usual cordiality. He keeps your hand a long time, looking quietly in
your face, as if he were reading traces of some resemblance that had
never struck him before.
The father is one of those calm, impassive men, who shows little upon
the surface, and whose feelings you have always thought cold. But now
there is a tremulousness in his tones that you never remember observing
before. He seems conscious of it himself, and forbears talking. He goes
to his old seat, and after gazing at you a little while with the same
steadfastness as at first, leans forward, and buries his face in his
hands.
From that very moment you feel a sympathy and a love for him, that you
have never known until then. And in after-years, when suffering or trial
come over you, and when your thoughts fly as to a refuge to that
shattered home, you will recall that stooping image of the
father,--with his head bowed, and from time to time trembling
convulsively with grief,--and feel that there remains yet by the
household fires a heart of kindred love and of kindred sorrow!
Nelly steals away from you gently, and stepping across the room, lays
her hand upon his shoulder with a touch that says, as plainly as words
could say it,--"We are here, father!"
And he rouses himself,--passes his arm around her,--looks in her face
fondly,--draws her to him, and prints a kiss upon her forehead.
"Nelly, we must love each other now more than ever."
Nelly's lips tremble, but she cannot answer; a tear or two go stealing
down her cheek.
You approach them; and your father takes your hand again with a firm
grasp,--looks at you thoughtfully,--drops his eyes upon the fire, and
for a moment there is a pause;--"We are quite alone now, my boy!"
----It is a Broken Home!
VI.
_Family Confidence._
Grief has a strange power in opening the hearts of those who sorrow in
common. The father, who has seemed to you, not so much neglectful, as
careless of your aims and purposes,--toward whom there have been in your
younger years yearnings of affection which his chilliness of manner has
seemed to repress, now grows under the sad light of the broken household
into a friend. The heart feels a joy it cannot express, in its freedom
to love and to cherish. There is a pleasure wholly new to you in telling
him of your youthful projects, in listening to his questionings, in
seeking his opinions, and in yielding to his judgment.
It is a sad thing for the child, and quite as sad for the parent, when
this confidence is unknown. Many and many a time with a bursting heart
you have longed to tell him of some boyish grief, or to ask his guidance
out of some boyish trouble; but at the first sight of that calm,
inflexible face, and at the first sound of his measured words, your
enthusiastic yearnings toward his love and his counsels have all turned
back upon your eager and sorrowing heart, and you have gone away to
hide in secret the tears which the lack of his sympathy has wrung from
your soul.
But now over the tomb of her, for whom you weep in common, there is a
new light breaking; and your only fear is lest you weary him with what
may seem a barren show of your confidence.
Nelly too is nearer now than ever; and with her you have no fears of
your extravagance; you listen delightfully there by the evening flame to
all that she tells you of the neighbors of your boyhood. You shudder
somewhat at her genial praises of the blue-eyed Madge,--a shudder that
you can hardly account for, and which you do not seek to explain. It may
be that there is a clinging and tender memory yet--wakened by the home
atmosphere--of the divided sixpence.
Of your quondam friend, Frank, the pleasant recollection of whom revives
again under the old roof-tree, she tells you very little,--and that
little in a hesitating and indifferent way that utterly surprises you.
Can it be, you think, that there has been some cause of unkindness?
----Clarence is still very young!
The fire glows warmly upon the accustomed hearth-stone, and--save that
vacant place never to be filled again--a home cheer reigns even in this
time of your mourning. The spirit of the lost parent seems to linger
over the remnant of the household; and the Bible upon its stand--the
book she loved so well--the book so sadly forgotten--seems still to open
on you its promises in her sweet tones, and to call you, as it were,
with her angel-voice to the land that she inherits.
And when late night has come, and the household is quiet, you call up in
the darkness of your chamber that other night of grief which followed
upon the death of Charlie. That was the boy's vision of death; and this
is the youthful vision. Yet essentially there is but little difference.
Death levels the capacities of the living as it levels the strength of
its victims. It is as grand to the man as to the boy, its teachings are
as deep for age as for infancy.
