“No; do you suppose I should see anybody before you?”
“Oh, then, you must go to her!” said Mary. “Oh, James, you don’t know how she has suffered!”
They were drawing near to the cottage-gate.
“Do, pray!” said Mary. “Go, hurry to your mother! Don’t be too sudden, either, for she’s very weak; she is almost worn out with sorrow. Go, my dear brother! Dear you always will be to me.”
James helped her into the house, and they parted. All the house was yet still. The open kitchen-door let in a sober square of moonlight on the floor. The very stir of the leaves on the trees could be heard. Mary went into her little room, and threw herself upon the bed, weak, weary, yet happy,—for deep and high above all other feelings was the great relief that he was living still. After a little while she heard the rattling of the wagon, and then the quick patter of Miss Prissy’s feet, and her mother’s considerate tones, and the Doctor’s grave voice,—and quite unexpectedly to herself, she was shocked to find herself turning with an inward shudder from the idea of meeting him. “How very wicked!” she thought,—“how ungrateful!” —and she prayed that God would give her strength to check the first rising of such feelings.
Then there was her mother, so ignorant and innocent, busy putting away baskets of things that she had bought in provision for the wedding-ceremony.
Mary almost felt as if she had a guilty secret. But when she looked back upon the last two hours, she felt no wish to take them back again. Two little hours of joy and rest they had been,—so pure, so perfect! she thought God must have given them to her as a keepsake to remind her of His love, and to strengthen her in the way of duty.
Some will, perhaps, think it an unnatural thing that Mary should have regarded her pledge to the Doctor as of so absolute and binding force; but they must remember the rigidity of her education. Self-denial and self-sacrifice had been the daily bread of her life. Every prayer, hymn, and sermon, from her childhood, had warned her to distrust her inclinations, and regard her feelings as traitors. In particular had she been brought up to regard the sacredness of a promise with a superstitious tenacity; and in this case the promise involved so deeply the happiness of a friend whom she had loved and revered all her life, that she never thought of any way of escape from it. She had been taught that there was no feeling so strong but that it might be immediately repressed at the call of duty; and if the thought arose to her of this great love to another, she immediately answered it by saying, “How would it have been if I had been married? As I could have overcome then, so I can now.”
Mrs. Scudder came into her room with a candle in her hand, and Mary, accustomed to read the expression of her mother’s face, saw at a glance a visible discomposure there. She held the light so that it shone upon Mary’s face.
“Are you asleep?” she said.
“No, mother.”
“Are you unwell?”
“No, mother,—only a little tired.”
Mrs. Scudder set down the candle, and shut the door, and, after a moment’s hesitation, said,—
“My daughter, I have some news to tell you, which I want you to prepare your mind for. Keep yourself quite quiet.”
“Oh, mother!” said Mary, stretching out her hands towards her, “I know it. James has come home.”
“How did you hear?” said her mother, with astonishment.
“I have seen him, mother.”
Mrs. Scudder’s countenance fell.
“Where?”
“I went to walk home with Cerinthy Twitchel, and as I was coming back he came up behind me, just at Savin Rock.”
Mrs. Scudder sat down on the bed and took her daughter’s hand.
“I trust, my dear child,” she said. She stopped.
“I think I know what you are going to say, mother. It is a great joy, and a great relief; but of course I shall be true to my engagement with the Doctor.”
Mrs. Scudder’s face brightened.
“That is my own daughter! I might have known that you would do so. You would not, certainly, so cruelly disappoint a noble man who has set his whole faith upon you.”
“No, mother, I shall not disappoint him. I told James that I should be true to my word.”
“He will probably see the justice of it,” said Mrs. Scudder, in that easy tone with which elderly people are apt to dispose of the feelings of young persons. “Perhaps it may be something of a trial at first.”
Mary looked at her mother with incredulous blue eyes. The idea that feelings which made her hold her breath when she thought of them could be so summarily disposed of! She turned her face wearily to the wall, with a deep sigh, and said,—
“After all, mother, it is mercy enough and comfort enough to think that he is living. Poor Cousin Ellen, too,—what a relief to her! It is like life from the dead. Oh, I shall be happy enough; no fear of that!”
“And you know,” said Mrs. Scudder, “that there has never existed any engagement of any kind between you and James. He had no right to found any expectations on anything you ever told him.”
“That is true also, mother,” said Mary. “I had never thought of such a thing as marriage, in relation to James.”
“Of course,” pursued Mrs. Scudder, “he will always be to you as a near friend.”
Mary assented.
“There is but a week now, before your wedding,” continued Mrs. Scudder; “and I think Cousin James, if he is reasonable, will see the propriety of your mind being kept as quiet as possible. I heard the news this afternoon in town,” pursued Mrs. Scudder, “from Captain Staunton, and, by a curious coincidence, I received from him this letter from James, which came from New York by post. The brig that brought it must have been delayed out of the harbor.”
