THE summer passed over the cottage, noiselessly, as our summers pass.
There were white clouds walking in saintly troops over blue mirrors
of sea,—there were purple mornings, choral with bird-singing,—there
were golden evenings, with long, eastward shadows. Apple-blossoms died
quietly in the deep orchard-grass, and tiny apples waxed and rounded
and ripened and gained stripes of gold and carmine; and the blue eggs
broke into young robins, that grew from gaping, yellow-mouthed youth
to fledged and outflying maturity. Came autumn, with its long Indian
summer, and winter, with its flinty, sparkling snows, under which all
Nature lay a sealed and beautiful corpse. Came once more the spring
winds, the lengthening days, the opening flowers, and the ever-renewing
miracle of buds and blossoms on the apple-trees around the cottage. A
year had passed since the June afternoon when first we showed you Mary
standing under the spotty shadows of the tree, with the white dove on
her hand,—a year in which not many outward changes have been made in
the relations of the actors of our story.
Mary calmly spun and read and thought; now and then composing with
care very English-French letters, to be sent to Philadelphia to Madame
de Frontignac, and receiving short missives of very French-English in
return.
The cautions of Madame, in regard to the Doctor, had not rippled the
current of their calm, confiding intercourse; and the Doctor, so very
satisfied and happy in her constant society and affection, scarcely as
yet meditated distinctly that he needed to draw her more closely to
himself. If he had a passage to read, a page to be copied, a thought
to express, was she not ever there, gentle, patient, unselfish? and
scarce by the absence of a day did she let him perceive that his need
of her was becoming so absolute that his hold on her must needs be made
permanent.
As to his salary and temporal concerns, they had suffered somewhat
for his unpopular warfare with reigning sins,—a fact which had rather
reconciled Mrs. Scudder to the dilatory movement of her cherished
hopes. Since James was gone, what need to press imprudently to new
arrangements? Better give the little heart time to grow over before
starting a subject which a certain womanly instinct told her might
be met with a struggle. Somehow she never thought without a certain
heart-sinking of Mary’s look and tone the night she spoke with her
about James; she had an awful presentiment that that tone of voice
belonged to the things that cannot be shaken. But yet, Mary seemed
so even, so quiet, her delicate form filled out and rounded so
beautifully, 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 know
where her heart is! do not ask for whom she expresses the most earnest
enthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew well, whose name she
never speaks,—if she seem to have an instinct to avoid every occasion
of its mention,—if, when you speak, she drops into silence and changes
the subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going through
deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may
know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern
and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her
spotted 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, where
crimson, green, and purple sea-weeds float up, like torn fringes of
Nereid vestures, and gold and silver shells lie on the wet wrinkles of
the sands.
The sea had become to her like a friend, with its ever-varying
monotony. Somehow she loved this old, fresh, blue, babbling, restless
giant, who had carried away her heart’s love to hide him in some far
off palmy island, such as she had often heard him tell of in his sea
romances. Sometimes she would wander out for an afternoon’s stroll on
the rocks, and pause by the great spouting cave, now famous to Newport
_dilettanti_, but then a sacred and impressive solitude. There the
rising tide bursts with deafening strokes through a narrow opening into
some inner cavern, which, with a deep thunder-boom, like the voice of
an 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 the
ever-rising columns of spray as they reddened with the transpiercing
beams of the afternoon sun; and thence her eye travelled far, far off
over the shimmering starry blue, where sails looked no bigger than
miller’s wings; and it seemed sometimes as if a door were opening by
which her soul might go out into some eternity,—some abyss, so wide
and deep, that fathomless lines of thought could not sound it. She was
no longer a girl in a mortal body, but an infinite spirit, the adoring
companion of Infinite Beauty and Infinite Love.