You may learn its manner, and estimate its approaches; but when it
comes, it comes always with the same awful front that it wore to your
boyhood. Reason and Revelation may point to rich issues that unfold from
its very darkness; yet all these are no more to your bodily sense, and
no more to your enlightened hope, than those foreshadowings of peace
which rest like a halo on the spirit of the child as he prays in
guileless tones--OUR FATHER, WHO ART IN HEAVEN!
It is a holy and a placid grief that comes over you,--not crushing, but
bringing to life from the grave of boyhood all its better and nobler
instincts. In their light your wild plans of youth look sadly misshapen
and in the impulse of the hour you abandon them; holy resolutions beam
again upon your soul like sunlight, your purposes seem bathed in
goodness. There is an effervescence of the spirit that carries away all
foul matter, and leaves you in a state of calm that seems kindred to the
land and to the life whither the sainted mother has gone.
This calm brings a smile in the middle of tears, and an inward looking
and leaning toward that Eternal Power which governs and guides us;--with
that smile and that leaning, sleep comes like an angelic minister, and
fondles your wearied frame and thought into that repose which is the
mirror of the Destroyer.
----Poor Clarence, he is like the rest of the world,--whose goodness
lies chiefly in the occasional throbs of a better nature, which soon
subside, and leave them upon the old level of _desire_.
As you lie between waking and sleeping, you have a fancy of a sound at
your door;--it seems to open softly, and the tall figure of your father,
wrapped in his dressing-gown, stands over you, and gazes--as he gazed at
you before;--his look is very mournful; and he murmurs your mother's
name--and sighs--and looks again--and passes out.
At morning you cannot tell if it was real or a dream. Those higher
resolves too, which grief and the night made, seem very vague and
shadowy. Life with its ambitious and cankerous desires wakes again. You
do not feel them at first; the subjugation of holy thoughts and of
reaches toward the Infinite, leave their traces on you, and perhaps
bewilder you into a half-consciousness of strength. But at the first
touch of the grosser elements about you,--on your very first entrance
upon those duties which quicken pride or shame, and which are pointing
at you from every quarter,--your holy calm, your high-born purpose, your
spiritual cleavings, pass away, like the electricity of August storms
drawn down by the thousand glittering turrets of a city!
The world is stronger than the night; and the bindings of sense are
tenfold stronger than the most exquisite delirium of soul. This makes
you feel, or will one day make you feel, that life,--strong life and
sound life,--that life which lends approaches to the Infinite, and takes
hold on Heaven, is not so much a PROGRESS as it is a RESISTANCE!
There is one special confidence which, in all your talk about plans and
purposes, you do not give to your father: you reserve that for the ear
of Nelly alone. Why happens it that a father is almost the last
confidant that a son makes in any matter deeply affecting the feelings?
Is it the fear that a father may regard such matter as boyish? Is it a
lingering suspicion of your own childishness; or of that extreme of
affection which reduces you to childishness?
Why is it always that a man, of whatever age or condition, forbears to
exhibit to those whose respect for his judgment and mental abilities
only he seeks, the most earnest qualities of the heart, and those
intenser susceptibilities of love which underlie his nature, and which
give a color in spite of him to the habit of his life? Why is he so
morbidly anxious to keep out of sight any extravagances of affection,
when he blurts officiously to the world his extravagances of action and
of thought? Can any lover explain me this?
Again, why is a sister the one of all others to whom you first whisper
the dawnings of any strong emotion,--as if it were a weakness that her
charity alone could cover?
However this may be, you have a long story for Nelly's ear. It is some
days after your return: you are strolling down a quiet, wooded lane,--a
remembered place,--when you first open to her your heart. Your talk is
of Laura Dalton. You describe her to Nelly with the extravagance of a
glowing hope. You picture those qualities that have attracted you most;
you dwell upon her beauty, her elegant figure, her grace of
conversation, her accomplishments. You make a study that feeds your
passion as you go on. You rise by the very glow of your speech into a
frenzy of feeling that she has never excited before. You are quite sure
that you would be wretched and miserable without her.
"Do you mean to marry her?" says Nelly.