“Oh, please, mother, give it to me!” said Mary, rising up with animation; “he mentioned having sent me one.”
“Perhaps you had better wait till morning,” said Mrs. Scudder; “you are tired and excited.”
“Oh, mother, I think I shall be more composed when I know all that is in it,” said Mary, still stretching out her hand.
“Well, my daughter, you are the best judge,” said Mrs. Scudder; and she set down the candle on the table, and left Mary alone.
It was a very thick letter of many pages, dated in Canton, and ran as follows:—
CHAPTER XXXVI
Jacob’s Vow
“MY DEAREST MARY:—
“I have lived through many wonderful scenes since I saw you last. My life has been so adventurous, that I scarcely know myself when I think of it. But it is not of that I am going now to write. I have written all that to mother, and she will show it to you. But since I parted from you, there has been another history going on within me; and that is what I wish to make you understand, if I can.
“It seems to me that I have been a changed man from that afternoon when I came to your window, and where we parted. I have never forgot how you looked then, nor what you said. Nothing in my life ever had such an effect upon me. I thought that I loved you before; but I went away feeling that love was something so deep and high and sacred, that I was not worthy to name it to you. I cannot think of the man in the world who is worthy of what you said you felt for me.
“From that hour there was a new purpose in my soul,—a purpose which has led me upward ever since. I thought to myself in this way: ‘There is some secret source from whence this inner life springs,’—and I knew that it was connected with the Bible which you gave me; and so I thought I would read it carefully and deliberately, to see what I could make of it.
“I began with the beginning. It impressed me with a sense of something quaint and strange,—something rather fragmentary; and yet there were spots all along that went right to the heart of a man who had to deal with life and things as I did. Now I must say that the Doctor’s preaching, as I told you, never impressed me much in any way. I could not make any connection between it and the men I had to manage and the things I had to do in my daily life. But there were
things in the Bible that struck me otherwise. There was one passage in particular, and that was where Jacob started off from all his friends to go off and seek his fortune in a strange country, and laid down to sleep all alone in the field, with only a stone for his pillow. It seemed to me exactly the image of what every young man is like, when he leaves his home and goes out to shift for himself in this hard world. I tell you, Mary, that one man alone on the great ocean of life feels himself a very weak thing. We are held up by each other more than we know till we go off by ourselves into this great experiment. Well, there he was as lonesome as I upon the deck of my ship. And so lying with the stone under his head, he saw a ladder in his sleep between him and heaven, and angels going up and down. That was a sight which came to the very point of his necessities. He saw that there was a way between him and God, and that there were those above who did care for him, and who could come to him to help him. Well, so the next morning he got up, and set up the stone to mark the place; and it says Jacob vowed a vow, saying, ‘If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God.’ Now there was something that looked to me like a tangible foundation to begin upon.
“If I understand Dr. Hopkins, I believe he would have called that all selfishness. At first sight it does look a little so; but then I thought of it in this way: ‘Here he was all alone. God was entirely invisible to him; and how could he feel certain that He really existed, unless he could come into some kind of connection with Him? the point that he wanted to be sure of, more than merely to know that there was a God who made the world;—he wanted to know whether He cared anything about men, and would do anything to help them. And so, in fact, it was saying, ‘If there is a God who interests Himself at all in me, and will be my Friend and Protector, I will obey Him, so far as I can find out His will.’
“I thought to myself, ‘This is the great experiment, and I will try it.’ I made in my heart exactly the same resolution, and just quietly resolved to assume for a while as a fact that there was such a God, and, whenever I came to a place where I could not help myself, just to ask His help honestly in so many words, and see what would come of it.
“Well, as I went on reading through the Old Testament, I was more and more convinced that all the men of those times had tried this experiment, and found that it would bear them; and in fact, I did begin to find, in my own experience, a great many things happening so remarkably that I could not but think that Somebody did attend even to my prayers,—I began to feel a trembling faith that Somebody was guiding me, and that the events of my life were not happening by accident, but working themselves out by His will.
“Well, as I went on in this way, there were other and higher thoughts kept rising in my mind. I wanted to be better than I was. I had a sense of a life much nobler and purer than anything I had ever lived, that I wanted to come up to. But in the world of men, as I found it, such feelings are always laughed down as romantic, and impracticable, and impossible. But about this time I began to read the New Testament, and then the idea came to me, that the same Power that helped me in the lower sphere of life would help me carry out those higher aspirations. Perhaps the Gospels would not have interested me so much, if I had begun with them first; but my Old Testament life seemed to have schooled me, and brought me to a place where I wanted something higher; and I began to notice that my prayers now were more that I might be noble, and patient, and self-denying, and constant in my duty, than for any other kind of help. And then I understood what met me in the very first of Matthew: ‘Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.’
