CHAPTER XX.
THE summer passed over the cottage, noiselessly, as our summers pass.There were white clouds walking in saintly troops over blue mirrorsof sea,—there were purple mornings, choral with bird-singing,—therewere golden evenings, with long, eastward shadows. Apple-blossoms diedquietly in the deep orchard-grass, and tiny apples waxed and roundedand ripened and gained stripes of gold and carmine; and the blue eggsbroke into young robins, that grew from gaping, yellow-mouthed youthto fledged and outflying maturity. Came autumn, with its long Indiansummer, and winter, with its flinty, sparkling snows, under which allNature lay a sealed and beautiful corpse. Came once more the springwinds, the lengthening days, the opening flowers, and the ever-renewingmiracle of buds and blossoms on the apple-trees around the cottage. Ayear had passed since the June afternoon when first we showed you Marystanding under the spotty shadows of the tree, with the white dove onher hand,—a year in which not many outward changes have been made inthe relations of the actors of our story.
Mary calmly spun and read and thought; now and then composing withcare very English-French letters, to be sent to Philadelphia to Madamede Frontignac, and receiving short missives of very French-English inreturn.
The cautions of Madame, in regard to the Doctor, had not rippled thecurrent of their calm, confiding intercourse; and the Doctor, so verysatisfied and happy in her constant society and affection, scarcely asyet meditated distinctly that he needed to draw her more closely tohimself. If he had a passage to read, a page to be copied, a thoughtto express, was she not ever there, gentle, patient, unselfish? andscarce by the absence of a day did she let him perceive that his needof her was becoming so absolute that his hold on her must needs be madepermanent.
As to his salary and temporal concerns, they had suffered somewhatfor his unpopular warfare with reigning sins,—a fact which had ratherreconciled Mrs. Scudder to the dilatory movement of her cherishedhopes. Since James was gone, what need to press imprudently to newarrangements? Better give the little heart time to grow over beforestarting a subject which a certain womanly instinct told her mightbe met with a struggle. Somehow she never thought without a certainheart-sinking of Mary’s look and tone the night she spoke with herabout James; she had an awful presentiment that that tone of voicebelonged to the things that cannot be shaken. But yet, Mary seemedso even, so quiet, her delicate form filled out and rounded sobeautifully, 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 knowwhere her heart is! do not ask for whom she expresses the most earnestenthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew well, whose name shenever speaks,—if she seem to have an instinct to avoid every occasionof its mention,—if, when you speak, she drops into silence and changesthe subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going throughdeep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you mayknow her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fernand buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in herspotted 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, wherecrimson, green, and purple sea-weeds float up, like torn fringes ofNereid vestures, and gold and silver shells lie on the wet wrinkles ofthe sands.
The sea had become to her like a friend, with its ever-varyingmonotony. Somehow she loved this old, fresh, blue, babbling, restlessgiant, who had carried away her heart’s love to hide him in some faroff palmy island, such as she had often heard him tell of in his searomances. Sometimes she would wander out for an afternoon’s stroll onthe rocks, and pause by the great spouting cave, now famous to Newport_dilettanti_, but then a sacred and impressive solitude. There therising tide bursts with deafening strokes through a narrow opening intosome inner cavern, which, with a deep thunder-boom, like the voice ofan 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 theever-rising columns of spray as they reddened with the transpiercingbeams of the afternoon sun; and thence her eye travelled far, far offover the shimmering starry blue, where sails looked no bigger thanmiller’s wings; and it seemed sometimes as if a door were opening bywhich her soul might go out into some eternity,—some abyss, so wideand deep, that fathomless lines of thought could not sound it. She wasno longer a girl in a mortal body, but an infinite spirit, the adoringcompanion of Infinite Beauty and Infinite Love.
