The Minister's Wooing
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Mary’s enchanted eye followed the beautiful narrator, as she enacted before her this poetry and tragedy of real life, so much beyond what dramatic art can ever furnish. Her eyes grew splendid in their depths and brilliancy; sometimes they were full of tears, and sometimes they flashed out like lightnings; her whole form seemed to be a plastic vehicle which translated every emotion of her soul; and Mary sat and looked at her with the intense absorption that one gives to the highest and deepest in art or nature.
‘Enfin – que faire?’ she said at last, suddenly stopping, and drooping in every limb. ‘Mary, I have lived on this dream so long – never thought of anything else – now all is gone, and what shall I do? I think,’ she added, pointing to the nest in the tree, ‘Mary, I see my life in many things. My heart was once still and quiet, like the round little eggs that were in your nest, – now it has broken out of its shell, and cries with cold and hunger: I want my dream again, – I wish it all back, – or that my heart could go back into its shell. If I only could drop this year out of my life, and care for nothing, as I used to, – I have tried to do that – I can’t – I cannot get back where I was before.’
‘Would you do it, dear Verginie,’ said Mary; ‘would you if you could?’
‘It was very noble and sweet, all that,’ said Verginie; ‘it gave me higher thoughts than ever I had before. I think my feelings were beautiful, – but now they are like little birds that have no mother – they kill me with their crying.’
‘Dear Verginie, there is a real friend in heaven, who is all you can ask or think, – nobler, better, purer, who cannot change, and cannot die, and who loved you and gave himself for you.’
‘You mean Jesus,’ said Verginie. ‘Ah, I know it; and I say the offices to him daily, but my heart is very wild and starts away from my words. I say, “My God, I give myself to you,” – and after all, I don’t give myself, and I don’t feel comforted. Dear Mary, you must have suffered too – for you loved really – I saw it, – when we feel a thing ourselves we can see very quick the same in others, – and it was a dreadful blow to come so all at once.’
‘Yes it was,’ said Mary; ‘I thought I must die; but Christ has given me peace.’
These words were spoken with that long-breathed sigh with which we always speak of peace, – a sigh that told of storms and sorrows past, – the sighing of the wave that falls spent and broken on the shores of eternal rest. There was a little pause in the conversation, and then Verginie raised her head and spoke in a sprightlier tone.
‘Well, my little fairy cat, – my white doe, – I have come to you. Poor Verginie wants something to hold to her heart; let me have you,’ she said, throwing her arms round Mary.
‘Dear, dear Verginie, indeed you shall,’ said Mary; ‘I will love you dearly, and pray for you. I always have prayed for you ever since the first day I knew you.’
‘I knew it, – I felt your prayers in my heart. Mary, I have many thoughts that I dare not tell to any one, lately, – but I cannot help feeling that some are real Christians who are not in the true Church. You are as true a saint as Saint Catharine; indeed, I always think of you when I think of our dear lady; and yet they say there is no salvation out of the Church.’
This was a new view of the subject to Mary, who had grown up with the familiar idea that the Romish Church was Babylon and anti-Christ, and who had during the conversation been revolving the same surmises with regard to her friend. She turned her grave, blue eyes on Madame de Frontignac, with a somewhat surprised look, which melted into a half-smile. But the latter still went on with a puzzled air, as if trying to talk herself out of some mental perplexity. ‘Now, Burr is a heretic, – and more than that, he is an infidel, – he has no religion in his heart, I saw that often, – it made me tremble for him. It ought to have put me on my guard, – but you, dear Mary, you love Jesus as your life. I think you love Him just as much as sister Agatha, who was a saint. The Abbé says that there is nothing so dangerous as to begin to use our reason in religion, – that if we once begin we never know where it may carry us; but I can’t help using mine a very little. I must think there are some saints that are not in the true Church.’
‘All are one who love Christ,’ said Mary; ‘we are one in Him.’
‘I should not dare to tell the Abbé,’ said Madame de Frontignac; and Mary queried in her heart whether Dr. Hopkins would feel satisfied that she could bring this wanderer to the fold of Christ, without undertaking to batter down the walls of her creed; and yet, there they were, the Catholic and the Puritan, each strong in her respective faith, yet melting together in that embrace of love and sorrow, joined in the great communion of suffering. Mary took up her Testament, and read the fourteenth of John: —
‘Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me; in my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; I go to prepare a place for you; and if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there you may be also.’