“I began now to live a new life,—a life in which I felt myself coming into sympathy with you; for, Mary, when I began to read the Gospels, I took knowledge of you, that you had been with Jesus.
“The crisis of my life was that dreadful night of the shipwreck. It was as dreadful as the Day of Judgment. No words of mine can describe to you what I felt when I knew that our rudder was gone, and saw those hopeless rocks before us. What I felt for our poor men! But, in the midst of it all, the words came into my mind, ‘And Jesus was in the hinder part of the ship asleep on a pillow,’ and at once I felt He was there; and when the ship struck I was only conscious of an intense going out of my soul to Him, like Peter’s when he threw himself from the ship to meet Him in the waters.
“I will not recapitulate what I have already written,—the wonderful manner in which I was saved, and in which friends and help and prosperity and worldly success came to me again, after life had seemed all lost; but now I am ready to return to my country, and I feel as Jacob did when he said, ‘With my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands.’1 ”I do not need any arguments now to convince me that the Bible is from above. There is a great deal in it that I cannot understand, a great deal that seems to me inexplicable; but all I can say is, that I have tried its directions, and find that in my case they do work,—that it is a book that I can live by; and that is enough for me.
“And now, Mary, I am coming home again, quite another man from what I went out,—with a whole new world of thought and feeling in my heart, and a new purpose, by which, please God, I mean to shape my life. All this, under God, I owe to you; and if you will let me devote my whole life to you, it will be a small return for what you have done for me.
“You know I left you wholly free. Others must have seen your loveliness, and felt your worth; and you may have learnt to love some better man than me. But I know not what hope tells me that this will not be; and I shall find true what the Bible says of love, that ‘many waters cannot quench it, nor floods drown.’ In any case, I shall be always, from my very heart, yours, and yours only.
“JAMES MARVYN.”
Mary rose, after reading this letter, rapt into a divine state of exaltation, —the pure joy, in contemplating an infinite good to another, in which the question of self was utterly forgotten.
He was, then, what she had always hoped and prayed he would be, and she pressed the thought triumphantly to her heart. He was that true and victorious man, that Christian able to subdue life, and to show, in a perfect and healthy manly nature, a reflection of the image of the superhuman excellence. Her prayers that night were aspirations and praises, and she felt how possible it might be so to appropriate the good and the joy and the nobleness of others as to have in them an eternal and satisfying treasure. And with this came the dearer thought, that she, in her weakness and solitude, had been permitted to put her hand to the beginning of a work so noble. The consciousness of good done to an immortal spirit is wealth that neither life nor death can take away.
And so, having prayed, she lay down to that sleep which God giveth to his beloved.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The Question of Duty
IT is a hard condition of our existence here, that every exaltation must have its depression. God will not let us have heaven here below, but only such glimpses and faint showings as parents sometimes give to children, when they show them beforehand the jewelry and pictures and stores of rare and curious treasures which they hold for the possession of their riper years. So it very often happens that the man who has gone to bed an angel, feeling as if all sin were forever vanquished, and he himself immutably grounded in love, may wake the next morning with a sick-headache and, if he be not careful, may scold about his breakfast like a miserable sinner.
We will not say that our dear little Mary rose in this condition next morning,—for, although she had the headache, she had one of those natures in which, somehow or other, the combative element seems to be left out, so that no one ever knew her to speak a fretful word. But still, as we have observed, she had the headache and the depression,—and there came the slow, creeping sense of waking up, through all her heart and soul, of a thousand, thousand things that could be said only to one person, and that person one that it would be temptation and dan
ger to say them to.
She came out of her room to her morning work with a face resolved and calm, but expressive of languor, with slight signs of some inward struggle.
Madame de Frontignac, who had already heard the intelligence, threw two or three of her bright glances upon her at breakfast, and at once divined how the matter stood. She was of a nature so delicately sensitive to the most refined shades of honor, that she apprehended at once that there must be a conflict,—though, judging by her own impulsive nature, she made no doubt that all would at once go down before the mighty force of reawakened love.
After breakfast she would insist upon following Mary about through all her avocations. She possessed herself of a towel, and would wipe the teacups and saucers, while Mary washed. She clinked the glasses, and rattled the cups and spoons, and stepped about as briskly as if she had two or three breezes to carry her train, and chattered half English and half French, for the sake of bringing into Mary’s cheek the shy, slow dimples that she liked to watch. But still Mrs. Scudder was around, with an air as provident and forbidding as that of a sitting hen who watches her nest; nor was it till after all things had been cleared away in the house, and Mary had gone up into her little attic to spin, that the long-sought opportunity came of diving to the bottom of this mystery.