FROST-WONDERS.
"No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung;
Like some tall palm, the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!"
HEBER.
The thaw continued till the snow was nearly gone. Only the great drifts
against the fences, and the white folds in the rifts of distant
hillsides lingered to tell what had been. Then came a day of warm rain,
that washed away the last fragment of earth's cast-off vesture, and
bathed her pure for the new adornment that was to be laid upon her. At
night, the weather cooled, and the rain changed to a fine, slow mist,
congealing as it fell.
Faith stood next morning by a small round table in the sitting-room
window, and leaned lovingly over her jonquils and hyacinths that were
coming into bloom. Then, drawing the curtain cord to let in the first
sunbeam that should slant from the south upon her bulbs, she gave a
little cry of rapturous astonishment. It was a diamond morning!
Away off, up the lane, and over the meadows, every tree and bush was
hung with twinkling gems that the slight wind swayed against each other
with tiny crashes of faint music, and the sun was just touching with a
level splendor.
After that first, quick cry, Faith stood mute with ecstasy.
"Mother!" said she, breathlessly, at last, as Mrs. Gartney entered,
"look there! have you seen it? Just imagine what the woods must be this
morning! How can we think of buckwheats?"
Sounds and odors betrayed that Mis' Battis and breakfast were in the
little room adjoining.
"There is a thought of something akin to them, isn't there, under all
this splendor? Men must live, and grass and grain must grow."
Mr. Gartney said this, as he came up behind wife and daughter, and laid
a hand on a shoulder of each.
"I know one thing, though," said Faith. "I'll eat the buckwheats, as a
vulgar necessity, and then I'll go over the brook and up in the woods
behind the Pasture Rocks. It'll last, won't it?"
"Not many hours, with this spring balm in the air," replied her father.
"You must make haste. By noon, it will be all a drizzle."
"Will it be quite safe for her to go alone?" asked Mrs. Gartney.
"I'll ask Aunt Faith to let me have Glory. She showed me the walk last
summer. It is fair she should see this, now."
So the morning odds and ends were done up quickly at Cross Corners and
at the Old House, and then Faith and Glory set forth together--the
latter in as sublime a rapture as could consist with mortal cohesion.
The common roadside was an enchanted path. The glittering rime
transfigured the very cart ruts into bars of silver; and every coarse
weed was a fretwork of beauty.
"Bells on their toes" they had, this morning, assuredly; each footfall
made a music on the sod.
Over the slippery bridge--out across a stretch of open meadow, and then
along a track that skirted the border of a sparse growth of trees,
projecting itself like a promontory upon the level land--round its
abrupt angle into a sweep of meadow again, on whose farther verge rose
the Pasture Rocks.
Behind these rocks swelled up gently a slope, half pasture, half
woodland--neither open ground nor forest; but, although clear enough for
comfortable walking, studded pretty closely with trees that often
interlaced their branches overhead, and made great, pillared aisles,
among whose shade, in summer, wound delicious little footpaths that all
came out together, midway up, into--what you shall be told of presently.
Here, among and beyond the rocks, were oaks, and pines, and savins--each
needle-like leaf a shimmering lance--each clustering branch a spray of
gems--and the stout, spreading limbs of the oaks delineating themselves
against the sky above in Gothic frost-work.
Suddenly--before they thought it could be so near--they came up and out
into a broader opening. Between two rocks that made, as it were, a
gateway, and around whose bases were grouped sentinel evergreens, they
came into this wider space, floored with flat rock, the surface of a
hidden ledge, carpeted with crisp mosses in the summer, whose every cup
and hollow held a jewel now--and inclosed with lofty oaks and pines,
while, straight beyond, where the woods shut in again far closer than
below, rose a bold crag, over whose brow hung pendent birches that in
their icy robing drooped like glittering wings of cherubim above an
altar.
All around and underneath, this strange magnificence. Overhead, the
everlasting Blue, that roofed it in with sapphire. In front, the rough,
gigantic shrine.
"It is like a cathedral!" said Faith, solemnly and low.
"See!" whispered Glory, catching her companion hastily by the
arm--"there is the minister!"
A little way beyond them, at the right, out from among the clumps of
evergreen where some other of the little wood walks opened, a figure
advanced without perceiving them. It was Roger Armstrong, the new
minister. He held his hat in his hand. He walked, uncovered, as he would
have into a church, into this forest temple, where God's finger had just
been writing on the walls.
When he turned, slowly, his eye fell on the other two who stood there.
It lighted up with a quick joy of sympathy. He came forward. Faith
bowed. Glory stood back, shyly. Neither party seemed astonished at the
meeting. It was so plain _why_ they came, that if they had wondered at
all, it would have been that the whole village should not be pouring out
hither, also.
Mr. Armstrong led them to the center of the rocky space. "This is the
best point," said he. And then was silent. There was no need of words. A
greatness of thought made itself felt from one to the other.
Only, between still pauses, words came that almost spoke themselves.
"'Eye hath not seen, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive, that which God hath prepared for them that love him.' What a
commentary upon His promise is a glory like this!
"'And they shall all shine like the sun in the kingdom of my Father!'"
Faith stood by the minister's side, and glanced, when he spoke, from the
wonderful beauty before her to a face whose look interpreted it all.
There was something in the very presence of this man that drew others
who approached him into the felt presence of God. Because he stood
therein in the spirit. These are the true apostles whom Christ sends
forth.
Glory could have sobbed with an oppression of reverence, enthusiasm, and
joy.
"It is only a glimpse," said Mr. Armstrong, by and by. "It is going,
already."
A drip--drip--was beginning to be heard.
"You ought to get away from under the trees before the thaw comes fully
on," continued he. "A branch breaks, now and then, and the ice will be
falling constantly. I can show you a more open way than the one you came
by, I think."
And he gave his arm to Faith over the slope that even now was growing
wet and slippery in the sun. Faith touched it with a reverence, and
dropped it again, modestly, when they reached a safer foothold.
Glory kept behind. Mr. Armstrong turned now and then, with a kindly
word, and a thought for her safety. Once he took her hand, and helped
her down a sudden descent in the path, where the water had run over and
made a smooth, dangerous glare.
"I shall call soon to see your father and mother, Miss Gartney," said
he, when they reached the road again beyond the brook, and their ways
home lay in different directions. "This meeting, to-day, has given me
pleasure."
"How?" Faith wondered silently, as she kept on to the Cross Corners. She
had hardly spoken a word. But, then, she might have remembered that the
minister's own words had been few, yet her very speechlessness before
him had come from the deep pleasure that his presence had given to her.
The recognition of souls cares little for words. Faith's soul had been
in her face to-day, as Roger Armstrong had seen it each Sunday, also, in
the sweet, listening look she uplifted before him in the church. He bent
toward this young, pure life, with a joy in its gentle purity; the joy
of an elder over a younger angel in the school of God.
And Glory? she laid up in her own heart a beautiful remembrance of
something she had never known before. Of a near approach to something
great and high, yet gentle and beneficent. Of a kindly, helping touch, a
gracious smile, a glance that spoke straight to the mute aspiration
within her.
The minister had not failed, through all her humbleness and shyness, to
read some syllables of that large, unuttered life of hers that lay
beneath. He whose labor it is to save souls, learns always the insight
that discerns souls.
"I have seen the Winter!" cried Faith, glowing and joyous, as she came
in from her walk.
"It has been a beautiful time!" said Glory to her shadow sister, when
she went to hang away hood and shawl. "It has been a beautiful time--and
I've been really in it--partly!"