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The Minister's Wooing

by Harriet Beecher Stowe · English · Gutenberg #47958 · 748,676 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Minister's Wooing

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Illustrator: Hablot Knight Browne


        
Release date: January 13, 2015 [eBook #47958]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MINISTER'S WOOING ***

[Illustration: _Frontispiece_

_C.XXV.P.233._

Sampson Low, Son & Co. Septr. 20th. 1859.]




THE MINISTER’S WOOING.

    BY H. BEECHER STOWE,
    AUTHOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN,” “SUNNY MEMORIES,” ETC.


    WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY PHIZ.


    LONDON:
    SAMPSON LOW, SON, & CO., 47 LUDGATE HILL.
    1859.

    [_The Author reserves the right of translation._]


    LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.




INTRODUCTION.


The author has endeavoured in this story to paint a style of life
and manners which existed in New England in the earlier days of her
national existence.

Some of the principal characters are historic: the leading events of
the story are founded on actual facts, although the author has taken
the liberty to arrange and vary them for the purposes of the story.

The author has executed the work with a reverential tenderness for
those great and religious minds who laid in New England the foundations
of many generations, and for those institutions and habits of life from
which, as from a fruitful germ, sprang all the present prosperity of
America.

Such as it is, it is commended to the kindly thoughts of that British
fireside from which the fathers and mothers of America first went out
to give to English ideas and institutions a new growth in a new world.

                                                     H. B. STOWE.

    _18 Montague Street, Russell Square,
    August 25, 1859._




THE MINISTER’S WOOING.




CHAPTER I.


MRS. KATY SCUDDER had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, and Deacon
Twitchel’s wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second,
A. D. 17—.

When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled which end of it
to begin at. You have a whole corps of people to introduce that _you_
know and your reader doesn’t; and one thing so presupposes another,
that, whichever way you turn your patchwork, the figures still seem
ill-arranged. The small item that I have given will do as well as any
other to begin with, as it certainly will lead you to ask, ‘Pray, who
was Mrs. Katy Scudder?’—and this will start me systematically on my
story.

You must understand that in the then small seaport-town of Newport,
at that time unconscious of its present fashion and fame, there lived
nobody in those days who did not know ‘the Widow Scudder.’

In New England settlements a custom has obtained, which is wholesome
and touching, of ennobling the woman whom God has made desolate, by
a sort of brevet rank which continually speaks for her as a claim on
the respect and consideration of the community. The Widow Jones, or
Brown, or Smith, is one of the fixed institutions of every New England
village,—and doubtless the designation acts as a continual plea for one
whom bereavement, like the lightning of heaven, has made sacred.

The Widow Scudder, however, was one of the sort of women who reign
queens in whatever society they move in; nobody was more quoted, more
deferred to, or enjoyed more unquestioned position than she. She was
not rich,—a small farm, with a modest, ‘gambrel-roofed,’ one-story
cottage, was her sole domain; but she was one of the much-admired class
who, in the speech of New England, are said to have ‘faculty,’—a gift
which, among that shrewd people, commands more esteem than beauty,
riches, learning, or any other worldly endowment. _Faculty_ is Yankee
for _savoir faire_, and the opposite virtue to shiftlessness. Faculty
is the greatest virtue, and shiftlessness the greatest vice, of Yankee
man and woman. To her who has faculty nothing shall be impossible. She
shall scrub floors, wash, wring, bake, brew, and yet her hands shall
be small and white; she shall have no perceptible income, yet always
be handsomely dressed; she shall not have a servant in her house,—with
a dairy to manage, hired men to feed, a boarder or two to care for,
unheard-of pickling and preserving to do,—and yet you commonly see
her every afternoon sitting at her shady parlour-window behind the
lilacs, cool and easy, hemming muslin cap-strings, or reading the last
new book. She who hath faculty is never in a hurry, never behindhand.
She can always step over to distressed Mrs. Smith, whose jelly won’t
come,—and stop to show Mrs. Jones how she makes her pickles so
green,—and be ready to watch with poor old Mrs. Simpkins, who is down
with the rheumatism.

Of this genus was the Widow Scudder,—or, as the neighbours would have
said of her, she that _was_ Katy Stephens. Katy was the only daughter
of a shipmaster, sailing from Newport harbour, who was wrecked off the
coast one cold December night, and left small fortune to his widow
and only child. Katy grew up, however, a tall, straight, black-eyed
girl, with eyebrows drawn true as a bow, a foot arched like a Spanish
woman’s, and a little hand which never saw the thing it could not
do,—quick of speech, ready of wit, and, as such girls have a right to
be, somewhat positive withal. Katy could harness a chaise, or row a
boat; she could saddle and ride any horse in the neighbourhood; she
could cut any garment that ever was seen or thought of; make cake,
jelly, and wine, from her earliest years, in most precocious style; all
without seeming to derange a sort of trim, well-kept air of ladyhood
that sat jauntily on her.

Of course, being young and lively, she had her admirers, and some
well-to-do in worldly affairs laid their lands and houses at Katy’s
feet; but, to the wonder of all, she would not even pick them up to
look at them. People shook their heads, and wondered whom Katy Stephens
expected to get, and talked about going through the wood to pick up a
crooked stick,—till one day she astonished her world by marrying a man
that nobody ever thought of her taking.

George Scudder was a grave, thoughtful young man,—not given to talking,
and silent in the society of women, with that kind of reverential
bashfulness which sometimes shows a pure, unworldly nature. How Katy
came to fancy him everybody wondered,—for he never talked to her, never
so much as picked up her glove when it fell, never asked her to ride
or sail; in short, everybody said she must have wanted him from sheer
wilfulness, because he of all the young men of the neighbourhood never
courted her. But Katy, having very sharp eyes, saw some things that
nobody else saw. For example, you must know she discovered by mere
accident that George Scudder always was looking at her, wherever she
moved, though he looked away in a moment if discovered,—and that an
accidental touch of her hand or brush of her dress would send the blood
into his cheek like the spirit in the tube of a thermometer; and so, as
women are curious, you know, Katy amused herself with investigating the
causes of these little phenomena, and, before she knew it, got her foot
caught in a cobweb that held her fast, and constrained her, whether she
would or no, to marry a poor man that nobody cared much for but herself.

George was, in truth, one of the sort who evidently have made some
mistake in coming into this world at all, as their internal furniture
is in no way suited to its general courses and currents. He was of the
order of dumb poets,—most wretched when put to the grind of the hard
and actual; for if he who would utter poetry stretches out his hand to
a gainsaying world, he is worse off still who is possessed with the
desire of living it. Especially is this the case if he be born poor,
and with a dire necessity upon him of making immediate efforts in the
hard and actual. George had a helpless invalid mother to support; so,
though he loved reading and silent thought above all things, he put
to instant use the only convertible worldly talent he possessed, which
was a mechanical genius, and shipped at sixteen as a ship-carpenter. He
studied navigation in the forecastle, and found in its calm diagrams
and tranquil eternal signs food for his thoughtful nature, and a refuge
from the brutality and coarseness of sea life. He had a healthful,
kindly animal nature, and so his inwardness did not ferment and turn
to Byronic sourness and bitterness; nor did he needlessly parade to
everybody in his vicinity the great gulf which lay between him and
them. He was called a good fellow,—only a little lumpish,—and as he was
brave and faithful, he rose in time to be a shipmaster. But when came
the business of making money, the aptitude for accumulating, George
found himself distanced by many a one with not half his general powers.

What shall a man do with a sublime tier of moral faculties, when the
most profitable business out of his port is the slave-trade? So it
was in Newport in those days. George’s first voyage was on a slaver,
and he wished himself dead many a time before it was over,—and ever
after would talk like a man beside himself if the subject was named.
He declared that the gold made in it was distilled from human blood,
from mothers’ tears, from the agonies and dying groans of gasping,
suffocating men and women, and that it would sear and blister the
soul of him that touched it: in short, he talked as whole-souled,
unpractical fellows are apt to talk about what respectable people
sometimes do. Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship,
with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary
institution, by which closely-packed heathens are brought over to enjoy
the light of the gospel.

So, though George was acknowledged to be a good fellow, and honest as
the noon-mark on the kitchen floor, he let slip so many chances of
making money as seriously to compromise his reputation among thriving
folks. He was wastefully generous,—insisted on treating every poor dog
that came in his way, in any foreign port, as a brother,—absolutely
refused to be party in cheating or deceiving the heathen on any
shore, or in skin of any colour,—and also took pains, as far as in
him lay, to spoil any bargains which any of his subordinates founded
on the ignorance or weakness of his fellow-men. So he made voyage
after voyage, and gained only his wages and the reputation among his
employers of an incorruptibly honest fellow.

To be sure, it was said that he carried out books in his ship, and
read and studied, and wrote observations on all the countries he saw,
which Parson Smith told Miss Dolly Persimmon would really do credit to
a printed book; but then they never _were_ printed, or, as Miss Dolly
remarked of them, they never seemed to come to anything—and coming to
anything, as she understood it, meant standing in definite relations to
bread and butter.

George never cared, however, for money. He made enough to keep his
mother comfortable, and that was enough for him, till he fell in love
with Katy Stephens. He looked at her through those glasses which such
men carry in their souls, and she was a mortal woman no longer, but
a transfigured, glorified creature,—an object of awe and wonder. He
was actually afraid of her; her glove, her shoe, her needle, thread,
and thimble, her bonnet-string, everything, in short, she wore or
touched became invested with a mysterious charm. He wondered at the
impudence of men that could walk up and talk to her,—that could ask
her to dance with such an assured air. _Now_ he wished he were rich;
he dreamed impossible chances of his coming home a millionnaire to lay
unknown wealth at Katy’s feet; and when Miss Persimmon, the ambulatory
dressmaker of the neighbourhood, in making up a new black gown for his
mother, recounted how Captain Blatherem had sent Katy Stephens ‘’most
the splendidest India shawl that ever she did see,’ he was ready to
tear his hair at the thought of his poverty. But even in that hour of
temptation he did not repent that he had refused all part and lot in
the ship by which Captain Blatherem’s money was made, for he knew every
timber of it to be seasoned by the groans and saturated with the sweat
of human agony. True love is a natural sacrament; and if ever a young
man thanks God for having saved what is noble and manly in his soul, it
is when he thinks of offering it to the woman he loves. Nevertheless,
the India-shawl story cost him a night’s rest; nor was it till Miss
Persimmon had ascertained, by a private confabulation with Katy’s
mother, that she had indignantly rejected it, and that she treated
the captain ‘real ridiculous,’ that he began to take heart. ‘He ought
not,’ he said, ‘to stand in her way now, when he had nothing to offer.
No, he would leave Katy free to do better, if she could; he would try
his luck, and if, when he came home from the next voyage, Katy was
disengaged, why, then he would lay all at her feet.’

And so George was going to sea with a secret shrine in his soul, at
which he was to burn unsuspected incense.

But, after all, the mortal maiden whom he adored suspected this private
arrangement, and contrived—as women will—to get her own key into the
lock of his secret temple; because, as girls say, ‘she was _determined_
to know what was there.’ So, one night, she met him quite accidentally
on the sea-sands, struck up a little conversation, and begged him in
such a pretty way to bring her a spotted shell from the South Sea, like
the one on his mother’s mantelpiece, and looked so simple and childlike
in saying it, that our young man very imprudently committed himself by
remarking, that, ‘When people had rich friends to bring them all the
world from foreign parts, he never dreamed of her wanting so trivial a
thing.’

Of course Katy ‘didn’t know what he meant,—she hadn’t heard of any
rich friends.’ And then came something about Captain Blatherem; and
Katy tossed her head, and said, ‘If anybody wanted to insult her, they
might talk to her about Captain Blatherem,’—and then followed this,
that, and the other, till finally, as you might expect, out came all
that never was to have been said; and Katy was almost frightened at the
terrible earnestness of the spirit she had evoked. She tried to laugh,
and ended by crying, and saying she hardly knew what; but when she came
to herself in her own room at home, she found on her finger a ring of
African gold that George had put there, which she did not send back
like Captain Blatherem’s presents.

Katy was like many intensely matter-of-fact and practical women, who
have not in themselves a bit of poetry or a particle of ideality,
but who yet worship these qualities in others with the homage which
the Indians paid to the unknown tongue of the first whites. They are
secretly weary of a certain conscious dryness of nature in themselves,
and this weariness predisposes them to idolize the man who brings them
this unknown gift. Naturalists say that every defect of organization
has its compensation, and men of ideal natures find in the favour of
women the equivalent for their disabilities among men.

Do you remember, at Niagara, a little cataract on the American side,
which throws its silver sheeny veil over a cave called the Grot of
Rainbows? Whoever stands on a rock in that grotto sees himself in the
centre of a rainbow-circle, above, below, around. In like manner,
merry, chatty, positive, busy, housewifely Katy saw herself standing in
a rainbow-shrine in her lover’s inner soul, and liked to see herself
so. A woman, by-the-by, must be very insensible who is not moved to
come upon a higher plane of being, herself, by seeing how undoubtingly
she is insphered in the heart of a good and noble man. A good man’s
faith in you, fair lady, if you ever have it, will make you better and
nobler even before you know it.

Katy made an excellent wife: she took home her husband’s old mother,
and nursed her with a dutifulness and energy worthy of all praise, and
made her own keen outward faculties and deft handiness a compensation
for the defects in worldly estate. Nothing would make Katy’s bright
eyes flash quicker than any reflections on her husband’s want of luck
in the material line. ‘She didn’t know whose business it was, if _she_
was satisfied. She hated these sharp, gimlet, gouging sort of men that
would put a screw between body and soul for money. George had that in
him that nobody understood. She would rather be his wife on bread and
water than to take Captain Blatherem’s house, carriages, and horses,
and all,—and she _might_ have had ’em fast enough, dear knows. She was
sick of making money when she saw what sort of men could make it,’—and
so on. All which talk did her infinite credit, because _at bottom_ she
_did_ care, and was naturally as proud and ambitious a little minx as
ever breathed, and was thoroughly grieved at heart at George’s want of
worldly success; but, like a nice little Robin Redbreast, she covered
up the grave of her worldliness with the leaves of true love, and sang
a ‘Who cares for that?’ above it.

Her thrifty management of the money her husband brought her soon
bought a snug little farm, and put up the little brown gambrel-roofed
cottage to which we directed your attention in the first of our story.
Children were born to them, and George found, in short intervals
between voyages, his home an earthly paradise. He was still sailing,
with the fond illusion, in every voyage, of making enough to remain
at home,—when the yellow fever smote him under the line, and the ship
returned to Newport without its captain.

George was a Christian man;—he had been one of the first to attach
himself to the unpopular and unworldly ministry of the celebrated Dr.
H., and to appreciate the sublime ideality and unselfishness of those
teachings which then were awakening new sensations in the theological
mind of New England. Katy, too, had become a professor with her husband
in the same church, and his death, in the midst of life, deepened the
power of her religious impressions. She became absorbed in religion,
after the fashion of New England, where devotion is doctrinal, not
ritual. As she grew older, her energy of character, her vigour and good
judgment, caused her to be regarded as a mother in Israel; the minister
boarded at her house, and it was she who was first to be consulted in
all matters relating to the well-being of the church. No woman could
more manfully breast a long sermon, or bring a more determined faith
to the reception of a difficult doctrine. To say the truth, there lay
at the bottom of her doctrinal system this stable corner-stone,—‘Mr.
Scudder used to believe it,—I will.’ And after all that is said about
independent thought, isn’t the fact that a just and good soul has thus
or thus believed, a more respectable argument than many that often are
adduced? If it be not, more’s the pity,—since two-thirds of the faith
in the world is built on no better foundation.

In time, George’s old mother was gathered to her son, and two sons and
a daughter followed their father to the invisible—one only remaining
of the flock, and she a person with whom you and I, good reader, have
joint concern in the further unfolding of our story.




CHAPTER II.


AS I before remarked, Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited company to tea.
Strictly speaking, it is necessary to begin with the creation of the
world, in order to give a full account of anything. But for popular
use, something less may serve one’s turn, and therefore I shall let
the past chapter suffice to introduce my story, and shall proceed to
arrange my scenery and act my little play on the supposition that you
know enough to understand things and persons.

Being asked to tea in our New England in the year 17— meant something
very different from the same invitation in our more sophisticated days.
In those times, people held to the singular opinion, that the night
was made to sleep in; they inferred it from a general confidence they
had in the wisdom of Mother Nature, supposing that she did not put out
her lights and draw her bed-curtains, and hush all noise in her great
world-house without strongly intending that her children should go to
sleep; and the consequence was, that very soon after sunset, the whole
community very generally set their faces bedward, and the tolling of
the nine-o’clock evening-bell had an awful solemnity in it, sounding
to the full. Good society in New England in those days very generally
took its breakfast at six, its dinner at twelve, and its tea at six.
‘Company tea,’ however, among thrifty, industrious folk, was often
taken an hour earlier, because each of the inviteés had children to
put to bed, or other domestic cares at home, and as in those simple
times people were invited because you wanted to see them, a tea-party
assembled themselves at three and held session till sundown, when each
matron rolled up her knitting-work and wended soberly home.

