How often, ah, how often, between the desire of the heart and its fulfilment, lies only the briefest space of time and distance, and yet the desire remains forever unfulfilled! It is so near that we can touch it with the hand, and yet so far away that the eye cannot perceive it. What Mr. Churchill most desired was before him. The Romance he was longing to find and record had really occurred in his neighbourhood, among his own friends. It had been set like a picture into the frame-work of his life, inclosed within his own experience. But he could not see it as an object apart from himself; and as he was gazing at what was remote and strange and indistinct, the nearer incidents of aspiration, love, and death, escaped him. They were too near to be clothed by the imagination with the golden vapors of romance; for the familiar seems trivial, and only the distant and unknown completely fill and satisfy the mind.
The winter did not pass without its peculiar delights and recreations. The singing of the great wood fires; the blowing of the wind over the chimney-tops, as if they were organ pipes; the splendor of the spotless snow; the purple wall built round the horizon at sunset; the sea-suggesting pines, with the moan of the billows in their branches, on which the snows were furled like sails; the northern lights; the stars of steel; the transcendent moonlight, and the lovely shadows of the leafless trees upon the snow;—these things did not pass unnoticed nor unremembered. Every one of them made its record upon the heart of Mr. Churchill.
His twilight walks, his long Saturday afternoon rambles, had again become solitary; for Kavanagh was lost to him for such purposes, and his wife was one of those women who never walk. Sometimes he went down to the banks of the frozen river, and saw the farmers crossing it with their heavy-laden sleds, and the Fairmeadow schooner imbedded in the ice; and thought of Lapland sledges, and the song of Kulnasatz, and the dismantled, ice-locked vessels of the explorers in the Arctic Ocean. Sometimes he went to the neighbouring lake, and saw the skaters wheeling round their fire, and speeding away before the wind; and in his imagination arose images of the Norwegian Skate-Runners, bearing the tidings of King Charles’s death from Frederickshall to Drontheim, and of the retreating Swedish army, frozen to death in its fireless tents among the mountains. And then he would watch the cutting of the ice with ploughs, and the horses dragging the huge blocks to the store-houses, and contrast them with the Grecian mules, bearing the snows of Mount Parnassus to the markets of Athens, in panniers protected from the sun by boughs of oleander and rhododendron.
The rest of his leisure hours were employed in any thing and every thing save in writing his Romance. A great deal of time was daily consumed in reading the newspapers, because it was necessary, he said, to keep up with the times; and a great deal more in writing a Lyceum Lecture, on “What Lady Macbeth might have been, had her energies been properly directed.” He also made some little progress in a poetical arithmetic, founded on Bhascara’s, but relinquished it, because the school committee thought it was not practical enough, and more than hinted that he had better adhere to the old system. And still the vision of the great Romance moved before his mind, august and glorious, a beautiful mirage of the desert.
XXIX.
The wedding did not take place till Spring. And then Kavanagh and his Cecilia departed on their journey to Italy and the East,—a sacred mission, a visit like the Apostle’s to the Seven Churches, nay, to all the Churches of Christendom; hoping by some means to sow in many devout hearts the desire and prophecy that filled his own,—the union of all sects into one universal Church of Christ. They intended to be absent one year only; they were gone three. It seemed to their friends that they never would return. But at length they came,—the long absent, the long looked for, the long desired,—bearing with them that delicious perfume of travel, that genial, sunny atmosphere, and soft, Ausonian air, which returning travellers always bring about them.
It was night when they reached the village, and they could not see what changes had taken place in it during their absence. How it had dilated and magnified itself,—how it had puffed itself up, and bedizened itself with flaunting, ostentatious signs,—how it stood, rotund and rubicund with brick, like a portly man, with his back to the fire and both hands in his pockets, warm, expansive, apoplectic, and entertaining a very favorable opinion of himself,—all this they did not see, for the darkness; but Kavanagh beheld it all, and more, when he went forth on the following morning.
How Cecilia’s heart beat as they drove up the avenue to the old house! The piny odors in the night air, the solitary light at her father’s window, the familiar bark of the dog Major at the sound of the wheels, awakened feelings at once new and old. A sweet perplexity of thought, a strange familiarity, a no less pleasing strangeness! The lifting of the heavy brass latch, and the jarring of the heavy brass knocker as the door closed, were echoes from her childhood. Mr. Vaughan they found, as usual, among his papers in the study;— the same bland, white-haired man, hardly a day older than when they left him there. To Cecilia the whole long absence in Italy became a dream, and vanished away. Even Kavanagh was for the moment forgotten. She was a daughter, not a wife;—she had not been married, she had not been in Italy!
In the morning, Kavanagh sallied forth to find the Fairmeadow of his memory, but found it not. The railroad had completely transformed it. The simple village had become a very precocious town. New shops, with new names over the doors; new streets, with new forms and faces in them; the whole town seemed to have been taken and occupied by a besieging army of strangers. Nothing was permanent but the work-house, standing alone in the pasture by the river; and, at the end of the street, the school-house, that other work-house, where in childhood we pick and untwist the cordage of the brain, that, later in life, we may not be obliged to pull to pieces the more material cordage of old ships.
