as you enter, as if many persons had died in it,—sombre, desolate, silent. The very clock in the hall had a dismal sound, gasping and catching its breath at times, and striking the hour with a violent, determined blow, reminding one of Jael driving the nail into the head of Sisera.
One other inmate the house had, and only one. This was Sally Manchester, or Miss Sally Manchester, as she preferred to be called; an excellent chamber-maid and a very bad cook, for she served in both capacities. She was, indeed, an extraordinary woman, of large frame and masculine features;—one of those who are born to work, and accept their inheritance of toil as if it were play, and who consequently, in the language of domestic recommendations, are usually styled “a treasure, if you can get her.” A treasure she was to this family; for she did all the housework, and in addition took care of the cow and the poultry,—occasionally venturing into the field of veterinary practice, and administering lamp-oil to the cock, when she thought he crowed hoarsely. She had on her forehead what is sometimes denominated a “widow’s peak,”—that is to say, her hair grew down to a point in the middle; and on Sundays she appeared at church in a blue poplin gown, with a large pink bow on what she called “the congregation side of her bonnet.” Her mind was strong, like her person; her disposition not sweet, but, as is sometimes said of apples by way of recommendation, a pleasant sour.
Such were the inmates of the gloomy house, —from which the last-mentioned frequently expressed her intention of retiring, being engaged to a travelling dentist, who, in filling her teeth with amalgam, had seized the opportunity to fill a soft place in her heart with something still more dangerous and mercurial. The wedding-day had been from time to time postponed, and at length the family hoped and believed it never would come,—a wish prophetic of its own fulfilment.
Almost the only sunshine that from without shone into the dark mansion came from the face of Cecilia Vaughan, the school-mate and bosom-friend of Alice Archer. They were nearly of the same age, and had been drawn together by that mysterious power which discovers and selects friends for us in our childhood. They sat together in school; they walked together after school; they told each other their manifold secrets; they wrote long and impassioned letters to each other in the evening; in a word, they were in love with each other. It was, so to speak, a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life.
IX.
The golden tints of Autumn now brightened the shrubbery around this melancholy house, and took away something of its gloom. The four poplar trees seemed all ablaze, and flickered in the wind like huge torches. The little border of box filled the air with fragrance, and seemed to welcome the return of Alice, as she ascended the steps, and entered the house with a lighter heart than usual. The brisk autumnal air had quickened her pulse and given a glow to her cheek.
She found her mother alone in the parlour, seated in her large arm-chair. The warm sun streamed in at the uncurtained windows; and lights and shadows from the leaves lay upon her face. She turned her head as Alice entered, and said,—
“Who is it? Is it you, Alice?”
“Yes, it is I, mother.”
“Where have you been so long?”
“I have been nowhere, dear mother. I have come directly home from church.”
“How long it seems to me! It is very late. It is growing quite dark. I was just going to call for the lights.”
“Why, mother!” exclaimed Alice, in a startled tone; “what do you mean? The sun is shining directly into your face!”
“Impossible, my dear Alice. It is quite dark. I cannot see you. Where are you?”
She leaned over her mother and kissed her. Both were silent,—both wept. They knew that the hour, so long looked forward to with dismay, had suddenly come. Mrs. Archer was blind!
This scene of sorrow was interrupted by the abrupt entrance of Sally Manchester. She, too, was in tears; but she was weeping for her own affliction. In her hand she held an open letter, which she gave to Alice, exclaiming amid sobs,—
“Read this, Miss Archer, and see how false man can be! Never trust any man! They are all alike; they are all false—false—false!”
Alice took the letter and read as follows:—
“It is with pleasure, Miss Manchester, I sit down to write you a few lines. I esteem you as highly as ever, but Providence has seemed to order and direct my thoughts and affections to another,—one in my own neighbourhood. It was rather unexpected to me. Miss Manchester, I suppose you are well aware that we, as professed Christians, ought to be resigned to our lot in this world. May God assist you, so that we may be prepared to join the great company in heaven. Your answer would be very desirable. I respect your virtue, and regard you as a friend.
Martin Cherryfield.
“P. S. The society is generally pretty good here, but the state of religion is quite low.”
“That is a cruel letter, Sally,” said Alice, as she handed it back to her. “But we all have our troubles. That man is unworthy of you. Think no mo
re about him.”
“What is the matter?” inquired Mrs. Archer, hearing the counsel given and the sobs with which it was received. “Sally, what is the matter?”
Sally made no answer; but Alice said,—
“Mr. Cherryfield has fallen in love with somebody else.”
