HESTER ALONE.
When the family separated for the night and Hester reached her room, she
sat down and fell a thinking, not more earnestly but more continuously.
She was one of those women--not few in number, I have good reason to
think, though doubtless few comparatively, who from the first dawn of
consciousness have all their lives endeavored, with varying success,
with frequent failure of strength, and occasional brief collapse of
effort, to do the right thing. Therein she had but followed in the
footsteps of her mother, who, though not so cultivated as she, walked no
less steady in the true path of humanity. But the very earnestness of
Hester's endeavor along with the small reason she found for considering
it successful; the frequent irritation with herself because of failure;
and the impossibility of satisfying the hard master Self, who, while he
flatters some, requires of others more than they can give--all tended to
make her less evenly sympathetic with those about her than her heart's
theory demanded. Willing to lay down her life for them, a matchless
nurse in sickness, and in trouble revealing a tenderness perfectly
lovely, she was yet not the one to whom first either of the children was
ready to flee with hurt or sorrow: she was not yet all human, because
she was not yet at home with the divine.
Thousands that are capable of great sacrifices are yet not capable of
the little ones which are all that are required of them. God seems to
take pleasure in working by degrees; the progress of the truth is as the
permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed: a multitude of successive
small sacrifices may work more good in the world than many a large one.
What would even our Lord's death on the cross have been, except as the
crown of a life in which he died daily, giving himself, soul, body and
spirit, to his men and women? It is the _Being_ that is the
precious thing. Being is the mother to all little Doings as well as the
grown-up Deeds and the mighty heroic Sacrifice; and these little Doings,
like the good children of the house, make the bliss of it. Hester had
not had time, neither had she prayed enough to _be_ quite yet,
though she was growing well towards it. She was a good way up the hill,
and the Lord was coming down to meet her, but they had not quite met
yet, so as to go up the rest of the way together.
In religious politics, Hester was what is called a good churchwoman,
which in truth means a good deal of a sectarian. She not merely recoiled
from such as venerated the more primitive modes of church-government
rather than those of later expediency, and preferred far inferior
extempore prayers to the best possible prayers in print, going therefore
to some chapel instead of the church, but she looked down upon them as
from a superior social standing--that is, with the judgment of this
world, and not that of Christ the carpenter's son. In short, she had a
repugnance to the whole race of dissenters, and would not have soiled
her dress with the dust of one of their school-rooms even. She regarded
her own conscience as her Lord, but had not therefore any respect for
that of another man where it differed from her in the direction of what
she counted vulgarity. So she was scarcely in the kingdom of heaven yet,
any more than thousands who regard themselves as choice Christians. I do
not say these feelings were very active in her, for little occurred to
call them out; but she did not love her dissenting neighbor, and felt
good and condescending when, brought into contact with one, she behaved
kindly to him.
I well know that some of my readers will heartily approve of her in this
very thing, and that not a few _good dissenters_ on the other hand,
who are equally and in precisely the same way sectarians, that is bad
Christians, will scorn her for it; but for my part I would rather cut
off my right hand than be so cased and stayed in a narrow garment of
pride and satisfaction, condemned to keep company with myself instead of
the Master as he goes everywhere--into the poorest companies of them
that love each other, and so invite his presence.
The Lord of truth and beauty has died for us: shall we who, by haunting
what we call his courts, have had our sense of beauty, our joy in grace
tenfold exalted, gather around us, in the presence of those we count
less refined than ourselves, skirts trimmed with the phylacteries of the
world's law, turning up the Pharisaical nose, and forgetting both what
painful facts self-criticism has revealed to ourselves, and the eyes
upon us of the yet more delicate refinement and the yet gentle breeding
of the high countries? May these not see in us some malgrace which it
needs the gentleness of Christ to get over and forget, some savagery of
which we are not aware, some _gaucherie_ that repels though it
cannot estrange them? Casting from us our own faults first, let us cast
from us and from him our neighbor's also. O gentle man, the common man
is yet thy brother, and thy gentleness should make him great, infecting
him with thy humility, not rousing in him the echo of a vile unheavenly
scorn. Wilt thou, with thy lofty condescension, more intrinsically
vulgar than even his ugly self-assertion, give him cause too good to
hate thy refinement? It is not thy refinement makes thee despise him; it
is thy own vulgarity; and if we dare not search ourselves close enough
to discover the low breeding, the bad blood in us, it will one day come
out plain as the smitten brand of the _forcat_.
