“There can be no higher choice than love like hers. Do you assume” —
“Nay,” said the Shaker, “I assume nothing. The time has been when we hoped that Egeria might be gathered in. But that time is past. She could now never be one of us without suffering that we could not ask her to undergo. She must follow the leadings of her own heart, now.”
“Why, man, you have no right to say that she cares anything for me. It’s atrocious; it ‘s”— “We pass no censure upon the feeling between you,” said Elihu quietly, looking into his hat, as if he were about to put it on. “All we ask is that you will not let the sight of your affection be a snare to those whose faces should be set against such things.”
Ford regarded him with a stormy look; but he controlled himself, and asked coldly, “What do you wish me to do?” —
“Nay; that is for you to decide.”
“Well, I must go away!” Ford irefully stared at the Shaker again. “But how can I go away? If there was ever any reason why I should remain, the reason is now stronger than ever.”
“Yee,” said Elihu.
“What shall I do? If I have not been strong enough and honest enough with myself to keep from drifting into this — this affair, it is not likely that I can get out of it, — I don’t want to get out of it! Do you suppose that now I have the hope of her I wish to leave her? Whatever her father’s state is, and whatever my duty to him is, I am bound to stay here for her sake till she sends me away. It’s my duty, it’s my privilege.”
Elihu was not visibly swept from his feet by this lover’s-logic. He said gravely, “Now you consult your inclination rather than your sense of duty. Friend Boynton and his daughter are here by virtue of the charity we use towards all” —
“You shall be paid every cent!” cried Ford impulsively.
“Nay, I didn’t boast,” said the Shaker, with a gentle reproof in his tone, which put the young man to shame, “and I didn’t merit this return from you. I merely stated a fact. You are yourself here by our concession as their friend. I have opened our mind to you upon this matter, and you know just how we feel. Farewell.”
XXIV.
IN his preoccupation Ford let Elihu find his way out, and heard him stumbling and groping about for the outer door in the dark. All night the words and circumstances of the interview burned in his heart, and his face was hot with a transport half shameful and half sweet. Once he tried to think when his old misgivings had vanished, but he could not; he only remembered them to spurn them. In the morning he went out for a long walk, and visited the places where he had been with her. He had a formless fear and hope that he might meet her; these conflicting emotions resolved themselves into the resignation with which he went to the shop where Elihu was at work.
“I am going away. I have no right to stay here; it’s a violation of your rights, and it’s a profanation of her. I shall go away, but I shall never give up the hope of speaking to her at the right time and place, and asking her to be my wife.” Seeing that he expected an answer, Elihu said, “You cannot do less.”
Ford did not quite like the answer. “You don’t understand. I hope for nothing, — I have no reason to hope for anything.”
“Nay,” said the Shaker, “I don’t understand that. She is fond of you.”
Ford reddened, but he did not resent the words. “What I propose to do now — to-day — is to go away, and to come back from time to time, with your leave, and see how Dr. Boynton is doing. I should like some of you to write to me, — I should like to write to her. Would you have any objection to that? You don’t object to the fact, but to the appearance in this — affair, as I understand. The letters could come under cover to Sister Frances,” he submissively suggested.
“Nay,” answered the Shaker, after deliberation, “I don’t see how we could object to that.”
“Thanks,” said Ford, with a nervous sigh. “I hope you will feel it right that I should see Dr. Wilson, and ask his opinion of Dr. Boynton’s condition, before I go?”
“Yee. There is Dr. Wilson, now.” Elihu leaned out and beckoned to him, and the doctor, who was turning away from the office gate, stopped his horse in the middle of the street. “You can ask him now; he has just seen Friend Boynton.” Elihu delicately refrained from joining Ford in going to speak with the doctor.
“I have to go away for a while,” said the young man, abruptly, “and I wanted to ask you whether there is any immediate danger in Dr. Boynton’s case to prevent my going. I shouldn’t like to leave him at a critical moment.”
