"Into the Silent Land!
Ah! who shall lead us thither?
Clouds in the evening sky more darkly gather,
And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand.
Who leads us with a gentle hand
Thither, O thither,
Into the Silent Land?
"O Land, O Land,
For all the broken-hearted,
The mildest herald by our fate allotted
Beckons, and with inverted torch doth stand
To lead us with a gentle hand
To the land of the great Departed--
Into the Silent Land!"
--LONGFELLOW. _From the German._
Early in September William Douglas failed suddenly. From taciturnity he
sank into silence, from quiet into lethargy. He rose in the morning, but
after that effort he became like a breathing statue, and sat all day in
his arm-chair without stirring or noticing anything. If they brought him
food he ate it, but he did not speak or answer their questions by motion
or gesture. The fort surgeon was puzzled; it was evidently not
paralysis. He was a new-comer on the island, and he asked many questions
as to the past. Anne sincerely, Miss Lois resolutely, denied that there
had ever been any trouble with the brain; Dr. Gaston drummed on the
table, and answered sharply that all men of intellect were more or less
mad. But the towns-people smiled, and tapped their foreheads
significantly; and the new surgeon had noticed in the course of his
experience that, with time for observation, the towns-people are
generally right. So he gave a few medicines, ordered a generous diet,
and looking about him for some friend of the family who could be
trusted, selected at last Père Michaux. For Miss Lois would not treat
him even civilly, bristling when he approached like a hedge-hog; and
with her frank eyes meeting his, he found it impossible to speak to
Anne. But he told Père Michaux the true state of his patient, and asked
him to break the tidings to the family.
"He can not live long," he said.
"Is it so?" said Père Michaux. "God's will be done. Poor Anne!"
"An odd lot of children he has in that ramshackle old house of his,"
continued the surgeon. "Two sets, I should say."
"Yes; the second wife was a French girl."
"With Indian blood?"
"Yes."
"I thought so. Who is to have charge of them? The boys will take to the
woods, I suppose, but that little Tita is an odd specimen. She would
make quite a sensation in New York a few years later."
"May she never reach there!" said the old priest, fervently.
"Well, perhaps you are right. But who is to have the child?"
"Her sister will take charge of her."
"Miss Anne? Yes, she will do her best, of course; she is a fine, frank
young Saxon. But I doubt if she understands that elfish little
creature."
"She understands her better than we do," said the priest, with some
heat.
"Ah? You know best, of course; I speak merely as an outsider," answered
the new surgeon, going off about his business.
[Illustration: "ALARMED, HE BENT OVER HER."]
Père Michaux decided that he would tell Anne herself. He went to the
house for the purpose, and called her out on the old piazza. But when
she stood before him, her violet eyes meeting his without a suspicion of
the tidings he brought, his heart failed him suddenly. He comprehended
for the first time what it would be to her, and, making some chance
inquiry, he asked to see Miss Lois, and turned away. Anne went in, and
Miss Lois came out. The contrast between the priest and the New England
woman was more marked than usual as they stood there facing each
other on the old piazza, he less composed than he ordinarily was on
account of what he had to tell. But it never occurred to him for a
moment that Miss Lois would falter. Why should she? He told her. She
sank down at his feet as though she had fallen there and died.
Alarmed, he bent over her, and in the twilight saw that she was not
dead; her features were working strangely; her hands were clinched over
her breast; her faded eyes stared at him behind the spectacles as though
he were miles away. He tried to raise her. She struck at him almost
fiercely. "Let me alone," she said, in a muffled voice. Then, still
lying where she fell, she threw up her arms and wailed once or twice,
not loudly, but with a struggling, inarticulate sound, as a person cries
out in sleep. Poor old Lois! it was the last wail of her love. But even
then she did not recognize it. Nor did the priest. Pale, with uncertain
steps and shaking hands, yet tearless, the stricken woman raised herself
by the aid of the bench, crossed the piazza, went down the path and into
the street, Père Michaux's eyes following her in bewilderment. She was
evidently going home, and her prim, angular shape looked strangely bare
and uncovered in the lack of bonnet and shawl, for through all the years
she had lived on the island she had never once been seen in the open air
without them. The precision of her bonnet strings was a matter of
conscience. The priest went away also. And thus it happened that Anne
was not told at all.