That Hester had a tendency to high church had little or nothing to do
with the matter. Such exclusiveness is simply a form of that pride,
justify or explain it as you will, which found its fullest embodiment in
the Jewish Pharisee--the evil thing that Christ came to burn up with his
lovely fire, and which yet so many of us who call ourselves by his name
keep hugging to our bosoms--I mean the pride that says, "I am better
than thou." If these or those be in any true sense below us, it is of
Satan to despise--of Christ to stoop and lay hold of and lift the sister
soul up nearer to the heart of the divine tenderness.
But this tenderness, which has its roots in every human heart, had
larger roots in the heart of Hester than in most. Whatever her failings,
whatever ugly weeds grew in the neglected corners of her nature, the
moment she came in contact with any of her kind in whatever condition of
sadness or need, the pent-up love of God--I mean the love that came of
God and was divine in her--would burst its barriers and rush forth,
sometimes almost overwhelming herself in its torrent. She would then be
ready to die, nothing less, to help the poor and miserable. She was not
yet far enough advanced to pity vulgarity in itself--perhaps none but
Christ is able to do that--but she could and did pity greatly its
associated want and misery, nor was repelled from them by their
accompanying degradation.
The tide of action, in these later years flowing more swiftly in the
hearts of women--whence has resulted so much that is noble, so much that
is paltry, according to the nature of the heart in which it swells--had
been rising in that of Hester also. She must not waste her life! She
must _do_ something! What should it be? Her deep sense of the
misery around her had of course suggested that it must be something in
the way of help. But what form was the help to take? "I have no money!"
she said to herself--for this the last and feeblest of means for the
doing of good is always the first to suggest itself to one who has not
perceived the mind of God in the matter. To me it seems that the first
thing in regard to money is to prevent it from doing harm. The man who
sets out to do good with his fortune is like one who would drive a team
of tigers through the streets of a city, or hunt the fox with cheetahs.
I would think of money as Christ thought of it, not otherwise; for no
other way is true, however it may recommend itself to good men; and
neither Christ nor his apostles did anything by means of money; nay, he
who would join them in their labors had to abandon his _fortune_.
This evening, then, the thought of the vulgar, miserable, ruinous old
man, with his wretched magic lantern, kept haunting Hester, and made her
very pitiful; and naturally, starting from him, her thoughts went
wandering abroad over the universe of misery. For was not the world full
of men and women who groaned, not merely under poverty and cruelty,
weakness and sickness, but under dullness and stupidity, hugged in the
paralyzing arms of that devil-fish, The Commonplace, or held fast to the
rocks by the crab Custom, while the tide of moral indifference was fast
rising to choke them? Was there no prophet, no redemption, no mediator
for such as these? Were there not thousands of women, born with a
trembling impulse towards the true and lovely, in whom it was withering
for lack of nurture, and they themselves continuously massing into
common clay, a summer-fall of human flowers off the branches of hope and
aspiration? How many young wives, especially linked to the husbands of
their choice, and by this very means disenchanted, as they themselves
would call it, were doomed to look no more upon life as the antechamber
of the infinite, but as the counting-house of the king of the
nursery-ballad, where you may, if you can, eat bread and honey, but
where you _must_ count your money! At the windows of the husband-house
no more looks out the lover but the man of business, who takes his life
to consist in the abundance of the things he possesses! He must make money
for his children!--and would make money if he had nor chick nor child.
Could she do nothing for such wives at least? The man who by honest means
made people laugh, sent a fire-headed arrow into the ranks of the
beleaguering enemy of his race; he who beguiled from another a genuine
tear, made heavenly wind visit his heart with a cool odor of paradise!
What was there for her to do?