“Is that all?” said Mrs. Archer, evidently relieved. “She ought to be very glad of it. Why does she want to be married? She had much better stay with us; particularly now that I am blind.”
When Sally heard this last word, she looked up in consternation. In a moment she forgot her own grief to sympathize with Alice and her mother. She wanted to do a thousand things at once;—to go here;—to send there;—to get this and that;—and particularly to call all the doctors in the neighbourhood. Alice assured her it would be of no avail, though she finally consented that one should be sent for.
Sally went in search of him. On her way, her thoughts reverted to herself; and, to use her own phrase, “she curbed in like a stage-horse,” as she walked. This state of haughty and offended pride continued for some hours after her return home. Later in the day, she assumed a decent composure, and requested that the man—she scorned to name him—might never again be mentioned in her hearing. Thus was her whole dream of felicity swept away by the tide of fate, as the nest of a ground-swallow by an inundation. It had been built too low to be secure.
Some women, after a burst of passionate tears, are soft, gentle, affectionate; a warm and genial air succeeds the rain. Others clear up cold, and are breezy, bleak, and dismal. Of the latter class was Sally Manchester. She became embittered against all men on account of one; and was often heard to say that she thought women were fools to be married, and that, for one, she would not marry any man, let him be who he might,—not she!
The village doctor came. He was a large man, of the cheerful kind; vigorous, florid, encouraging; and pervaded by an indiscriminate odor of drugs. Loud voice, large cane, thick boots;—every thing about him synonymous with noise. His presence in the sick-room was like martial music,—inspiriting, but loud. He seldom left it without saying to the patient, “I hope you will feel more comfortable to-morrow,” or, “When your fever leaves you, you will be better.” But, in this instance, he could not go so far. Even his hopefulness was not sufficient for the emergency. Mrs. Archer was blind,—beyond remedy, beyond hope,—irrevocably blind!
X.
On the following morning, very early, as the school-master stood at his door, inhaling the bright, wholesome air, and beholding the shadows of the rising sun, and the flashing dew-drops on the red vine-leaves, he heard the sound of wheels, and saw Mr. Pendexter and his wife drive down the village street in their old-fashioned chaise, known by all the boys in town as “the ark.” The old white horse, that for so many years had stamped at funerals, and gnawed the tops of so many posts, and imagined he killed so many flies because he wagged the stump of a tail, and, finally, had been the cause of so much discord in the parish, seemed now to make common cause with his master, and stepped as if endeavouring to shake the dust from his feet as he passed out of the ungrateful village. Under the axle-tree hung suspended a leather trunk; and in the chaise, between the two occupants, was a large bandbox, which forced Mr. Pendexter to let his legs hang out of the vehicle, and gave him the air of imitating the Scriptural behaviour of his horse. Gravely and from a distance he saluted the school-master, who saluted him in return, with a tear in his eye, that no man saw, but which, nevertheless, was not unseen.
“Farewell, poor old man!” said the school-master within himself, as he shut out the cold autumnal air, and entered his comfortable study. “We are not worthy of thee, or we should have had thee with us forever. Go back again to the place of thy childhood, the scene of thine early labors and thine early love; let thy days end where they began, and like the emblem of eternity, let the serpent of life coil itself round and take its tail into its mouth, and be still from all its hissings for evermore! I would not call thee back; for it is better thou shouldst be where thou art, than amid the angry contentions of this little town.”
Not all took leave of the old clergyman in so kindly a spirit. Indeed, there was a pretty general feeling of relief in the village, as when one gets rid of an ill-fitting garment, or old-fashioned hat, which one neither wishes to wear, nor is quite willing to throw away.
Thus Mr. Pendexter departed from the village. A few days afterwards he was seen at a fall training, or general muster of the militia, making a prayer on horseback, with his eyes wide open; a performance in which he took evident delight, as it gave him an opportunity of going quite at large into some of the bloodiest campaigns of the ancient Hebrews.
XI.
For a while the school-master walked to and fro, looking at the gleam of the sunshine on the carpet, and revelling in his day-dreams of unwritten books, and literary fame. With these day-dreams mingled confusedly the pattering of little feet, and the murmuring and cooing of his children overhead. His plans that morning, could he have executed them, would have filled a shelf in his library with poems and romances of his own creation. But suddenly the vision vanished; and another from the actual world took its place. It was the canvas-covered cart of the butcher, that, like the flying wigwam of the Indian tale, flitted before his eyes. It drove up the yard and stopped at the back door; and the poet felt that the sacred rest of Sunday, the God’s-truce with worldly cares, was once more at an end. A dark hand passed between him and the land of light. Suddenly closed the ivory gate of dreams, and the horn gate of every-day life opened, and he went forth to deal with the man of flesh and blood.