Though Newport, even in those early times, was not without its families
which affected state and splendour, rolled about in carriages with
armorial emblazonments, and had servants in abundance to every turn
within-doors, yet there, as elsewhere in New England, the majority of
the people lived with the wholesome, thrifty simplicity of the olden
time, when labour and intelligence went hand in hand in perhaps a
greater harmony than the world has ever seen.

Our scene opens in the great old-fashioned kitchen, which, on ordinary
occasions, is the family dining and sitting room of the Scudder family.
I know fastidious moderns think that the working-room, wherein are
carried on the culinary operations of a large family, must necessarily
be an untidy and comfortless sitting-place; but it is only because they
are ignorant of the marvellous workings which pertain to the organ
of ‘faculty,’ on which we have before insisted. The kitchen of a New
England matron was her throne-room, her pride; it was the habit of her
life to produce the greatest possible results there with the slightest
possible discomposure; and what any woman could do, Mrs. Katy Scudder
could do _par excellence_. Everything there seemed to be always done,
and never doing. Washing and baking, those formidable disturbers of
the composure of families, were all over within those two or three
morning-hours when we are composing ourselves for a last nap,—and
only the fluttering of linen over the green-yard, on Monday mornings,
proclaimed that the dreaded solemnity of a wash had transpired. A
breakfast arose there as by magic; and in an incredibly short space
after, every knife, fork, spoon, and trencher, clean and shining, was
looking as innocent and unconscious in its place as if it never had
been used and never expected to be.

The floor,—perhaps, sir, you remember your grandmother’s floor, of
snowy boards sanded with whitest sand; you remember the ancient
fireplace stretching quite across one end,—a vast cavern, in each
corner of which a cozy seat might be found, distant enough to enjoy
the crackle of the great jolly wood-fire; across the room ran a
dresser, on which was displayed great store of shining pewter dishes
and plates, which always shone with the same mysterious brightness;
and by the side of the fire a commodious wooden ‘settee,’ or settle,
offered repose to people too little accustomed to luxury to ask for a
cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden times, the old, clean, roomy New
England kitchen! Who that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in one
has not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, its coolness? The
noon-mark on its floor was a dial that told of some of the happiest
days; thereby did we right up the shortcomings of the solemn old clock
that tick-tacked in the corner, and whose ticks seemed mysterious
prophecies of unknown good yet to arise out of the hours of life. How
dreamy the winter twilight came in there!—as yet the candles were not
lighted,—when the crickets chirped around the dark stone hearth, and
shifting tongues of flame flickered and cast dancing shadows and elfish
lights on the walls, while grandmother nodded over her knitting-work,
and puss purred, and old Rover lay dreamily opening now one eye and
then the other on the family group! With all our ceiled houses, let us
not forget our grandmothers’ kitchens!

But we must pull up, however, and back to our subject-matter, which is
in the kitchen of Mrs. Katy Scudder, who has just put into the oven,
by the fireplace, some wondrous tea-rusks, for whose composition she
is renowned. She has examined and pronounced perfect a loaf of cake
which has been prepared for the occasion, and which, as usual, is done
exactly right. The best room, too, has been opened and aired,—the white
window-curtains saluted with a friendly little shake, as when one says,
‘How d’ye do?’ to a friend; for you must know, clean as our kitchen
is, we are genteel, and have something better for company. Our best
room in here has a polished little mahogany tea-table, and six mahogany
chairs, with claw talons grasping balls; the white sanded floor is
crinkled in curious little waves, like those on the sea-beach; and
right across the corner stands the ‘buffet,’ as it is called, with its
transparent glass doors, wherein are displayed the solemn appurtenances
of company tea-table. There you may see a set of real China teacups,
which George bought in Canton, and had marked with his and his wife’s
joint initials,—a small silver cream-pitcher, which has come down
as an heirloom from unknown generations,—silver spoons and delicate
China cake-plates, which have been all carefully reviewed and wiped on
napkins of Mrs. Scudder’s own weaving.

Her cares now over, she stands drying her hands on a roller-towel in
the kitchen, while her only daughter, the gentle Mary, stands in the
doorway with the afternoon sun streaming in spots of flickering golden
light on her smooth pale-brown hair,—a _petite_ figure, in a full
stuff petticoat and white short-gown, she stands reaching up one hand
and cooing to something among the apple-blossoms,—and now a Java dove
comes whirring down and settles on her finger,—and we, that have seen
pictures, think, as we look on her girlish face, with its lines of
statuesque beauty,—on the tremulous, half-infantine expression of her
lovely mouth, and the general air of simplicity and purity,—of some old
pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin. But Mrs. Scudder was thinking
of no such Popish matter, I can assure you,—not she! I don’t think you
could have done her a greater indignity than to mention her daughter
in any such connection. She had never seen a painting in her life, and
therefore was not to be reminded of them; and furthermore, the dove was
evidently, for some reason, no favourite,—for she said, in a quick,
imperative tone, ‘Come, come, child! don’t fool with that bird, it’s
high time we were dressed and ready,’—and Mary, blushing, as it would
seem, even to her hair, gave a little toss, and sent the bird, like
a silver fluttering cloud, up among the rosy apple-blossoms. And now
she and her mother have gone to their respective little bedrooms for
the adjustment of their toilets, and while the door is shut and nobody
hears us, we shall talk to you about Mary.

Newport at the present day blooms like a flower-garden with young
ladies of the best _ton_,—lovely girls, hopes of their families,
possessed of amiable tempers and immensely large trunks, and capable of
sporting ninety changes in thirty days, and otherwise rapidly emptying
the purses of distressed fathers, and whom yet travellers and the world
in general look upon as genuine specimens of the kind of girls formed
by American institutions.

We fancy such a one lying in a rustling silk _négligé_, and, amid
a gentle generality of rings, ribbons, puffs, laces, beaux, and
dinner-discussion, reading our humble sketch;—and what favour shall
our poor heroine find in her eyes? For though her mother was a world
of energy and ‘faculty,’ in herself considered, and had bestowed on
this one little lone chick all the vigour and all the care and all the
training which would have sufficed for a family of sixteen, there were
no results produced which could be made appreciable in the eyes of
such company. She could not waltz, or polk, or speak bad French, or
sing Italian songs; but, nevertheless, we must proceed to say what was
her education and what her accomplishments.

Well, then, she could both read and write fluently in the
mother-tongue. She could spin both on the little and the great wheel,
and there were numberless towels, napkins, sheets, and pillow-cases in
the household store that could attest the skill of her pretty fingers.
She had worked several samplers of such rare merit, that they hung
framed in different rooms of the house, exhibiting every variety and
style of possible letter in the best marking-stitch. She was skilful
in all sewing and embroidery, in all shaping and cutting, with a quiet
and deft handiness that constantly surprised her energetic mother, who
could not conceive that so much could be done with so little noise.
In fact, in all household lore she was a veritable good fairy; her
knowledge seemed unerring and intuitive: and whether she washed or
ironed, or moulded biscuit or conserved plums, her gentle beauty seemed
to turn to poetry all the prose of life.

There was something in Mary, however, which divided her as by an
appreciable line from ordinary girls of her age. From her father she
had inherited a deep and thoughtful nature, predisposed to moral
and religious exaltation. Had she been born in Italy, under the
dissolving influences of that sunny, dreamy clime, beneath the shadow
of cathedrals, and where pictured saints and angels smiled in clouds of
painting from every arch and altar, she might, like fair St. Catherine
of Siena, have seen beatific visions in the sunset skies, and a silver
dove descending upon her as she prayed; but, unfolding in the clear,
keen, cold New England clime, and nurtured in its abstract and positive
theologies, her religious faculties took other forms. Instead of lying
entranced in mysterious raptures at the foot of altars, she read and
pondered treatises on the Will, and listened in rapt attention while
her spiritual guide, the venerated Dr. H., unfolded to her the theories
of the great Edwards on the nature of true virtue. Womanlike, she felt
the subtle poetry of these sublime abstractions which dealt with such
infinite and unknown quantities,—which spoke of the universe, of its
great Architect, of men, of angels, as matters of intimate and daily
contemplation; and her teacher, a grand-minded and simple-hearted man
as ever lived, was often amazed at the tread with which this fair young
child walked through these high regions of abstract thought,—often
comprehending through an ethereal clearness of nature what he had
laboriously and heavily reasoned out; and sometimes, when she turned
her grave, childlike face upon him with some question or reply, the
good man started as if an angel had looked suddenly out upon him from
a cloud. Unconsciously to himself, he often seemed to follow her, as
Dante followed the flight of Beatrice, through the ascending circles of
the celestial spheres.

When her mother questioned him, anxiously, of her daughter’s spiritual
estate, he answered, that she was a child of a strange graciousness
of nature, and of a singular genius; to which Katy responded, with a
woman’s pride, that she was all her father over again. It is only now
and then that a matter-of-fact woman is sublimated by a real love; but
if she is, it is affecting to see how impossible it is for death to
quench it; for in the child the mother feels that she has a mysterious
and undying repossession of the father.

But, in truth, Mary was only a recast in feminine form of her father’s
nature. The elixir of the spirit that sparkled within her was of that
quality of which the souls of poets and artists are made; but the keen
New England air crystallizes emotions into ideas, and restricts many
a poetic soul to the necessity of expressing itself only in practical
living.

The rigid theological discipline of New England is fitted to produce
rather strength and purity than enjoyment. It was not fitted to make
a sensitive and thoughtful nature happy, however it might ennoble and
exalt.

The system of Dr. H. was one that could only have had its origin in a
soul at once reverential and logical,—a soul, moreover, trained from
its earliest years in the habits of thought engendered by monarchical
institutions. For although he, like other ministers, took an active
part as a patriot in the Revolution, still he was brought up under the
shadow of a throne; and a man cannot ravel out the stitches in which
early days have knit him. His theology, was, in fact, the turning to
an invisible Sovereign of that spirit of loyalty and unquestioning
subjugation which is one of the noblest capabilities of our nature.
And as a gallant soldier renounces life and personal aims in the cause
of his king and country, and holds himself ready to be drafted for a
forlorn hope, to be shot down, or help make a bridge of his mangled
body, over which the more fortunate shall pass to victory and glory, so
he regarded himself as devoted to the King Eternal, ready in His hands
to be used to illustrate and build up an Eternal Commonwealth, either
by being sacrificed as a lost spirit or glorified as a redeemed one,
ready to throw not merely his mortal life, but his immortality even,
into the forlorn hope, to bridge with a never-dying soul the chasm over
which white-robed victors should pass to a commonwealth of glory and
splendour, whose vastness should dwarf the misery of all the lost to an
infinitesimal.

It is not in our line to imply the truth or the falsehood of those
systems of philosophic theology which seem for many years to have been
the principal outlet for the proclivities of the New England mind,
but as psychological developments they have an intense interest. He
who does not see a grand side to these strivings of the soul cannot
understand one of the noblest capabilities of humanity.

No real artist or philosopher ever lived who has not at some hours
risen to the height of utter self-abnegation for the glory of the
invisible. There have been painters who would have been crucified to
demonstrate the action of a muscle,—chemists who would gladly have
melted themselves and all humanity in their crucible, if so a new
discovery might arise out of its fumes. Even persons of mere artistic
sensibility are at times raised by music, painting, or poetry to a
momentary trance of self-oblivion, in which they would offer their
whole being before the shrine of an invisible loveliness. These hard
old New England divines were the poets of metaphysical philosophy,
who built systems in an artistic fervour, and felt self exhale from
beneath them as they rose into the higher regions of thought. But
where theorists and philosophers tread with sublime assurance, woman
often follows with bleeding footsteps;—women are always turning from
the abstract to the individual, and feeling where the philosopher only
thinks.

It was easy enough for Mary to believe in _self_-renunciation, for
she was one with a born vocation for martyrdom; and so, when the
idea was put to her of suffering eternal pains for the glory of God
and the good of being in general, she responded to it with a sort of
sublime thrill, such as it is given to some natures to feel in view of
uttermost sacrifice. But when she looked around on the warm, living
faces of friends, acquaintances, and neighbours, viewing them as
possible candidates for dooms so fearfully different, she sometimes
felt the walls of her faith closing round her as an iron shroud,—she
wondered that the sun could shine so brightly, that flowers could
flaunt such dazzling colours, that sweet airs could breathe, and little
children play, and youth love and hope, and a thousand intoxicating
influences combine to cheat the victims from the thought that their
next step might be into an abyss of horrors without end. The blood of
youth and hope was saddened by this great sorrow, which lay ever on
her heart,—and her life, unknown to herself, was a sweet tune in the
minor key; it was only in prayer, or deeds of love and charity, or in
rapt contemplation of that beautiful millennial day which her spiritual
guide most delighted to speak of, that the tone of her feelings ever
rose to the height of joy.

Among Mary’s young associates was one who had been as a brother to
her childhood. He was her mother’s cousin’s son,—and so, by a sort of
family immunity, had always a free access to her mother’s house. He
took to the sea, as the most bold and resolute young men will, and
brought home from foreign parts those new modes of speech, those other
eyes for received opinions and established things, which so often shock
established prejudices,—so that he was held as little better than an
infidel and a castaway by the stricter religious circles in his native
place. Mary’s mother, now that Mary was grown up to woman’s estate,
looked with a severe eye on her cousin. She warned her daughter against
too free an association with him,—and so—— We all know what comes to
pass when girls are constantly warned not to think of a man. The most
conscientious and obedient little person in the world, Mary resolved
to be very careful. She never would think of James, except, of course,
in her prayers; but as these were constant, it may easily be seen it
was not easy to forget him.

All that was so often told her of his carelessness, his trifling, his
contempt of orthodox opinions, and his startling and bold expressions,
only wrote his name deeper in her heart,—for was not his soul in peril?
Could she look in his frank, joyous face, and listen to his thoughtless
laugh, and then think that a fall from a mast-head, or one night’s
storm, might——Ah, with what images her faith filled the blank! Could
she believe all this and forget him?

You see, instead of getting our tea ready, as we promised at the
beginning of this chapter, we have filled it with descriptions and
meditations,—and now we foresee that the next chapter will be equally
far from the point. But have patience with us; for we can write only as
we are driven, and never know exactly where we are going to land.




CHAPTER III.


A QUIET, maiden-like place was Mary’s little room. The window looked
out under the overarching boughs of a thick apple orchard, now all
in a blush with blossoms and pink-tipped buds, and the light came
golden-green, strained through flickering leaves,—and an ever-gentle
rustle and whirr of branches and blossoms, a chitter of birds, and
an indefinite whispering motion, as the long heads of orchard-grass
nodded and bowed to each other under the trees, seemed to give the
room the quiet hush of some little side chapel in a cathedral, where
green and golden glass softens the sunlight, and only the sigh and
rustle of kneeling worshippers break the stillness of the aisles. It
was small enough for a nun’s apartment, and dainty in its neatness as
the waxen cell of a bee. The bed and low window were draped in spotless
white, with fringes of Mary’s own knotting. A small table under the
looking-glass bore the library of a well-taught young woman of those
times. The ‘Spectator,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ Shakspeare, and ‘Robinson
Crusoe,’ stood for the admitted secular literature, and beside them
the Bible and the works then published of Mr. Jonathan Edwards. Laid a
little to one side, as if of doubtful reputation, was the only novel
which the stricter people in those days allowed for the reading of
their daughters: that seven-volumed, trailing, tedious, delightful old
bore, ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’—a book whose influence in those times
was so universal, that it may be traced in the epistolary style even
of the gravest divines. Our little heroine was mortal, with all her
divinity, and had an imagination which sometimes wandered to the things
of earth; and this glorious hero in lace and embroidery, who blended
rank, gallantry, spirit, knowledge of the world, disinterestedness,
constancy, and piety, sometimes walked before her, while she sat
spinning at her wheel, till she sighed, she hardly knew why, that
no such men walked the earth now. Yet it is to be confessed, this
occasional raid of the romantic into Mary’s balanced and well-ordered
mind was soon energetically put to rout, and the book, as we have
said, remained on her table under protest,—protected by being her
father’s gift to her mother during their days of courtship. The small
looking-glass was curiously wreathed with corals and foreign shells,
so disposed as to indicate an artistic eye and skilful hand; and some
curious Chinese paintings of birds and flowers gave rather a piquant
and foreign air to the otherwise homely neatness of the apartment.

