The Minister's Wooing

  CHAPTER XXI.

  THE next day broke calm and fair. The robins sang remorselessly inthe apple-tree, and were answered by bobolink, oriole, and a wholetribe of ignorant little bits of feathered, happiness that dancedamong the leaves. Golden and glorious unclosed those purple eyelids ofthe East, and regally came up the sun; and the treacherous sea brokeinto ten thousand smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, asunconsciously as if no form dear to human hearts had gone down beneathit. Oh! treacherous, deceiving beauty of outward things! beauty,wherein throbs not one answering nerve to human pain!

  Mary rose early and was about her morning work. Her education was thatof the soldier, who must know himself no more, whom no personal painmust swerve from the slightest minutiæ of duty. So she was there, ather usual hour, dressed with the same cool neatness, her brown hairparted in satin bands, and only the colourless cheek and lip differingfrom the Mary of yesterday.

  How strange this external habit of living! One thinks how to stick in apin, and how to tie a string,—one busies one’s self with folding robes,and putting away napkins, the day after some stroke that has cut theinner life in two, with the heart’s blood dropping quietly at everystep.

  Yet it is better so! Happy those whom stern principle or long habitor hard necessity calls from the darkened room, the languid tranceof pain, in which the wearied heart longs to indulge, and gives thistrite prose of common life, at which our weak and wearied appetites sorevolt!

  Mary never thought of such a thing as self-indulgence;—this daughter ofthe Puritans had her seed within her. Aërial in her delicacy, as theblue-eyed flax-flower with which they sowed their fields, she had yetits strong fibre, which no stroke of the flail could break; bruisingand hackling only made it fitter for uses of homely utility. Mary,therefore, opened the kitchen-door at dawn, and, after standing onemoment to breathe the freshness, began spreading the cloth for an earlybreakfast. Mrs. Scudder, the meanwhile, was kneading the bread that hadbeen set to rise over-night; and the oven was crackling and roaringwith a large-throated, honest garrulousness.

  But, ever and anon, as the mother worked, she followed the motions ofher child anxiously.

  ‘Mary, my dear,’ she said, ‘the eggs are giving out; hadn’t you betterrun to the barn and get a few?’

  Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. No treatise on the laws ofnervous fluids could have taught Mrs. Scudder a better _rôle_ for thismorning, than her tender gravity, and her constant expedients to breakand ripple, by changing employments, that deep, deadly under-current ofthoughts which she feared might undermine her child’s life.

  Mary went into the barn, stopped a moment, and took out a handful ofcorn to throw to her hens, who had a habit of running towards her andcocking an expectant eye to her little hand whenever she appeared.All came at once flying towards her,—speckled, white, and gleamy withhues between of tawny orange-gold,—the cocks, magnificent with theblade-like waving of their tails,—and, as they chattered and cackledand pressed and crowded about her, pecking the corn even where itlodged in the edge of her little shoes, she said, ‘Poor things, Iam glad they enjoy it!’—and even this one little act of love to theignorant fellowship below her carried away some of the choking painwhich seemed all the while suffocating her heart. Then, climbing intothe hay, she sought the nest and filled her little basket with eggs,warm, translucent, pinky-white in their freshness. She felt, for amoment, the customary animation in surveying her new treasures; butsuddenly, like a vision rising before her, came a remembrance of oncewhen she and James were children together and had been seeking eggsjust there. He flashed before her eyes, the bright boy with the longblack lashes, the dimpled cheeks, the merry eyes, just as he stood andthrew the hay over her when they tumbled and laughed together,—and shesat down with a sick faintness, and then turned and walked wearily in.