The summer passed over the cottage, noiselessly, as our summers pass.
There were white clouds walking in saintly troops over blue mirrors of
sea,--there were purple mornings, choral with bird-singing,--there were
golden evenings, with long, eastward shadows. Apple-blossoms died
quietly in the deep orchard grass, and tiny apples waxed and rounded and
ripened and gained stripes of gold and carmine; and the blue eggs broke
into young robins, that grew from gaping, yellow-mouthed youth to
fledged and outflying maturity. Came autumn, with its long Indian
summer, and winter, with its flinty, sparkling snows, under which all
Nature lay a sealed and beautiful corpse. Came once more the spring
winds, the lengthening days, the opening flowers, and the ever-renewing
miracle of buds and blossoms on the apple-trees around the cottage. A
year had passed since the June afternoon when first we showed you Mary
standing under the spotty shadows of the tree, with the white dove on
her hand--a year in which not many outward changes have been made in the
relations of the actors of our story.
Mary calmly spun and read and thought; now and then composing with care
very English-French letters, to be sent to Philadelphia to Madame de
Frontignac, and receiving short missives of very French-English in
return.
The cautions of Madame, in regard to the Doctor, had not rippled the
current of their calm, confiding intercourse; and the Doctor, so very
satisfied and happy in her constant society and affection, scarcely as
yet meditated distinctly that he needed to draw her more closely to
himself. If he had a passage to read, a page to be copied, a thought to
express, was she not ever there, gentle, patient, unselfish? and scarce
by the absence of a day did she let him perceive that his need of her
was becoming so absolute that his hold on her must needs be made
permanent.
As to his salary and temporal concerns, they had suffered somewhat for
his unpopular warfare with reigning sins,--a fact which had rather
reconciled Mrs. Scudder to the dilatory movement of her cherished hopes.
Since James was gone, what need to press imprudently to new
arrangements? Better give the little heart time to grow over before
starting a subject which a certain womanly instinct told her might be
met with a struggle. Somehow she never thought without a certain
heart-sinking of Mary's look and tone the night she spoke with her about
James; she had an awful presentiment that that tone of voice belonged to
the things that cannot be shaken. But yet, Mary seemed so even, so
quiet, her delicate form filled out and rounded so beautifully, and she
sang so cheerfully at her work, and, above all, she was so entirely
silent about James, that Mrs. Scudder had hope.
Ah, that silence! Do not listen to hear whom a woman praises, to know
where her heart is! do not ask for whom she expresses the most earnest
enthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew well, whose name she never
speaks,--if she seem to have an instinct to avoid every occasion of its
mention,--if, when you speak, she drops into silence and changes the
subject,--why, look there for something! just as, when going through
deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may
know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and
buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her
spotted breast, to act her pretty little falsehood before you.
Poor Mary's little nest was along the sedgy margin of the sea-shore,
where grow the tufts of golden-rod, where wave the reeds, where crimson,
green, and purple sea-weeds float up, like torn fringes of Nereid
vestures, and gold and silver shells lie on the wet wrinkles of the
sands.
The sea had become to her like a friend, with its ever-varying monotony.
Somehow she loved this old, fresh, blue, babbling, restless giant, who
had carried away her heart's love to hide him in some far-off palmy
island, such as she had often heard him tell of in his sea-romances.
Sometimes she would wander out for an afternoon's stroll on the rocks,
and pause by the great spouting cave, now famous to Newport
_dilettanti_, but then a sacred and impressive solitude. There the
rising tide bursts with deafening strokes through a narrow opening into
some inner cavern, which, with a deep thunder-boom, like the voice of an
angry lion, casts it back in a high jet of foam into the sea.
Mary often sat and listened to this hollow noise, and watched the
ever-rising columns of spray as they reddened with the transpiercing
beams of the afternoon sun; and thence her eye travelled far, far off
over the shimmering starry blue, where sails looked no bigger than
miller's wings; and it seemed sometimes as if a door were opening by
which her soul might go out into some eternity,--some abyss, so wide and
deep, that fathomless lines of thought could not sound it. She was no
longer a girl in a mortal body, but an infinite spirit, the adoring
companion of Infinite Beauty and Infinite Love.
As there was an hour when the fishermen of Galilee saw their Master
transfigured, his raiment white and glistening, and his face like the
light, so are there hours when our whole mortal life stands forth in a
celestial radiance. From our daily lot falls off every weed of
care,--from our heart-friends every speck and stain of earthly
infirmity. Our horizon widens, and blue, and amethyst, and gold touch
every object. Absent friends and friends gone on the last long journey
stand once more together, bright with an immortal glow, and, like the
disciples who saw their Master floating in the clouds above them, we
say, "Lord, it is good to be here!" How fair the wife, the husband, the
absent mother, the gray-haired father, the manly son, the bright-eyed
daughter! Seen in the actual present, all have some fault, some flaw;
but absent, we see them in their permanent and better selves. Of our
distant home we remember not one dark day, not one servile care, nothing
but the echo of its holy hymns and the radiance of its brightest
days,--of our father, not one hasty word, but only the fulness of his
manly vigor and noble tenderness,--of our mother, nothing of mortal
weakness, but a glorified form of love,--of our brother, not one
teasing, provoking word of brotherly freedom, but the proud beauty of
his noblest hours,--of our sister, our child, only what is fairest and
sweetest.