Here in this little retreat, Mary spent those few hours which her
exacting conscience would allow her to spare from her busy-fingered
household-life; here she read and wrote and thought and prayed;—and
here she stands now, arraying herself for the tea company that
afternoon. Dress, which in our day is becoming in some cases the
whole of woman, was in those times a remarkably simple affair. True,
every person of a certain degree of respectability had state and
festival robes; and a certain camphor-wood brass-bound trunk, which
was always kept solemnly locked in Mrs. Katy Scudder’s apartment,
if it could have spoken, might have given off quite a catalogue of
brocade satin and laces. The wedding-suit there slumbered in all the
unsullied whiteness of its stiff ground broidered with heavy knots of
flowers; and there were scarfs of wrought India muslin and embroidered
crape, each of which had its history,—for each had been brought into
the door with beating heart on some return voyage of one who, alas!
should return no more. The old trunk stood with its histories, its
imprisoned remembrances,—and a thousand tender thoughts seemed to be
shaping out of every rustling fold of silk and embroidery, on the
few yearly occasions when all were brought out to be aired, their
history related, and then solemnly locked up again. Nevertheless, the
possession of these things gave to the women of an establishment a
certain innate dignity, like a good conscience, so that in that larger
portion of existence commonly denominated among them ‘every day,’ they
were content with plain stuff and homespun. Mary’s toilet, therefore,
was sooner made than those of Newport belles of the present day; it
simply consisted in changing her ordinary ‘short-gown and petticoat’
for another of somewhat nicer materials, a skirt of India chintz and
a striped jaconet short-gown. Her hair was of the kind which always
lies like satin; but, nevertheless, girls never think their toilet
complete unless the smoothest hair has been shaken down and rearranged.
A few moments, however, served to braid its shining folds and dispose
them in their simple knot on the back of the head; and having given a
final stroke to each side with her little dimpled hands, she sat down
a moment at the window, thoughtfully watching where the afternoon sun
was creeping through the slates of the fence in long lines of gold
among the tall, tremulous orchard-grass, and unconsciously she began
warbling, in a low, gurgling voice, the words of a familiar hymn, whose
grave earnestness accorded well with the general tone of her life and
education:—

    ‘Life is the time to serve the Lord,
     The time t’ insure the great reward.’

There was a swish and rustle in the orchard-grass, and a tramp of
elastic steps; then the branches were brushed aside, and a young man
suddenly emerged from the trees a little behind Mary. He was apparently
about twenty-five, dressed in the holiday rig of a sailor on shore,
which well set off his fine athletic figure, and accorded with a sort
of easy, dashing, and confident air which sat not unhandsomely on him.
For the rest, a high forehead shaded by rings of the blackest hair, a
keen, dark eye, a firm and determined mouth, gave the impression of one
who had engaged to do battle with life, not only with a will, but with
shrewdness and ability.

[Illustration: _Mary and her Cousin._

_Page 20._

Sampson Low, Son & Co. Jany. 24, 1859]

He introduced the colloquy by stepping deliberately behind Mary,
putting his arms round her neck, and kissing her.

‘Why, James!’ said Mary, starting up and blushing, ‘Come, now!’

‘I have come, haven’t I?’ said the young man, leaning his elbow on
the window-seat and looking at her with an air of comic determined
frankness, which yet had in it such wholesome honesty that it was
scarcely possible to be angry. ‘The fact is, Mary,’ he added, with a
sudden earnest darkening of the face, ‘I won’t stand this nonsense any
longer. Aunt Katy has been holding me at arm’s length ever since I got
home; and what have I done? Haven’t I been to every prayer-meeting
and lecture and sermon, since I got into port, just as regular as a
psalm-book? and not a bit of a word could I get with you, and no chance
even so much as to give you my arm. Aunt Katy always comes between us
and says, “Here, Mary, you take my arm.” What does she think I go to
meeting for, and almost break my jaws keeping down the gapes? I never
even go to sleep, and yet I am treated in this way! It’s too bad!
What’s the row? What’s anybody been saying about me? I always have
waited on you ever since you were that high. Didn’t I always draw you
to school on my sled? didn’t we always use to do our sums together?
didn’t I always wait on you to singing school? and I’ve been made free
to run in and out as if I were your brother;—and now she is as glum and
stiff, and always stays in the room every minute of the time that I am
there, as if she was afraid I should be in some mischief. It’s too bad!’

‘Oh, James, I am sorry that you only go to meeting for the sake of
seeing me; you feel no real interest in religious things; and besides,
mother thinks now I am grown so old that—Why, you know, things are
different now,—at least, we mustn’t, you know, always do as we did
when we were children. But I wish you did feel more interested in good
things.’

‘I _am_ interested in one or two good things, Mary,—principally in you,
who are the best I know of. Besides,’ he said quickly, and scanning her
face attentively to see the effect of his words, ‘don’t you think there
is more merit in my sitting out all these meetings, when they bore me
so confoundedly, than there is in your and Aunt Katy’s doing it, who
really seem to find something to like in them? I believe you have a
sixth sense, quite unknown to me, for it’s all a maze,—I can’t find
top, nor bottom, nor side, nor up, nor down to it,—it’s you can and you
can’t, you shall and you shan’t, you will and you won’t,—’

‘James!’

‘You needn’t look at me so. I’m not going to say the rest of it. But,
seriously, it’s all anywhere and nowhere to me; it don’t touch me, it
don’t help me, and I think it rather makes me worse; and then they tell
me it’s because I’m a natural man, and the natural man understandeth
not the things of the Spirit. Well, I _am_ a natural man,—how’s a
fellow to help it?’

‘Well, James, why need you talk everywhere as you do? You joke, and
jest, and trifle, till it seems to everybody that you don’t believe in
anything. I’m afraid mother thinks you are an infidel, but I _know_ it
can’t be; yet we hear all sorts of things that you say.’

‘I suppose you mean my telling Deacon Twitchel that I had seen as good
Christians among the Mahometans as any in Newport. _Didn’t_ I make him
open his eyes? It’s true, too!’

‘In every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is
accepted of Him,’ said Mary; ‘and if there are better Christians than
us among the Mahometans, I am sure I am glad of it. But, after all, the
great question is, “Are we Christians ourselves?” Oh, James, if you
only were a real, true, noble Christian!’

‘Well, Mary, you have got into that harbour, through all the sandbars
and rocks and crooked channels; and now do you think it right to leave
a fellow beating about outside, and not go out to help him in? This
way of drawing up, among your good people, and leaving us sinners to
ourselves, isn’t generous. You might care a little for the soul of an
old friend, anyhow!’

‘And don’t I care, James? How many days and nights have been one
prayer for you! If I could take my hopes of heaven out of my own heart
and give them to you, I would. Dr. H. preached last Sunday on the text,
“I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen;”
and he went on to show how we must be willing to give up even our own
salvation, if necessary, for the good of others. People said it was
hard doctrine, but I could feel my way through it very well. Yes, I
would give my soul for yours; I wish I could.’

There was a solemnity and pathos in Mary’s manner which checked the
conversation. James was the more touched because he felt it all so
real, from one whose words were always yea and nay, so true, so
inflexibly simple. Her eyes filled with tears, her face kindled with a
sad earnestness, and James thought, as he looked, of a picture he had
once seen in a European cathedral, where the youthful Mother of Sorrows
is represented,

    ‘Radiant and grave, as pitying man’s decline;
     All youth, but with an aspect beyond time;
     Mournful, but mournful of another’s crime;
     She looked as if she sat by Eden’s door,
     And grieved for those who should return no more.’

James had thought he loved Mary; he had admired her remarkable beauty;
he had been proud of a certain right in her before that of other young
men, her associates; he had thought of her as the keeper of his home;
he had wished to appropriate her wholly to himself;—but in all this
there had been, after all, only the thought of what she was to be to
him; and this, for this poor measure of what he called love, she was
ready to offer an infinite sacrifice.

As a subtle flash of lightning will show in a moment a whole
landscape—tower, town, winding stream, and distant sea—so that one
subtle ray of feeling seemed in a moment to reveal to James the whole
of his past life; and it seemed to him so poor, so meagre, so shallow,
by the side of that childlike woman, to whom the noblest of feelings
were unconscious matters of course, that a sort of awe awoke in him:
like the Apostles of old, he ‘feared as he entered into the cloud:’ it
seemed as if the deepest string of some eternal sorrow had vibrated
between them.

After a moment’s pause, he spoke in a low and altered voice:—

‘Mary, I am a sinner. No psalm or sermon ever taught it to me, but I
see it now. Your mother is quite right, Mary; you are too good for me;
I am no mate for you. Oh, what would you think of me, if you knew me
wholly? I have lived a mean, miserable, shallow, unworthy life. You are
worthy, you are a saint, and walk in white! Oh, what upon earth, could
ever make you care so much for me?’

‘Well, then, James, you will be good? Won’t you talk with Dr. H.?’

‘Hang Dr. H.!’ said James. ‘Now Mary, I beg your pardon, but I can’t
make head or tail of a word Dr. H. says. I don’t get hold of it, or
know what he would be at. You girls and women don’t know your power.
Why, Mary, you are a living gospel. You have always had a strange
power over us boys. You never talked religion much; but I have seen
high fellows come away from being with you as still and quiet as one
feels when one goes into a church. I can’t understand all the hang
of predestination, and moral ability, and natural ability, and God’s
efficiency, and man’s agency, which Dr. H. is so engaged about; but I
can understand _you_—_you_ can do me good!’

‘Oh, James, can I?’

‘Mary I am going to confess my sins. I saw that, somehow or other, the
wind was against me in Aunt Katy’s quarter, and you know we fellows
who take up the world in both fists don’t like to be beat. If there’s
opposition, it sets us on. Now I confess I never did care much about
religion, but I thought, without being really a hypocrite, I’d just
let you try to save my soul for the sake of getting you; for there’s
nothing surer to hook a woman than trying to save a fellow’s soul.
It’s a dead-shot, generally, that. Now our ship sails to-night, and I
thought I’d just come across this path in the orchard to speak to you.
You know I used always to bring you peaches and juneatings across this
way, and once I brought you a ribbon.’

‘Yes, I’ve got it yet, James.’

‘Well, now, Mary, all this seems mean to me,—mean to try and trick and
snare you, who are so much too good for me. I felt very proud this
morning that I was to go out first mate this time, and that I should
command a ship next voyage. I meant to have asked you for a promise,
but I don’t. Only, Mary, just give me your little Bible, and I’ll
promise to read it all through soberly, and see what it all comes to.
And pray for me; and if, while I’m gone, a good man comes who loves
you, and is worthy of you, why take him, Mary,—that’s my advice.’

‘James, I’m not thinking of any such things; I don’t ever mean to be
married. And I’m glad you don’t ask me for any promise, because it
would be wrong to give it; mother don’t even like me to be much with
you. But I’m sure all I have said to you to-day is right; I shall tell
her exactly all I have said.’

‘If Aunt Katy knew what things we fellows are pitched into, who take
the world head-foremost, she wouldn’t be so selfish. Mary, you girls
and women don’t know the world you live in; you ought to be pure and
good; you are not as we are. You don’t know what men, what women,—no,
they’re not women!—what creatures, beset us in every foreign port, and
boarding-houses that are gates of hell; and then, if a fellow comes
back from all this and don’t walk exactly straight, you just draw up
the hems of your garments and stand close to the wall, for fear he
should touch you when he passes. I don’t mean you, Mary, for you are
different from most; but if you would do what you could, you might save
us.—But it’s no use talking, Mary. Give me the Bible; and please be
kind to my dove,—for I had a hard time getting him across the water,
and I don’t want him to die.’

If Mary had spoken all that welled up in her little heart at that
moment, she might have said too much; but duty had its habitual seal
upon her lips. She took the little Bible from her table and gave it
with a trembling hand, and James turned to go. In a moment he turned
back and stood irresolute.

‘Mary,’ he said, ‘we are cousins; I may never come back: you might kiss
me this once.’

The kiss was given and received in silence, and James disappeared among
the thick trees.

‘Come, child,’ said Aunt Katy, looking in, ‘there is Deacon Twitchel’s
chaise in sight,—are you ready?’

‘Yes, mother.’




CHAPTER IV.

THEOLOGICAL TEA.


AT the call of her mother, Mary hurried into the ‘best room, with
a strange discomposure of spirit she had never felt before. From
childhood, her love for James had been so deep, equable, and intense,
that it had never disturbed her with thrills and yearnings; it had
grown up in sisterly calmness, and, quietly expanding, had taken
possession of her whole nature without her once dreaming of its power.
But this last interview seemed to have struck some great nerve of
her being,—and calm as she usually was, from habit, principle, and
good health, she shivered and trembled as she heard his retreating
footsteps, and saw the orchard-grass fly back from under his feet.
It was as if each step trod on a nerve,—as if the very sound of the
rustling grass was stirring something living and sensitive in her soul.
And, strangest of all, a vague impression of guilt hovered over her.
_Had_ she done anything wrong? She did not ask him there; she had not
spoken love to him; no, she had only talked to him of his soul, and how
she would give hers for his,—oh, so willingly!—and that was not love;
it was only what Dr. H. said Christians must always feel.

‘Child, what _have_ you been doing?’ said Aunt Katy, who sat in full
flowing chintz petticoat and spotless dimity short-gown, with her
company knitting-work in her hands; ‘your cheeks are as red as peonies.
Have you been crying? What’s the matter?’

‘There is the Deacon’s wife, mother,’ said Mary, turning confusedly,
and darting to the entry-door.

Enter Mrs. Twitchel,—a soft, pillowy, little elderly lady, whose
whole air and dress reminded one of a sack of feathers tied in the
middle with a string. A large, comfortable pocket, hung upon the side,
disclosed her knitting-work ready for operation; and she zealously
cleansed herself with a checked handkerchief from the dust which had
accumulated during her ride in the old ‘one-hoss shay,’ answering the
hospitable salutation of Katy Scudder in that plaintive, motherly voice
which belongs to certain nice old ladies, who appear to live in a state
of mild chronic compassion for the sins and sorrows of this mortal life
generally.

‘Why, yes, Miss Scudder, I’m pretty tol’able. I keep goin’, and goin’.
That’s my way. I’s a-tellin’ the Deacon, this mornin’, I didn’t see how
I _was_ to come here this afternoon; but then I _did_ want to see Miss
Scudder, and talk a little about that precious sermon, Sunday. How is
the Doctor? blessed man! Well, his reward must be great in heaven, if
not on earth, as I was a-tellin’ the Deacon; and he says to me, says
he, “Polly, we mustn’t be man-worshippers.” There, dear,’ (_to Mary_,)
‘don’t trouble yourself about my bonnet; it a’n’t my Sunday one, but I
thought ’twould do. Says I to Cerinthy Ann, “Miss Scudder won’t mind,
’cause her heart’s set on better things.” I always like to drop a word
in season to Cerinthy Ann, ’cause she’s clean took up with vanity and
dress. Oh, dear! oh, dear me! so different from your blessed daughter,
Miss Scudder! Well, it’s a great blessin’ to be called in one’s youth,
like Samuel and Timothy; but then we doesn’t know the Lord’s ways.
Sometimes I gets clean discouraged with my children,—but then ag’in I
don’t know; none on us does. Cerinthy Ann is one of the most master
hands to turn off work; she takes hold and goes along like a woman, and
nobody never knows when that gal finds the time to do all she does do;
and I don’t know nothin’ what I _should_ do without her. Deacon was
saying, if ever she was called, she’d be a Martha, and not a Mary: but
then she’s dreadful opposed to the doctrines. Oh, dear me! oh, dear
me! Somehow they seem to rile her all up; and she was a-tellin’ me
yesterday, when she was a-hangin’ out clothes, that she never should
get reconciled to Decrees and ’Lection, ’cause she can’t see, if things
is certain, how folks is to help ’emselves. Says I, “Cerinthy Ann,
folks a’n’t to help themselves; they’s to submit unconditional.” And
she jest slammed down the clothes-basket and went into the house.’

When Mrs. Twitchel began to talk, it flowed a steady stream, as when
one turns a faucet, that never ceases running till some hand turns it
back again; and the occasion that cut the flood short at present was
the entrance of Mrs. Brown.

Mr. Simeon Brown was a thriving ship-owner of Newport, who lived in a
large house, owned several negro-servants and a span of horses, and
affected some state and style in his worldly appearance. A passion for
metaphysical Orthodoxy had drawn Simeon to the congregation of Dr. H.,
and his wife of course stood by right in a high place there. She was a
tall, angular, somewhat hard-favoured body, dressed in a style rather
above the simple habits of her neighbours, and her whole air spoke the
great woman, who in right of her thousands expected to have her say in
all that was going on in the world, whether she understood it or not.

