To understand the impression which Paul's letter produced upon Miss
Ludington imagine, in the days before the resurrection of the dead was
preached, with what effect the convincing announcement of that doctrine
would have fallen on the ears of one who had devoted her life to hopeless
regrets over the ashes of a friend.
And yet at no time have men been wholly without belief in some form of
survival beyond the grave, and such a bereaved woman of antiquity would
merely have received a more clear and positive assurance of what she had
vaguely imagined before. But that there was any resurrection for her
former self--that the bright youth which she had so yearned after and
lamented could anywhere still exist, in a mode however shadowy, Miss
Ludington had never so much as dreamed.
There might be immortality for all things else; the birds and beasts, and
even the lowest forms of life, might, under some form, in some world,
live again; but no priest had ever promised, nor any poet ever dreamed,
that the title of a man's past selves to a life immortal is as
indefeasible as that of his present self.
It did not occur to her to doubt, to quibble, or to question, concerning
the grounds of this great hope. From the first moment that she
comprehended the purport of Paul's argument, she had accepted its
conclusion as an indubitable revelation, and only wondered that she had
never thought of it herself, so natural, so inevitable, so
incontrovertible did it seem.
And as a sunburst in an instant transforms the sad fields of November
into a bright and cheerful landscape, so did this revelation suddenly
illumine her sombre life.
All day she went about the house and the village like one in a dream,
smiling and weeping, and reading Paul's letter over and over, through
eyes swimming with a joy unutterable.
In the afternoon, with tender, tremulous fingers, she removed the crape
from the frame of Ida's picture, which it had draped for so many years.
As she was performing this symbolic act, it seemed to the old lady that
the fair young face smiled upon her. "Forgive me!" she murmured. "How
could I have ever thought you dead!"
It was not till evening that her servants reminded her that she had not
eaten that day, and induced her to take food.
The next afternoon Paul arrived. He had not been without very serious
doubt as to the manner in which his argument for the immortality of past
selves might impress Miss Ludington. A mild melancholy such as hers
sometimes becomes sweet by long indulgence. She might not welcome
opinions which revolutionized the fixed ideas of her life, even though
they should promise a more cheerful philosophy. If she did not accept his
belief, but found it chimerical and visionary, the effect of its
announcement upon her mind could only be unpleasantly disturbing. It was,
therefore, not without some anxiety that he approached the house.
But his first glimpse of her, as she stood in the door awaiting him,
dissipated his apprehensions. She wore a smiling face, and the deep black
in which she always dressed was set off, for the first time since his
knowledge of her, with a bit or two of bright colour.
She said not a word, but, taking him by the hand, led him into the
sitting-room.
That morning she had sent into Brooklyn for immortelles, and had spent
the day in festooning them about Ida's picture, so that now the sweet
girlish face seemed smiling upon them out of a veritable bower of the
white flowers of immortality.
In the days that followed, Miss Ludington seemed a changed woman, such
blitheness did the new faith she had found bring into her life. The
conviction that the past was deathless, and her bright girlhood immortal,
took all the melancholy out of retrospection. Nay, more than that, it
turned retrospection into anticipation. She no longer viewed her
youth-time through the pensive haze of memory, but the rosy mist of hope.
She should see it again, for was it not safe with God? Her pains to guard
the memory of the beautiful past, to preserve it from the second death of
forgetfulness, were now all needless; she could trust it with God, to be
restored to her in his eternal present, its lustre undimmed, and no trait
missing.
The laying aside of her mourning garb was but one indication of the
change that had come over her.
The whole household, from scullion to coachman, caught the inspiration of
her brighter mood. The servants laughed aloud about the house. The
children of the gardener, ever before banished to other parts of the
grounds, played unrebuked in the sacred street of the silent village.
As for Paul, since the revelation had come to him that the lady of his
love was no mere dream of a life for ever vanished, but was herself alive
for evermore, and that he should one day meet her, his love had assumed a
colour and a reality it had never possessed before. To him this meant all
it would have meant to the lover of a material maiden, to be admitted to
her immediate society.
The sense of her presence in the village imparted to the very air a fine
quality of intoxication. The place was her shrine, and he lived in it as
in a sanctuary.
It was not as if he should have to wait many years, till death, before he
should see her. As soon as he gave place to the later self which was to
succeed him, he should be with her. Already his boyish self had no doubt
greeted her, and she had taken in her arms the baby Paul who had held his
little arms out to her picture twenty years before.
To be in love with the spirit of a girl, however beautiful she might have
been when on earth, would doubtless seem to most young men a very
chimerical sort of passion; but Paul, on the other hand, looked upon the
species of attraction which they called love as scarcely more than a
gross appetite. During his absence from home he had seen no woman's face
that for a moment rivalled Ida's portrait. Shy and fastidious, he had
found no pleasure in ladies' society, and had listened to his classmates'
talk of flirtations and conquests with secret contempt. What did they
know of love? What had their coarse and sensuous ideas in common with the
rare and delicate passion to which his heart was dedicated--a love asking
and hoping for no reward, but sufficient to itself?
He had spent but a few weeks at home when Miss Ludington began to talk
quite seriously to him about studying for some profession. He was rather
surprised at this, for he had supposed she would be glad to have him at
home, for a while at lease, now that he had done with college. To Paul,
at this time, the idea of any pursuit which would take him away from the
village was extremely distasteful, and he had no difficulty in finding
excuses enough for procrastinating a step for which, indeed, no sort of
urgency could be pretended.
He was to be Miss Ludington's heir, and any profession which he might
adopt would be purely ornamental at most.
Finding that he showed no disposition to consider a profession she
dropped that point and proposed that he should take six months of foreign
travel, as a sort of rounding off of his college course. To the
advantages of this project he was, however, equally insensible. When she
urged it on him, he said, "Why, aunty, one would say you were anxious to
get rid of me. Don't we get on well together? Have you taken a dislike to
me? I'm sure I'm very comfortable here. I don't want to do anything
different, or to go off anywhere. Why won't you let me stay with you?"
And so she had to let the matter drop.
The truth was she had become anxious to get him away; but it was on his
account, not hers.
In putting his room to rights one day since his return from college she
had come upon a scrap of paper containing some verses addressed "To Ida."
Paul had rather a pretty knack at turning rhymes, and the tears came to
Miss Ludington's eyes as she read these lines. They were an attempt at a
love sonnet, throbbing with passion, and yet so mystical in some of the
allusions that nothing but her knowledge of Paul's devotion to Ida would
have given her a clue to his meaning. She was filled with apprehension as
she considered the effect which this infatuation, if it should continue
to gain strength, might have upon one of Paul's dreamy temperament and
excessive ideality. That she had devoted her own lonely and useless life
to the cult of the past did not greatly matter, although in the light of
her present happier faith she saw and regretted her mistake; but as for
permitting Paul's life to be overshadowed by the same influence she could
not consent to it. Something must be done to get him away from home, or
at least to divert the current of his thought. The failure of her efforts
to induce him to consider any scheme that involved his leaving the
village threw her into a state of great uneasiness.