Mary read on through the chapter, through the next wonderful prayer; her face grew solemnly transparent, as of an angel; for her soul was lifted from earth by the words, and walked with Christ far above all things, over that starry pavement where each footstep is on a world.
The greatest moral effects are like those of music, not wrought out by sharp-sided intellectual propositions, but melted in by a divine fusion, by words that have mysterious indefinite fulness of meaning, made living by sweet voices, which seem to be the out-throbbings of angelic hearts; so one verse in the Bible read by a mother in some hour of tender prayer has a significance deeper and higher than the most elaborate of sermons, the most acute of arguments.
Verginie Frontignac sat as one divinely enchanted, while that sweet voice read on; and when the silence fell between them she gave a long sigh as we do when sweet music stops. They heard between them the soft stir of summer leaves, the distant songs of birds, the breezy hum when some afternoon wind shivered through many branches, and the silver sea chimed in; Verginie rose at last, and kissed Mary on the forehead. ‘That is a beautiful book,’ she said, ‘and to read it all by one’s self must be lovely; I cannot understand why it should be dangerous; it has not injured you.
‘Sweet saint,’ she added, ‘let me stay with you; you shall read to me every day; do you know I came here to get you to take me; I want you to show me how to find peace where you do; will you let me be your sister?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Mary, with a cheek brighter than it had been for many a day; her heart feeling a throb of more real human pleasure than for long months.
‘Will you get your mamma to let me stay?’ said Verginie, with the bashfulness of a child; ‘haven’t you a little place like yours, with white curtains, and sanded floor, to give to poor little Verginie to learn to be good in?’
‘Why, do you really want to stay here with us,’ said Mary, ‘in this little house?’
‘Do I really?’ said Virginie, mimicking her voice with a start of her old playfulness; ‘don’t I really? Come now, mimi, coax the good mamma for me, tell her I shall try to be very good. I shall help you with the spinning; you know I spin beautifully, – and I shall make butter, and milk the cow, and set the tables. Oh, I will be so useful, you can’t spare me!’
‘I should love to have you dearly,’ said Mary, warmly; ‘but you would soon be dull for want of society here.’
‘Quelle idée! ma petite drole,’ said the lady, who with the mobility of her nation had already recovered some of the saucy mocking grace that was habitual to her, as she began teasing Mary with a thousand little childish motions. ‘Indeed, mimi, you must keep me hid up here, or may be the wolf will find me and eat me up; who knows?’ Mary looked at her with inquiring eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Mary, – I mean that when he comes back to Philadelphia he thinks he will find me there; he thought I should stay while my husband was gone; and when he finds I am gone he may come to Newport; and I never want to see him again without you; you must let me stay with you.’
‘Have you told him,’ said Mary, ‘what you think?’
‘I wrote to him, Mary, but oh, I can’t trust my heart! I want so much to believe him; it kills me so to think evil of him that it will never do for me to see him. If he looks at me with those eyes of his I am all gone; I shall believe anything he tells me; he will draw me to him as a great magnet draws a poor little grain of steel.’
‘But now you know his unworthiness, his baseness,’ said Mary, ‘I should think it would break all his power.’
‘Should you think so? Ah, Mary, we cannot unlove in a minute; love is a great while dying. I do not worship him now as I did. I know what he is. I know he is bad, and I am sorry for it. I would like to cover it from all the world, even from you, Mary, since I see it makes you dislike him; it hurts me to hear any one else blame him; but sometimes I do so long to think I am mistaken, that I know if I should see him I should catch at anything he might tell me, as a drowning man at straws; I should shut my eyes and think after all that it was all my fault, and ask a thousand pardons for all the evil he has done. No. Mary, you must keep your blue eyes upon me, or I shall be gone.’
At this moment Mrs. Scudder’s voice was heard, calling Mary below.
‘Go down now, darling, and tell mamma; make a good little talk to her, ma reine; ah, you are queen here; all do as you say, even the good priest there; you have a little hand, but it leads all; so go, petite.’