On her entrance, mild little Mrs. Twitchel fled from the cushioned
rocking-chair, and stood with the quivering air of one who feels she
has no business to be anywhere in the world, until Mrs. Brown’s bonnet
was taken and she was seated, when Mrs. Twitchel subsided into a corner
and rattled her knitting-needles to conceal her emotion.

New England has been called the land of equality; but what land upon
earth is wholly so? Even the mites in a bit of cheese, naturalists say,
have great tumblings and strivings about position and rank: he who has
ten pounds will always be a nobleman to him who has but one, let him
strive as manfully as he may; and therefore let us forgive meek little
Mrs. Twitchel from melting into nothing in her own eyes when Mrs.
Brown came in, and let us forgive Mrs. Brown that she sat down in the
rocking-chair with an easy grandeur, as one who thought it her duty
to be affable and meant to be. It was, however, rather difficult for
Mrs. Brown, with her money, house, negroes, and all, to patronise Mrs.
Katy Scudder, who was one of those women whose natures seems to sit
on thrones, and who dispense patronage and favour by an inborn right
and aptitude, whatever be their social advantages. It was one of Mrs.
Brown’s trials of life, this secret, strange quality in her neighbour,
who stood apparently so far below her in worldly goods. Even the quiet
positive style of Mrs. Katy’s knitting made her nervous; it was an
implication of independence of her sway; and though on the present
occasion every customary courtesy was bestowed, she still felt, as she
always did when Mrs. Katy’s guest, a secret uneasiness. She mentally
contrasted the neat little parlour, with its white sanded floor and
muslin curtains, with her own grand front-room, which boasted the then
uncommon luxuries of Turkey carpet and Persian rug, and wondered if
Mrs. Katy did really feel as cool and easy in receiving her as she
appeared.

You must not understand that this was what Mrs. Brown _supposed_
herself to be thinking about; oh, no! by no means! All the little,
mean work of our nature is generally done in a small dark closet just
a little back of the subject we are talking about, on which subject we
suppose ourselves of course to be thinking;—of course we _are_ thinking
of it; how else could we talk about it?

The subject in discussion, and what Mrs. Brown supposed to be in her
own thoughts, was the last Sunday’s sermon, on the doctrine of entire
Disinterested Benevolence, in which good Doctor H. had proclaimed to
the citizens of Newport their duty of being so wholly absorbed in the
general good of the universe as even to acquiesce in their own final
and eternal destruction, if the greater good of the whole might thereby
be accomplished.

‘Well, now, dear me!’ said Mrs. Twitchel, while her knitting-needles
trotted contentedly to the mournful tone of her voice,—‘I was tellin’
the Deacon, if we only could get there! Sometimes I think I get a
little way,—but then ag’in I don’t know; but the Deacon he’s quite
down,—he don’t see no evidences in himself. Sometimes he says he don’t
feel as if he ought to keep his place in the church,—but then ag’in
he don’t know. He keeps a-turnin’ and turnin’ on’t over in his mind,
and a-tryin’ himself this way and that way; and he says he don’t see
nothin’ but what’s selfish, no way.

’’Member one night last winter, after the Deacon got warm in bed,
there come a rap at the door; and who should it be but old Beulah
Ward wantin’ to see the Deacon—’twas her boy she sent, and he said
Beulah was sick and hadn’t no more wood nor candles. Now I know’d the
Deacon had carried that critter half a cord of wood, if he had one
stick, since Thanksgivin’, and I’d sent her two o’ my best moulds of
candles,—nice ones that Cerinthy Ann run when we killed a crittur;
but nothin’ would do but the Deacon must get right out his warm bed
and dress himself, and hitch up his team to carry over some wood to
Beulah. Says I, “Father, you know you’ll be down with the rheumatis
for this; besides, Beulah is real aggravatin’. I know she trades off
what we send her to the store for rum, and you never get no thanks. She
’xpects, ’cause we has done for her, we always must; and more we do,
more we may do.” And says he to me, says he, “That’s jest the way we
sarves the Lord, Polly; and what if He shouldn’t hear us when we call
on Him in our troubles?” So I shet up; and the next day he was down
with the rheumatis. And Cerinthy Ann, says she, “Well, father, _now_ I
hope you’ll own you have got _some_ disinterested benevolence,” says
she; and the Deacon he thought it over a spell, and then he says, “I’m
’fraid it’s all selfish. I’m jest a-makin’ a righteousness of it.” And
Cerinthy Ann she come out, declarin’ that the best folks never had no
comfort in religion; and for her part she didn’t mean to trouble her
head about it, but have jest as good a time as she could while she’s
young, ’cause if she was ’lected to be saved she should be, and if she
wa’n’t she couldn’t help it, any how.’

‘Mr. Brown says he came on to Dr. H.’s ground years ago’ said Mrs.
Brown, giving a nervous twitch to her yarn, and speaking in a sharp,
hard, didactic voice, which made little Mrs. Twitchel give a gentle
quiver, and look humble and apologetic. ‘Mr. Brown’s a master thinker;
there’s nothing pleases that man better than a hard doctrine; he says
you can’t get ’em too hard for him. He don’t find any difficulty in
bringing his mind up; he just reasons it out all plain; and he says,
people have no need to be in the dark; and that’s _my_ opinion. “If
folks know they ought to come up to anything, why _don’t_ they?” he
says; and I say so too.’

‘Mr. Scudder used to say that it took great afflictions to bring his
mind to that place,’ said Mrs. Katy. ‘He used to say that an old
paper-maker told him once, that paper that was shaken only one way in
the making would tear across the other, and the best paper had to be
shaken every way; and so he said we couldn’t tell, till we had been
turned and shaken and tried every way, where we should tear.’

Mrs. Twitchel responded to this sentiment with a gentle series of
groans, such as were her general expression of approbation, swaying
herself backward and forward; while Mrs. Brown gave a sort of toss and
snort, and said that for her part she always thought people knew what
they did know,—but she guessed she was mistaken.

The conversation was here interrupted by the civilities attendant on
the reception of Mrs. Jones,—a broad, buxom, hearty soul, who had come
on horseback from a farm about three miles distant.

Smiling with rosy content, she presented Mrs. Katy a small pot of
golden butter,—the result of her forenoon’s churning.

There are some people so evidently broadly and heartily of this world,
that their coming into a room always materializes the conversation. We
wish to be understood that we mean no disparaging reflection on such
persons;—they are as necessary to make up a world as cabbages to make
up a garden; the great healthy principles of cheerfulness and animal
life seem to exist in them in the gross; they are wedges and ingots
of solid, contented vitality. Certain kinds of virtues and Christian
graces thrive in such people as the first crop of corn does in the
bottom-lands of the Ohio. Mrs. Jones was a church-member, a regular
church-goer, and planted her comely person plump in front of Dr. H.
every Sunday, and listened to his searching and discriminating sermons
with broad, honest smiles of satisfaction. Those keen distinctions
as to motives, those awful warnings and urgent expostulations, which
made poor Deacon Twitchel weep, she listened to with great, round,
satisfied eyes, making to all, and after all, the same remark,—that it
was good, and she liked it, and the Doctor was a good man; and on the
present occasion, she announced her pot of butter as one fruit of her
reflections after the last discourse.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘as I was a-settin’ in the spring-house, this
mornin’, a-workin’ my butter, I says to Dinah,—“I’m goin’ to carry a
pot of this down to Miss Scudder for the Doctor,—I got so much good
out of his Sunday’s sermon.” And Dinah she says to me, says she,—“Laws,
Miss Jones, I thought you was asleep, for sartin!” But I wasn’t; only I
forgot to take any carraway-seed in the mornin’, and so I kinder missed
it; you know it ’livens one up. But I never lost myself so but what I
kinder heerd him goin’ on, on, sort o’ like,—and it sounded _all_ sort
o’ _good_; and so I thought of the Doctor to-day.’

‘Well, I’m sure,’ said Aunt Katy, ‘this will be a treat; we all know
about your butter, Mrs. Jones. I sha’n’t think of putting any of mine
on table to-night, I’m sure.’

‘Law, now don’t!’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘Why you re’lly make me ashamed,
Miss Scudder. To be sure, folks does like our butter, and it always
fetches a pretty good price,—_he’s_ very proud on’t. I tell him he
oughtn’t to be,—we oughtn’t to be proud of anything.’

And now Mrs. Katy, giving a look at the old clock, told Mary it was
time to set the tea-table; and forthwith there was a gentle movement of
expectancy. The little mahogany tea-table opened its brown wings, and
from a drawer came forth the snowy damask covering. It was etiquette,
on such occasions, to compliment every article of the establishment
successively as it appeared; so the Deacon’s wife began at the
table-cloth.

‘Well, I do declare, Miss Scudder beats us all in her table-cloths,’
she said, taking up a corner of the damask, admiringly; and Mrs. Jones
forthwith jumped up and seized the other corner.

‘Why, this ’ere must have come from the Old Country. It’s most the
beautiflest thing I ever did see.’

‘It’s my own spinning,’ replied Mrs. Katy, with conscious dignity.
‘There was an Irish weaver came to Newport the year before I was
married, who wove beautifully,—just the Old-Country patterns,—and I’d
been spinning some uncommonly fine flax then. I remember Mr. Scudder
used to read to me while I was spinning,’—and Aunt Katy looked afar, as
one whose thoughts are in the past, and dropped out the last words with
a little sigh, unconsciously, as to herself.

‘Wall, now, I must say,’ said Mrs. Jones, ‘this goes quite beyond me. I
thought I could spin some; but I shan’t never dare to show mine.’

‘I’m sure, Mrs. Jones, your towels that you had out bleaching, this
spring, were wonderful,’ said Aunt Katy. ‘But I don’t pretend to do
much now,’ she continued, straightening her trim figure. ‘I’m getting
old, you know; we must let the young folks take up these things. Mary
spins better now than I ever did; Mary, hand out those napkins.’

And so Mary’s napkins passed from hand to hand.

‘Well, well,’ said Mrs. Twitchel to Mary, ‘it’s easy to see that _your_
linen-chest will be pretty full by the time _he_ comes along; won’t it,
Miss Jones?’—and Mrs Twitchel looked pleasantly facetious, as elderly
ladies generally do, when suggesting such possibilities to younger ones.

Mary was vexed to feel the blood boil up in her cheeks in a most
unexpected and provoking way at the suggestion; whereat Mrs. Twitchel
nodded knowingly at Mrs. Jones, and whispered something in a mysterious
aside, to which plump Mrs. Jones answered,—‘Why, do tell! now I never!’

‘It’s strange,’ said Mrs. Twitchel, taking up her parable again, in
such a plaintive tone that all knew something pathetic was coming,
‘what mistakes some folks will make, a-fetchin’ up girls. Now there’s
your Mary, Miss Scudder,—why, there a’n’t nothin’ she can’t do: but
law, I was down to Miss Skinner’s, last week, a-watchin’ with her,
and re’lly it ’most broke my heart to see her. Her mother was a most
amazin’ smart woman; but she brought Suky up, for all the world, as if
she’d been a wax doll, to be kept in the drawer,—and sure enough, she
was a pretty cretur,—and now she’s married, what is she? She ha’n’t
no more idee how to take hold than nothin’. The poor child means well
enough, and she works so hard she ’most kills herself; but then she is
in the suds from mornin’ till night,—she’s one the sort whose work’s
never done,—and poor George Skinner’s clean discouraged.’

‘There’s everything in _knowing how_,’ said Mrs. Katy. ‘Nobody ought
to be always working; it’s a bad sign. I tell Mary,—“Always do up your
work in the forenoon.” Girls must learn that. I never work afternoons,
after my dinner dishes are got away; I never did and never would.’

‘Nor I, neither,’ chimed in Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Twitchel,—both
anxious to show themselves clear on this leading point of New-England
housekeeping.

‘There’s another thing I always tell Mary,’ said Mrs. Katy,
impressively. ‘“Never say there isn’t time for a thing that ought to
be done. If a thing is _necessary_, why, life is long enough to find
a place for it. That’s my doctrine. When anybody tells me they can’t
_find time_ for this or that, I don’t think much of ’em. I think they
don’t know how to work,—that’s all.”’

Here Mrs. Twitchel looked up from her knitting, with apologetic giggle
at Mrs. Brown.

‘Law, now, there’s Miss Brown, she don’t know nothin’ about it, ’cause
she’s got her servants to every turn. I s’pose she thinks it queer
to hear us talkin’ about our work. Miss Brown must have her time all
to herself. I was tellin’ the Deacon the other day that she was a
privileged woman.’

‘I’m sure, those that have servants find work enough following ’em
’round,’ said Mrs. Brown,—who, like all other human beings, resented
the implication of not having as many trials in life as her neighbours.
‘As to getting the work done up in the forenoon, that’s a thing I never
can teach ’em; they’d rather not. Chloe likes to keep her work ’round,
and do it by snacks, any time, day or night, when the notion takes her.’

‘And it was just for that reason I never would have one of those
creatures ’round,’ said Mrs. Katy. ‘Mr. Scudder was principled against
buying negroes,—but if he had _not_ been, I should not have wanted any
of _their_ work. I know what’s to be done, and most help is no help
to me. I want people to stand out of my way and let me get done. I’ve
tried keeping a girl once or twice, and I never worked so hard in my
life. When Mary and I do all ourselves, we can calculate everything to
a minute; and we get our time to sew and read and spin and visit, and
live just as we want to.’

Here, again, Mrs. Brown looked uneasy. To what use was it that she
was rich and owned servants, when this Mordecai in her gate utterly
despised her prosperity? In her secret heart she thought Mrs. Katy
must be envious, and rather comforted herself on this view of the
subject,—sweetly unconscious of any inconsistency in the feeling with
her views of utter self-abnegation just announced.

Meanwhile the tea-table had been silently gathering on its snowy
plateau the delicate china, the golden butter, the loaf of faultless
cake, a plate of crullers or wonders, as a sort of sweet fried cake
was commonly called,—tea-rusks, light as a puff, and shining on top
with a varnish of eggs,—jellies of apple and quince quivering in amber
clearness,—whitest and purest honey in the comb,—in short, everything
that could go to the getting-up of a most faultless tea.

‘I don’t see,’ said Mrs. Jones, resuming the gentle pæans of the
occasion, ‘how Miss Scudder’s loaf-cake always comes out just so. It
don’t rise neither to one side nor t’other, but just even all ’round;
and it a’n’t white one side and burnt the other, but just a good brown
all over; and it don’t have any heavy streak in it.’

‘Jest what Cerinthy Ann was sayin’, the other day,’ said Mrs. Twichel.
‘She says she can’t never be sure how hers is a-comin’ out. Do what she
can, it will be either too much or too little; but Miss Scudder’s is
always jest so. “Law,” says I, “Cerinthy Ann, it’s _faculty_,—that’s
it;—them that has it has it, and them that hasn’t—why, they’ve got to
work hard, and not do half so well, neither.”’

Mrs. Katy took all these praises as matter of course. Since she was
thirteen years old, she had never put her hand to anything that she had
not been held to do better than other folks, and therefore she accepted
her praises with the quiet repose and serenity of assured reputation:
though, of course, she used the usual polite disclaimers of ‘Oh, it’s
nothing, nothing at all; I’m sure I don’t know how I do it, and was
not aware it was so good,’ and so on. All which things are proper for
gentlewomen to observe, in like cases, in every walk of life.

‘Do you think the Deacon will be along soon?’ said Mrs. Katy, when
Mary, returning from the kitchen, announced the important fact, that
the tea-kettle was boiling.

‘Why, yes,’ said Mrs. Twitchel. ‘I’m a-lookin’ for him every minute. He
told me, that he and the men should be plantin’ up to the eight-acre
lot, but he’d keep the colt up there to come down on; and so I laid
him out a clean shirt, and says, “Now, father, you be sure and be
there by five, so that Miss Scudder may know when to put her tea
a-drawin’.”—There he is, I believe,’ she added, as a horse’s tramp was
heard without, and, after a few moments, the desired Deacon entered.

He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, low, sinewy, thin, with black hair
showing lines and patches of silver. His keen, thoughtful dark eye
marked the nervous and melancholic temperament. A mild and pensive
humility of manner seemed to brood over him, like the shadow of a
cloud. Everything in his dress, air, and motions indicated punctilious
exactness and accuracy, at times rising to the point of nervous anxiety.

Immediately after the bustle of his entrance had subsided, Mr. Simeon
Brown followed. He was a tall, lank individual, with high-cheek bones,
thin, sharp features, small, keen, hard eyes, and large hands and feet.

Simeon was, as we have before remarked, a keen theologian, and had the
scent of a hound for a metaphysical distinction. True, he was a man
of business, being a thriving trader to the coast of Africa, whence
he imported negroes for the American market; and no man was held to
understand that branch of traffic better,—he having, in his earlier
days, commanded ships in the business, and thus learned it from the
root. In his private life, Simeon was severe and dictatorial. He
was one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant
themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and
argue to prove that selfishness is the root of moral evil. Simeon said
he always had thought so; and his neighbours sometimes supposed that
nobody could enjoy better experimental advantages for understanding
the subject. He was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive
to the Divine will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme
theology of that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel,
no imagination to conceive, what endless happiness or suffering is,
and who deal therefore with the great question of the salvation or
damnation of myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked
out by their inevitable _x_, _y_, _z_.