“No,” said the doctor, with the slowness of his thought. “It’s one of those obscure cases. I find him very well, — very well, indeed, considering. It’s the nature of his disease to make this sort of pause. It’s often a very long pause.”
Ford went back to Elihu, whom he found quietly at work again. “He says there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go,” he reported, with the excitement of a new purpose in his face. He waited a moment before he added, “I must go and tell Dr. Boynton, now. I confess I don’t know exactly how to do it.”
“Yee, it will be quite a little cross,” Elihu admitted.
“Do you think,” asked Ford, after a moment’s abstraction, “that there would be anything wrong in speaking to him about — what we have spoken of?”
“Nay,” said Elihu. “I was thinking that perhaps you might like to do that. It would set his mind at rest, perhaps.”
“Thank you,” said Ford, but he bit his nail in perplexity and hesitation.
“I presume that will be quite a cross, too,” added Elihu, quaintly.
Ford stared at him without perceiving his jest. “I suppose you don’t know what you’ve done in giving me the sort of hope you have! If you have mocked a drowning man with a straw” —
Rapt as he was in his own thoughts, when he entered the sick man’s room he could not but be aware of some great change in Boynton. When they had last seen each other, Boynton had sat up in an arm-chair to receive his visitor. Now he was stretched upon the bed, and he looked very old and frail.
“Why, the doctor said you were better!” cried the young man.
“So I am, — or so I was, half an hour ago,” replied Boynton. “I am glad you have come early to-day. I missed you yesterday; and there is something now on which I want the light of your clearest judgment. Sit down,” he said politely, seeing that Ford had remained on foot.
The young man mechanically drew up a chair, and sat facing him.
“I have heard a story of Agassiz,” Boynton said, “to the effect that when he had read some book wholly upsetting a theory he had labored many years to establish, he was so glad of the truth that his personal defeat was nothing to him. He exulted in his loss, because it was the gain of science. I have not the magnanimity of Agassiz, I find, though I have tried to pursue my inquiries in the same spirit of scientific devotion. Perhaps I had a great deal more at stake: there is a difference between seeking to ascertain some fact of natural science and endeavoring to place beyond question the truth of a future existence.”
He plainly expected some sort of acquiescence, and Ford cleared his throat to assent to the preposterous vanity of his speech: “Certainly.”
“You will bear me witness,” said Boynton, “that I have readily, even cheerfully, relinquished positions which I had carefully taken and painfully built upon, so long as their loss did not lead to doubt of this great truth, — did not weaken the citadel, so to speak.”
“Yes,” said Ford, with blank expectancy.
“You know I have rested my hopes upon a power, which I believed my daughter to possess, of communicating with the world of spirits?”
“Yes.”
“You remember that I abandoned without a murmur the hypothesis of your adverse control when that was no longer tenable?”
He was so anxious for Ford’s explicit assent that the young man again answered, “Yes.”
“And when I was forced to accept the conclusion that her power was limited by a cert
ain nervous condition, and had forever passed away with her restoration to complete health, did you find any childish disposition in me to shrink from the truth?”
“No,” said Ford, “I did not.”
“I thank you!” cried Boynton. “These successive strokes, hard as they were to bear, had nothing mortal to my hopes in them. Now, I have had my death-blow.” Ford began a kindly dissent; but Boynton waved him to silence. “Unless your trained eye can see some way out of the conclusions to which I am now brought, I must give up the whole hypothesis of communion with disembodied life, and with that hypothesis my belief in that life itself. In other words, I have received my deathblow.”
No doubt Boynton still enjoyed his own rhetoric, and had a measurable consolation in his powers of graphic statement; but there was a real passion in his words, and the young man was moved by the presence of a veritable despair. “What facts, or reasons, have brought you to your conclusions?” he asked.