When, late in the evening, Miss Lois returned, grayly pale, but quiet,
as she entered the hall a cry met her ears and rang through the house.
It had come sooner than any one expected. The sword of sorrow, which
sooner or later must pierce all loving hearts, had entered Anne
Douglas's breast. Her father was dead.
He had died suddenly, peacefully and without pain, passing away in
sleep. Anne was with him, and Tita, jealously watchful to the last. No
one else was in the room at the moment. Père Michaux, coming in, had
been the first to perceive the change.
Tita drew away quickly to a distant corner, and kneeling down where she
could still see everything that went on, began repeating prayers; but
Anne, with a wild cry, threw herself down beside her dead, sobbing,
holding his hand, and calling his name again and again. She would not
believe that he was gone.
Ah, well, many of us know the sorrow. A daughter's love for a kind
father is a peculiarly dependent, clinging affection; it is mixed with
the careless happiness of childhood, which can never come again. Into
the father's grave the daughter, sometimes a gray-haired woman, lays
away forever the little pet names and memories which to all the rest of
the world are but foolishness. Even though happy in her woman's lot, she
weeps convulsively here for a while with a sorrow that nothing can
comfort; no other love so protecting and unselfish will ever be hers
again.
Anne was crushed by her grief; it seemed to those who watched her that
she revealed a new nature in her sorrow. Dr. Gaston and Père Michaux
spoke of it to each other, but could find little to say to the girl
herself; she had, as it were, drifted beyond their reach, far out on an
unknown sea. They prayed for her, and went silently away, only to come
back within the hour and meet again on the threshold, recognizing each
other's errand. They were troubled by the change in this young creature,
upon whom they had all, in a certain way, depended. Singularly enough,
Miss Lois did not seem to appreciate Anne's condition: she was suffering
too deeply herself. The whole of her repressed nature was in revolt. But
faithful to the unconscious secret of her life, she still thought the
wild pain of her heart was "sorrow for a friend."
She went about as usual, attending to household tasks for both homes.
She was unchanged, yet totally changed. There was a new tension about
her mouth, and an unwonted silence, but her hands were as busy as ever.
Days had passed after the funeral before she began to perceive, even
slightly, the broken condition of Anne. The girl herself was the first
to come back to the present, in the necessity for asking one of those
sad questions which often raise their heads as soon as the coffin is
borne away. "Miss Lois, there are bills to be paid, and I have no money.
Do you know anything of our real income?"
The old habits of the elder woman stirred a little; but she answered,
vaguely, "No."
"We must look through dear papa's papers," said Anne, her voice breaking
as she spoke the name. "He received few letters, none at all lately;
whatever he had, then, must be here."
Miss Lois assented, still silently, and the two began their task. Anne,
with a quivering lip, unlocked her father's desk. William Douglas had
not been a relic-loving man. He had lived, he had loved; but memory was
sufficient for him; he needed no tokens. So, amid a hundred mementos of
nature, they found nothing personal, not even a likeness of Anne's
mother, or lock of her curling brown hair. And amid a mass of
miscellaneous papers, writings on every philosophic and imaginative
subject, they found but one relating to money--some figures jotted down,
with a date affixed, the sum far from large, the date three years
before. Below, a later line was added, as if (for the whole was vague)
so much had gone, and this was the remainder; the date of this last line
was eight months back.
"Perhaps this is it," said Anne; "perhaps this is what he had."
"I'm sure I don't know," said Miss Lois, mechanically.
They went on with the search, and at last came to a package tied in
brown paper, which contained money; opening it, they counted the
contents.
"Three hundred and ten dollars and eighty-five cents," said Anne.
Miss Lois took a pen and made a calculation, still with the manner of a
machine. "That is about what would be left by this time, at the rate of
the sums you have had, supposing the memorandum is what you think it
is," she said, rubbing her forehead with a shadowy imitation of her old
habit.
"It is a large sum," said Anne.
Nothing more was found. It appeared, therefore, that the five children
of William Douglas were left alone in the world with exactly three
hundred and ten dollars and eighty-five cents.
Dr. Gaston and Père Michaux learned the result that day; the story
spread through the village and up to the fort. "I never heard anything
so extraordinary in my life," said Mrs. Cromer. "That a man like Dr.