Mrs. Scudder was somewhat flurried and discomposed at the proposition; there were the pros and the cons in her nature, such as we all have.
In the first place, Madame de Frontignac belonged to high society, and that was pro; for Mrs. Scudder prayed daily against worldly vanities, because she felt a little traitor in her heart that was ready to open its door to them if not constantly talked down. In the second place, Madame de Frontignac was French, there was a con; for Mrs. Scudder had enough of her father John Bull in her heart to have a very wary look-out on anything French. But then, in the third place, she was out of health and unhappy, and there was a pro again; for Mrs. Scudder was as kind and motherly a soul as ever breathed. But then she was a Catholic, con. But the Doctor and Mary might convert her, pro. And then Mary wanted her, pro. And she was a pretty, bewitching, loveable creature, pro. The pros had it; and it was agreed that Madame de Frontignac should be installed as proprietress of the spare chamber, and she sat down to the tea-table that evening in the great kitchen.
CHAPTER XXVI
The domesticating of Madame de Frontignac as an inmate of the cottage, added a new element of vivacity to that still and unvaried life. One of the most beautiful traits of French nature is that fine gift of appreciation, which seizes at once the picturesque side of every condition of life, and finds in its own varied storehouse something to assort with it. As compared with the Anglo-Saxon, the French appear to be gifted with a naïve childhood of nature, and to have the power that children have of gilding every scene of life with some of their own poetic fancies.
Madame de Frontignac was in raptures with the sanded floor of her little room, which commanded, through the apple-boughs, a little morsel of a sea-view. She could fancy it was a nymph’s cave, she said.
‘Yes, ma Marie, I will play Calypso, and you shall play Telemachus, and Dr. Hopkins shall be Mentor. Mentor was so very, very good, only a little bit —dull,’ she said, pronouncing the last word with a wicked accent, and lifting her hands with a whimsical gesture like a naughty child who expects a correction.
Mary could not but laugh; and as she laughed more colour rose in her waxen cheeks than for many days before.
Madame de Frontignac looked triumphant as a child who has made its mother laugh, and went on laying things out of her trunk into her drawers with a zeal that was quite amusing to see.
‘You see, ma blanche, I have left all Madame’s clothes at Philadelphia, and brought only those that belong to Verginie, – no tromperie, no feathers, no gauzes, no diamonds, only white dresses and my straw hat en bergère. I brought one string of pearls that was my mother’s; but pearls, you know, belong to the sea-nymphs. I will trim my hat with sea-weed and buttercups together, and we will go out on the beach to-night and get some gold and silver shells to dress ma miroir.’
‘Oh, I have ever so many now,’ said Mary, running into her room, and coming back with a little bag. They both sat on the bed together, and began pouring them out, Madame de Frontignac showering childish exclamations of delight.
Suddenly Mary put her hand to her heart as if she had been struck with something; and Madame de Frontignac heard her say, in a low voice of sudden pain, ‘Oh, dear!’
‘What is it, mimi?’ she said, looking up quickly.
‘Nothing,’ said Mary, turning her head. Madame de Frontignac looked down, and saw among the sea-treasures a necklace of Venetian shells that she knew never grew on the shores of Newport. She held it up.
‘Ah, I see,’ she said. ‘He gave you this. Ah, ma pauvrette,’ she said, clasping Mary in her arms, ‘thy sorrow meets thee everywhere. May I be a comfort to thee, just a little one.’
‘Dear, dear friend,’ said Mary, weeping. ‘I know not how it is. Sometimes I think this sorrow is all gone; but then, for a moment, it comes back again. But I am at peace; it is all right, all right; I would not have it otherwise. But oh, if he could have spoken one word to me before! He gave me this,’ she added, ‘when he came home from his first voyage to the Mediterranean. I did not know it was in this bag. I had looked for it everywhere.’
‘Sister Agatha would have told you to make a rosary of it,’ said Madame de Frontignac; ‘but you pray without a rosary. It is all one,’ she added; ‘there will be a prayer for every shell, though you do not count them. But come, ma chère, get your bonnet, and let us go out on the beach.’
