THANK God! it is not within the power of one man’s errors to blight the
promise of a life like that of Hope. It is but a feeble destiny that
is wrecked by passion, when it should be ennobled. Aunt Jane and Kate
watched Hope closely during her years of probation, for although she
fancied herself to be keeping her own counsel, yet her career lay
in broad light for them. She was like yonder sailboat, which floats
conspicuous by night amid the path of moonbeams, and which yet seems to
its own voyagers to be remote and unseen upon a waste of waves.
Why should I linger over the details of her life, after the width
of ocean lay between her and Malbone, and a manhood of self-denying
usefulness had begun to show that even he could learn something by
life’s retributions? We know what she was, and it is of secondary
importance where she went or what she did. Kindle the light of the
light-house, and it has nothing to do, except to shine. There is for it
no wrong direction. There is no need to ask, “How? Over which especial
track of distant water must my light go forth, to find the wandering
vessel to be guided in?” It simply shines. Somewhere there is a ship
that needs it, or if not, the light does its duty. So did Hope.
We must leave her here. Yet I cannot bear to think of her as passing
through earthly life without tasting its deepest bliss, without the last
pure ecstasy of human love, without the kisses of her own children on
her lips, their waxen fingers on her bosom.
And yet again, is this life so long? May it not be better to wait until
its little day is done, and the summer night of old age has yielded to
a new morning, before attaining that acme of joy? Are there enough
successive grades of bliss for all eternity, if so much be consummated
here? Must all novels end with an earthly marriage, and nothing be left
for heaven?
Perhaps, for such as Hope, this life is given to show what happiness
might be, and they await some other sphere for its fulfilment. The
greater part of the human race live out their mortal years without
attaining more than a far-off glimpse of the very highest joy. Were this
life all, its very happiness were sadness. If, as I doubt not, there
be another sphere, then that which is unfulfilled in this must yet
find completion, nothing omitted, nothing denied. And though a thousand
oracles should pronounce this thought an idle dream, neither Hope nor I
would believe them.
It was a radiant morning of last February when I walked across the low
hills to the scene of the wreck. Leaving the road before reaching
the Fort, I struck across the wild moss-country, full of boulders and
footpaths and stunted cedars and sullen ponds. I crossed the height of
land, where the ruined lookout stands like the remains of a Druidical
temple, and then went down toward the ocean. Banks and ridges of snow
lay here and there among the fields, and the white lines of distant
capes seemed but drifts running seaward. The ocean was gloriously
alive,--the blackest blue, with white caps on every wave; the shore was
all snowy, and the gulls were flying back and forth in crowds; you could
not tell whether they were the white waves coming ashore, or bits of
snow going to sea. A single fragment of ship-timber, black with time and
weeds, and crusty with barnacles, heaved to and fro in the edge of the
surf, and two fishermen’s children, a boy and girl, tilted upon it as it
moved, clung with the semblance of terror to each other, and played at
shipwreck.
The rocks were dark with moisture, steaming in the sun. Great sheets of
ice, white masks of departing winter, clung to every projecting cliff,
or slid with crash and shiver into the surge. Icicles dropped their slow
and reverberating tears upon the rock where Emilia once lay breathless;
and it seemed as if their cold, chaste drops were sent to cleanse from
her memory each scarlet stain, and leave it virginal and pure.