But we must not spend too much time with our analysis of character,
for matters at the tea-table are drawing to a crisis. Mrs. Jones has
announced that she does not think ‘_he_’ can come this afternoon; by
which significant mode of expression she conveyed the dutiful idea
that there was for her but one male person in the world. And now Mrs.
Katy says, ‘Mary, dear, knock at the Doctor’s door and tell him that
tea is ready.’

[Illustration: _Theological Tea_

Sampson Low, Son & Co. Jany 24, 1859 Page 37.]

The Doctor was sitting in his shady study, in the room on the other
side of the little entry. The windows were dark and fragrant with the
shade and perfume of blossoming lilacs, whose tremulous shadow, mingled
with spots of afternoon sunlight, danced on the scattered papers of a
great writing-table covered with pamphlets and heavily-bound volumes of
theology, where the Doctor was sitting.

A man of gigantic proportions, over six feet in height, and built
every way with an amplitude corresponding to his height, sitting bent
over his writing, so absorbed that he did not hear the gentle sound of
Mary’s entrance.

‘Doctor,’ said the maiden, gently, ‘tea is ready.’

No motion, no sound, except the quick tracing of the pen over the paper.

‘Doctor! Doctor!’ a little louder, and with another step into the
apartment,—‘tea is ready.’

The Doctor stretched his head forward to a paper which lay before him,
and responded in a low, murmuring voice, as reading something.

‘Firstly,—if underived virtue be peculiar to the Deity, can it be the
duty of a creature to have it?’

Here a little waxen hand came with a very gentle tap on his huge
shoulder, and ‘Doctor, tea is ready,’ penetrated drowsily to the nerve
of his ear, as a sound heard in sleep. He rose suddenly with a start,
opened a pair of great blue eyes, which shone abstractedly under the
dome of a capacious and lofty forehead, and fixed them on the maiden,
who by this time was looking up rather archly, and yet with an attitude
of the most profound respect, while her venerated friend was assembling
together his earthly faculties.

‘Tea is ready, if you please. Mother wished me to call you.’

‘Oh!—ah!—yes!—indeed!’ he said, looking confusedly about, and starting
for the door in his study gown.

‘If you please, sir,’ said Mary, standing in his way, ‘would you not
like to put on your coat and wig?’

The Doctor gave a hurried glance at his study gown, put his hand to
his head, which, in place of the ample curls of his full-bottomed wig,
was decked only with a very ordinary cap, and seemed to come at once
to full comprehension. He smiled a kind of conscious, benignant smile,
which adorned his high cheek-bones and hard features as sunshine adorns
the side of a rock, and said, kindly, ‘Ah, well, child, I understand
now; I’ll be out in a moment.’

And Mary, sure that he was now on the right track, went back to the
tea-room with the announcement that the Doctor was coming.

In a few moments he entered, majestic and proper, in all the dignity
of full-buttomed, powdered wig, full, flowing coat, with ample cuffs,
silver knee and shoe buckles, as became the gravity and majesty of the
minister of those days.

He saluted all the company with a benignity which had a touch of the
majestic, and also of the rustic in it; for at heart the Doctor was
a bashful man, that is, he had somewhere in his mental camp that
treacherous fellow whom John Bunyan anathematizes under the name of
Shame. The company rose on his entrance; the men bowed and the women
curtsied, and all remained standing while he addressed to each, with
punctilious decorum, those inquiries in regard to health and well-being
which preface a social interview. Then, at a dignified sigh from Mrs.
Katy, he advanced to the table, and all following his example, stood,
while, with one hand uplifted, he went through a devotional exercise
which, for length, more resembled a prayer than a grace,—after which
the company were seated.

‘Well, Doctor,’ said Mr. Brown, who, as a householder of substance,
felt a conscious right to be first in open conversation with the
minister, ‘people are beginning to make a noise about your views. I was
talking with Deacon Timmins the other day down on the wharf, and he
said Dr. Stiles said that it was entirely new doctrine—entirely so,—and
for his part he wanted the good old ways.’

‘They say so, do they?’ said the Doctor, kindling up from an
abstraction into which he seemed to be gradually subsiding. ‘Well, let
them. I had rather publish _new_ divinity than any other, and the more
of it the better,—_if it be but true_. I should think it hardly worth
while to write, if I had nothing _new_ to say.’

‘Well,’ said Deacon Twitchel,—his meek face flushing with awe of his
minister—‘Doctor, there’s all sorts of things said about you. Now
the other day I was at the mill with a load of corn, and while I was
a-waitin’, Amariah Wadsworth come along with his’n; and so while we
were waitin’, he says to me, “Why, they say your minister is gettin’
to be an Arminian;” and he went on a-tellin’ how old Ma’am Badger told
him that you interpreted some parts of Paul’s Epistles clear on the
Arminian side. You know Ma’am Badger’s a master-hand at doctrines, and
she’s ’most an uncommon Calvinist.’

‘That does not frighten me at all,’ said the sturdy Doctor. ‘Supposing
I do interpret some texts like the Arminians. Can’t Arminians have
anything right about them? Who wouldn’t rather go with the Arminians
when they are _right_, than with the Calvinists when they are wrong?’

‘That’s it,—you’ve hit it, Doctor,’ said Simeon Brown. ‘That’s what
I always say. I say, ‘Don’t he _prove_ it? and how are you going to
answer him?’ That gravels ’em.’

‘Well,’ said Deacon Twitchel, ‘Brother Seth—you know Brother Seth,—he
says you deny depravity. He’s all for imputation of Adam’s sin, you
know; and I have long talks with Seth about it, every time he comes to
see me; and he says, that if we did not sin in Adam, it’s givin’ up the
whole ground altogether; and then he insists you’re clean wrong about
the unregenerate doings.’

‘Not at all,—not in the least,’ said the Doctor, promptly.

‘I wish Seth could talk with you some time, Doctor. Along in the
spring, he was down helpin’ me to lay stone fence,—it was when we was
fencin’ off the south-pastur’ lot,—and we talked pretty nigh all day;
and it really did seem to me that the longer we talked, the sotter
Seth grew. He’s a master-hand at readin’; and when he heard that your
remarks on Dr. Mayhew had come out, Seth tackled up o’ purpose and
come up to Newport to get them, and spent all his time, last winter,
studyin’ on it and makin’ his remarks: and I tell you, sir, he’s a
tight fellow to argue with. Why, that day, what with layin’ stone
wall and what with arguin’ with Seth, I come home quite beat out,—Miss
Twitchel will remember.’

‘That he was!’ said his helpmeet. ‘I ’member, when he came home, says
I, “Father, you seem clean used up;” and I stirred ’round lively like,
to get him his tea. But he jest went into the bedroom and laid down
afore supper; and I says to Cerinthy Ann, “That’s a thing I ha’n’t
seen your father do since he was took with the typhus.” And Cerinthy
Ann, she said she knew ’twa’n’t anything but them old doctrines,—that
it was always so when Uncle Seth come down. And after tea father was
kinder chirked up a little, and he and Seth set by the fire, and was
a-beginnin’ it ag’in, and I jest spoke out and said,—“Now, Seth, these
’ere things doesn’t hurt you; but the Deacon is weakly, and if he gets
his mind riled after supper, he don’t sleep none all night. So,” says
I, “you’d better jest let matters stop where they be; ’cause,” says I,
“’twon’t make no difference, for to-night, which on ye’s got the right
on’t;—reckon the Lord’ll go on his own way without you; and we shall
find out, by’m-by, what that is.”’

‘Mr. Scudder used to think a great deal on these points,’ said Mrs.
Katy, ‘and the last time he was home he wrote out his views. I haven’t
ever shown them to you, Doctor; but I should be pleased to know what
you think of them.’

‘Mr. Scudder was a good man, with a clear head,’ said the Doctor; ‘and
I should be much pleased to see anything that he wrote.’

A flush of gratified feeling passed over Mrs. Katy’s face;—for one
flower laid on the shrine which we keep in our hearts for the dead is
worth more than any gift to our living selves.

We will not now pursue our party further, lest you, Reader, get more
theological tea than you can drink. We will not recount the numerous
nice points raised by Mr. Simeon Brown and adjusted by the Doctor,—and
how Simeon invariably declared, that that was the way in which he
disposed of them himself, and how he had thought it out ten years ago.

We will not relate, either, too minutely, how Mary changed colour
and grew pale and red in quick succession, when Mr. Simeon Brown
incidentally remarked that the ‘Monsoon’ was going to set sail that
very afternoon for her three-years’ voyage. Nobody noticed—in the
busy amenities—the sudden welling and ebbing of that one poor little
heart-fountain.

So we go,—so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we
talk! We drop out a common piece of news,—‘Mr. So-and-so is dead,—Miss
Such-a-one is married,—such a ship has sailed,’—and lo, on our right
hand or our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently,—gone
down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell
its drowning pang. And this—God help us!—is what we call living!




CHAPTER V.

THE LETTER.


MARY returned to the quietude of her room. The red of twilight had
faded, and the silver moon, round and fair, was rising behind the thick
boughs of the apple-trees. She sat down in the window, thoughtful and
sad, and listened to the crickets, whose ignorant jollity often sounds
as mournfully to us mortals as ours may to superior beings. There the
little hoarse, black wretches were scraping and creaking, as if life
and death were invented solely for their pleasure, and the world were
created only to give them a good time in it. Now and then a little
wind shivered among the boughs, and brought down a shower of white
petals which shimmered in the slant beams of the moonlight; and now a
ray touched some tall head of grass, and forthwith it blossomed into
silver, and stirred itself with a quiet joy, like a new-born saint
just awaking in Paradise. And ever and anon came on the still air the
soft, eternal pulsations of the distant sea,—sound mournfullest, most
mysterious, of all the harpings of Nature. It was the sea,—the deep,
eternal sea,—the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea; and
he was perhaps at this moment being borne away on it,—away, away,—to
what sorrows, to what temptations, to what dangers, she knew not. She
looked along the old, familiar, beaten path by which he came, by which
he went, and thought, ‘What if he _never_ should come back?’ There
was a little path through the orchard out to a small elevation in the
pasture-lot behind, whence the sea was distinctly visible, and Mary
had often used her low-silled window as a door when she wanted to pass
out thither; so now she stepped out, and, gathering her skirts back
from the dewy grass, walked thoughtfully along the path and gained
the hill. Newport harbour lay stretched out in the distance, with the
rising moon casting a long, wavering track of silver upon it; and
vessels, like silver-winged moths, were turning and shifting slowly
to and fro upon it, and one stately ship in full sail passing fairly
out under her white canvas, graceful as some grand, snowy bird. Mary’s
beating heart told her that _there_ was passing away from her one
who carried a portion of her existence with him. She sat down under
a lonely tree that stood there, and, resting her elbow on her knee,
followed the ship with silent prayers, as it passed, like a graceful,
cloudy dream, out of her sight.

Then she thoughtfully retraced her way to her chamber; and as she was
entering, observed in the now clearer moonlight what she had not seen
before,—something white, like a letter, lying on the floor. Immediately
she struck a light, and there, sure enough, it was,—a letter in James’s
handsome, dashing hand; and the little puss, before she knew what she
was about, actually kissed it, with a fervour which would much have
astonished the writer, could he at that moment have been clairvoyant.
But Mary felt as one who finds, in the emptiness after a friend’s
death, an unexpected message or memento; and all alone in the white,
calm stillness of her little room her heart took sudden possession
of her. She opened the letter with trembling hands, and read what of
course we shall let you read. We got it out of a bundle of old, smoky,
yellow letters, years after all the parties concerned were gone on the
eternal journey beyond earth.

    ‘MY DEAR MARY,—

    ‘I cannot leave you so. I have about two hundred things to
    say to you, and it’s a shame I could not have had longer
    to see you; but blessed be ink and paper! I am writing and
    seeing to fifty things besides; so you musn’t wonder if my
    letter has rather a confused appearance.

    ‘I have been thinking that perhaps I gave you a wrong
    impression of myself, this afternoon. I am going to speak to
    you from my heart, as if I were confessing on my death-bed.
    Well, then, I do not confess to being what is commonly
    called a bad young man. I should be willing that men of
    the world generally, even strict ones, should look my life
    through and know all about it. It is only in your presence,
    Mary, that I feel that I am bad and low and shallow and
    mean, because you represent to me a sphere higher and
    holier than any in which I have ever moved, and stir up a
    sort of sighing and longing in my heart to come towards
    it. In all countries, in all temptations, Mary, your image
    has stood between me and low, gross vice. When I have been
    with fellows roaring drunken, beastly songs,—suddenly I
    have seemed to see you as you used to sit beside me in the
    singing-school, and your voice has been like an angel’s in
    my ear, and I have got up and gone out sick and disgusted.
    Your face has risen up calm and white and still, between
    the faces of poor lost creatures who know no better way of
    life than to tempt us to sin. And sometimes, Mary, when I
    have seen girls that, had they been cared for by good, pious
    mothers, might have been like you, I have felt as if I could
    cry for them. Poor women are abused all the world over; and
    it’s no wonder they turn round and revenge themselves on us.

    ‘No, I have not been bad, Mary, as the world calls badness.
    I have been kept by you. But do you remember you told me
    once, that, when the snow first fell and lay so dazzling and
    pure and soft, all about, you always felt as if the spreads
    and window-curtains that seemed white before were dirty?
    Well, it’s just like that with me. Your presence makes me
    feel that I am not pure,—that I am low and unworthy,—not
    worthy to touch the hem of your garment. Your good Dr. H.
    spent a whole half-day, the other Sunday, trying to tell us
    about the beauty of holiness; and he cut, and pared, and
    peeled, and sliced, and told us what it wasn’t, and what
    was _like_ it, and wasn’t; and then he built up an exact
    definition, and fortified and bricked it up all round; and
    I thought to myself that he’d better tell ’em to look at
    Mary Scudder, and they’d understand all about it. That was
    what I was thinking when you talked to me for looking at you
    in church instead of looking towards the pulpit. It really
    made me laugh in myself to see what a good little ignorant,
    unconscious way you had of looking up at the Doctor, as if
    he knew more about that than you did.

    ‘And now as to your Doctor that you think so much of, I like
    him for certain things, in certain ways. He is a great,
    grand, large pattern of a man,—a man who isn’t afraid to
    think, and to speak anything he does think; but then I do
    believe, if he would take a voyage round the world in the
    forecastle of a whaler, he would know more about what to
    say to people than he does now; it would certainly give him
    several new points to be considered. Much of his preaching
    about men is as like live men as Chinese pictures of trees
    and rocks and gardens,—no nearer the reality than that.
    All I can say is, “It isn’t so; and you’d know it, Sir, if
    you knew men.” He has got what they call a _system_,—just
    so many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow
    to take in all I see in my wanderings round this world of
    ours. Nobody that has a soul, and goes round the world as I
    do, can help feeling it at times, and thinking, as he sees
    all the races of men and their ways, who made them, and
    what they were made for. To doubt the existence of a God
    seems to me like a want of common sense. There is a Maker
    and a Ruler, doubtless; but then, Mary, all this invisible
    world of religion is unreal to me. I can see we must be
    good, somehow,—that if we are not, we shall not be happy
    here or hereafter. As to all the metaphysics of your good
    Doctor, you can’t tell how they tire me. I’m not the sort of
    person that they can touch. I must have real things,—real
    people; abstractions are nothing to me. Then I think that he
    systematically contradicts on one Sunday what he preaches on
    another. One Sunday he tells us that God is the immediate
    efficient Author of every act of will; the next he tells us
    that we are entire free agents. I see no sense in it, and
    can’t take the trouble to put it together. But then he and
    you have something in you that I call religion,—something
    that makes you _good_. When I see a man working away on an
    entirely honest, unworldly, disinterested pattern, as he
    does, and when I see you, Mary, as I said before, I should
    like at least to _be_ as you are, whether I could believe as
    you do or not.

    ‘How could you so care for me, and waste on one so unworthy
    of you such love? Oh, Mary, some better man must win you;
    I never shall and never can;—but then you must not quite
    forget me; you must be my friend, my saint. If, through your
    prayers, your Bible, your friendship, you can bring me to
    your state, I am willing to be brought there,—nay, desirous.
    God has put the key of my soul into your hands.

    ‘So, dear Mary, good-bye! Pray still for your naughty, loving

                                              ‘COUSIN JAMES.’

