The two meeting-houses which faced each other like a pair of
fighting-cocks had not flapped their wings or crowed at each other for
a considerable time. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather had been dyspeptic and
low-spirited of late, and was too languid for controversy. The Reverend
Doctor Honeywood had been very busy with his benevolent associations,
and had discoursed chiefly on practical matters, to the neglect of
special doctrinal subjects. His senior deacon ventured to say to him
that some of his people required to be reminded of the great fundamental
doctrine of the worthlessness of all human efforts and motives. Some of
them were altogether too much pleased with the success of the Temperance
Society and the Association for the Relief of the Poor. There was a
pestilent heresy about, concerning the satisfaction to be derived from
a good conscience, as if, anybody ever did anything which was not to be
hated, loathed, despised, and condemned.
The old minister listened gravely, with an inward smile, and told his
deacon that he would attend to his suggestion. After the deacon had
gone, he tumbled over his manuscripts, until at length he came upon his
first-rate old sermon on “Human Nature.” He had read a great deal of
hard theology, and had at last reached that curious state which is
so common in good ministers,--that, namely, in which they contrive to
switch off their logical faculties on the narrow sidetrack of their
technical dogmas, while the great freight-train of their substantial
human qualities keeps in the main highway of common-sense, in which
kindly souls are always found by all who approach them by their human
side.
The Doctor read his sermon with a pleasant, paternal interest: it was
well argued from his premises. Here and there he dashed his pen through
a harsh expression. Now and then he added an explanation or qualified
abroad statement. But his mind was on the logical side-track, and he
followed the chain of reasoning without fairly perceiving where it would
lead him, if he carried it into real life.
He was just touching up the final proposition, when his granddaughter,
Letty, once before referred to, came into the room with her smiling face
and lively movement. Miss Letty or Letitia Forrester was a city-bred
girl of some fifteen or sixteen years old, who was passing the summer
with her grandfather for the sake of country air and quiet. It was a
sensible arrangement; for, having the promise of figuring as a belle by
and by, and being a little given to dancing, and having a voice which
drew a pretty dense circle around the piano when she sat down to play
and sing, it was hard to keep her from being carried into society before
her time, by the mere force of mutual attraction. Fortunately, she had
some quiet as well as some social tastes, and was willing enough to pass
two or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much
better bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places
where so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of
self-consciousness.
Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a young
girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic pattern
which is the classical type of certain excellent young females, often
the subjects of biographical memoirs. But the old minister was proud of
his granddaughter for all that. She was so full of life, so graceful, so
generous, so vivacious, so ready always to do all she could for him and
for everybody, so perfectly frank in her avowed delight in the pleasures
which this miserable world offered her in the shape of natural beauty,
of poetry, of music, of companionship, of books, of cheerful cooperation
in the tasks of those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not
find it in his heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those
particular graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes
noticed in feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases
which impaired their vivacity and removed them from the range of
temptation.
When Letty, therefore, came bounding into the old minister's study,
he glanced up from his manuscript, and, as his eye fell upon her,
it flashed across him that there was nothing so very monstrous and
unnatural about the specimen of congenital perversion he was looking at,
with his features opening into their pleasantest sunshine. Technically,
according to the fifth proposition of the sermon on Human Nature, very
bad, no doubt. Practically, according to the fact before him, a very
pretty piece of the Creator's handiwork, body and soul. Was it not a
conceivable thing that the divine grace might show itself in different
forms in a fresh young girl like Letitia, and in that poor thing he had
visited yesterday, half-grown, half-colored, in bed for the last year
with hip-disease?
Was it to be supposed that this healthy young girl, with life throbbing
all over her, could, without a miracle, be good according to the invalid
pattern and formula?
And yet there were mysteries in human nature which pointed to some
tremendous perversion of its tendencies,--to some profound, radical vice
of moral constitution, native or transmitted, as you will have it, but
positive, at any rate, as the leprosy, breaking out in the blood of
races, guard them ever so carefully. Did he not know the case of a young
lady in Rockland, daughter of one of the first families in the place,
a very beautiful and noble creature to look at, for whose bringing up
nothing had been spared,--a girl who had had governesses to teach her at
the house, who had been indulged almost too kindly,--a girl whose father
had given himself, up to her, he being himself a pure and high-souled
man?--and yet this girl was accused in whispers of having been on the
very verge of committing a fatal crime; she was an object of fear to
all who knew the dark hints which had been let fall about her, and there
were some that believed--Why, what was this but an instance of the total
obliquity and degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it
be owing, but to an innate organic tendency?
