THE JOURNEY.
It was a lovely morning when they left London. The trains did not then
travel so fast as now, and it was late in the afternoon when they
reached the station at which they must leave the railway for the road.
Before that the weather had changed, or they had changed their weather,
for the sky was one mass of cloud, and rain was falling persistently.
They had been for some time in the abode of the hills, but those they
were passing through, though not without wonder and strange interest,
were but an inferior clan, neither lofty nor lovely. Through the rain
and the mist they looked lost and drear. They were mostly bare, save of
a little grass, and broken with huge brown and yellow gulleys, worn by
such little torrents as were now rushing along them straight from the
clouded heavens. It was a vague sorrowful region of tears, whence the
streams in the valleys below were forever fed.
This part of the journey Saffy had been sound asleep, but Mark had been
standing at the window of the railway-carriage, gazing out on an awful
world. What would he do, he thought, if he were lost there? Would he be
able to sit still all night without being frightened, waiting for God to
come and take him? As they rushed along, it was not through the brain
alone of the child the panorama flitted, but through his mind and heart
as well, and there, like a glacier it scored its passage. Or rather, it
left its ghosts behind it, ever shifting forms and shadows, each
atmosphered in its own ethereal mood. Hardly thoughts were they, but
strange other consciousnesses of life and being. Hills and woods and
valleys and plains and rivers and seas, entering by the gates of sight
into the live mirror of the human, are transformed to another nature, to
a living wonder, a joy, a pain, a breathless marvel as they pass.
Nothing can receive another thing, not even a glass can take into its
depth a face, without altering it. In the mirror of man, things become
thoughts, feelings, life, and send their streams down the cheeks, or
their sunshine over the countenance.
Before Mark reached the end of that journey, there was gathered in the
bottom of his heart a great mass of fuel, there stored for the future
consumption of thinking, and for reproduction in forms of power. He knew
nothing of it. He took nothing consciously. The things kept sinking into
him. The sole sign of his reception was an occasional sigh--of which he
could not have told either the cause or the meaning.
They got into their own carriage at the station. The drive was a long
and a tedious one, for the roads were rough and muddy and often steep,
and Mr. Raymount repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction, that they had
not put four horses to. For some time they drove along the side of a
hill, and could see next to nothing except in one direction; and when at
length the road ran into a valley, and along the course of the swollen
river, it was getting so dark, and the rain was coming down so fast,
that they could see next to nothing at all. Long before they reached
their new home, Saffy and Mark were sound asleep, Hester was sunk in her
own thoughts, and the father and mother sat in unbroken silence, hand in
hand. It was pitch-dark ere they arrived; and save what she learned from
the thousand musics of the swollen river along which they had been
driving for the last hour, Hester knew nothing of the country for which
she had left the man-swarming city. Ah, that city! so full of
fellow-creatures! so many of them her friends! and struggling in the
toils of so many foes! Many sorrows had entered in at Hester's ears;
tongues that had never known how to give trouble shape, had grown
eloquent in pouring the tale--of oppression oftener than want, into the
bosom of her sympathy. I do not say many tongues--only many sorrows; she
knew from the spray that reached her on its borders, how that human sea
tossed and raged afar. Reading and interpreting the looks of faces and
the meanings of actions around her by what she had heard, she could not
doubt she had received but a too true sample of experiences innumerable.
One result was, that, young as was Hester, she no longer shrank from the
thought of that invisible, intangible solvent in which the generations
of man vanish from the eyes of their fellows. She said to herself what a
blessed thing was death for countless human myriads--yea doubtless for
the whole race! It looked sad enough for an end; but then it was not the
end; while but for the thought of the change to some other mode of life,
the idea of this world would have been unendurable to her. "Surely they
are now receiving their evil things!" she said. Alas, but even now she
felt as if the gulf of death separated her from those to whom it had
been her painful delight to minister! The weeping wind and the moaning
rush of the river, through which they were slowly moving toward their
earthly paradise, were an orchestral part as of hautboys in the wailing
harmony of her mood.
They turned and went through a gate, then passed through trees and trees
that made yet darker pieces of the night. By and by appeared the faint
lights of the house, with blotchy pallors thinning the mist and
darkness. Presently the carriage stopped.
Both the children continued dead asleep, and were carried off to bed.
The father and mother knew the house of old time, and revived for each
other old memories. But to Hester all was strange, and what with the
long journey, the weariness, the sadness, and the strangeness, it was as
if walking in a dream that she entered the old hall. It had a quiet,
dull, dignified look, as if it expected nobody; as if it was here itself
because it could not help it, and would rather not be here; as if it had
seen so many generations come and go that it had ceased to care much
about new faces. Every thing in the house looked somber and solemn, as
if it had not forgotten its old mistress, who had been so many years in
it, and was such a little while gone out of it. They had supper in a
long, low room, with furniture almost black, against whose windows heavy
roses every now and then softly patted, caught in the fringes of the
rain gusts. The dusky room, the perfect stillness within, the low
mingled sounds of swaying trees and pattering rain without, the sense of
the great darkness folding in its bosom the beauty so near and the
moaning city miles upon miles away--all grew together into one
possessing mood, which rose and sank, like the water in a sea-cave, in
the mind of Hester. But who by words can fix the mood that comes and
goes unbidden, like a ghost whose acquaintance is lost with his
vanishing, whom we know not when we do not see? A single happy phrase,
the sound of a wind, the odor of the mere earth may avail to send us
into some lonely, dusky realm of being; but how shall we take our
brother with us, or send him thither when we would? I doubt if even the
poet ever works just what he means on the mind of his fellow. Sisters,
brothers, we cannot meet save in God.
But the nearest mediator of feeling, the most potent, the most delicate,
the most general, the least articulate, the farthest from thought, yet
perhaps the likest to the breath moving upon the soft face of the waters
of chaos, is music. It rose like a soft irrepressible tide in the heart
of Hester; it mingled and became one with her mood; together swelling
they beat at the gates of silence; for life's sake they must rush,
embodied and born in sound, into the outer world where utterance meets
utterance! She looked around her for such an instrument as hitherto had
been always within her reach--rose and walked around the shadowy room
searching. But there was no creature amongst the aged furniture--nothing
with a brain to it which her soul might briefly inhabit. She returned
and sat again at the table, and the mood vanished in weariness.
But they did not linger there long. Fatigue made the ladies glad to be
shown to the rooms prepared for them. The housekeeper, the ancient
authority of the place, in every motion and tone expressing herself
wronged by their intrusion, conducted them. Every spot they passed was
plainly far more hers than theirs; only law was a tyrant, and she dared
not assert her rights! But she had allotted their rooms well, and they
approved her judgment.
Weary as she was, Hester was charmed with hers, and the more charmed the
more she surveyed it. I will not spend time or space in describing it,
but remember how wearisome and useless descriptions often are. I will
but say it was old-fashioned to her heart's content; that it seemed full
of shadowy histories, as if each succeeding occupant had left behind an
ethereal phantasmic record, a memorial imprint of presence on walls and
furniture--to which she now was to add hers. But the old sleep must have
the precedence of all the new things. In weary haste she undressed, and
ascending with some difficulty the high four-post bed which stood
waiting for her like an altar of sleep for its sacrifice, was presently
as still and straight and white as alabaster lady lying upon ancient
tomb.