THE TRANSFIGURED.
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 unusual
agitation, her sensitive nature divided between two opposing
consciences and two opposing affections. Her devoted filial love toward
the Doctor made her feel the keenest sensitiveness at the thought of
giving him pain. At the same time, the questions which James had
proposed to her had raised serious doubts in her mind whether it was
altogether right to suffer him blindly to enter into this union. So,
after she was all prepared, she bolted the door of her chamber, and,
opening her Bible, read, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of
God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall
be given him"; and then, kneeling down by the bedside, she asked that
God would give her some immediate light in her present perplexity. So
praying, her mind grew calm and steady, and she rose up at the sound of
the bell which marked that it was time to set forward for church.
Everybody noticed, as she came into church that morning, how beautiful
Mary Scudder looked. It was no longer the beauty of the carved statue,
the pale alabaster shrine, the sainted virgin, but a warm, bright,
living light, that spoke of some summer breath breathing within her
soul.
When she took her place in the singers' seat, she knew, without turning
her head, that he was in his old place, not far from her side; and
those whose eyes followed her to the gallery marvelled at her face
there,--
"her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That you might almost say her body thought";
for a thousand delicate nerves were becoming vital once more,--the holy
mystery of womanhood had wrought within her.
When they rose to sing, the tune must needs be one which they had often
sung together, out of the same book, at the singing-school,--one of
those wild, pleading tunes, dear to the heart of New England,--born, if
we may credit the report, in the rocky hollows of its mountains, and
whose notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph in their warbling
wail, and in which different parts of the harmony, set contrary to all
the canons of musical Pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic
effect, which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize.
The four parts, tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then
called, rose and swelled and wildly mingled, with the fitful
strangeness of Aeolian harp, or of winds in mountain-hollows, or the
vague moanings of the sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary, while her
voice rose over the waves of the treble, and trembled with a pathetic
richness, felt, to her inmost heart, the deep accord of that other
voice which rose to meet hers, so wildly melancholy, as if the soul in
that manly breast had come to meet her soul in the disembodied, shadowy
verity of eternity. The grand old tune, called by our fathers "China,"
never, with its dirge-like melody, drew two souls more out of
themselves, and entwined them more nearly with each other.
The last verse of the hymn spoke of the resurrection of the saints with
Christ:
"Then let the last dread trumpet sound
And bid the dead arise;
Awake, ye nations under ground!
Ye saints, ascend the skies!"
And as Mary sang, she felt sublimely upborne with the idea that life is
but a moment and love is immortal, and seemed, in a shadowy trance, to
feel herself and him past this mortal fane, far over on the shores of
that other life, ascending with Christ, all-glorified, all tears wiped
away, and with full permission to love and to be loved forever. And as
she sang, the Doctor looked upward, and marvelled at the light in her
eyes and the rich bloom on her cheek,--for where she stood, a sunbeam,
streaming aslant through the dusty panes of the window, touched her
head with a kind of glory,--and the thought he then received
outbreathed itself in the yet more fervent adoration of his prayer.