The Minister's Wooing
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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 vigour 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 for ever 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 colour in cheek 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.
CHAPTER XXI
The next day broke calm and fair. The robins sang remorselessly in the apple-tree, and were answered by bobolink, oriole, and a whole tribe of ignorant little bits of feathered, happiness that danced among the leaves. Golden and glorious unclosed those purple eyelids of the East, and regally came up the sun; and the treacherous sea broke into ten thousand smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, as unconsciously as if no form dear to human hearts had gone down beneath it. Oh! treacherous, deceiving beauty of outward things! beauty, wherein throbs not one answering nerve to human pain!
Mary rose early and was about her morning work. Her education was that of the soldier, who must know himself no more, whom no personal pain must swerve from the slightest minutiæ of duty. So she was there, at her usual hour, dressed with the same cool neatness, her brown hair parted in satin bands, and only the colourless cheek and lip differing from the Mary of yesterday.
How strange this external habit of living! One thinks how to stick in a pin, and how to tie a string, – one busies one’s self with folding robes, and putting away napkins, the day after some stroke that has cut the inner life in two, with the heart’s blood dropping quietly at every step.
Yet it is better so! Happy those whom stern principle or long habit or hard necessity calls from the darkened room, the languid trance of pain, in which the wearied heart longs to indulge, and gives this trite prose of common life, at which our weak and wearied appetites so revolt!
Mary never thought of such a thing as self-indulgence; – this daughter of the Puritans had her seed within her. Aërial in her delicacy, as the blue-eyed flax-flower with which they sowed their fields, she had yet its strong fibre, which no stroke of the flail could break; bruising and hackling only made it fitter for uses of homely utility. Mary, therefore, opened the kitchen-door at dawn, and, after standing one moment to breathe the freshness, began spreading the cloth for an early breakfast. Mrs. Scudder, the meanwhile, was kneading the bread that had been set to rise over-night; and the oven was crackling and roaring with a large-throated, honest garrulousness.
But, ever and anon, as the mother worked, she followed the motions of her child anxiously.
‘Mary, my dear,’ she said, ‘the eggs are giving out; hadn’t you better run to the barn and get a few?’
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. No treatise on the laws of nervous fluids could have taught Mrs. Scudder a better rôle for this morning, than her tender gravity, and her constant expedients to break and ripple, by changing employments, that deep, deadly under-current of thoughts which she feared might undermine her child’s life.
Mary went into the barn, stopped a moment, and took out a handful of corn to throw to her hens, who had a habit of running towards her and cocking an expectant eye to her little hand whenever she appeared. All came at once flying towards her, – speckled, white, and gleamy with hues between of tawny orange-gold, – the cocks, magnificent with the blade-like waving of their tails, – and, as they chattered and cackled and pressed and crowded about her, pecking the corn even where it lodged in the edge of her little shoes, she said, ‘Poor things, I am glad they enjoy it!’ – and even this one little act of love to the ignorant fellowship below her carried away some of the choking pain which seemed all the while suffocating her heart. Then, climbing into the hay, she sought the nest and filled her little basket with eggs, warm, translucent, pinky-white in their freshness. She felt, for a moment, the customary animation in surveying her new treasures; but suddenly, like a vision rising before her, came a remembrance of once when she and James were children together and had been seeking eggs just there. He flashed before her eyes, the bright boy with the long black lashes, the dimpled cheeks, the merry eyes, just as he stood and threw the hay over her when they tumbled and laughed together, – and she sat down with a sick faintness, and then turned and walked wearily in.
CHAPTER XXII
Mary returned to the house with her basket of warm, fresh eggs, which she set down mournfully upon the table. In her heart there was one conscious want and yearning, and that was to go to the friends of him she had lost – to go to his mother. The first impulse of bereavement is to stretch out the hands towards what was nearest and dearest to the departed.
Her dove came fluttering down out of the tree and settled on her hand, and began asking in his dumb way to be noticed. Mary stroked his white feathers, and bent her head down over them till they were wet with tears. ‘Oh, birdie, you live, but he is gone!’ she said. Then suddenly putting it gently from her, and going near and throwing her arms around her mother’s neck, – ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I want to go up to Cousin Ellen’s.’ (This was the familiar name by which she always called Mrs. Marvyn.) ‘Can’t you go with me, mother?’
‘My daughter, I have thought of it. I hurried about my baking this morning, and sent word to Mr. Jenkyns that he needn’t come to see about the chimney, because I expected to go as soon as breakfast should be out of the way. So hurry, now, boil some eggs, and get on the cold beef and potatoes, for I see Solomon and Amaziah coming in with the milk. They’ll want their breakfast immediately.’