It is a question that gives a swift bound to the blood of youth. It
involves the idea of possession, and of the dependence of the cherished
one upon your own arm and strength. But the admiration you entertain
seems almost too lofty for this; Nelly's question makes you diffident of
reply; and you lose yourself in a new story of those excellencies of
speech and of figure which have so charmed you.
Nelly's eye on a sudden becomes full of tears.
----"What is it, Nelly?"
"Our mother, Clarence."
The word and the thought dampen your ardor; the sweet watchfulness and
gentle kindness of that parent for an instant make a sad contrast with
the showy qualities you have been naming; and the spirit of that
mother--called up by Nelly's words--seems to hang over you with an
anxious love that subdues all your pride of passion.
But this passes; and now--half believing that Nelly's thoughts have run
over the same ground with yours--you turn special pleader for your
fancy. You argue for the beauty which you just now affirmed; you do your
utmost to win over Nelly to some burst of admiration. Yet there she
sits beside you, thoughtfully and half sadly, playing with the frail
autumn flowers that grow at her side. What can she be thinking? You ask
it by a look.
She smiles,--takes your hand, for she will not let you grow angry,--
"I was thinking, Clarence, whether this Laura Dalton would, after all,
make a good wife,--such an one as you would love always?"
VII.
_A Good Wife._
The thought of Nelly suggests new dreams that are little apt to find
place in the rhapsodies of a youthful lover. The very epithet of a good
wife mates tamely with the romantic fancies of a first passion. It is
measuring the ideal by too practical a standard. It sweeps away all the
delightful vagueness of a fairy dream of love, and reduces one to a dull
and economic estimate of actual qualities. Passion lives above all
analysis and estimate, and arrives at its conclusions by intuition.
Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever
think it of Corinne? Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever
think it of the impassioned Flora? Would it not weaken faith in their
romantic passages, if you believed it? What have such vulgar, practical
issues to do with that passion which sublimates the faculties, and makes
the loving dreamer to live in an ideal sphere where nothing but goodness
and brightness can come?
Nelly is to be pitied for entertaining such a thought; and yet Nelly is
very good and kind. Her affections are without doubt all centred in the
remnant of the shattered home; she has never known any further and
deeper love; never once fancied it even--
--Ah, Clarence, you are very young!
And yet there are some things that puzzle you in Nelly. You have found
accidentally, in one of her treasured books,--a book that lies almost
always on her dressing-table,--a little withered flower with its stem in
a slip of paper, and on the paper the initials of--your old friend
Frank. You recall, in connection with this, her indisposition to talk of
him on the first evening of your return. It seems--you scarce know
why--that these are the tokens of something very like a leaning of the
heart. It does occur to you that she too may have her little casket of
loves; and you try one day very adroitly to take a look into this
casket.
----You will learn later in life that the heart of a modest, gentle
girl is a very hard matter for even a brother to probe; it is at once
the most tender and the most unapproachable of all fastnesses. It admits
feeling by armies, with great trains of artillery,--but not a single
scout. It is as calm and pure as polar snows; but deep underneath, where
no footsteps have gone, and where no eye can reach but one, lies the
warm and the throbbing earth.
Make what you will of the slight, quivering blushes, and of the half
broken expressions,--more you cannot get. The love that a
delicate-minded girl will tell is a short-sighted and outside love; but
the love that she cherishes without voice or token is a love that will
mould her secret sympathies, and her deepest, fondest yearnings, either
to a quiet world of joy, or to a world of placid sufferance. The true
voice of her love she will keep back long and late, fearful ever of her
most prized jewel,--fearful to strange sensitiveness; she will show
kindness, but the opening of the real floodgates of the heart, and the
utterance of those impassioned yearnings which belong to its nature,
come far later. And fearful, thrice fearful is the shock, if these flow
out unmet!
That deep, thrilling voice, bearing all the perfume of the womanly soul
in its flow, rarely finds utterance; and if uttered vainly,--if called
out by tempting devices, and by a trust that is abused,--desolate indeed
is the maiden heart, widowed of its chastest thought! The soul shrinks
affrighted within itself. Like a tired bird lost at sea, fluttering
around what seem friendly boughs, it stoops at length, and finding only
cold, slippery spars, with no bloom and no foliage,--its last hope
gone,--it sinks to a wild ocean grave!