Mary read this letter, and re-read it, with more pain than pleasure. To
feel the immortality of a beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that
its only communications with Heaven must be through us, is the most
solemn and touching thought that can pervade a mind. It was without one
particle of gratified vanity, with even a throb of pain, that she read
such exalted praises of herself from one blind to the glories of a far
higher loveliness.

Yet was she at that moment, unknown to herself, one of the great
company scattered through earth who are priests unto God,—ministering
between the Divine One, who has unveiled himself unto them, and those
who as yet stand in the outer courts of the great sanctuary of truth
and holiness. Many a heart, wrung, pierced, bleeding with the sins
and sorrows of earth, longing to depart, stands in this mournful and
beautiful ministry, but stands unconscious of the glory of the work in
which it waits and suffers. God’s kings and priests are crowned with
thorns, walking the earth with bleeding feet and comprehending not the
work they are performing.

Mary took from a drawer a small pocket-book, from which dropped a lock
of black hair,—a glossy curl, which seemed to have a sort of wicked,
wilful life in every shining ring, just as she had often seen it shake
naughtily on the owner’s head. She felt a strange tenderness towards
the little wilful thing, and, as she leaned over it, made in her heart
a thousand fond apologies for every fault and error.

She was standing thus when Mrs. Scudder entered the room to see if her
daughter had yet retired.

‘What are you doing there, Mary?’ she said, as her eye fell on the
letter. ‘What is it you are reading?’

Mary felt herself grow pale: it was the first time in her whole life
that her mother had asked her a question that she was not from the
heart ready to answer. Her loyalty to her only parent had gone on
even-handed with that she gave to her God; she felt, somehow, that the
revelations of that afternoon had opened a gulf between them, and the
consciousness overpowered her.

Mrs. Scudder was astonished at her evident embarrassment, her
trembling, and paleness. She was a woman of prompt, imperative
temperament, and the slightest hesitation in rendering to her a full,
outspoken confidence had never before occurred in their intercourse.
Her child was the core of her heart, the apple of her eye, and intense
love is always near neighbour to anger; there was therefore an
involuntary flash from her eye and a heightening of her colour, as she
said,—‘Mary, are you concealing anything from your mother?’

In that moment Mary had grown calm again. The wonted serene, balanced
nature had found its habitual poise, and she looked up innocently,
though with tears in her large blue eyes, and said,—‘No, mother,—I have
nothing that I do not mean to tell you fully. This letter came from
James Marvyn; he came here to see me this afternoon.’

‘Here?—when? I did not see him.’

‘After dinner. I was sitting here in the window, and suddenly he came
up behind me through the orchard-path.’

Mrs. Katy sat down with a flushed cheek and a discomposed air; but Mary
seemed actually to bear her down by the candid clearness of the large
blue eye which she turned on her as she stood perfectly collected, with
her deadly-pale face and a brilliant spot burning on each cheek.

‘James came to say good-bye. He complained that he had not had a chance
to see me alone since he came home.’

‘And what should he want to see you alone for?’ said Mrs. Scudder, in a
dry, disturbed tone.

‘Mother,—everybody has things at times which they would like to say to
some one person alone,’ said Mary.

‘Well, tell me what he said.’

‘I will try. In the first place he said that he always had been free,
all his life, to run in and out of our house, and to wait on me like a
brother.’

‘Hum!’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘but he isn’t your brother for all that.’

‘Well, then he wanted to know why you were so cold to him, and why you
never let him walk with me from meetings, or see me alone as we often
used to. And I told him why,—that we were not children now, and that
you thought it was not best; and then I talked with him about religion,
and tried to persuade him to attend to the concerns of his soul; and I
never felt so much hope for him as I do now.’

Aunt Katy looked sceptical, and remarked,—‘If he really felt a
disposition for religious instruction, Dr. H. could guide him much
better than you could.’

‘Yes,—so I told him, and I tried to persuade him to talk with Dr. H.;
but he was very unwilling. He said, I could have more influence over
him than anybody else,—that nobody could do him any good but me.’

‘Yes, yes,—I understand all that,’ said Aunt Katy,—‘I have heard young
men say _that_ before, and I know just what it amounts to.’

‘But, mother, I do think James was moved very much, this afternoon. I
never heard him speak so seriously; he seemed really in earnest, and he
asked me to give him my Bible.’

‘Couldn’t he read any Bible but yours?’

‘Why, naturally, you know, mother, he would like my Bible better,
because it would put him in mind of me. He promised faithfully to read
it all through.’

‘And then, it seems, he wrote you a letter.’ ‘Yes, mother.’

Mary shrank from showing this letter, from the natural sense of honour
which makes us feel it indelicate to expose to an unsympathising eye
the confidential outpourings of another heart; and then, she felt quite
sure that there was no such intercessor for James in her mother’s heart
as in her own. But over all this reluctance rose the determined force
of duty; and she handed the letter in silence to her mother.

Mrs. Scudder took it, laid it deliberately in her lap, and then began
searching in the pocket of her chintz petticoat for her spectacles.
These being found, she wiped them, accurately adjusted them, opened
the letter and spread it on her lap, brushing out its folds and
straightening it, that she might read with the greater ease. After this
she read it carefully and deliberately; and all this while there was
such a stillness, that the sound of the tall varnished clock in the
best room could be heard through the half-opened door.

After reading it with the most tiresome, torturing slowness, she rose,
and laying it on the table under Mary’s eye, and, pressing down her
finger on two lines in the letter, said, ‘Mary, have you told James
that you loved him?’

‘Yes, mother, always. I always loved him, and he always knew it.’

‘But, Mary, this that he speaks of is something different. What has
passed between——’

‘Why, mother, he was saying that we who were Christians drew to
ourselves and did not care for the salvation of our friends; and then I
told him how I had always prayed for him, and how I should be willing
even to give up my hopes in heaven, if he might be saved.’

‘Child,—what do you mean?’

‘I mean, if only one of us two could go to heaven, I had rather it
should be him than me,’ said Mary.

‘Oh, child! child!’ said Mrs. Scudder, with a sort of groan,—‘has it
gone with you so far as this? Poor child!—after all my care, you _are_
in love with this boy,—your heart is set on him.’

‘Mother, I am not. I never expect to see him much,—never expect to
marry him or anybody else;—only he seems to me to have so much more
life and soul and spirit than most people,—I think him so noble
and grand,—that is, that he _could_ be, if he were all he ought to
be,—that, somehow, I never think of myself in thinking of him, and his
salvation seems worth more than mine;—men can do so much more!—they can
live such splendid lives!—oh, a real noble man is so glorious!’

‘And you would like to see him well married, would you not?’ said
Mrs. Scudder, sending, with a true woman’s aim, this keen arrow into
the midst of the cloud of enthusiasm which enveloped her daughter. ‘I
think,’ she added, ‘that Jane Spencer would make him an excellent wife.’

Mary was astonished at a strange, new pain that shot through her at
these words. She drew in her breath and turned herself uneasily, as
one who had literally felt a keen dividing blade piercing between soul
and spirit. Till this moment, she had never been conscious of herself;
but the shaft had torn the veil. She covered her face with her hands;
the hot blood flushed scarlet over neck and brow; at last, with a
beseeching look, she threw herself into her mother’s arms.

‘Oh, mother, mother, I am selfish, after all!’

Mrs. Scudder folded her silently to her heart, and said, ‘My daughter,
that is not at all what I wished it to be; I see how it is;—but then
you have been a good child; I don’t blame you. We can’t always help
ourselves. We don’t always really know how we do feel. I didn’t
know, for a long while, that I loved your father. I thought I was
only curious about him, because he had a strange way of treating me,
different from other men; but, one day, I remember, Julian Simons told
me that it was reported that his mother was making a match for him with
Susan Emery, and I was astonished to find how I felt. I saw him that
evening, and the moment he looked at me I saw it wasn’t true; all at
once I knew something I never knew before,—and that was, that I should
be very unhappy, if he loved any one else better than me. But then,
my child, your father was a different man from James;—he was as much
better than I was as you are than James. I was a foolish, thoughtless
young thing then. I never should have been anything at all, but for
him. Somehow, when I loved him, I grew more serious, and then he always
guided and led me. Mary, your father was a wonderful man; he was one
of the sort that the world knows not of; sometime I must show you his
letters. I always hoped, my daughter, that you would marry such a man.’

‘Don’t speak of marrying, mother. I never shall marry.’

‘You certainly should not, unless you can marry in the Lord. Remember
the words, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For
what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what
communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with
Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?”’

‘Mother, James is not an infidel.’

‘He certainly is an _unbeliever_, Mary, by his own confession; but then
God is a Sovereign and hath mercy on whom He will. You do right to pray
for him; but if he does not come out on the Lord’s side, you must not
let your heart mislead you. He is going to be gone three years, and
you must try to think as little of him as possible;—put your mind upon
your duties, like a good girl, and God will bless you. Don’t believe
too much in your power over him:—young men, when they are in love,
will promise anything, and really think they mean it; but nothing is a
saving change, except what is wrought in them by sovereign grace.’

‘But, mother, does not God use the love we have to each other as a
means of doing us good? Did you not say that it was by your love to
father that you first were led to think seriously?’

‘That is true, my child,’ said Mrs. Scudder, who, like many of the
rest of the world, was surprised to meet her own words walking out
on a track where she had not expected them, but was yet too true of
soul to cut their acquaintance because they were not going the way of
her wishes. ‘Yes, all that is true; but yet, Mary, when one has but
one little ewe lamb in the world, one is jealous of it. I would give
all the world, if you had never seen James. It is dreadful enough for
a woman to love anybody as you can, but it is more to love a man of
unsettled character and no religion. But then the Lord appoints all our
goings: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps;—I leave you,
my child, in His hands.’ And, with one solemn and long embrace, the
mother and daughter parted for the night.

It is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for a
thoughtless, shallow-minded person. If we represent things as they are,
their intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and earnestness,
must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as the reverse pole of the
magnet drives off sticks and straws.

In no other country were the soul and the spiritual life ever such
intense realities, and everything contemplated so much (to use a
current New-England phrase) ‘in reference to eternity.’ Mrs. Scudder
was a strong clear-headed, practical woman. No one had a clearer
estimate of the material and outward life, or could more minutely
manage its smallest item; but then a tremendous, eternal future had
so weighed down and compacted the fibres of her very soul, that all
earthly things were but as dust in comparison to it. That her child
should be one elected to walk in white, to reign with Christ when earth
was a forgotten dream, was her one absorbing wish; and she looked on
all the events of life only with reference to this. The way of life
was narrow, the chances in favour of any child of Adam infinitely
small; the best, the most seemingly pure and fair, was by nature a
child of wrath, and could be saved only by a sovereign decree, by
which it should be plucked as a brand from the burning. Therefore it
was, that, weighing all things in one balance, there was the sincerity
of her whole being in the dread which she felt at the thought of her
daughter’s marriage with an unbeliever.

Mrs. Scudder, after retiring to her room, took her Bible, in
preparation for her habitual nightly exercise of devotion, before going
to rest. She read and re-read a chapter, scarce thinking what she was
reading,—aroused herself,—and then sat with the book in her hand in
deep thought. James Marvyn was her cousin’s son, and she had a strong
feeling of respect and family attachment for his father. She had, too,
a real kindness for the young man, whom she regarded as a well-meaning,
wilful youngster; but that _he_ should touch her saint, her Mary,
that _he_ should take from her the daughter who was her all, really
embittered her heart towards him.

‘After all,’ she said to herself, ‘there are three years,—three years
in which there will be no letters, or perhaps only one or two,—and a
great deal may be done in three years, if one is wise;’—and she felt
within herself an arousing of all the shrewd womanly and motherly tact
of her nature to meet this new emergency.




CHAPTER VI.

THE DOCTOR.


IT is seldom that man and woman come together in intimate association,
unless influences are at work more subtle and mysterious than the
subjects of them dream. Even in cases where the strongest ruling force
of the two sexes seems out of the question, there is still something
peculiar and insidious in their relationship. A fatherly old gentleman,
who undertakes the care of a sprightly young girl, finds, to his
astonishment, that little Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him.
Grave professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their female
pupils just as they give them to the coarser sex; and more than once
has the fable of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ been acted over by the most
unlikely performers.

The Doctor was a philosopher, a metaphysician, a philanthropist, and
in the highest and most earnest sense a minister of good on earth. The
New England clergy had no sentimental affectation of sanctity that
segregated them from wholesome human relations; and, consequently, our
good Doctor had always resolved, in a grave and thoughtful spirit,
at a suitable time in his worldly affairs, to choose unto himself a
helpmeet. Love, as treated of in romances, he held to be a foolish and
profane matter, unworthy the attention of a serious and reasonable
creature. All the language of poetry on this subject was to him an
unknown tongue. He contemplated the entrance on married life somewhat
in this wise:—That at a time and place suiting, he should look out
unto himself a woman of a pleasant countenance and of good repute, a
zealous, earnest Christian, and well skilled in the items of household
management, whom, accosting as a stranger and pilgrim to a better life,
he should loyally and lovingly entreat, as Isaac did Rebekah, to come
under the shadow of his tent and be a helpmeet unto him in what yet
remained of this mortal journey. But straitened circumstances, and the
unsettled times of the Revolution, in which he had taken an earnest and
zealous part, had delayed to a late bachelorhood the fulfilment of this
resolution.

When once received under the shadow of Mrs. Scudder’s roof, and within
the provident sphere of her unfailing housekeeping, all material
necessity for an immediate choice was taken away; for he was in exactly
that situation dearest to every scholarly and thoughtful man, in which
all that pertained to the outward life appeared to rise under his hand
at the moment he wished for it, without his knowing how or why.

He was not at the head of a prosperous church and society, rich and
well-to-do in the world,—but, as the pioneer leader of a new theology,
in a country where theology was the all-absorbing interest, he had to
breast the reaction that ever attends the advent of new ideas. His
pulpit talents, too, were unattractive. His early training had been
all logical, not in the least æsthetic; for, like the ministry of his
country generally, he had been trained always to think more of what
he should say than of how he should say it. Consequently, his style,
though not without a certain massive greatness, which always comes from
largeness of nature, had none of those attractions by which the common
masses are beguiled into thinking. He gave only the results of thought,
not its incipient processes; and the consequence was, that few could
follow him. In like manner, his religious teachings were characterized
by an ideality so high as quite to discourage ordinary virtue.

There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human
affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love,
through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes,
till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image
of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of
Paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where
the soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience
of devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and
Beauty of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type,
the distant shadow. This highest step, this saintly elevation, which
but few selectest spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to
which the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence
and strung every chord of human love, for which this world is one long
discipline, for which the soul’s human education is constantly varied,
for which it is now torn by sorrow, now flooded by joy, to which all
its multiplied powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant
aspiration,—this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by our
sage as the _all_ of religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder
but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendour, said to
the world, ‘Go up thither and be saved!’

Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional surrender
to the Infinite, there was nothing meritorious,—because, if _that_
were commanded, every moment of refusal was rebellion. Every prayer,
not based on such consecration, he held to be an insult to the Divine
Majesty;—the reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of life,
the performance of the duties of man to man, being, without this, the
deeds of a creature in conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign,
were all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be preached to the
sinner, but his ability and obligation to rise immediately to this
height.

It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort should seem to many
unendurable, and that the multitude should desert the preacher with
the cry, ‘This is an hard saying; who can hear it?’ The young and
gay were wearied by the dryness of metaphysical discussions which to
them were as unintelligible as a statement of the last results of the
mathematician to the child commencing the multiplication-table. There
remained around him only a select circle,—shrewd, hard thinkers, who
delighted in metaphysical subtleties,—deep-hearted, devoted natures,
who sympathized with the unworldly purity of his life, his active
philanthropy and untiring benevolence,—courageous men, who admired his
independence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinions,—and
those unperceiving, dull, good people who are content to go to church
anywhere as convenience and circumstances may drift them,—people who
serve, among the keen-feeling and thinking portion of the world, much
the same purpose as adipose matter in the human system, as a soft
cushion between the nerves of feeling and the muscles of activity.

There was something affecting in the pertinacity with which the good
Doctor persevered in saying his say to his discouraging minority of
hearers. His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged during the
Revolutionary struggle, was dilapidated and forlorn,—fireless in
winter, and in summer admitting a flood of sun and dust through those
great windows which formed so principal a feature in those first
efforts of Puritan architecture.

Still, grand in his humility, he preached on,—and as a soldier never
asks why, but stands at apparently the most useless post, so he went
on from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with the reflection
that no one could think more meanly of his ministrations than he did
himself. ‘I am like Moses only in not being eloquent,’ he said in his
simplicity. ‘My preaching is barren and dull, my voice is hard and
harsh; but then the Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me. He
fed Elijah once through a raven, and he may feed some poor wandering
soul through me.’