That evening, before retiring, Mrs. Scudder came into Mary’s room. Her manner was grave and tender, her eyes had tears in them; and although her usual habits were not caressing, she came to Mary and put her arms around and kissed her. It was an unusual manner, and Mary’s gentle eyes seemed to ask the reason of it.
‘My daughter,’ said her mother, ‘I have just had a long and very interesting talk with our dear good friend, the Doctor; ah, Mary, very few people know how good he is.’
‘True, mother,’ said Mary, warmly; ‘he is the best, the noblest, and yet the humblest man in the world.’
‘You love him very much, do you not?’ said her mother.
‘Very dearly,’ said Mary.
‘Mary, he has asked me this evening if you would be willing to be his wife.’
‘His wife, mother?’ said Mary in the tone of one confused with a new and strange thought.
‘Yes, daughter; I have long seen that he was preparing to make you this proposal.’
‘You have, mother?’
‘Yes, daughter; have you never thought of it?’
‘Never, mother.’
There was a long pause, Mary standing just as she had been interrupted in her night toilette, with her long, light hair streaming down over her white dress, and the comb held mechanically in her hand. She sat down after a moment, and clasping both hands over her knees, fixed her eyes intently on the floor; and there fell between the two a silence so intense, that the tickings of the clock in the next room seemed to knock upon the door. Mrs. Scudder sat with anxious eyes watching that silent face, pale as sculptured marble.
‘Well, Mary,’ she said at last.
A deep sigh was the only answer. The violent throbbings of her heart could be seen undulating the long hair as the moaning sea tosses the rockweed.
‘My daughter!’ again said Mrs. Scudder.
Mary gave a great sigh, like that of a sleeper awakening from a dream, and looking on her mother, said: ‘Do you suppose he really loves me, mother?’
‘Indeed he does, Mary, as much as man ever loved woman.’
‘Does he indeed?’ said Mary, relapsing into thoughtfulness.
‘And you love him, do you not?’ said her mother.
‘Oh yes, I love him!’
‘You love him better than any man in the world, don’t you?’
‘Oh, mother, mother! yes!’ said Mary, throwing herself passionately forward, and bursting into sobs; ‘yes, there is no one else now that I love better, – no one, – no one!’
‘My darling, my daughter!’ said Mrs. Scudder, coming and taking her in her arms.
‘Oh, mother, mother!’ she said, sobbing distressfully, ‘let me cry, just for a little, – oh, mother, mother, mother!’
What was there hidden under that despairing wail? – it was the parting of the last strand of the cord of youthful hope.
Mrs. Scudder soothed and caressed her daughter, but maintained still in her breast a tender pertinacity of purpose, such as mothers will, who think they are conducting a child through some natural sorrow into a happier state.
Mary was not one either to yield long to emotion of any kind. Her rigid education had taught her to look upon all such outbursts as a species of weakness, and she struggled for composure, and soon seemed entirely calm.
‘If he really loves me, mother, it would give him great pain if I refuse,’ said Mary, thoughtfully.
‘Certainly it would; and, Mary, you have allowed him to act as a very near friend for a long time; and it is quite natural that he should have hopes that you loved him.’
‘I do love him, mother, – better than anybody in the world except you. Do you think that will do?’
‘Will do?’ said her mother; ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Why, is that loving enough to marry? I shall love him more perhaps after, shall I, mother?’
‘Certainly you will; every one does.’
‘I wish he did not want to marry me, mother,’ said Mary, after a pause. ‘I liked it a great deal better as we were before.’
‘All girls feel so, Mary, at first; it is very natural.’
‘Is that the way you felt about father, mother?’
Mrs. Scudder’s heart smote her when she thought of her own early love, – that great love that asked no questions; that had no doubts, no fears, no hesitations; nothing but one great, outsweeping impulse, which swallowed her life in that of another. She was silent; and after a moment, she said, ‘I was of a different disposition from you, Mary. I was of a strong, wilful, positive nature. I either liked or disliked with all my might; and besides, Mary, there never was a man like your father.’
The matron uttered this first article in the great confession of woman’s faith with the most unconscious simplicity.
‘Well, mother, I will do whatever is my duty. I want to be guided. If I can make that good man happy, and help him to do some good in the world, – After all, life is short, and the great thing is to do for others.’