Douglas should have gone on for the last four or five years deliberately
living on his capital, seeing it go dollar by dollar, without making one
effort to save it, or to earn an income--a father with children! I shall
always believe, after this, that the villagers were right, and that his
mind was affected."
The chaplain stopped these comments gruffly, and the fort ladies forgave
him on account of the tremor in his voice. He left them, and went across
to his little book-clogged cottage with the first indications of age
showing in his gait.
"It is a blow to him; he is very fond of Anne, and hoped everything for
her," said Mrs. Bryden. "I presume he would adopt her if he could; but
there are the other children."
"They might go to their mother's relatives, I should think," said Mrs.
Rankin.
"They could, but Anne will not allow it. You will see."
"I suppose our good chaplain has nothing to bequeath, even if he should
adopt Anne?"
"No, he has no property, and has saved nothing from his little salary;
it has all gone into books," answered the colonel's wife.
Another week passed. By that time Dr. Gaston and Père Michaux together
had brought the reality clearly before Anne's eyes; for the girl had
heretofore held such small sums of money in her hands at any one time
that the amount found in the desk had seemed to her large. Père Michaux
began the small list of resources by proposing that the four children
should go at once to their uncle, their mother's brother, who was
willing to receive them and give them a home, such as it was, among his
own brood of black-eyed little ones. Anne decidedly refused. Dr. Gaston
then asked her to come to him, and be his dear daughter as long as he
lived.
"I must not come with them, and I can not come without them," was Anne's
reply.
There remained Miss Lois. But she seemed entirely unconscious of any
pressing necessity for haste in regard to the affairs of the little
household, coming and going as usual, but without words; while people
round her, with that virtuous readiness as to the duties of their
neighbors which is so helpful in a wicked world, said loudly and
frequently that she was the nearest friend, and ought to do-- Here
followed a variety of suggestions, which amounted in the aggregate to
everything. At last, as often happens, it was an outside voice that
brought the truth before her.
"And what are you thinking of doing, dear Miss Lois, for the five poor
orphans?" asked the second Miss Macdougall while paying a visit of
general condolence at the church-house.
"Why, what should I do?" said Miss Lois, with a faint remembrance of her
old vigilant pride. "They want nothing."
"They want nothing! And not one hundred dollars apiece for them in the
wide world!" exclaimed Miss Jean.
"Surely you're joking, my dear. Here's Dr. Gaston wishing to take Anne,
as is most kind and natural; but she will not leave those children.
Although why they should not go back to the stratum from which they came
is a mystery to me. She can never make anything of them: mark my words."
Miss Jean paused; but whether Miss Lois marked her words or not, she
made no response, but sat gazing straight at the wall. Miss Jean,
however, knew her duty, and did it like a heroine of old. "We thought,
perhaps, dear Miss Lois, that _you_ would like to take them for a time,"
she said, "seeing that Anne has proved herself so obstinate as to the
other arrangements proposed. The village has thought so generally, and
I am not the one to hide it from you, having been taught by my lamented
parent to honor and abide by veracity the most precise. We could all
help you a little in clothing them for the present, and we will
contribute to their support a fish now and then, a bag of meal, a barrel
of potatoes, which we would do gladly--right gladly, I do assure you.
For no one likes to think of Dr. Douglas's children being on the town."
The homely phrase roused Miss Lois at last. "What in the world are you
talking about, Jean Macdougall?" she exclaimed, in wrath. "On the town!
Are you clean daft? On the town, indeed! Clear out of my house this
moment, you lying, evil-speaking woman!"
The second Miss Macdougall rose in majesty, and drew her black silk
visite round her. "Of whom ye are speaking, Miss Hinsdale, I knaw not,"
she said, growing Scotch in her anger; "but I believe ye hae lost your
wits. I tak' my departure freely, and not as sent by one who has
strangely forgotten the demeanor of a leddy."
With hands folded, she swept toward the door, all the flowers on her
dignified bonnet swaying perceptibly. Pausing on the threshold, she
added, "As a gude Christian, and a keeper of my word, I still say, Miss
Hinsdale, in spite of insults, that in the matter of a fish or two, or a
barrel of potatoes now and then, ye can count upon the Macdougalls."