As there was an hour when the fishermen of Galilee saw their Mastertransfigured, his raiment white and glistening, and his face like thelight, so are there hours when our whole mortal life stands forthin a celestial radiance. From our daily lot falls off every weedof care,—from our heart-friends every speck and stain of earthlyinfirmity. Our horizon widens, and blue, and amethyst, and gold touchevery object. Absent friends and friends gone on the last long journeystand once more together, bright with an immortal glow, and, like thedisciples who saw their Master floating in the clouds above them, wesay, ‘Lord, it is good to be here!’ How fair the wife, the husband, theabsent mother, the gray-haired father, the manly son, the bright-eyeddaughter! Seen in the actual present, all have some fault, someflaw; but absent, we see them in their permanent and better selves.Of our distant home we remember not one dark day, not one servilecare, nothing but the echo of its holy hymns and the radiance of itsbrightest days,—of our father, not one hasty word, but only the fulnessof his manly vigour and noble tenderness,—of our mother, nothing ofmortal weakness, but a glorified form of love,—of our brother, not oneteasing, provoking word of brotherly freedom, but the proud beauty ofhis noblest hours,—of our sister, our child, only what is fairest andsweetest.
This is to life the true ideal, the calm glass, wherein looking, weshall see, that, whatever defects cling to us, they are not, after all,permanent, and that we are tending to something nobler than we yetare;—it is ‘the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of thepurchased possession.’ 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, becausejust before us there lies a dark valley, and we shrink and tremble toenter it.
But it _must_ come, and why do we delay?
* * * * *
Towards evening, one afternoon in the latter part of June, Maryreturned from one of these lonely walks by the sea, and entered thekitchen. It was still in its calm and sober cleanness;—the tall clockticked with a startling distinctness. From the half-closed door ofher mother’s bedroom, which stood ajar, she heard the chipper of MissPrissy’s voice. She stayed her light footsteps, and the words that fellon her ear were these:—
‘Miss Marvyn fainted dead away;—she stood it till he 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 inMary’s mind, and then came one of those awful moments when the powersof life seem to make a dead pause and all things stand still; and thenall 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 thefoot of the bed, when the door opened noiselessly, and Mary glided tothem like a spirit,—no colour in cheek or lip,—her blue eyes wide withcalm horror; and laying her little hand, with a nervous grasp, on MissPrissy’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 herarms.
‘My daughter!’
‘Oh! mother! mother!’
Then fell that long, hopeless silence, broken only by hys
teric sobsfrom Miss Prissy, and answering ones from the mother; but _she_ laystill and quiet, her blue eyes wide and clear, making an inarticulatemoan.
‘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 thatI 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 thinkhe _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 ofbroken hearts,—and the mother sat down by her in silence. Miss Prissystole 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 ifhe’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, andfaded, and sunken she looked; nothing but the painful flutter of theeyelids and lips showed that she yet breathed. At a sign from Mrs.Scudder, he kneeled by the bed, and began to pray,—‘Lord, thou hastbeen our dwelling-place in all generations,’—prayer deep, mournful,upheaving like the swell of the ocean, surging upward, under thepressure of mighty sorrows, towards an Almighty heart.
The truly good are of one language in prayer. Whatever lines or anglesof thought may separate them in other hours, _when they pray inextremity_, all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles V. and MartinLuther, two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed out their dyingstruggle in the self-same words.
There be many tongues and many languages of men,—but the languageof prayer is one by itself, _in_ all and _above_ all. It is theinspiration of that Spirit that is ever working with our spirit, andconstantly lifting us higher than we know, and, by our wants, by ourwoes, by our tears, by our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us,with mightier and mightier force, against those chains of sin whichkeep us from our God. We speak not of _things_ conventionally calledprayers,—vain mutterings of unawakened spirits talking drowsily insleep,—but of such prayers as come when flesh and heart fail, in mightystraits;—_then_ he who prays is a prophet, and a Mightier than hespeaks in him; for the ‘_Spirit_ helpeth our infirmities; for we knownot what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit itself makethintercession for us, with groanings which cannot be uttered.’
So the voice of supplication, upheaving from that great heart, sochildlike in its humility, rose with a wisdom and a pathos beyond whathe dreamed in his intellectual hours; it uprose even as a strong angel,whose brow is solemnly calm, and whose wings shed healing dews ofparadise.