Kavanagh soon turned in despair from the main street into a little green lane, where there were few houses, and where the barberry still nodded over the old stone wall;—a place he had much loved in the olden time for its silence and seclusion. He seemed to have entered his ancient realm of dreams again, and was walking with his hat drawn a little over his eyes. He had not proceeded far, when he was startled by a woman’s voice, quite sharp and loud, crying from the opposite side of the lane. Looking up, he beheld a small cottage, against the wall of which rested a ladder, and on this ladder stood the woman from whom the voice came. Her face was nearly concealed by a spacious gingham sun-bonnet, and in her right hand she held extended a large brush, with which she was painting the front of her cottage, when interrupted by the approach of Kavanagh, who, thinking she was calling to him, but not understanding what she said, made haste to cross over to her assistance. At this movement her tone became louder and more peremptory; and he could now understand that her cry was rather a warning than an invitation.
“Go away!” she said, flourishing her brush. “Go away! What are you coming down here for, when I am on the ladder, painting my house? If you don’t go right about your business, I will come down and—”
“Why, Miss Manchester!” exclaimed Kavanagh; “how could I know that you would be going up the ladder just as I came down the lane?”
“Well, I declare! if it is not Mr. Kavanagh!”
And she scrambled down the ladder backwards with as much grace as the circumstances permitted. She, too, like the rest of his friends in the village, showed symptoms of growing older. The passing years had drunk a portion of the light from her eyes, and left their traces on her cheeks, as birds that drink at lakes leave their foot-prints on the margin. But the pleasant smile remained, and reminded him of the by-gone days, when she used to open for him the door of the gloomy house under the poplars.
Many things had she to ask, and many to tell; and for full half an hour Kavanagh stood leaning over the paling, while she remained among the hollyhocks, as stately and red as the plants themselves. At parting, she gave him one of the flowers for his wife; and, when he was fairly out of sight, again climbed the perilous ladder, and resumed her fresco painti
ng.
Through all the vicissitudes of these later years, Sally had remained true to her principles and resolution. At Mrs. Archer’s death, which occured soon after Kavanagh’s wedding, she had retired to this little cottage, bought and paid for by her own savings. Though often urged by Mr. Vaughan’s man, Silas, who breathed his soul out upon the air of Summer evenings through a keyed bugle, she resolutely refused to marry. In vain did he send her letters written with his own blood,—going barefooted into the brook to be bitten by leeches, and then using his feet as inkstands: she refused again and again. Was it that in some blue chamber, or some little warm back parlour, of her heart, the portrait of the inconstant dentist was still hanging? Alas, no! But as to some hearts it is given in youth to blossom with the fragrant blooms of young desire, so others are doomed by a mysterious destiny to be checked in Spring by chill winds, blowing over the bleak common of the world. So had it been with her desires and thoughts of love. Fear now predominated over hope; and to die unmarried had become to her a fatality which she dared not resist.
In the course of his long conversation with Miss Manchester, Kavanagh learned many things about the inhabitants of the town. Mrs. Wilmerdings was still carrying on her labors in the “Dunstable and eleven-braid, open-work and colored straws.” Her husband had taken to the tavern, and often came home very late, “with a brick in his hat,” as Sally expressed it. Their son and heir was far away in the Pacific, on board a whale-ship. Miss Amelia Hawkins remained unmarried, though possessing a talent for matrimony which amounted almost to genius. Her brother, the poet, was no more. Finding it impossible to follow the old bachelor’s advice, and look upon Miss Vaughan as a beautiful statue, he made one or two attempts, but in vain, to throw himself away on unworthy objects, and then died. At this event, two elderly maidens went into mourning simultaneously, each thinking herself engaged to him; and suddenly went out of it again, mutually indignant with each other, and mortified with themselves. The little taxidermist was still hopping about in his aviary, looking more than ever like his gray African parrot. Mrs. Archer’s house was uninhabited.
XXX.
Kavanagh continued his walk in the direction of Mr. Churchill’s residence. This, at least, was unchanged,—quite unchanged. The same white front; the same brass knocker; the same old wooden gate, with its chain and ball; the same damask roses under the windows; the same sunshine without and within. The outer door and study door were both open, as usual in the warm weather; and at the table sat Mr. Churchill, writing. Over each ear was a black and inky stump of a pen, which, like the two ravens perched on Odin’s shoulders, seemed to whisper to him all that passed in heaven and on earth. On this occasion, their revelations were of the earth. He was correcting school exercises.
The joyful welcome of Mr. Churchill, as Kavanagh entered, and the cheerful sound of their voices, soon brought Mrs. Churchill to the study,—her eyes bluer than ever, her cheeks fairer, her form more round and full. The children came in also,—Alfred grown to boy’s estate and exalted into a jacket; and the baby that was, less than two years behind him, and catching all his falling mantles, and all his tricks and maladies.