The breakfast for the hired men was soon arranged on the table, and Mary sat down to preside while her mother was going on with her baking, introducing various loaves of white and brown bread into the capacious oven by means of a long iron shovel, and discoursing at intervals with Solomon with regard to the different farming operations which he had in hand for the day.
Solomon was a tall, large-boned man, brawny and angular, with a face tanned by the sun, and graven with those considerate lines which New England so early writes on the faces of her sons. He was reputed an oracle in matters of agriculture and cattle, and, like oracles generally, was prudently sparing of his responses. Amaziah was one of those uncouth over-grown boys of eighteen, whose physical bulk appears to have so suddenly developed that the soul has more matter than she has learned to recognize, so that the hapless individual is always awkwardly conscious of too much limb; and in Amaziah’s case this consciousness grew particularly distressing when Mary was in the room. He liked to have her there, he said, ‘but somehow she was so white and pretty, she made him feel sort o’ awful-like.’
Of course, as such poor mortals always do, he must, on this particular morning, blunder into precisely the wrong subject.
‘S’pose you’ve heerd the news that Jeduthan Pettibone brought home in the “Flying Scud,” ’bout the wreck o’ the “Monsoon;” it’s an awful providence, that ’ar’ is – a’n’t it? Why Jeduthan says she jest crushed like an egg-shell’ – and with that Amaziah illustrated the fact by crushing an egg-shell in his great brown hand.
Mary did not answer. She could not grow any paler than she was before; a dreadful curiosity came over her, but her lips could frame no question. Amaziah went on:
‘Ye see, the cap’en he got killed with a spar when the blow fust come on, and Jim Marvyn he commanded; and Jeduthan says that he seemed to have the spirit of ten men in him. He worked, and he watched, and he was everywhere at once, and he kep’ ’em all up for three days, till finally they lost their rudder, and went drivin’ right onto the rocks. When they come in sight, he come up on deck, and says he, “Well, my boys, we’re headin’ right into eternity,” says he, “and our chances for this world a’n’t worth mentionin’, any on us; but we’ll all have one try for our lives. Boys, I’ve tried to do my duty by you and the ship – but God’s will be done! All I have to ask now is, that if any of you git to shore, you’ll find my mother and tell her I died thinkin’ of her and father and my dear friends.” That was the last Jeduthan saw of him, for in a few minutes more the ship struck, and then it was every man for himself. Laws! Jeduthan says there couldn’t nobody have stood beatin’ agin them rocks unless they was all leather and inger-rubber like him. Why, he says the waves would take strong men and jest crush ’em against the rocks like smashin’ a pie-plate!’
Here Mary’s paleness became livid; she made a hasty motion to rise from the table, and Solomon trod on the foot of the narrator.
‘You seem to forget that friends and relations has feelin’s,’ he said, as Mary hastily went into her own room.
Amaziah, suddenly awakened to the fact that he had been trespassing, sat with mouth half open and a stupefied look of perplexity on his face for a moment, and then, rising hastily, said: ‘Well, Sol, I guess I’ll go an’ yoke up the steers.’
At eight o’clock all the morning toils were over, the wide kitchen cool and still, and the one-horse waggon standing at the door, into which climbed Mary, her mother, and the Doctor, for, though invested with no spiritual authority, and charged with no ritual or form for hours of affliction, the religion of New England always expects her minister as a first visitor in every house of mourning.
The ride was a sorrowful and silent one. The Doctor, propped upon his cane, seemed to reflect deeply.
‘Have you been at all conversant with the exercises of our young friend’s mind on the subject of religion?’ he asked.
Mrs. Scudder did not at first reply. The remembrance of James’s last letter flashed over her mind, and she felt the vibration of the frail child beside her, in whom every nerve was quivering. After a moment she said: ‘It does not become us to judge the spiritual state of any one. James’s mind was in an unsettled way when he left; but who can say what wonders may have been effected by Divine grace since then?’
This conversation fell on the soul of Mary like the sound of clods falling on a coffin to the ear of one buried alive; she heard it with a dull, smothering sense of suffocation. That question to be raised! – and about one, too, for whom she could have given her own soul! At this moment she felt how idle is the mere hope or promise of personal salvation made to one who has passed beyond the life of self, and struck deep the roots of his existence in others. She did not utter a word – how could she? A doubt – the faintest shadow of a doubt – in such a case, falls on the soul with the weight of mountain certainty, and in that short ride she felt what an infinite pain may be locked in one small, silent breast.
The waggon drew up to the house of mourning. Cato stood at the gate, and came forward, officiously, to help them out. ‘Mass’r and Missis will be glad to see you,’ he said. ‘It’s a drefful stroke has come upon ’em.’