Left alone, Miss Lois put on her shawl and bonnet with feverish haste,
and went over to the Agency. Anne was in the sitting-room, and the
children were with her.
"Anne, of course you and the children are coming to live with me
whenever you think it best to leave this house," said Miss Lois,
appearing on the threshold like an excited ghost in spectacles. "You
never thought or planned anything else, I hope?"
"No," said Anne, frankly, "I did not--at least for the present. I knew
you would help us, Miss Lois, although you did not speak."
"Speak! was there any need of speaking?" said the elder woman, bursting
into a few dry, harsh sobs. "You are all I have in the world, Anne. How
could you mistrust me?"
"I did not," said Anne.
And then the two women kissed each other, and it was all understood
without further words. And thus, through the intervention of the second
Miss Macdougall (who found herself ill rewarded for her pains), Lois
Hinsdale came out from the watch-chamber of her dead to real life again,
took up her burden, and went on.
Anne now unfolded her plans, for she had been obliged to invent plans:
necessity forced her forward. "We must all come to you for a time, dear
Miss Lois; but I am young and strong, and I can work. I wish to educate
the boys as father would have wished them educated. Do you ask what I
can do? I think--that is, I hope--that I can teach." Then, in a lower
voice, she added, "I promised father that I would do all I could for the
children, and I shall keep my promise."
Miss Lois's eyes filled with tears. But the effect of the loving emotion
was only to redden the lids, and make the orbs beneath look smaller and
more unbeautiful than before.
For to be born into life with small, inexpressive eyes is like being
born dumb. One may have a heart full of feeling, but the world will not
believe it. Pass on, then, Martha, with your pale little orbs; leave the
feeling to Beatrice with her deep brown glance, to Agnes with her pure
blue gaze, to Isabel with hers of passionate splendor. The world does
not believe you have any especial feelings, poor Martha. Then do not
have them, if you can help it--and pass on.
"I have been thinking deeply," continued Anne, "and I have consulted Dr.
Gaston. He says that I have a good education, but probably an
old-fashioned one; at least the fort ladies told him that it would be so
considered. It seems that what I need is a 'polish of modern
accomplishments.' That is what he called it. Now, to obtain a teacher's
place, I must have this, and I can not obtain it here." She paused; and
then, like one who rides forward on a solitary charge, added, "I am
going to write to Miss Vanhorn."
"A dragon!" said Miss Lois, knitting fiercely. Then added, after a
moment, "A positive demon of pride." Then, after another silence, she
said, sternly, "She broke your mother's heart, Anne Douglas, and she
will break yours."
"I hope not," said the girl, her voice trembling a little; for her
sorrow was still very near the surface. "She is old now, and perhaps
more gentle. At any rate, she is my only living relative, and to her I
must appeal."
"How do you know she is alive? The world would be well rid of such a
wicked fiend," pursued Miss Lois, quoting unconsciously from Anne's
forest Juliet.
"She was living last year, for father spoke of her."
"I did not know he ever spoke of her."
"Only in answer to my questions; for I had found her address, written in
mother's handwriting, in an old note-book. She brought up my mother, you
know, and was once very fond of her."
"So fond of her that she killed her. If poor Alida had not had that
strain upon her, she might have been alive at this day," said Miss Lois.
Anne's self-control left her now, and she began to sob like a child. "Do
not make it harder for me than it is," she said, amid her tears. "I
_must_ ask her; and if she should consent to help me, it will be grief
enough to leave you all, without these cruel memories added. She is old:
who knows but that she may be longing to repair the harm she did?"
"Can the leopard change his spots?" said Miss Lois, sternly. "But what
do you mean by leaving us all? What do you intend to do?"
"I intend to ask her either to use her influence in obtaining a
teacher's place for me immediately, or if I am not, in her opinion,
qualified, to give me the proper masters for one year. I would study
very hard; she would not be burdened with me long."
"And the proper masters are not here, of course?"
"No; at the East."
Miss Lois stopped in the middle of a round, took off her spectacles,
rolled up her knitting-work slowly and tightly as though it was never to
be unrolled again, and pinned it together with decision; she was pinning
in also a vast resolution. Then she looked at Anne in silence for
several minutes, saw the tear-dimmed eyes and tired, anxious face, the
appealing glance of William Douglas's child.