“Busy, grandpapa?” said Letty, and without waiting for an answer
kissed his cheek with a pair of lips made on purpose for that little
function,--fine, but richly turned out, the corners tucked in with a
finish of pretty dimples, the rose-bud lips of girlhood's June.
The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter. Nature swelled up from
his heart in a wave that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle to his
eye. But it is very hard to be interrupted just as we are winding up a
string of propositions with the grand conclusion which is the statement
in brief of all that has gone before: our own starting-point, into which
we have been trying to back our reader or listener as one backs a horse
into the shafts.
“Video meliora, proboque,--I see the better, and approve it; deteriora
sequor, I follow after the worse; 't is that natural dislike to what
is good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted selfishness, totally
insensible to the claims of”--
Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss Letty.
“Do come, if you can, grandpapa,” said the young girl; “here is a poor
old black woman wants to see you so much!”
The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the
dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so
much of the world's life and happiness. “With the heart man believeth
unto righteousness;” a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good
or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special
beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with
Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all, the patterns of
all earth's thousand tribes!
The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden on
it. He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young girl's
face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that she was
a little angel,--which was in violent contradiction to the leading
doctrine of his sermon on Human Nature. And so he followed her out of
the study into the wide entry of the old-fashioned country-house.
An old black woman sat on the plain oaken settle which humble visitors
waiting to see the minister were wont to occupy. She was old, but how
old it would be very hard to guess. She might be seventy. She might be
ninety. One could not swear she was not a hundred. Black women remain
at a stationary age (to the eyes of white people, at least) for thirty
years. They do not appear to change during this period any more than
so many Trenton trilobites. Bent up, wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long
upper-lip, projecting jaws, retreating chin, still meek features, long
arms, large flat hands with uncolored palms and slightly webbed
fingers, it was impossible not to see in this old creature a hint of
the gradations by which life climbs up through the lower natures to the
highest human developments. We cannot tell such old women's ages because
we do not understand the physiognomy of a race so unlike our own.
No doubt they see a great deal in each other's faces that we
cannot,--changes of color and expression as real as our own, blushes and
sudden betrayals of feeling,--just as these two canaries know what
their single notes and short sentences and full song with this or that
variation mean, though it is a mystery to us unplumed mortals.
This particular old black woman was a striking specimen of her
class. Old as she looked, her eye was bright and knowing. She wore a
red-and-yellow turban, which set off her complexion well, and hoops of
gold in her ears, and beads of gold about her neck, and an old funeral
ring upon her finger. She had that touching stillness about her which
belongs to animals that wait to be spoken to and then look up with a
kind of sad humility.
“Why, Sophy!” said the good minister, “is this you?”
She looked up with the still expression on her face. “It's ol' Sophy,”
she said.
“Why,” said the Doctor, “I did not believe you could walk so far as this
to save the Union. Bring Sophy a glass of wine, Letty. Wine's good for
old folks like Sophy and me, after walking a good way, or preaching a
good while.”
The young girl stepped into the back-parlor, where she found the
great pewter flagon in which the wine that was left after each
communion-service was brought to the minister's house. With much toil
she managed to tip it so as to get a couple of glasses filled. The
minister tasted his, and made old Sophy finish hers.
“I wan' to see you 'n' talk wi' you all alone,” she said presently.
The minister got up and led the way towards his study. “To be sure,” he
said; he had only waited for her to rest a moment before he asked her
into the library. The young girl took her gently by the arm, and helped
her feeble steps along the passage. When they reached the study, she
smoothed the cushion of a rocking-chair, and made the old woman sit
down in it. Then she tripped lightly away, and left her alone with the
minister.
Old Sophy was a member of the Reverend Doctor Honeywood's church.
She had been put through the necessary confessions in a tolerably
satisfactory manner. To be sure, as her grandfather had been a cannibal
chief, according to the common story, and, at any rate, a terrible wild
savage, and as her mother retained to the last some of the prejudices
of her early education, there was a heathen flavor in her Christianity
which had often scandalized the elder of the minister's two deacons.
But, the good minister had smoothed matters over: had explained that
allowances were to be made for those who had been long sitting without
the gate of Zion,--that, no doubt, a part of the curse which descended
to the children of Ham consisted in “having the understanding darkened,”
as well as the skin,--and so had brought his suspicious senior deacon to
tolerate old Sophy as one of the communion of fellow-sinners.