Candace appeared at the door. There was a majesty of sorrow in her bearing as she received them. She said not a word, but pointed with her finger towards the inner room; but as Mary lifted up her faded, weary face to hers, her whole soul seemed to heave towards her like a billow, and she took her up in her arms and broke forth into sobbing, and, carrying her in, as if she had been a child, set her down in the inner room and sat down beside her.
Mrs. Marvyn and her husband sat together, holding each other’s hands, the open Bible between them. For a few moments nothing was to be heard but sobs and unrestrained weeping, and then all kneeled down while the Doctor prayed.
After they rose up, Mr. Zebedee Marvyn stood for a moment thoughtfully, and then said: ‘If it had pleased the Lord to give me a sure evidence of my son’s salvation, I could have given him up with all my heart; but now, whatever there may be, I have seen none.’ He stood in an attitude of hopeless, heart-smitten dejection, which contrasted painfully with his usual upright carriage and the firm lines of his face.
Mrs. Marvyn started as if a sword had pierced her, passed her arm round Mary’s waist, with a strong, nervous clasp, unlike her usual calm self, and said, ‘Stay with me, daughter, to-day! – stay with me!’
‘Mary can stay as long as you wish, cousin,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘we have nothing to call her home.’
‘Come with me!’ said Mrs. Marvyn to Mary, opening an adjoining door into her bedroom, and drawing her in with a sort of suppressed vehemence, ‘I want you! – I must have you!’
‘Mrs. Marvyn’s state alarms me,’ said her husband, looking apprehensively after her when the door was closed; ‘she has not shed any tears nor slept any since she heard this news. You know that her mind has been in a peculiar and unhappy state with regard to religious things for many years. I was in hopes she might feel free to open her exercises of mind to the Doctor.’
‘Perhaps she will feel more freedom with Mary,’ said the Doctor. ‘There is no healing for such troubles except in unconditional submission to Infinite Wisdom and Goodness. The Lord reigneth, and will at last bring infinite good out of evil, whether our small portion of existence be included or not.’
After a few moments more of conference, Mrs. Scudder and the Doctor departed, leaving Mary alone in the house of mourning.
CHAPTER XXIII
We have said before, what we now repeat, that it is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for superficial thought or shallow feeling. They who would fully understand the springs which moved the characters with whom we now associate must go down with us to the very depths.
Never was there a community where the roots of common life shot down so deeply, and were so intensely grappled around things sublime and eternal. The founders of it were a body of confessors and martyrs, who turned their backs on the whole glory of the visible to found in the wilderness a republic of which the God of heaven and earth should be the sovereign power. For the first hundred years grew this community, shut out by a fathomless ocean from the existing world, and divided by an antagonism not less deep from all the reigning ideas of nominal Christendom.
In a community thus unworldly must have arisen a mode of thought, energetic, original, and sublime. The leaders of thought and feeling were the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle of the early ministry of New England was one to which the world gives no parallel. Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling the earth with their own hands, they yet carried on the most startling and original religious investigations with a simplicity that might have been deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All old issues relating to government, religion, ritual, and forms of church organization having for them passed away, they went straight to the heart of things, and boldly confronted the problem of universal being. They had come out from the world as witnesses to the most solemn and sacred of human rights. They had accustomed themselves boldly to challenge and dispute all sham pretensions and idolatries of past ages – to question the right of kings in the State and of prelates in the Church; and now they turned the same bold inquiries towards the Eternal Throne, and threw down their glove in the lists as authorized defenders of every mystery in the Eternal Government. The task they proposed to themselves was that of reconciling the most tremendous facts of sin and evil, present and eternal, with those conceptions of Infinite Power and Benevolence which their own strong and generous natures enabled them so vividly to realize. In the intervals of planting and harvesting they were busy with the toils of adjusting the laws of a universe. Solemnly simple, they made long journeys in their old one-horse chaises to settle with each other some nice point of celestial jurisprudence, and to compare their maps of the Infinite. Their letters to each other form a literature altogether unique. Hopkins sends to Edwards the younger his scheme of the universe, in which he starts with the proposition that God is infinitely above all obligations of any kind to his creatures. Edwards replies with the brusque comment: – ‘This is wrong; God has no more right to injure a creature than a creature has to injure God;’ and each probably about that time preached a sermon on his own views, which was discussed by every farmer, in intervals of plough and hoe, by every woman and girl, at loom, spinning-wheel, or wash-tub. New England was one vast sea, surging from depths to heights with thought and discussion on the most insoluble of mysteries. And it is to be added that no man or woman accepted any theory or speculation simply as theory or speculation; all was profoundly real and vital – a foundation on which actual life was based with intensest earnestness.