This is to life the true ideal, the calm glass, wherein looking, we
shall see, that, whatever defects cling to us, they are not, after all,
permanent, and that we are tending to something nobler than we yet
are;--it is "the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the
purchased possession." In the resurrection we shall see our friends
forever as we see them in these clairvoyant hours.
We are writing thus on and on, linking image and thought and feeling,
and lingering over every flower, and listening to every bird, because
just before us there lies a dark valley, and we shrink and tremble to
enter it.
But it _must_ come, and why do we delay?
Towards evening, one afternoon in the latter part of June, Mary returned
from one of these lonely walks by the sea, and entered the kitchen. It
was still in its calm and sober cleanness;--the tall clock ticked with a
startling distinctness. From the half-closed door of her mother's
bedroom, which stood ajar, she heard the chipper of Miss Prissy's voice.
She stayed her light footsteps, and the words that fell on her ear were
these:--
"Miss Marvyn fainted dead away;--she stood it till he came to _that_;
but then she just clapped both hands together, as if she'd been shot,
and fell right forward on the floor in a faint!"
What could this be? There was a quick, intense whirl of thoughts in
Mary's mind, and then came one of those awful moments when the powers of
life seem to make a dead pause and all things stand still; and then all
seemed to fail under her, and the life to sink down, down, down, till
nothing was but one dim, vague, miserable consciousness.
Mrs. Scudder and Miss Prissy were sitting, talking earnestly, on the
foot of the bed, when the door opened noiselessly, and Mary glided to
them like a spirit,--no color in check or lip,--her blue eyes wide with
calm horror; and laying her little hand, with a nervous grasp, on Miss
Prissy's arm, she said,--
"Tell me,--what is it?--is it?--is he--dead?"
The two women looked at each other, and then Mrs. Scudder opened her
arms.
"My daughter!"
"Oh! mother! mother!"
Then fell that long, hopeless silence, broken only by hysteric sobs from
Miss Prissy, and answering ones from the mother; but _she_ lay still and
quiet, her blue eyes wide and clear, making an inarticulate moan.
"Oh! are they _sure_?--_can_ it be?--_is_ he dead?" at last she gasped.
"My child, it is too true; all we can say is, 'Be still, and know that I
am God!'"
"I shall _try_ to be still, mother," said Mary, with a piteous, hopeless
voice, like the bleat of a dying lamb; "but I did not think he _could_
die! I never thought of that!--I never _thought_ of it!--Oh! mother!
mother! mother! oh! what shall I do?"
They laid her on her mother's bed,--the first and last resting-place of
broken hearts,--and the mother sat down by her in silence. Miss Prissy
stole away into the Doctor's study, and told him all that had happened.
"It's the same to her," said Miss Prissy, with womanly reserve, "as if
he'd been an own brother."
"What was his spiritual state?" said the Doctor, musingly.
Miss Prissy looked blank, and answered mournfully,--
"I don't know."
The Doctor entered the room where Mary was lying with closed eyes. Those
few moments seemed to have done the work of years,--so pale, and faded,
and sunken she looked; nothing but the painful flutter of the eyelids
and lips showed that she yet breathed. At a sign from Mrs. Scudder, he
kneeled by the bed, and began to pray,--"Lord, thou hast been our
dwelling-place in all generations,"--prayer deep, mournful, upheaving
like the swell of the ocean, surging upward, under the pressure of
mighty sorrows, towards an Almighty heart.
The truly good are of one language in prayer. Whatever lines or angles
of thought may separate them in other hours, _when they pray in
extremity_, all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles V. and Martin
Luther, two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed out their dying
struggle in the self-same words.
There be many tongues and many languages of men,--but the language of
prayer is one by itself, _in_ all and _above_ all. It is the inspiration
of that Spirit that is ever working with our spirit, and constantly
lifting us higher than we know, and, by our wants, by our woes, by our
tears, by our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us, with mightier and
mightier force, against those chains of sin which keep us from our God.
We speak not of _things_ conventionally called prayers,--vain mutterings
of unawakened spirits talking drowsily in sleep,--but of such prayers as
come when flesh and heart fail, in mighty straits;--_then_ he who prays
is a prophet, and a Mightier than he speaks in him; for the "_Spirit_
helpeth our infirmities; for we know not what we should pray for as we
ought; but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us, with groanings
which cannot be uttered."
So the voice of supplication, upheaving from that great heart, so
childlike in its humility, rose with a wisdom and a pathos beyond what
he dreamed in his intellectual hours; it uprose even as a strong angel,
whose brow is solemnly calm, and whose wings shed healing dews of
paradise.