Nelly--and the thought brings a tear of sympathy to your eye--must have
such a heart; it speaks in every shadow of her action. And this very
delicacy seems to lend her a charm that would make her a wife to be
loved and honored.
Ay, there is something in that maidenly modesty--retiring from you as
you advance, retreating timidly from all bold approaches, fearful and
yet joyous--which wins upon the iron hardness of a man's nature like a
rising flame. To force of action and resolve he opposes force; to strong
will he mates his own; pride lights pride; but to the gentleness of the
true womanly character he yields with a gush of tenderness that nothing
else can call out. He will never be subjugated on his own ground of
action and energy; but let him be lured to that border country over
which the delicacy and fondness of a womanly nature presides, and his
energy yields, his haughty determination faints, he is proud of
submission!
And with this thought of modesty and gentleness to illuminate your dream
of an ideal wife, you chase the pleasant phantom to that shadowy
home--lying far off in the future--of which she is the glory and the
crown. I know it is the fashion nowadays with many to look for a woman's
excellencies and influence--away from her home; but I know too that a
vast many eager and hopeful hearts still cherish the belief that her
virtues will range highest and live longest within those sacred walls.
Where, indeed, can the modest and earnest virtue of a woman tell a
stronger story of its worth than upon the dawning habit of a child?
Where can her grace of character win a higher and a riper effect than
upon the action of her household? What mean those noisy declaimers who
talk of the feeble influence, and of the crushed faculties, of a woman?
What school of learning, or of moral endeavor, depends more on its
teacher, than the home upon the mother? What influence of all the
world's professors and teachers tells so strongly on the habit of a
man's mind as those gentle droppings from a mother's lips, which, day by
day and hour by hour, grow into the enlarging stature of his soul, and
live with it forever? They can hardly be mothers who aim at a broader
and noisier field; they have forgotten to be daughters; they must needs
have lost the hope of being wives!
Be this how it may, the heart of a man with whom affection is not a
name, and love a mere passion of the hour, yearns toward the quiet of a
home as toward the goal of his earthly joy and hope. And as you fasten
there your thought, an indulgent yet dreamy fancy paints the loved image
that is to adorn it and to make it sacred.
----She is there to bid you God speed! and an adieu that hangs like
music on your ear as you go out to the every-day labor of life. At
evening she is there to greet you, as you come back wearied with a
day's toil; and her look so full of gladness cheats you of your
fatigue; and she steals her arm around you with a soul of welcome that
beams like sunshine on her brow, and that fills your eye with tears of a
twin gratitude--to her and Heaven!
She is not unmindful of those old-fashioned virtues of cleanliness and
of order which give an air of quiet, and which secure content. Your
wants are all anticipated: the fire is burning brightly; the clean
hearth flashes under the joyous blaze; the old elbow-chair is in its
place. Your very unworthiness of all this haunts you like an accusing
spirit, and yet penetrates your heart with a new devotion toward the
loved one who is thus watchful of your comfort.
She is gentle,--keeping your love, as she has won it, by a thousand
nameless and modest virtues which radiate from her whole life and
action. She steals upon your affections like a summer wind breathing
softly over sleeping valleys. She gains a mastery over your sterner
nature by very contrast, and wins you unwittingly to her lightest wish.
And yet her wishes are guided by that delicate tact which avoids
conflict with your manly pride; she subdues by seeming to yield. By a
single soft word of appeal she robs your vexation of its anger; and,
with a slight touch of that fair hand, and one pleading look of that
earnest eye, she disarms your sternest pride.
She is kind,--shedding her kindness as heaven sheds dew. Who indeed
could doubt it?--least of all you, who are living on her kindness day by
day, as flowers live on light? There is none of that officious parade
which blunts the point of benevolence; but it tempers every action with
a blessing. If trouble has come upon you, she knows that her voice,
beguiling you into cheerfulness, will lay your fears; and as she draws
her chair beside you, she knows that the tender and confiding way with
which she takes your hand, and looks up into your earnest face, will
drive away from your annoyance all its weight. As she lingers, leading
off your thought with pleasant words, she knows well that she is
redeeming you from care, and soothing you to that sweet calm which such
home and such wife can alone bestow. And in sickness,--sickness that you
almost covet for the sympathy it brings,--that hand of hers resting on
your fevered forehead, or those fingers playing with the scattered
locks, are more full of kindness than the loudest vaunt of friends; and
when your failing strength will permit no more, you grasp that cherished
hand with a fulness of joy, of thankfulness, and of love, which your
tears only can tell.