"I have not one word to say against it," she remarked at last, breaking
the silence; and then she walked out of the house and went homeward.
It was a hard battle for her. She was to be left with the four
brown-skinned children, for whom she had always felt unconquerable
aversion, while the one child whom she loved--Anne--was to go far away.
It was a revival of the bitter old feeling against Angélique Lafontaine,
the artful minx who had entrapped William Douglas to his ruin. In truth,
however, there had been very little art about Angélique; nor was Douglas
by any means a rich prey. But women always attribute wonderful powers of
strategy to a successful rival, even although by the same ratio they
reduce the bridegroom to a condition approaching idiocy; for anything is
better than the supposition that he was a free agent, and sought his
fate from the love of it.
The thought of Anne's going was dreadful to Miss Lois; yet her
long-headed New England thrift and calculation saw chances in that
future which Anne did not see. "The old wretch has money, and no near
heirs," she said to herself, "why should she not take a fancy to this
grandniece? Anne has no such idea, but her friends should, therefore,
have it for her." Still, the tears would rise and dim her spectacles as
she thought of the parting. She took off the gold-rimmed glasses and
rubbed them vigorously. "One thing is certain," she added, to herself,
as a sort of comfort, "Tita will have to do her mummeries in the garden
after this."
Poor old Lois! in these petty annoyances and heavy cures her great grief
was to be pressed down into a subdued under-current, no longer to be
indulged or made much of even by herself.
Anne knew but little of her grandaunt. William Douglas would not speak
of what was the most bitter memory of his life. The address in the old
note-book, in her mother's unformed girlish handwriting, was her only
guide. She knew that Miss Vanhorn was obstinate and ill-tempered; she
knew that she had discarded her mother on account of her disobedient
marriage, and had remained harsh and unforgiving to the last. And this
was all she knew. But she had no choice. Hoping, praying for the best,
she wrote her letter, and sent it on its way. Then they all waited. For
Père Michaux had been taken into the conference also, and had given
hearty approval to Anne's idea--so hearty, indeed, that both the
chaplain and Miss Lois looked upon him with disfavor. What did he mean?
He did not say what he meant, but returned to his hermitage cheerfully.
Dr. Gaston, not so cheerfully, brought out his hardest chess problems,
and tried to pass away the time in mathematical combinations of the
deepest kind. Miss Lois, however, had combinations at hand of another
sort. No sooner was the letter gone than she advanced a series of
conjectures which did honor even to her New England origin.
The first was that Miss Vanhorn had gone abroad: those old New-Yorkers
were "capable of wishing to ride on camels, even"; she added, from
habit, "through the eye of a needle." The next day she decided that
paralysis would be the trouble: those old New-Yorkers were "often
stricken down in that way, owing to their high living and desperate
wine-bibbing." Anne need give no more thought to her letter; Miss
Vanhorn would not be able even to read it. The third day, Miss Vanhorn
would read the letter, but would immediately throw it on the floor and
stamp on it: those old New-Yorkers "had terrible tempers," and were
"known to swear like troopers even on the slightest provocation." The
fourth day, Miss Vanhorn was mad; the fifth day, she was married; the
sixth, she was dead: those old New-Yorkers having tendencies toward
insanity, matrimony, and death which, Miss Lois averred, were known to
all the world, and indisputable. That she herself had never been in New
York in her life made no difference in her certainties: women like Miss
Lois are always sure they know all about New York.
Anne, weary and anxious, and forced to hear all these probabilities,
began at last to picture her grandaunt as a sort of human kaleidoscope,
falling into new and more fantastic combinations at a moment's notice.