--Poor things! How little we know the simple notions with which these
rudiments of souls are nourished by the Divine Goodness! Did not Mrs.
Professor come home this very blessed morning with a story of one of her
old black women?
“And how do you feel to-day, Mrs. Robinson?”
“Oh, my dear, I have this singing in my head all the time.” (What
doctors call tinnitus aurium.)
“She 's got a cold in the head,” said old Mrs. Rider.
“Oh, no, my dear! Whatever I'm thinking about, it's all this singing,
this music. When I'm thinking of the dear Redeemer, it all turns into
this singing and music. When the clark came to see me, I asked him if
he couldn't cure me, and he said, No,--it was the Holy Spirit in me,
singing to me; and all the time I hear this beautiful music, and it's
the Holy Spirit a-singing to me.”
The good man waited for Sophy to speak; but she did not open her lips as
yet.
“I hope you are not troubled in mind or body,” he said to her at length,
finding she did not speak.
The poor old woman took out a white handkerchief, and lifted it--to her
black face. She could not say a word for her tears and sobs.
The minister would have consoled her; he was used to tears, and could in
most cases withstand their contagion manfully; but something choked
his voice suddenly, and when he called upon it, he got no answer, but a
tremulous movement of the muscles, which was worse than silence.
At last she spoke.
“Oh, no, no, no! It's my poor girl, my darling, my beauty, my baby,
that 's grown up to be a woman; she will come to a bad end; she will do
something that will make them kill her or shut her up all her life. Or,
Doctor, Doctor, save her, pray for her! It a'n't her fault. It a'n't
her fault. If they knew all that I know, they would n' blame that poor
child. I must tell you, Doctor: if I should die, perhaps nobody else
would tell you. Massa Veneer can't talk about it. Doctor Kittredge won't
talk about it. Nobody but old Sophy to tell you, Doctor; and old Sophy
can't die without telling you.”
The kind minister soothed the poor old soul with those gentle, quieting
tones which had carried peace and comfort to so many chambers of
sickness and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened by the trials laid
upon them.
Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and proceeded to tell her
story. She told it in the low half-whisper which is the natural voice
of lips oppressed wish grief and fears; with quick glances around the
apartment from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the dim portraits on
the walls and the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her words.
It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report
minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers
of stories made out of authors' brains. Yet its main character can be
imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to give
all its details.
She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,--she being
then a middle-aged woman. The heir and hope of a family which had been
narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been surrounded
with every care and trained by the best education he could have in New
England. He had left college, and was studying the profession which
gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he fell in love with a young girl
left in the world almost alone, as he was. The old woman told the story
of his young love and his joyous bridal with a tenderness which had
something more, even, than her family sympathies to account for it. Had
she not hanging over her bed a paper-cutting of a profile,--jet black,
but not blacker than the face it represented--of one who would have been
her own husband in the small years of this century, if the vessel in
which he went to sea, like Jamie in the ballad, had not sailed away and
never come back to land? Had she not her bits of furniture stowed away
which had been got ready for her own wedding,--two rocking-chairs,
one worn with long use, one kept for him so long that it had grown a
superstition with her never to sit in it,--and might he not come back
yet, after all? Had she not her chest of linen ready for her humble
house-keeping with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of neatly
folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against her
black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in
“the presence”?
All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet
dwelling upon every incident with a loving pleasure. How happy this
young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they had
formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young and
fresh and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early summer when
they walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in
the garden,--she told of this as loath to leave it and come to the woe
that lay beneath.
She told the whole story;-shall I repeat it? Not now. If, in the course
of relating the incidents I have undertaken to report, it tells itself,
perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of producing a painful
impression on some of those susceptible readers whom it would be
ill-advised to disturb or excite, when they rather require to be amused
and soothed. In our pictures of life, we must show the flowering-out of
terrible growths which have their roots deep, deep underground. Just
how far we shall lay bare the unseemly roots themselves is a matter of
discretion and taste, and which none of us are infallible.
The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her
peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and
hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development.
