The Minister's Wooing

  CHAPTER XXXVIII.

  THE next morning rose calm and fair. It was the Sabbath-day; the _last_Sabbath in Mary’s maiden life if her promises and plans were fulfilled.

  Mary dressed herself in white—her hands trembling with unusualagitation, her sensitive nature divided between two opposingconsciences and two opposing affections. Her devoted filial lovetowards the Doctor made her feel the keenest sensitiveness at thethought of giving him pain. At the same time, the questions which Jameshad proposed to her had raised serious doubts in her mind whether itwas altogether right to suffer him blindly to enter into this union.So after she was all prepared, she bolted the door of her chamber, andopening her Bible, read, ‘If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God,who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given;’and then kneeling down by the bed, she asked that God would give hersome immediate light in her present perplexity. So praying, her mindgrew calm and steady, and she rose up at the sound of the bell whichmarked that it was time to set forward for church.

  Everybody noticed, as she came into the church that morning, howbeautiful Mary Scudder looked. It was no longer the beauty of thecarved statue, the pale alabaster shrine, the sainted virgin, but awarm, bright, living light, that spoke of some summer breath breathingwithin her soul.

  When she took her place in the singers’ seat she knew, without turningher head, that _he_ was in his old place not far from her side, andthose whose eyes followed her to the gallery marvelled at her face,where—

  ‘The pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so divinely wrought That you might almost say her body thought;’

  for a thousand delicate nerves were becoming vital once more, as theholy mystery of womanhood wrought within her.

  When they rose to sing, the tune must needs be one which Mary and Jameshad often sung together out of the same book at the singing school—oneof those wild, pleading tunes dear to the heart of New England, born,if we may credit the report, in the rocky hollow of its mountains, andwhose notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph in their warblingwail. The different parts of the harmony, set contrary to all thecanons of musical pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic effect,which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize. Thefour parts, tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then called,rose and swelled and wildly mingled with the fitful strangeness of anÆolian harp, or of winds in mountain hollows, or the vague moanings ofthe sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary, while her voice rose overthe waves of the treble, and trembled with a pathetic richness, felt toher inmost heart the deep accord of that other voice which came to meethers so wildly melancholy, as if the soul in that manly breast had comeforth to meet her soul in the disembodied shadowy verity of eternity.That grand old tune, called by our fathers ‘China,’ never, with itsdirge-like melody, drew two souls more out of themselves and entwinedthem more nearly with each other.

  The last verse of the hymn spoke of the resurrection of the saints withChrist—

  ‘Then let the last dread trumpet sound, And bid the dead arise; Awake, ye nations underground, Ye saints, ascend the skies.’

  And as Mary sang she felt sublimely upborn with the idea that life isbut a moment and love is immortal, and seemed in a shadowy trance tofeel herself and him past this mortal pain far over on the shores ofthat other life, ascending with Christ all glorified, all tears wipedaway, and with full permission to love and to be loved for ever. And asshe sang, the Doctor looked upward and marvelled at the light in hereyes and the rich bloom on her cheek, for where she stood a sunbeam,streaming aslant through the dusty panes of the window, touched herhead with a kind of glory, and the thought he then received outbreatheditself in the yet more fervent adoration of his prayer.