‘I am sure, Mary, if you could have heard how he spoke, you would be sure you could make him happy. He had not spoken before, because he felt so unworthy of such a blessing: he said I was to tell you that he should love and honour you all the same, whether you could feel to be his wife or not; but that nothing this side of heaven would be so blessed a gift; that it would make up for every trial that could possibly come upon him, – and you know, Mary, he has a great many discouragements and trials; – people don’t appreciate him; his efforts to do good are misunderstood, and misconstrued; they look down on him, and despise him, and tell all sorts of evil things about him; and sometimes he gets quite discouraged.’
‘Yes, mother, I will marry him,’ said Mary. ‘Yes, I will.’
‘My darling daughter,’ said Mrs. Scudder, ‘this has been the hope of my life.’
‘Has it, mother?’ said Mary, with a faint smile; ‘I shall make you happier then?’
‘Yes, dear, you will; and think what a prospect of usefulness opens before you; you can take a position as his wife which will enable you to do even more good than you do now; and you will have the happiness of seeing every day how much you comfort the hearts and encourage the hands of God’s dear people.’
‘Mother, I ought to be very glad I can do it,’ said Mary; ‘and I trust I am. God orders all things for the best.’
‘Well, my child, sleep to-night, and to-morrow we will talk more about it.’
CHAPTER XXVII
Mrs. Scudder kissed her daughter, and left her. After a moment’s thought, Mary gathered the long silky folds of hair around her head, and knotted them for the night. Then leaning forward on her toilet-table, she folded her hands together, and stood regarding the reflection of herself in the mirror.
Nothing is capable of more ghostly effect than such a silent, lonely contemplation of that mysterious image of ourselves which seems to look out of an infinite depth in the mirror, as if it were our own soul beckoning to us visibly from unknown regions. Those eyes look into our own with an expression sometimes vaguely sad and inquiring. The face wears weird and tremulous lights and shadows; it asks us mysterious questions, and troubles us with the suggestions of our relations to some dim unknown. The sad, blue eyes that gazed into Mary’s had that look of calm initiation, of melancholy comprehension, peculiar to eyes made clairvoyant by ‘great and critical’ sorrow. They seemed to say to her, ‘Fulfil thy mission; life is made for sacrifice; the flower must fall before fruit can perfect itself.’ A vague shuddering of mystery gave intensity to her reverie. It seemed as if those mirror depths were another world; she heard the far-off dashing of sea-green waves; she felt a yearning impulse towards that dear soul gone out into the infinite unknown.
Her word just passed had in her eyes all the sacred force of the most solemnly-attested vow; and she felt as if that vow had shut some before open door between her and him; and she had a kind of shadowy sense of a throbbing and yearning nature that seemed to call on her, – that seemed surging towards her with an imperative, protesting force that shook her heart to its depths.
Perhaps it is so, that souls once intimately related have ever after this strange power of affecting each other, – a power that neither absence nor death can annul. How else can we interpret these mysterious hours, in which the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal band? Is it not deep calling unto deep? the free soul singing outside the cage to her mate, beating against the bars within?
Mary even for a moment fancied that a voice called her name, and started, shivering. Then the habits of her positive and sensible education returned at once, and she came out of her reverie as one breaks from a dream, and lifted all these sad thoughts with one heavy sigh from her breast; and opening her Bible, she read: ‘They that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion that cannot be moved. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is about His people from this time henceforth and for evermore.’
Then she kneeled by her bedside, and offered her whole life a sacrifice to the loving God who had offered His life a sacrifice for her. She prayed for grace to be true to her promise – to be faithful to the new relation she had accepted. She prayed that all vain regrets for the past might be taken away, and that her soul might vibrate without discord in unison with the will of Eternal Love. So praying, she rose calm, and with that clearness of spirit which follows an act of uttermost self-sacrifice; and so calmly she lay down and slept, with her two hands crossed upon her breast, her head slightly turned on the pillow, her cheek pale as marble, and her long dark lashes lying drooping, with a sweet expression, as if under that mystic veil of sleep the soul were seeing things forbidden to the waking eye. Only the gentlest heaving of the quiet breast told that the heavenly spirit within had not gone where it was hourly aspiring to go.