She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when she first tried
to crawl across the carpet, and her father's look as she worked her way
towards him. With the memory of Juliet's nurse she told the story of
her teething, and how, the woman to whose breast she had clung dying
suddenly about that time, they had to struggle hard with the child
before she would learn the accomplishment of feeding with a spoon. And
so of her fierce plays and fiercer disputes with that boy who had been
her companion, and the whole scene of the quarrel when she struck him
with those sharp white teeth, frightening her, old Sophy, almost to
death; for, as she said, the boy would have died, if it hadn't been for
the old Doctor's galloping over as fast as he could gallop and burning
the places right out of his arm. Then came the story of that other
incident, sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such
an ecstasy of fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the
household. And so the old woman came down to this present time. That boy
she never loved nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man,
and he was under their roof. He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and
Elsie hated him, and sometimes she would look at him over her shoulder
just as she used to look at that woman she hated; and she, old Sophy,
couldn't sleep for thinking she should hear a scream from the white
chamber some night and find him in spasms such as that woman came so
near dying with. And then there was something about Elsie she did not
know what to make of: she would sit and hang her head sometimes, and
look as if she were dreaming; and she brought home books they said a
young gentleman up at the great school lent her; and once she heard her
whisper in her sleep, and she talked as young girls do to themselves
when they're thinking about somebody they have a liking for and think
nobody knows it.
She finished her long story at last. The minister had listened to it in
perfect silence. He sat still even when she had done speaking,--still,
and lost in thought. It was a very awkward matter for him to have a
hand in. Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Veneers had a pew in
the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house. It would seem that he, Mr.
Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most interested. Had
he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people? Was there enough
capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature to furnish sympathy
and unshrinking service for his friends in an emergency? or was he too
busy with his own attacks of spiritual neuralgia, and too much occupied
with taking account of stock of his own thin-blooded offences, to forget
himself and his personal interests on the small scale and the large,
and run a risk of his life, if need were, at any rate give himself up
without reserve to the dangerous task of guiding and counselling these
distressed and imperilled fellow-creatures?
The good minister thought the best thing to do would be to call and talk
over some of these matters with Brother Fairweather,--for so he would
call him at times, especially if his senior deacon were not within
earshot. Having settled this point, he comforted Sophy with a few words
of counsel and a promise of coming to see her very soon. He then called
his man to put the old white horse into the chaise and drive Sophy back
to the mansion-house.
When the Doctor sat down to his sermon again, it looked very differently
from the way it had looked at the moment he left it. When he came to
think of it, he did not feel quite so sure practically about that matter
of the utter natural selfishness of everybody. There was Letty, now,
seemed to take a very unselfish interest in that old black woman, and
indeed in poor people generally; perhaps it would not be too much to
say that she was always thinking of other people. He thought he had
seen other young persons naturally unselfish, thoughtful for others; it
seemed to be a family trait in some he had known.
But most of all he was exercised about this poor girl whose story Sophy
had been telling. If what the old woman believed was true,--and it
had too much semblance of probability,--what became of his theory of
ingrained moral obliquity applied to such a case? If by the visitation
of God a person receives any injury which impairs the intellect or the
moral perceptions, is it not monstrous to judge such a person by our
common working standards of right and wrong? Certainly, everybody will
answer, in cases where there is a palpable organic change brought about,
as when a blow on the head produces insanity. Fools! How long will it be
before we shall learn that for every wound which betrays itself to the
sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations that cripple,
each of them, some one or more of our highest faculties? If what Sophy
told and believed was the real truth, what prayers could be agonizing
enough, what tenderness could be deep enough, for this poor, lost,
blighted, hapless, blameless child of misfortune, struck by such a doom
as perhaps no living creature in all the sisterhood of humanity shared
with her?
The minister thought these matters over until his mind was bewildered
with doubts and tossed to and fro on that stormy deep of thought heaving
forever beneath the conflict of windy dogmas. He laid by his old sermon.
He put back a pile of old commentators with their eyes and mouths and
hearts full of the dust of the schools. Then he opened the book of
Genesis at the eighteenth chapter and read that remarkable argument of
Abraham's with his Maker in which he boldly appeals to first principles.
He took as his text, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
and began to write his sermon, afterwards so famous, “On the Obligations
of an Infinite Creator to a Finite Creature.”
It astonished the good people, who had been accustomed so long to repeat
mechanically their Oriental hyperboles of self-abasement, to hear their
worthy minister maintaining that the dignified attitude of the old
Patriarch, insisting on what was reasonable and fair with reference to
his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful to his Maker, and
a great deal manlier and more to his credit, than if he had yielded the
whole matter, and pretended that men had not rights as well as duties.