The only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that the
elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was
preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living, by his visitations
to homes of poverty and sorrow, by his searching out of the lowly
African slaves, his teaching of those whom no one else in those days
had thought of teaching, and by the grand humanity, outrunning his age,
in which he protested against the then admitted system of slavery and
the slave-trade. But when, rising in the pulpit, he followed trains of
thought suited only to the desk of the theological lecture-room, he did
it blindly, following that law of self-development by which minds of
a certain amount of fervour _must_ utter what is in them, whether men
will hear or whether they will forbear.

But the place where our Doctor was happiest was his study. There he
explored, and wandered, and read, and thought, and lived a life as
wholly ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.

And could _Love_ enter a reverend doctor’s study, and find his way into
a heart empty and swept of all those shreds of poetry and romance in
which he usually finds the material of his incantations? Even so;—but
he came so thoughtfully, so reverently, with so wise and cautious a
footfall, that the good Doctor never even raised his spectacles to
see who was there. The first that he knew, poor man, he was breathing
an air of strange and subtile sweetness,—from what Paradise he never
stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great, rugged elm, with
all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which has stood
cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful
of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its naked
strength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April there
is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,—a whispering of
knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from bough to bough
with a warm and gentle life; and though the old elm knows it not, a new
creation is at hand. Just so, ever since the good man had lived at Mrs.
Scudder’s, and had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a richer life
seemed to have coloured his thoughts,—his mind seemed to work with a
pleasure never felt before.

Whoever looked on the forehead of the good Doctor must have seen the
squareness of ideality giving marked effect to its outline. As yet
ideality had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible, leading to
subtile refinements of argument and exalted ideas of morals. But there
was lying in him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those artistic
feelings and perceptions which are awakened and developed only by the
touch of beauty. Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great Duomo
of Florence, where Giotto’s Campanile rises like the slender stalk of
a celestial lily, where varied marbles and rainbow glass and gorgeous
paintings and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood, the
soul’s reminiscences of the bygone glories of its pristine state, his
would have been a soul as rounded and full in its sphere of faculties
as that of Da Vinci or Michael Angelo. But of all that he was as
ignorant as a child; and the first revelation of his dormant nature
was to come to him through the face of woman,—that work of the Mighty
Master which is to be found in all lands and ages.

What makes the love of a great mind something fearful in its inception
is, that it is often the unsealing of a hitherto undeveloped portion of
a large and powerful being: the woman may or may not seem to other eyes
adequate to the effect produced, but the man cannot forget her, because
with her came a change which makes him for ever a different being. So
it was with our friend. A woman it was that was destined to awaken in
him all that consciousness which music, painting, poetry awaken in more
evenly-developed minds; and it is the silent breathing of her creative
presence that is even now creating him anew, while as yet he knows it
not.

He never thought, this good old soul, whether Mary were beautiful or
not; he never even knew that he looked at her; nor did he know why it
was that the truths of his theology, when uttered by her tongue, had
such a wondrous beauty as he never felt before. He did not know why it
was, that, when she silently sat by him, copying tangled manuscript for
the press, as she sometimes did, his whole study seemed so full of some
divine influence, as if, like St. Dorothea, she had worn in her bosom,
invisibly, the celestial roses of Paradise. He recorded honestly in his
diary what marvellous freshness of spirit the Lord had given him, and
how he seemed to be uplifted in his communings with heaven, without
once thinking from the robes of what angel this sweetness had exhaled.

On Sundays, when he saw good Mrs. Jones asleep, and Simon Brown’s hard,
sharp eyes, and Deacon Twitchel mournfully rocking to and fro, and his
wife handing fennel to keep the children awake, his eye glanced across
to the front gallery, where one earnest young face, ever kindling
with feeling and bright with intellect, followed on his way, and he
felt uplifted and comforted. On Sunday mornings, when Mary came out
of her little room, in clean white dress, with her singing-book and
psalm-book in her hands, her deep eyes solemn from recent prayer, he
thought of that fair and mystical bride, the Lamb’s wife, whose union
with her Divine Redeemer in a future millenial age was a frequent and
favourite subject of his musings; yet he knew not that this celestial
bride, clothed in fine linen, clean and white, veiled in humility and
meekness, bore in his mind those earthly features. No, he never had
dreamed of that! But only after she had passed by, that mystical vision
seemed to him more radiant, more easy to be conceived.

It is said that, if a grape-vine be planted in the neighbourhood of
a well, its roots, running silently under ground, wreathe themselves
in a network around the cold clear waters, and the vine’s putting on
outward greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is all that tells
where every root and fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So
those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with unheeded
quietness, every thought and fibre of our life twines gradually around
some human soul, to us the unsuspected well-spring of our being.
Fearful it is, because so often the vine must be uprooted, and all its
fibres wrenched away; but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it
transfigured by a new and beautiful life!

There is nothing in life more beautiful than that trancelike quiet
dawn which precedes the rising of love in the soul. When the whole
being is pervaded imperceptibly and tranquilly by another being, and
we are happy, we know not and ask not why, the soul is then receiving
all and asking nothing. At a later day she becomes self-conscious, and
then come craving exactions, endless questions,—the whole world of the
material comes in with its hard counsels and consultations, and the
beautiful trance fades for ever.

Of course all this is not so to _you_, my good friends, who read it
without the most distant idea what it can mean; but there are people in
the world to whom it has meant and will mean much, and who will see in
the present happiness of our respectable friend something even ominous
and sorrowful.

It had not escaped the keen eye of the mother how quickly and
innocently the good Doctor was absorbed by her daughter, and thereupon
had come long trains of practical reflections.

The Doctor, though not popular indeed as a preacher, was a noted man in
his age. Her deceased husband had regarded him with something of the
same veneration which might have been accorded to a divine messenger,
and Mrs. Scudder had received and kept this veneration as a precious
legacy. Then, although not handsome, the Doctor had decidedly a grand
and imposing appearance. There was nothing common or insignificant
about him. Indeed, it had been said, that, when, just after the
declaration of peace, he walked through the town in the commemorative
procession side by side with General Washington, the minister, in the
majesty of his gown, bands, cocked hat, and full flowing wig, was
thought by many to be the more majestic and personable figure of the
two.

In those days, the minister united in himself all those ideas of
superior position and cultivation with which the theocratic system of
the New England community had invested him. Mrs. Scudder’s notions of
social rank could reach no higher than to place her daughter on the
throne of such pre-eminence.

Her Mary, she pondered, was no common girl. In those days it was a
rare thing for young persons to devote themselves to religion or make
any professions of devout life. The church, or that body of people who
professed to have passed through a divine regeneration, was almost
entirely confined to middle-aged and elderly people, and it was looked
upon as a singular and unwonted call of divine grace when young persons
came forward to attach themselves to it. When Mary, therefore, at quite
an early age, in all the bloom of her youthful beauty, arose, according
to the simple and impressive New England rite, to consecrate herself
publicly to a religious life, and to join the company of professing
Christians, she was regarded with a species of deference amounting
even to awe. Had it not been for the childlike, unconscious simplicity
of her manners, the young people of her age would have shrunk away
from her, as from one entirely out of their line of thought and
feeling; but a certain natural and innocent playfulness and amiable
self-forgetfulness made her a general favourite.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Scudder knew no young man whom she deemed worthy to
have and hold a heart which she prized so highly. As to James, he stood
at double disadvantage, because, as her cousin’s son, he had grown up
from childhood under her eye, and all those sins and iniquities into
which gay and adventurous youngsters will be falling had come to her
knowledge. She felt kindly to the youth; she wished him well; but as
to giving him her Mary!—the very suggestion made her dislike him. She
was quite sure he must have tried to beguile her—he must have tampered
with her feelings to arouse in her pure and well-ordered mind so much
emotion and devotedness as she had witnessed.

How encouraging a Providence, then, was it that he was gone to sea for
three years!—how fortunate that Mary had been prevented in any way
from committing herself with him!—how encouraging that the only man in
those parts, in the least fitted to appreciate her, seemed so greatly
pleased and absorbed in her society!—how easily might Mary’s dutiful
reverence be changed to a warmer sentiment, when she should find that
so great a man could descend from his lofty thoughts to think of her!

In fact, before Mrs. Scudder had gone to sleep the first night after
James’s departure, she had settled upon the house where the minister
and his young wife were to live, had reviewed the window-curtains and
bed-quilts for each room, and glanced complacently at an improved
receipt for wedding-cake, which might be brought out to glorify a
certain occasion!




CHAPTER VII.

THE FRIENDS AND RELATIONS OF JAMES.


MR. ZEBEDEE MARVYN, the father of James, was the sample of an
individuality so purely the result of New England society and education
that he must be embodied in our story as a representative man of the
times.

He owned a large farm in the immediate vicinity of Newport, which he
worked with his own hands and kept under the most careful cultivation.
He was a man past the middle of life, with a white head, a keen blue
eye, and a face graven deeply with the lines of energy and thought. His
was one of those clearly-cut minds which New England forms among her
farmers, as she forms quartz crystals in her mountains, by a sort of
gradual influence flowing through every pore of her soil and system.

His education, properly so called, had been merely that of those common
schools and academies with which the States are thickly sown, and
which are the springs of so much intellectual activity. Here he had
learned to think and to inquire,—a process which had not ceased with
his schooldays. Though toiling daily with his sons and hired man in all
the minutiæ of a farmer’s life, he kept an observant eye on the field
of literature, and there was not a new publication heard of that he did
not immediately find means to add it to his yearly increasing stock of
books. In particular was he a well-read and careful theologian, and
all the controversial tracts, sermons, and books, with which then, as
ever since, New England has abounded, not only lay on his shelves, but
had his pencilled annotations, queries, and comments thickly scattered
along their margins. There was scarce an office of public trust which
had not at one time or another been filled by him. He was deacon of
the church, chairman of the school committee, justice of the peace,
had been twice representative in the State legislature, and was in
permanence a sort of adviser-general in all cases between neighbour and
neighbour. Among other acquisitions, he had gained some knowledge of
the general forms of law, and his advice was often asked in preference
to that of the regular practitioners.

His dwelling was one of those large, square, white, green-blinded
mansions—cool, clean, and roomy—wherein the respectability of New
England in those days rejoiced. The windows were shaded by clumps of
lilacs; the deep yard with its white fence enclosed a sweep of clean,
short grass and a few fruit-trees. Opposite the house was a small
blacksmith’s shed, which, of a wet day, was sparkling and lively
with bellows and ringing forge, while Mr. Zebedee and his sons were
hammering and pounding and putting in order anything that was out
of the way in farming-tools or establishments. Not unfrequently the
latest scientific work or the last tractate of theology lay open by
his side, the contents of which would be discussed with a neighbour
or two as they entered; for, to say the truth, many a neighbour, less
forehanded and thrifty, felt the benefit of this arrangement of Mr.
Zebedee, and would drop in to see if he ‘wouldn’t just tighten that
rivet,’ or ‘kind o’ease out that ’ere brace,’ or ‘let a feller have a
turn with his bellows or a stroke or two on his anvil,’—to all which
the good man consented with a grave obligingness. The fact was, that
as nothing in the establishment of Mr. Marvyn was often broken or lost
or out of place, he had frequent applications to lend to those less
fortunate persons, always to be found, who supply their own lack of
considerateness from the abundance of their neighbours.

He who is known always to be in hand, and always obliging, in a
neighbourhood, stands the chance sometimes of having nothing for
himself. Mr. Zebedee reflected quietly on this subject, taking it, as
he did all others, into grave and orderly consideration, and finally
provided a complete set of tools, which he kept for the purpose of
lending; and when any of these were lent, he told the next applicant
quietly that the axe or the hoe was already out, and thus he reconciled
the Scripture which commanded him to ‘do good and lend’ with that law
of order which was written in his nature.

Early in life Mr. Marvyn had married one of the handsomest girls
of his acquaintance, who had brought him a thriving and healthy
family of children, of whom James was the youngest. Mrs. Marvyn was,
at this time, a tall, sad-eyed, gentle-mannered woman, thoughtful,
earnest, deep-natured, though sparing in the matter of words. In all
her household arrangements, she had the same thrift and order which
characterized her husband; but hers was a mind of a finer and higher
stamp than his.

In her bedroom, near by her work-basket, stood a table covered with
books,—and so systematic were her household arrangements, that she
never any day missed her regular hours for reading. One who should
have looked over this table would have seen there how eager and hungry
a mind was hid behind the silent eyes of this quiet woman. History,
biography, mathematics, volumes of the encyclopædia, poetry, novels,
all alike found their time and place there,—and while she pursued
her household labours, the busy, active soul within travelled cycles
and cycles of thought, few of which ever found expression in words.
What might be that marvellous music of the _Miserere_, of which she
read, that it convulsed crowds and drew groans and tears from the most
obdurate? What might be those wondrous pictures of Raphael and Leonardo
da Vinci? What would it be to see the Apollo, the Venus? What was the
charm that enchanted the old marbles—charm untold and inconceivable
to one who had never seen even the slightest approach to a work of
art? Then those glaciers of Switzerland, that grand, unapproachable
mixture of beauty and sublimity in her mountains!—what would it be to
one who could see it? Then what were all those harmonies of which she
read,—masses, fugues, symphonies? Oh, could she once hear the Miserere
of Mozart, just to know what music was like! And the cathedrals, what
were they? How wonderful they must be, with their forests of arches,
many-coloured as autumn-woods with painted glass, and the chants
and anthems rolling down their long aisles! On all these things she
pondered quietly, as she sat often on Sundays in the old staring,
rattle-windowed meeting-house, and looked at the uncouth old pulpit,
and heard the choir fa-sol-la-ing or singing fuguing tunes; but of all
this she said nothing.

Sometimes, for days, her thoughts would turn from these subjects and
be absorbed in mathematical or metaphysical studies. ‘I have been
following that treatise on Optics for a week, and never understood it
till to-day,’ she once said to her husband. ‘I have found now that
there has been a mistake in drawing the diagrams. I have corrected it,
and now the demonstration is complete.—Dinah, take care, that wood is
hickory, and it takes only seven sticks of that size to heat the oven.’

It is not to be supposed that a woman of this sort was an inattentive
listener to preaching so stimulating to the intellect as that of Dr.
H. No pair of eyes followed the web of his reasonings with a keener
and more anxious watchfulness than those sad, deep-set, hazel ones;
and as she was drawn along the train of its inevitable logic, a close
observer might have seen how the shadows deepened over them. For, while
others listened for the clearness of the thought, for the acuteness
of the argument, she listened as a soul wide, fine-strung, acute,
repressed, whose every fibre is a nerve, listens to the problem of its
own destiny,—listened as the mother of a family listens, to know what
were the possibilities, the probabilities of this mysterious existence
of ours to herself and those dearer to her than herself.

The consequence of all her listening was a history of deep inward
sadness. That exultant joy, or that entire submission, with which
others seemed to view the scheme of the universe, as thus unfolded,
did not visit her mind. Everything to her seemed shrouded in gloom and
mystery; and that darkness she received as a token of unregeneracy,
as a sign that she was one of those who are destined, by a mysterious
decree, never to receive the light of the glorious gospel of Christ.
Hence, while her husband was a deacon of the church, she for years
had sat in her pew while the sacramental elements were distributed, a
mournful spectator. Punctilious in every duty, exact, reverential, she
still regarded herself as a child of wrath, an enemy to God, and an
heir of perdition; nor could she see any hope of remedy, except in the
sovereign, mysterious decree of an Infinite and Unknown Power, a mercy
for which she waited with the sickness of hope deferred.

Her children had grown up successively around her, intelligent and
exemplary. Her eldest son was mathematical professor in one of the
leading colleges of New England. Her second son, who jointly with his
father superintended the farm, was a man of wide literary culture and
of fine mathematical genius; and not unfrequently, on winter evenings,
the son, father, and mother worked together, by their kitchen fireside,
over the calculations for the almanac for the ensuing year, which the
son had been appointed to edit.

Everything in the family arrangements was marked by a sober precision,
a grave and quiet self-possession. There was little demonstrativeness
of affection between parents and children, brothers and sisters, though
great mutual affection and confidence. It was not pride, nor sternness,
but a sort of habitual shamefacedness, that kept far back in each soul
those feelings which are the most beautiful in their outcome; but
after a while, the habit became so fixed a nature, that a caressing
or affectionate expression could not have passed the lips of one to
another without a painful awkwardness. Love was understood, once for
all, to be the basis on which their life was built. Once for all, they
loved each other, and after that, the less said the better. It had cost
the woman’s heart of Mrs. Marvyn some pangs, in the earlier part of
her wedlock, to accept of this _once for all_, in place of those daily
out-gushings which every woman desires should be like God’s loving
kindness, ‘new every morning;’ but hers, too, was a nature strongly
inclining inward, and, after a few tremulous movements, the needle of
her soul settled, and her life-lot was accepted,—not as what she would
like or could conceive, but as a reasonable and good one. Life was a
picture painted in low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though
another and brighter style might have pleased better, she did not
quarrel with this.