They had allowed two weeks for the letter to reach the island, always
supposing that Miss Vanhorn was not on a camel, paralyzed, obstinate,
mad, married, or dead. But on the tenth day the letter came. Anne took
it with a hand that trembled. Dr. Gaston was present, and Miss Lois, but
neither of them comprehended her feelings. She felt that she was now to
be confronted by an assent which would strain her heart-strings almost
to snapping, yet be ultimately for the best, or by a refusal which would
fill her poor heart with joy, although at the same time pressing down
upon her shoulders a heavy, almost hopeless, weight of care. The two
could not enter into her feelings, because in the depths of their hearts
they both resented her willingness to leave them. They never said this
to each other, they never said it to themselves; yet they both felt it
with the unconscious selfishness of those who are growing old,
especially when their world is narrowed down to one or two loving young
hearts. They did not realize that it was as hard for her to go as it was
for them to let her go; they did not realize what a supreme effort of
courage it required to make this young girl go out alone into the wide
world, and face its vastness and its strangeness; they did not realize
how she loved them, and how every tree, every rock of the island, also,
was dear to her strongly loving, concentrated heart.
After her father's death Anne had been for a time passive, swept away by
grief as a dead leaf on the wind. But cold necessity came and stood by
her bedside silently and stonily, and looked at her until, recalling her
promise, she rose, choked back her sorrow, and returned to common life
and duty with an aching but resolute heart. In the effort she made to
speak at all it was no wonder that she spoke quietly, almost coldly;
having, after sleepless nights of sorrow, nerved herself to bear the
great change in her lot, should it come to her, could she trust herself
to say that she was sorry to go? Sorry!--when her whole heart was one
pain!
The letter was as follows:
* * * * *
"GRANDNIECE ANNE,--I did not know that you were in existence. I have
read your letter, and have now to say the following. Your mother
willfully disobeyed me, and died. I, meanwhile, an old woman, remain as
strong as ever.
"While I recognize no legal claim upon me (I having long since attended
to the future disposal of all my property according to my own wishes), I
am willing to help you to a certain extent, as I would help any
industrious young girl asking for assistance. If what you say of your
education is true, you need only what are called modern accomplishments
(of which I personally have small opinion, a grimacing in French and a
squalling in Italian being not to my taste) to make you a fairly well
qualified teacher in an average country boarding-school, which is all
you can expect. You may, therefore, come to New York at my expense, and
enter Madame Moreau's establishment, where, as I understand, the extreme
of everything called 'accomplishment' is taught, and much nonsense
learned in the latest style. You may remain one year; not longer. And I
advise you to improve the time, as nothing more will be done for you by
me. You will bring your own clothes, but I will pay for your books. I
send no money now, but will refund your travelling expenses (of which
you will keep strict account, without extras) upon your arrival in the
city, which must not be later than the last of October. Go directly to
Madame Moreau's (the address is inclosed), and remember that you are
simply Anne Douglas, and not a relative of your obedient servant,
KATHARINE VANHORN."
* * * * *
Anne, who had read the letter aloud in a low voice, now laid it down,
and looked palely at her two old friends.
"A hard letter," said the chaplain, indignantly. "My child, remain with
us. We will think of some other plan for you. Let the proud,
cold-hearted old woman go."
"I told you how it would be," said Miss Lois, a bright spot of red on
each cheek-bone. "She was cruel to your mother before you, and she will
be cruel to you. You must give it up."
"No," said Anne, slowly, raising the letter and replacing it in its
envelope; "it is a matter in which I have no choice. She gives me the
year at school, as you see, and--there are the children. I promised
father, and I must keep the promise. Do not make me falter, dear
friends, for--I _must_ go." And unable longer to keep back the tears,
she hurriedly left the room.
Dr. Gaston, without a word, took his old felt hat and went home. Miss
Lois sat staring vaguely at the window-pane, until she became conscious
that some one was coming up the path, and that "some one" Père Michaux.
She too then went hurriedly homeward, by the back way, in order to avoid
him. The old priest, coming in, found the house deserted. Anne was on
her knees in her own room, sobbing as if her heart would break; but the
walls were thick, and he could not hear her.
Then Tita came in. "Annet is going away," she said, softly; "she is
going to school. The letter came to-day."
"So Miss Vanhorn consents, does she? Excellent! excellent!" said Père
Michaux, rubbing his hands, his eyes expressing a hearty satisfaction.
"When will you say 'Excellent! excellent!' about me?" said Tita,
jealously.
"Before long, I hope," said the priest, patting her small head.
"But are you sure, mon père?"
"Well, yes," said Père Michaux, "on the whole, I am."
He smiled, and the child smiled also; but with a deep quiet triumph
remarkable in one so young.