She is good; her hopes live where the angels live. Her kindness and
gentleness are sweetly tempered with that meekness and forbearance which
are born of Faith. Trust comes into her heart as rivers come to the
sea. And in the dark hours of doubt and foreboding you rest fondly upon
her buoyant Faith, as the treasure of your common life; and in your
holier musings you look to that frail hand, and that gentle spirit, to
lead you away from the vanities of worldly ambition to the fulness of
that joy which the good inherit.
----Is Laura Dalton such an one?
VIII.
_A Broken Hope._
Youthful passion is a giant. It overleaps all the dreams, and all the
resolves of our better and quieter nature; and drives madly toward some
wild issue, that lives only in its frenzy. How little account does
passion take of goodness! It is not within the cycle of its revolution:
it is below; it is tamer; it is older; it wears no wings.
And your proud heart flashing back to the memory of that sparkling eye
which lighted your hope--full-fed upon the vanities of cloister
learning, drives your soberer visions to the wind. As you recall those
tones, so full of brilliancy and pride, the quiet virtues fade, like the
soft haze upon a spring landscape driven westward by a swift, sea-born
storm. The pulse bounds; the eyes flash; the heart trembles with its
sharp springs. Hope dilates, like the eye, fed with swift blood leaping
to the brain.
Again the image of Miss Dalton, so fine, so noble, so womanly, fills and
bounds the Future. The lingering tears of grief drop away from your eye,
as the lingering loves of boyhood drop from your scalding passion, or
drip into clouds of vapor.
You listen to the calm, thoughtful advice of the father, with a deep
consciousness of something stronger than his counsels seething in your
bosom. The words of caution, of instruction, of guidance, fall upon your
heated imagination like the night-dews upon the crater of an Ætna. They
are beneficent and healthful for the straggling herbage upon the surface
of the mountain, but they do not reach or temper the inner fires that
are rolling their billows of flame beneath!
You drop hints from time to time, to those with whom you are most
familiar, of some prospective change of condition. There is a new and
cheerful interest in the building-plans of your neighbors,--a new and
cheerful study of the principles of domestic architecture,--in which
very elegant boudoirs, adorned with harps, hold prominent place; and
libraries with gilt-bound books, very rich in lyrical and dramatic
poetry; fine views from bay-windows; graceful pots of flowers;
sleek-looking Italian greyhounds; cheerful sunlight; musical goldfinches
chattering on the wall; superb pictures of princesses in peasant
dresses; soft Axminster carpets; easy-acting bell-pulls; gigantic
candelabrums; porcelain vases of classic shape; neat waiters in white
aprons; luxurious lounges; and, to crown them all with the very height
of your pride,--the elegant Laura, the mistress, and the guardian of
your soul, moving amid the scene like a new Duchess of Vallière!
You catch chance sights here and there of the blue-eyed Madge: you see
her in her mother's household, the earnest and devoted daughter,--gliding
gracefully about her mother's cottage, the very type of gentleness and of
duty. Yet withal there are sparks of spirit in her that pique your pride,
lofty as it is. You offer flowers, which she accepts with a kind smile,
not of coquetry, but of simplest thankfulness. She is not the girl to
gratify your vanity with any half-show of tenderness. And if there lived
ever in her heart an old girlish liking for the schoolboy Clarence, it is
all gone before the romantic lover of the elegant Laura; or at most it
lies in some obscure corner of her soul, never to be brought to light.
You enter upon the new pursuits, which your father has advised, with a
lofty consciousness, not only of the strength of your mind, but of your
heart. You relieve your opening professional study with long letters to
Miss Dalton, full of Shakspearean compliments, and touched off with very
dainty elaboration. And you receive pleasant, gossiping notes in
answer,--full of quotations, but meaning very little.