Kavanagh found Mr. Churchill precisely where he left him. He had not advanced one step,— not one. The same dreams, the same longings, the same aspirations, the same indecision. A thousand things had been planned, and none completed. His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely used his good ideas in conversation, and in letters; and they were straightway wrought into the texture of other men’s books, and so lost to him for ever. His work on Obscure Martyrs was anticipated by Mr. Hathaway, who, catching the idea from him, wrote and published a series of papers on Unknown Saints, before Mr. Churchill had fairly arranged his materials. Before he had written a chapter of his great Romance, another friend and novelist had published one on the same subject.
Poor Mr. Churchill! So far as fame and external success were concerned, his life certainly was a failure. He was, perhaps, too deeply freighted, too much laden by the head, to ride the waves gracefully. Every sea broke over him,—he was half the time under water!
All his defects and mortifications he attributed to the outward circumstances of his life, the exigencies of his profession, the accidents of chance. But, in reality, they lay much deeper than this. They were within himself. He wanted the all-controlling, all-subduing will. He wanted the fixed purpose that sways and bends all circumstances to its uses, as the wind bends the reeds and rushes beneath it.
In a few minutes, and in that broad style of handling, in which nothing is distinctly defined, but every thing clearly suggested, Kavanagh sketched to his friends his three years’ life in Italy and the East. And then, turning to Mr. Churchill, he said,—
“And you, my friend,—what have you been doing all this while? You have written to me so rarely that I have hardly kept pace with you. But I have thought of you constantly. In all the old cathedrals; in all the lovely landscapes; among the Alps and Apennines; in looking down on Duomo d’Ossola; at the Inn of Baveno; at Gaeta; at Naples; in old and mouldy Rome; in older Egypt; in the Holy Land; in all galleries and churches and ruins; in our rural retirement at Fiesoli;—whenever I have seen any thing beautiful, I have thought of you, and of how much you would have enjoyed it!”
Mr. Churchill sighed; and then, as if, with a touch as masterly, he would draw a picture that should define nothing, but suggest every thing, he said,—
“You have no children, Kavanagh; we have five.”
“Ah, so many already!” exclaimed Kavanagh. “A living Pentateuch! A beautiful Pentapylon, or five-gated temple of Life! A charming number!”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Churchill; “a beautiful number; Juno’s own; the wedding of the first even and first uneven numbers; the number sacred to marriage, but having no reference, direct or indirect, to the Pythagorean novitiate of five years of silence.”
“No; it certainly is not the vocation of children to be silent,” said Kavanagh, laughing. “That would be out of nature; saving always the children of the brain, which do not often make so much noise in the world as we desire. I hope a still larger family of these has grown up around you during my absence.”
“Quite otherwise,” answered the school-master, sadly. “My brain has been almost barren of songs. I have only been trifling; and I am afraid, that, if I play any longer with Apollo, the untoward winds will blow the discus of the god against my forehead, and strike me dead with it, as they did Hyacinth of old.”
“And your Romance,—have you been more successful with that? I hope it is finished, or nearly finished?”
“Not yet begun,” said Mr. Churchill. “The plan and characters still remain vague and indefinite in my mind. I have not even found a name for it.”
“That you can determine after the book is written,” suggested Kavanagh. “You can name it, for instance, as the old Heimskringla was named, from the initial word of the first chapter.”
“Ah! that was very well in the olden time, and in Iceland, when there were no quarterly reviews. It would be called affectation now.”
“I see you still stand a little in awe of opinion. Never fear that. The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticized.”
“That is the truth, Kavanagh; and I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for.”
“I will not say,” replied Kavanagh, “that humility is the only road to excellence, but I am sure that it is one road.”
“Yes, humility; but not humiliation,” sighed Mr. Churchill, despondingly. “As for excellence, I can only desire it, and dream of it; I cannot attain to it; it lies too far from me; I cannot reach it. These very boo
ks about me here, that once stimulated me to action, have now become my accusers. They are my Eumenides, and drive me to despair.”
“My friend,” said Kavanagh, after a short pause, during which he had taken note of Mr. Churchill’s sadness, “that is not always excellent which lies far away from us. What is remote and difficult of access we are apt to overrate; what is really best for us lies always within our reach, though often overlooked. To speak frankly, I am afraid this is the case with your Romance. You are evidently grasping at something which lies beyond the confines of your own experience, and which, consequently, is only a play of shadows in the realm of fancy. The figures have no vitality; they are only outward shows, wanting inward life. We can give to others only what we have.”
“And if we have nothing worth giving?” interrupted Mr. Churchill.
“No man is so poor as that. As well might the mountain streamlets say they have nothing worth giving to the sea, because they are not rivers. Give what you have. To some one, it may be better than you dare to think. If you had looked nearer for the materials of your Romance, and had set about it in earnest, it would now have been finished.”
“And burned, perhaps,” interposed Mr. Churchill; “or sunk with the books of Simon Magus to the bottom of the Dead Sea.”
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