“Alas!” said he with a sigh; “and must my life, then, always be like the Sabbatical river of the Jews, flowing in full stream only on the seventh day, and sandy and arid all the rest?”
Then he thought of his beautiful wife and children, and added, half aloud,—
“No; not so! Rather let me look upon the seven days of the week as the seven magic rings of Jarchas, each inscribed with the name of a separate planet, and each possessing a peculiar power;—or as the seven sacred and mysterious stones which the pilgrims of Mecca were forced to throw over their shoulders in the valleys of Menah and Akbah, cursing the devil and saying at each throw, ‘God is great!’ ”
He found Mr. Wilmerdings, the butcher, standing beside his cart, and surrounded by five cats, that had risen simultaneously on their hind legs, to receive their quotidian morning’s meal. Mr. Wilmerdings not only supplied the village with fresh provisions daily, but he likewise weighed all the babies. There was hardly a child in town that had not hung beneath his steelyards, tied in a silk handkerchief, the movable weight above sliding along the notched beam from eight pounds to twelve. He was a young man with a very fresh and rosy complexion, and every Monday morning he appeared dressed in an exceedingly white frock. He had lately married a milliner, who sold “Dunstable and eleven-braid, open-work and colored straws,” and their bridal tour had been to a neighbouring town to see a man hanged for murdering his wife. A pair of huge ox-horns branched from the gable of his slaughter-house; and near it stood the great pits of the tannery, which all the school-boys thought were filled with blood!
Perhaps no two men could be more unlike than Mr. Churchill and Mr. Wilmerdings. Upon such a grating, iron hinge opened the door of his daily life;—opened into the school-room, the theatre of those life-long labors, which theoretically are the most noble, and practically the most vexatious in the world. Toward this, as soon as breakfast was over, and he had played awhile with his children, he directed his steps. On his way, he had many glimpses into the lovely realms of Nature, and one into those of Art, through the medium of a placard pasted against a wall. It was as follows:—
“The subscriber professes to take profiles, plain and shaded, which, viewed at right-angles with the serious countenance, are warranted to be infallibly correct.
“No trouble of adorning or dressing the person is required. He takes infants and children at sight, and has frames of all
sizes to accommodate.
“A profile is a delineated outline of the exterior form of any person’s face and head, the use of which when seen tends to vivify the affections of those whom we esteem or love.
William Bantam.” Ere long even this glimpse into the ideal world had vanished; and he felt himself bound to the earth with a hundred invisible threads, by which a hundred urchins were tugging and tormenting him; and it was only with considerable effort, and at intervals, that his mind could soar to the moral dignity of his profession.
Such was the school-master’s life; and a dreary, weary life it would have been, had not poetry from within gushed through every crack and crevice in it. This transformed it, and made it resemble a well, into which stones and rubbish have been thrown; but underneath is a spring of fresh, pure water, which nothing external can ever check or defile.
XII.
Mr. Pendexter had departed. Only a few old and middle-aged people regretted him. To these few, something was wanting in the service ever afterwards. They missed the accounts of the Hebrew massacres, and the wonderful tales of the Zumzummims; they missed the venerable gray hair, and the voice that had spoken to them in childhood, and forever preserved the memory of it in their hearts, as in the Russian church the old hymns of the earliest centuries are still piously retained.
The winter came, with all its affluence of snows, and its many candidates for the vacant pulpit. But the parish was difficult to please, as all parishes are; and talked of dividing itself, and building a new church, and other extravagances, as all parishes do. Finally it concluded to remain as it was, and the choice of a pastor was made.
The events of the winter were few in number, and can be easily described. The following extract from a schoolgirl’s letter to an absent friend contains the most important:—
“At school, things have gone on pretty much as usual. Jane Brown has grown very pale. They say she is in a consumption; but I think it is because she eats so many slate-pencils. One of her shoulders has grown a good deal higher than the other. Billy Wilmerdings has been turned out of school for playing truant. He promised his mother, if she would not whip him, he would experience religion. I am sure I wish he would; for then he would stop looking at me through the hole in the top of his desk. Mr. Churchill is a very curious man. To-day he gave us this question in arithmetic: ‘One-fifth of a hive of bees flew to the Kadamba flower; onethird flew to the Silandhara; three times the difference of these two numbers flew to an arbor; and one bee continued flying about, attracted on each side by the fragrant Ketaki and the Malati. What was the number of bees?’ Nobody could do the sum.
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