As there was an hour when the fishermen of Galilee saw their Master
transfigured, his raiment white and glistening, and his face like the
light, so are there hours when our whole mortal life stands forth
in a celestial radiance. From our daily lot falls off every weed
of care,—from our heart-friends every speck and stain of earthly
infirmity. Our horizon widens, and blue, and amethyst, and gold touch
every object. Absent friends and friends gone on the last long journey
stand once more together, bright with an immortal glow, and, like the
disciples who saw their Master floating in the clouds above them, we
say, ‘Lord, it is good to be here!’ How fair the wife, the husband, the
absent mother, the gray-haired father, the manly son, the bright-eyed
daughter! Seen in the actual present, all have some fault, some
flaw; but absent, we see them in their permanent and better selves.
Of our distant home we remember not one dark day, not one servile
care, nothing but the echo of its holy hymns and the radiance of its
brightest days,—of our father, not one hasty word, but only the fulness
of his manly vigour and noble tenderness,—of our mother, nothing of
mortal weakness, but a glorified form of love,—of our brother, not one
teasing, provoking word of brotherly freedom, but the proud beauty of
his noblest hours,—of our sister, our child, only what is fairest and
sweetest.
This is to life the true ideal, the calm glass, wherein looking, we
shall see, that, whatever defects cling to us, they are not, after all,
permanent, and that we are tending to something nobler than we yet
are;—it is ‘the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the
purchased possession.’ In the resurrection we shall see our friends for
ever 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, because
just before us there lies a dark valley, and we shrink and tremble to
enter it.
But it _must_ come, and why do we delay?
* * * * *
Towards evening, one afternoon in the latter part of June, Mary
returned from one of these lonely walks by the sea, and entered the
kitchen. It was still in its calm and sober cleanness;—the tall clock
ticked with a startling distinctness. From the half-closed door of
her mother’s bedroom, which stood ajar, she heard the chipper of Miss
Prissy’s voice. She stayed her light footsteps, and the words that fell
on 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 in
Mary’s mind, and then came one of those awful moments when the powers
of life seem to make a dead pause and all things stand still; and then
all 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 the
foot of the bed, when the door opened noiselessly, and Mary glided to
them like a spirit,—no colour in cheek or lip,—her blue eyes wide with
calm horror; and laying her little hand, with a nervous grasp, on Miss
Prissy’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 her
arms.
‘My daughter!’
‘Oh! mother! mother!’
Then fell that long, hopeless silence, broken only by hysteric sobs
from Miss Prissy, and answering ones from the mother; but _she_ lay
still and quiet, her blue eyes wide and clear, making an inarticulate
moan.
‘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 that
I 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 think
he _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 of
broken hearts,—and the mother sat down by her in silence. Miss Prissy
stole 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 if
he’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, and
faded, and sunken she looked; nothing but the painful flutter of the
eyelids and lips showed that she yet breathed. At a sign from Mrs.
Scudder, he kneeled by the bed, and began to pray,—‘Lord, thou hast
been our dwelling-place in all generations,’—prayer deep, mournful,
upheaving like the swell of the ocean, surging upward, under the
pressure of mighty sorrows, towards an Almighty heart.
The truly good are of one language in prayer. Whatever lines or angles
of thought may separate them in other hours, _when they pray in
extremity_, all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles V. and Martin
Luther, two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed out their dying
struggle in the self-same words.
There be many tongues and many languages of men,—but the language
of prayer is one by itself, _in_ all and _above_ all. It is the
inspiration of that Spirit that is ever working with our spirit, and
constantly lifting us higher than we know, and, by our wants, by our
woes, by our tears, by our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us,
with mightier and mightier force, against those chains of sin which
keep us from our God. We speak not of _things_ conventionally called
prayers,—vain mutterings of unawakened spirits talking drowsily in
sleep,—but of such prayers as come when flesh and heart fail, in mighty
straits;—_then_ he who prays is a prophet, and a Mightier than he
speaks in him; for the ‘_Spirit_ helpeth our infirmities; for we know
not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit itself maketh
intercession for us, with groanings which cannot be uttered.’
So the voice of supplication, upheaving from that great heart, so
childlike in its humility, rose with a wisdom and a pathos beyond what
he dreamed in his intellectual hours; it uprose even as a strong angel,
whose brow is solemnly calm, and whose wings shed healing dews of
paradise.