Boynton pushed his hand up under his pillow, and drew out an old copy of a magazine. “Here is what might have saved me years of research and of hopes as futile as those of the seekers for the philosopher’s stone, if I had seen it in time.” Though he laid the book on the coverlet, he kept his hand on it, and had evidently no intention that Ford should look at it for himself. “There is a paper in this magazine giving an account of a girl, in this very region, possessing powers so identical in all essentials with those of my daughter that there can be no doubt of their common origin. Wherever this unhappy creature appeared the most extraordinary phenomena attended her: raps were evoked; tables were moved; bells were rung; flashes of light were seen; and violent explosions were heard. The writer was not blinded by the fool’s faith that lured me on. He sought a natural cause for these unnatural effects, and he found that by insulating the posts of the girl’s bedstead — for these things mostly occurred during her sleep — he controlled them perfectly. She was simply surcharged with electricity. After a while she fell into a long sickness, from which she imperfectly recovered, and she died in a mad-house.” Boynton removed his hand from the magazine, as if to let Ford now see for himself, and impressively waited his movement.
“Excuse me,” said the young man, who found the parallel extremely distasteful, “but I don’t see the identity of the cases. Miss Boynton seems the perfection of health, and” —
“Yes,” interrupted Boynton, “there is that merciful difference. But I cannot base my selfforgiveness upon that. So far as my recklessness is concerned, her health and her sanity might have been sacrificed where her childhood has been wasted and her happiness destroyed. Poor girl! Poor girl!”
“I think you exaggerate,” Ford began, but Boynton interrupted him: — .
“Oh, you don’t know, you don’t know! I couldn’t exaggerate the sum of her sufferings at my hands. To be wrenched from a home in which she was simply happy, and from love that was immeasurably wiser and more unselfish than mine; to be thrust on to the public exhibition of abnormal conditions that puzzled and terrified her; to be made the partner of my defeat and shame; to be forced to share my aimless vagabondage and abject poverty, houseless, friendless, exposed to suspicion and insult and danger, — that is the fate to which I brought her; and for what? For a delusion that ends in chaos! Oh, my God! And here I lie at last, a sick beggar, sheltered by the charity of these Shakers, whose kindness I have insulted, and a sorrow and shame to the child whose young life I have blighted, — here I lie, stripped to the last shred of hope in anything, here or hereafter. Oh, young man! I once thought that you were hard upon me, and I resented the blame you spoke as outrage; but now I confess it merciful justice. You have your triumph!”
“Don’t say that!” cried Ford. “I never was more ashamed of what I said to you there in Boston than I am at this moment, and I never felt the need of your kindness so much. I believe that if Miss Boynton were here, and understood it all, she would feel nothing but pity” —
“Oh, does that make it different? Does that right the wrong which has been done?”
“Yes,” cried the young man, with a fervor that came he knew not how or whence, “forgiveness does somehow right a wrong! It must be so, or else this world is not a world of possibilities and recoveries, but a hopeless hell. Why, look!” He spoke as if Egeria were before them. “Have you ever seen her stronger, younger, more” — The image he had conjured up seemed to shine upon him with a smile that reflected itself upon his lips, and a thrill of tenderness passed through him. “No one could do her harm that her own goodness couldn’t repair.”
Boynton was not one to refuse the comfort of such rapture. “Yes, you are right. She is unharmed by all that she has suffered. I have at least that comfort.” Then he underwent a quick relapse. “But whether I have harmed her or not, the fact remains that she had never any supernatural power, and I return through all my years of experiment and research to the old ground, — the ground which I once occupied, and which you have never left, — the ground of materialism. It is doubtless well to have something under the foot, if it is only a lump of lifeless adamant.”
“I find it hard not to imagine something better than this life when I think of Miss Boynton!” exclaimed Ford impetuously.