But possibly Hester might neither have begun nor gone on thinking thus,
had it not been for a sense of power within her springing from, or at
least associated with, a certain special gift which she had all her
life, under the faithful care of her mother, been cultivating. Endowed
with a passion for music--what is a true passion but a heavenly
hunger?--which she indulged; relieved, strengthened, nor ever sated, by
a continuous study of both theoretical and practical music, she
approached both piano and organ with eager yet withholding foot, each as
a great and effectual door ready to open into regions of delight. But
she was gifted also with a fine contralto voice, of exceptional scope
and flexibility, whose capacity of being educated into an organ of
expression was not thrown away upon one who had a world inside her to
express--doubtless as yet not a little chaotic, but in process of
assuming form that might demand utterance; and this angelic instrument
had for some years been under careful training. And now this night came
to Hester, if not for the first time, yet more clearly than ever before,
the thought whether she might not in some way make use of this her one
gift for the service she desired--for the comfort, that was, and the
uplifting of humanity, especially such humanity as had sunk below even
its individual level. Thus instinctively she sought relief from
sympathetic pain in the alleviation and removal of its cause.
But pity and instinctive recoil from pain were by no means all the
elements of the impulse moving Hester in this direction. An honest and
active mind such as hers could not have carried her so often to church
and for so long a time, whatever might be the nature of the direct
teaching she there received, without gaining some glimpses of the
mightiest truth of our being, that we belong to God in actual fact of
spiritual property and profoundest relationship. She had much to learn
in this direction yet--as who has not who is ages in advance of
life?--but this night came back to her, as it had often already
returned, the memory of a sermon she had heard some twelve months before
on the text, "Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are
God's." It was a dull enough sermon, yet not so dull but it enabled her
to supply in some degree its own lack; and when she went out of the dark
church into the sunshine,--and heard the birds singing as if they knew
without any St. Francis to tell them that their bodies and their spirits
were God's, a sense awoke in her such as she had not had before, that
the grand voice lying like an unborn angel in the chest and throat of
her, belonged not to herself but to God, and must be used in some way
for the working of his will in the world which as well as the voice he
had made. She had no real notion yet of what is meant by the glory of
God. She had not quite learned that simplest of high truths that the
glory of God is the beauty of Christ's face. She had a lingering idea--a
hideously frightful one, though its vagueness kept it in great measure
from injuring her--that the One only good, the One only unselfish
thought a great deal of himself, and looked strictly after his rights in
the way of homage. Hence she thought first of devoting the splendor and
richness of her voice to swell the song of some church-choir. With her
notion of God and of her relation to him, how could she yet have escaped
the poor pagan fancy--good for a pagan, but beggarly for a Christian,
that church and its goings-on are a serving of God? She had not begun to
ask how these were to do God any good--or if my reader objects to the
phrase, I will use a common one saying the same thing--how these were to
do anything for God. She had not begun to see that God is the one great
servant of all, and that the only way to serve him is to be a
fellow-servant with him--to be, say, a nurse in his nursery, and tend
this or that lonely, this or that rickety child of his. She had not yet
come to see that it is as absurd to call song and prayer a serving of
God, as it would be to say the thief on the cross did something for
Christ in consenting to go with him to paradise. But now some dim
perception of this truth began to wake in her. Vaguely she began to feel
that perhaps God had given her this voice and this marriage of delight
and power in music and song for some reason like that for which he had
made the birds the poets of the animal world: what if her part also
should be to drive dull care away? what if she too were intended to be a
door-keeper in the house of God, and open or keep open windows in heaven
that the air of the high places might reach the low swampy ground? If
while she sang, her soul mounted on the wings of her song till it
fluttered against the latticed doors of heaven as a bird flutters
against the wires of its cage; if also God has made of one blood all
nations of men--why, then, surely her song was capable of more than
carrying merely herself up into the regions of delight! Nay more, might
there not from her throat go forth a trumpet-cry of truth among such as
could hear and respond to the cry? Then, when the humblest servant
should receive the reward of his well-doing, she would not be left
outside, but enter into the joy of her Lord. How specially such work
might be done by her she did not yet see, but the truth had drawn nigh
her that, to serve God in any true sense, we must serve him where he
needs service--among his children lying in the heart of lack, in sin and
pain and sorrow; and she saw that, if she was to serve at all, it must
be with her best, with her special equipment.
I need not follow the gradations, unmarked of herself, by which she at
length came to a sort of conclusion: the immediate practical result was,
that she gave herself more than ever to the cultivation of her gift,
seeing in the distance the possibility of her becoming, in one mode or
another, or in all modes perhaps together, a songstress to her
generation.