The same logic which had carried him to certain conclusions with
reference to human nature, this same irresistible logic carried him
straight on from his text until he arrived at those other results, which
not only astonished his people, as was said, but surprised himself. He
went so far in defence of the rights of man, that he put his foot into
several heresies, for which men had been burned so often, it was time,
if ever it could be, to acknowledge the demonstration of the argumentum
ad ignem. He did not believe in the responsibility of idiots. He did
not believe a new-born infant was morally answerable for other people's
acts. He thought a man with a crooked spine would never be called to
account for not walking erect. He thought if the crook was in his brain,
instead of his back, he could not fairly be blamed for any consequence
of this natural defect, whatever lawyers or divines might call it.
He argued, that, if a person inherited a perfect mind, body, and
disposition, and had perfect teaching from infancy, that person could do
nothing more than keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing that
the Creator allows a person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted
organic tendency, and then puts this person into the hands of
teachers incompetent or positively bad, is not what is called sin or
transgression of the law necessarily involved in the premises? Is not
a Creator bound to guard his children against the ruin which inherited
ignorance might entail on them? Would it be fair for a parent to put
into a child's hands the title-deeds to all its future possessions, and
a bunch of matches? And are not men children, nay, babes, in the eye
of Omniscience?--The minister grew bold in his questions. Had not he as
good right to ask questions as Abraham?
This was the dangerous vein of speculation in which the Reverend Doctor
Honeywood found himself involved, as a consequence of the suggestions
forced upon him by old Sophy's communication. The truth was, the good
man had got so humanized by mixing up with other people in various
benevolent schemes, that, the very moment he could escape from his old
scholastic abstractions, he took the side of humanity instinctively,
just as the Father of the Faithful did,--all honor be to the noble old
Patriarch for insisting on the worth of an honest man, and making the
best terms he could for a very ill-conditioned metropolis, which might
possibly, however, have contained ten righteous people, for whose sake
it should be spared!
The consequence of all this was, that he was in a singular and seemingly
self-contradictory state of mind when he took his hat and cane and went
forth to call on his heretical brother. The old minister took it for
granted that the Reverend Mr. Fairweather knew the private history of
his parishioner's family. He did not reflect that there are griefs
men never put into words,--that there are fears which must not be
spoken,--intimate matters of consciousness which must be carried,
as bullets which have been driven deep into the living tissues are
sometimes carried, for a whole lifetime,--encysted griefs, if we may
borrow the chirurgeon's term, never to be reached, never to be seen,
never to be thrown out, but to go into the dust with the frame that
bore them about with it, during long years of anguish, known only to the
sufferer and his Maker. Dudley Venner had talked with his minister about
this child of his. But he had talked cautiously, feeling his way for
sympathy, looking out for those indications of tact and judgment which
would warrant him in some partial communication, at least, of the origin
of his doubts and fears, and never finding them.
There was something about the Reverend Mr. Fairweather which repressed
all attempts at confidential intercourse. What this something was,
Dudley Venner could hardly say; but he felt it distinctly, and it
sealed his lips. He never got beyond certain generalities connected
with education and religious instruction. The minister could not help
discovering, however, that there were difficulties connected with this
girl's management, and he heard enough outside of the family to convince
him that she had manifested tendencies, from an early age, at variance
with the theoretical opinions he was in the habit of preaching, and in
a dim way of holding for truth, as to the natural dispositions of the
human being.
About this terrible fact of congenital obliquity his new beliefs
began to cluster as a centre, and to take form as a crystal around its
nucleus. Still, he might perhaps have struggled against them, had it not
been for the little Roman Catholic chapel he passed every Sunday, on his
way to the meeting-house. Such a crowd of worshippers, swarming into the
pews like bees, filling all the aisles, running over at the door like
berries heaped too full in the measure,--some kneeling on the steps,
some standing on the sidewalk, hats off, heads down, lips moving, some
looking on devoutly from the other side of the street! Oh, could he
have followed his own Bridget, maid of all work, into the heart of that
steaming throng, and bowed his head while the priests intoned their
Latin prayers! could he have snuffed up the cloud of frankincense, and
felt that he was in the great ark which holds the better half of the
Christian world, while all around it are wretched creatures, some
struggling against the waves in leaky boats, and some on ill-connected
rafts, and some with their heads just above water, thinking to ride out
the flood which is to sweep the earth clean of sinners, upon their own
private, individual life-preservers!
Such was the present state of mind of the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather,
when his clerical brother called upon him to talk over the questions to
which old Sophy had called his attention.