“Very true,” said the doctor, accepting the tribute without perceiving the passion in it; “there has always been that suggestion of diviner goodness in her loving, self-devoted nature. But she had no more supernatural power than you or I, and the whole system of belief which I had built upon the hypothesis of its existence in her lies a heap of rubbish. And here at death’s door I am without a sense of anything but darkness and the void beyond.” A silence ensued, which Boynton broke with a startling appeal: “In the name of God, — in the name of whatever is better and greater than ourselves, — give me some hope! Speak! Say something from your vantage-ground of health and strength! Let me have some hope. I am not a coward. I am not afraid of torment. I should not be afraid of it if I had ever willed wrong to any living creature, and I know that I have not. But this darkness rushing back upon me, after years of faith and surety — it’s unendurable! Give me some hope! A word comes from you at times that does not seem of your own authority: speak! Say it!”
“You have the hope that the world has had for eighteen hundred years,” answered Ford, deeply moved.
“Was that first in your thoughts?” Boynton swiftly rejoined. “Was it all you could think of?”
“It was first in my thoughts, it was all I could think of,” repeated Ford.
“But you have rejected that hope.”
“It left me. It seemed to have left me. I don’t realize it now as a faith, but I realize that it was always present somewhere in me. It may be different with those who come after us, to whom it will never have been imparted; but we who were born in it, — how can we help it, how can we escape it?”
“Is that really true?” mused Boynton aloud. “Do we come back only to that at last? Have you ever spoken with a clergyman about it?”
“Oh, no!” cried Ford.
“I should like to talk with a clergyman — I should like to talk with the church about it! There must be something in organization — But it is of no use, now! Theories, theories, theories! A thousand formulas repeat themselves to me; the air is full of them; I can read and hear them.” He put his hands under his head and clasped them there. “And there is absolutely nothing else but that? Nothing in science?”
“No.”
“Nothing of hope in the new metaphysics?”
“No, nothing.”
“Nothing in the philosophy that applies the theories of science to the moral world?”
“Nothing but death.”
“Then that is the only hope, — that old story of a credulous and fabulous time, resting upon hearsay and the witness of the ignorant, the pedantic wisdom of the learned, the interest of a church lustful of power; and that allegory of the highest serving the lowest, the best suffering for the worst, — that is still the world’s only hope!” He
paused; and then he recurred to the thought which he had dropped: “A clergyman, — a priest! — I should like to know the feelings of such a man. He fulfills an office with which his order has been clothed for two thousand years; he bears the tradition of authority which is as old as the human race; he claims to derive from Christ himself the touch of blessing and of healing for the broken spirit. I have often thought of that, — what a sacred and awful commission it must be, if we admit its divine origin! Yes, I should like to know the feelings of such a man. I wonder if he feels his authority perpetually reconsecrated by the anguish, the fears, the prayers, the trembling hopes, of all those who have lain upon beds of death, or wept over them! Poor human soul, it should make him superhuman! What a vast cumulative power of consolation must come to a priest in our time! He is the church incarnate, the vicar of Christ, the helpful brother of the helpless human race, — it’s a tremendous thought. I should like to talk with such a man.”
“Would you really like to see a minister?” asked Ford. “Because” —
“No, — no,” said Boynton. “At least, not now, not yet; not till I have clearly formulated my ideas. But there are certainly some points that I should like to discuss — Oh, words, words! Phrases, phrases, — this glibness tires me to death! I can’t get any foot-hold on it — I slip on it as if it were ice.” He lay in a silence which Ford did not interrupt, and which he broke himself at last in a mood of something like philosophical cheerfulness: “I can find reason, if not consolation, for my failure, — reason in the physical world. I shall take the first opportunity of committing my ideas to paper. Has it never struck you as very extraordinary that all the vast mass of evidence which has been accumulating in favor of spiritualism for the last twenty years, until now it is literally immense, should have no convincing power whatever with those who have not been convinced by their own senses? Why should I, as soon as personal proof failed me, instantly lapse from faith in it?”
“I am afraid,” Ford said, “that I have not thought sufficiently about the matter.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 108