Into this steady, decorous, highly-respectable circle, the youngest
child, James, made a formidable irruption. One sometimes sees launched
into a family circle a child of so different a nature from all the
rest, that it might seem as if, like an aërolite, he had fallen out
of another sphere. All the other babies of the Marvyn family had been
of that orderly, contented sort who sleep till it is convenient to
take them up, and while awake suck their thumbs contentedly and look
up with large, round eyes at the ceiling when it is not convenient
for their elders and betters that they should do anything else. In
farther advanced childhood, they had been quiet and decorous children,
who could be all dressed and set up in chairs, like so many dolls, of
a Sunday morning, patiently awaiting the stroke of the church-bell
to be carried out and put into the waggon which took them over the
two miles’ road to church. Possessed of such tranquil, orderly, and
exemplary young offshoots, Mrs. Marvyn had been considered eminent for
her ‘faculty’ in bringing up children.

But James was destined to put ‘faculty,’ and every other talent which
his mother possessed, to rout. He was an infant of moods and tenses,
and those not of any regular verb. He would cry of nights, and he would
be taken up of mornings, and he would not suck his thumb, nor a bundle
of caraway-seed tied in a rag and dipped in sweet milk, with which the
good gossips in vain endeavoured to pacify him. He fought manfully with
his two great fat fists the battle of babyhood, utterly reversed all
nursery maxims, and reigned as baby over the whole prostrate household.
When old enough to run alone, his splendid black eyes and glossy
rings of hair were seen flashing and bobbing in every forbidden place
and occupation. Now trailing on his mother’s gown, he assisted her
in salting her butter by throwing in small contributions of snuff or
sugar, as the case might be; and again, after one of those mysterious
periods of silence which are of most ominous significance in nursery
experience, he would rise from the demolition of her indigo-bag,
showing a face ghastly with blue streaks, and looking more like a
gnome than the son of a respectable mother. There was not a pitcher of
any description of contents left within reach of his little tiptoes
and busy fingers that was not pulled over upon his giddy head without
in the least seeming to improve its steadiness. In short, his mother
remarked that she was thankful every night when she had fairly gotten
him into bed and asleep: James had really got through one more day and
killed neither himself nor any one else.

As a boy, the case was little better. He did not take to study, yawned
over books, and cut out moulds for running anchors when he should have
been thinking of his columns of words in four syllables. No mortal knew
how he learned to read, for he never seemed to stop running long enough
to learn anything; and yet he did learn, and used the talent in conning
over travels, sea-voyages, and lives of heroes and naval commanders.
Spite of father, mother, and brother, he seemed to possess the most
extraordinary faculty of running up unsavoury acquaintances. He was a
hail-fellow well-met with every Tom and Jack and Jim and Ben and Dick
that strolled on the wharves, and astonished his father with minutest
particulars of every ship, schooner, and brig in the harbour, together
with biographical notes of the different Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, by
whom they were worked.

There was but one member of the family that seemed to know at all what
to make of James, and that was their negro servant, Candace.

In those days, when domestic slavery prevailed in New England, it
was quite a different thing in its aspects from the same institution
in more southern latitudes. The hard soil, unyielding to any but the
most considerate culture, the thrifty, close, shrewd habits of the
people, and their untiring activity and industry, prevented, among
the mass of the people, any great reliance on slave labour. It was
something foreign, grotesque, and picturesque in a life of the most
matter-of-fact sameness: it was even as if one should see clusters of
palm-trees scattered here and there among Yankee wooden meeting-houses,
or open one’s eyes on clumps of yellow-striped aloes growing among
hardhack and huckleberry bushes in the pastures.

Added to this, there were from the very first, in New England, serious
doubts in the minds of thoughtful and conscientious people in reference
to the lawfulness of slavery; and this scruple prevented many from
availing themselves of it, and proved a restraint on all, so that
nothing like plantation-life existed, and what servants were owned were
scattered among different families, of which they came to be regarded
and to regard themselves as a legitimate part and portion,—Mr. Marvyn,
as a man of substance, numbering two or three in his establishment,
among whom Candace reigned chief. The presence of these tropical
specimens of humanity, with their wide, joyous, rich physical abundance
of nature and their hearty _abandon_ of outward expression, was a
relief to the still clear-cut lines in which the picture of New England
life was drawn, which an artist must appreciate.

No race has ever shown such infinite and rich capabilities of
adaptation to varying soil and circumstances as the negro. Alike to
them the snows of Canada, the hard, rocky land of New England, with
its set lines and orderly ways, or the gorgeous profusion and loose
abundance of the Southern States. Sambo and Cuffy expand under
them all. New England yet preserves among her hills and valleys the
lingering echoes of the jokes and jollities of various sable worthies,
who saw alike in orthodoxy and heterodoxy, in Dr. This-side and
Dr. That-side, only food for more abundant merriment;—in fact, the
minister of those days not unfrequently had his black shadow, a sort of
African Boswell, who powdered his wig, brushed his boots, defended and
patronized his sermons, and strutted complacently about, as if through
virtue of his blackness he had absorbed every ray of his master’s
dignity and wisdom. In families, the presence of these exotics was a
godsend to the children, supplying from the abundant outwardness and
demonstrativeness of their nature that aliment of sympathy so dear
to childhood, which the repressed and quiet habits of New England
education denied. Many and many a New Englander counts among his
pleasantest early recollections the memory of some of these genial
creatures, who by their warmth of nature were the first and most potent
mesmerizers of his childish mind.

Candace was a powerfully built, majestic black woman, corpulent,
heavy, with a swinging majesty of motion like that of a ship in a
ground swell. Her shining black skin and glistening white teeth were
indications of perfect physical vigour which had never known a day’s
sickness; her turban, of broad red and yellow bandanna stripes, had
even a warm tropical glow; and her ample skirts were always ready to
be spread over every childish transgression of her youngest pet and
favourite, James.

She used to hold him entranced long winter evenings, while she sat
knitting in the chimney-corner, and crooned to him strange, wild
African legends of the things that she had seen in her childhood and
early days,—for she had been stolen when about fifteen years of age;
and these weird, dreamy talks increased the fervour of his roving
imagination, and his desire to explore the wonders of the wide and
unknown world. When rebuked or chastised, it was she who had secret
bowels of mercy for him, and hid doughnuts in her ample bosom to be
secretly administered to him in mitigation of the sentence that sent
him supperless to bed; and many a triangle of pie, many a wedge of
cake, had conveyed to him surreptitious consolations which his more
conscientious mother longed, but dared not, to impart. In fact, these
ministrations, if suspected, were winked at by Mrs. Marvyn, for two
reasons: first, that mothers are generally glad of any loving-kindness
to an erring boy, which they are not responsible for; and second, that
Candace was so set in her ways and opinions that one might as well come
in front of a ship under full sail as endeavour to stop her in a matter
where her heart was engaged.

[Illustration: _Candace’s defence of James_

_Page 70._

Sampson Low, Son & Co. Feby. 25th, 1859]

To be sure, she had her own private and special quarrels with ‘Massa
James,’ when he disputed any of her sovereign orders in the kitchen,
and would sometimes pursue him with uplifted rolling-pin and floury
hands when he had snatched a gingernut or cooky without suitable
deference or supplication, and would declare, roundly, that there
‘never was sich an aggravatin’ young-un.’ But if, on the strength of
this, any one else ventured a reproof, Candace was immediately round on
the other side: ‘Dat ar chile gwin’ to be spiled, ’cause dey’s allers
a’pickin’ on him; he’s well enough on’y let him alone.’

Well, under this miscellaneous assortment of influences,—through
the order and gravity and solemn monotone of life at home, with the
unceasing tick-tack of the clock for ever resounding through clean,
empty-seeming rooms,—through the sea, ever shining, ever smiling,
dimpling, soliciting, like a magical charger who comes saddled and
bridled and offers to take you to fairyland,—through acquaintance with
all sorts of foreign, outlandish ragamuffins among the ships in the
harbour,—from disgust of slow-moving oxen, and long-drawn, endless
furrows round the fifteen-acre lot,—from misunderstandings with grave
elder brothers, and feeling somehow as if, he knew not why, he grieved
his mother all the time just by being what he was and couldn’t help
being,—and, finally, by a bitter break with his father, in which
came that last wrench for an individual existence which some time or
other the young growing mind will give to old authority,—by all these
united, was the lot at length cast; for one evening James was missing
at supper, missing by the fireside, gone all night, not at home to
breakfast,—till, finally, a strange, weird, most heathenish-looking
cabin-boy, who had often been forbidden the premises by Mr. Marvyn,
brought in a letter, half-defiant, half-penitent, which announced that
James had sailed in the ‘Ariel’ the evening before.

Mr. Zebedee Marvyn set his face as a flint, and said, ‘He went out
from us because he was not of us,’—whereat old Candace lifted her
great floury fist from the kneading-trough, and, shaking it like a
large snowball, said, ‘Oh, you go ’long, Massa Marvyn; ye’ll live to
count dat ar boy for de staff o’ your old age yet, now I tell ye; got
de makin’ o’ ten or’nary men in him; kittles dat’s full allers will
bile over; good yeast will blow out de cork,—lucky ef it don’t bust de
bottle. Tell ye, der’s angels has der hooks in sich, and when de Lord
wants him dey’ll haul him in safe and sound.’ And Candace concluded her
speech by giving a lift to her whole batch of dough, and flinging it
down in the trough with an emphasis that made the pewter on the dresser
rattle.

This apparently irreverent way of expressing her mind, so contrary to
the deferential habits studiously inculcated in family discipline, had
grown to be so much a matter of course to all the family that nobody
ever thought of rebuking it. There was a sort of savage freedom about
her, which they excused in right of her having been born and bred a
heathen, and of course not to be expected to come at once under the
yoke of civilization. In fact, you must all have noticed, my dear
readers, that there are some sorts of people for whom everybody turns
out as they would for a railroad-car, without stopping to ask why—and
Candace was one of them.

Moreover, Mr. Marvyn was not displeased with this defence of James,
as might be inferred from his mentioning it four or five times in the
course of the morning, to say how foolish it was,—wondering why it was
that Candace and everybody else got so infatuated with that boy,—and
ending, at last, after a long period of thought, with the remark that
these poor African creatures often seemed to have a great deal of
shrewdness in them, and that he was often astonished at the penetration
that Candace showed.

At the end of the year James came home, more quiet and manly than he
had ever been known before,—so handsome with his sunburnt face, and
his keen, dark eyes and glossy curls, that half the girls in the front
gallery lost their hearts the first Sunday he appeared in church. He
was tender as a woman to his mother, and followed her with his eyes,
like a lover, wherever she went: he made due and manly acknowledgments
to his father, but declared his fixed and settled intention to abide by
the profession he had chosen; and he brought home all sorts of strange
foreign gifts for every member of the household. Candace was glorified
with a flaming red and yellow turban of Moorish stuff from Mogadore,
together with a pair of gorgeous yellow morocco slippers with peaked
toes, which, though there appeared no call to wear them in her common
course of life, she would put on her fat feet, and contemplate with
daily satisfaction. She became increasingly strengthened thereby in the
conviction that the angels who had their hooks in Massa James’s jacket
were already beginning to shorten the line.




CHAPTER VIII.

WHICH TREATS OF ROMANCE.


THERE is no word in the English language more unceremoniously and
indefinitely kicked and cuffed about, by what are called sensible
people, than the word _romance_. When Mr. Smith or Mr. Stubbs has
brought every wheel of life into such range and order that it is one
steady, daily grind,—when they themselves have come into the habits
and attitudes of the patient donkey, who steps round and round the
endlessly turning wheel of some machinery—then they fancy that they
have gotten ‘the victory that overcometh the world.’

All but this dead grind, and the dollars that come through the mill,
is by them thrown into one waste ‘catch-all’ and labelled _romance_.
Perhaps there was a time in Mr. Smith’s youth,—he remembers it
now,—when he read poetry, when his cheek was wet with strange tears,
when a little song, ground out by an organ-grinder in the street, had
power to set his heart beating and bring a mist before his eyes. Ah, in
those days he had a vision!—a pair of soft eyes stirred him strangely;
a little weak hand was laid on his manhood, and it shook and trembled;
and then came all the humility, the aspiration, the fear, the hope, the
high desire, the troubling of the waters by the descending angel of
love,—and a little more and Mr. Smith might have become a man, instead
of a banker! He thinks of it now, sometimes, as he looks across the
fireplace after dinner and sees Mrs. Smith asleep, innocently shaking
the bouquet of pink bows and Brussels lace that waves over her placid
red countenance.

Mrs. Smith wasn’t his first love, nor, indeed, any love at all; but
they agreed reasonably well. And as for poor Nellie,—well, she is dead
and buried,—all that was stuff and romance. Mrs. Smith’s money set him
up in business, and Mrs. Smith is a capital manager, and he thanks God
that he isn’t romantic, and tells Smith Junior not to read poetry or
novels, and to stick to realities.

‘This is the victory that overcometh the world,’—to learn to be fat and
tranquil, to have warm fires and good dinners, to hang your hat on the
same peg at the same hour every day, to sleep soundly all night, and
never to trouble your head with a thought or imagining beyond.

But there are many people besides Mr. Smith who have gained this
victory,—who have strangled their higher nature and buried it, and
built over its grave the structure of their life, the better to keep it
down.

The fascinating Mrs. T., whose life is a whirl between ball and opera,
point-lace, diamonds, and schemings of admiration for herself, and
of establishments for her daughters,—there was a time, if you will
believe me, when that proud, worldly woman was so humbled, under the
touch of some mighty power, that she actually thought herself capable
of being a poor man’s wife. She thought she could live in a little,
mean house, on no-matter-what-street, with one servant, and make her
own bonnets, and mend her own clothes, and sweep the house Mondays,
while Betty washed,—all for what? All because she thought that there
was a man so noble, so true, so good, so high-minded, that to live with
him in poverty, to be guided by him in adversity, to lean on him in
every rough place of life, was a something nobler, better, purer, more
satisfying, than French laces, opera-boxes, and even Madame Roget’s
best gowns.

Unfortunately, this was all romance,—there was no such man. There was,
indeed, a person of very common, self-interested aims and worldly
nature, whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited draft on all
her better nature; and when the hour of discovery came, she awoke
from her dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since has despised
aspiration, and been busy with the _realities_ of life, and feeds poor
little Mary Jane, who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all the
fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree of knowledge. There
is no end of the epigrams and witticisms which she can throw out, this
elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love, lead prosy, worky lives,
and put on their best cap with pink ribbons for Sunday. ‘Mary Jane
shall never make a fool of herself;’ but, even as she speaks, poor Mary
Jane’s heart is dying within her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers
from an opposite box, which whiskers the poor little fool has credited
with a _résumé_ drawn from her own imaginings of all that is grandest
and most heroic, most worshipful in man. By-and-by, when Mrs. T. finds
the glamour has fallen on her daughter, she wonders; she has ‘tried to
keep novels out of the girl’s way,—where did she get these notions?’

All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets
and novelists _made_ romance. They do—just as much as craters make
volcanoes,—no more. What is romance? whence comes it? Plato spoke to
the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago,
when he said, ‘Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared
among the gods; and so it comes to pass, that, in this life, when the
soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her
remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a pricking
pain as of wings trying to come forth,—even as children in teething.’
And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely
of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian
lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it
to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?

Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, ‘GOD is the great maker
of romance. HE, from whose hand came man and woman,—HE, who strung the
great harp of Existence with all its wild and wonderful and manifold
chords, and attuned them to one another,—HE is the great Poet of life.’
Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love,
fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being than that which
closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life,
is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there
is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.

Therefore, man or woman, when thy ideal is shattered—as shattered a
thousand times it must be; when the vision fades, the rapture burns
out, turn not away in scepticism and bitterness, saying, ‘There is
nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink,’ but
rather cherish the revelations of those hours as prophecies and
fore-shadowings of something real and possible, yet to be attained
in the manhood of immortality. The scoffing spirit that laughs at
romance, is an apple of the Devil’s own handing from the bitter tree of
knowledge;—it opens the eyes only to see eternal nakedness.

If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship—a boundless
worship and belief in some hero of your soul; if ever you have so
loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations, have
gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from
heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your
whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the
feet of another, and all for nothing,—if you awoke bitterly betrayed
and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse
of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest
capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you;
treasure it, as the highest honour of your being, that ever you could
so feel,—that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.

By such experiences are we taught the pathos, the sacredness of life;
and if we use them wisely, our eyes will ever after be anointed to see
what poems, what romances, what sublime tragedies lie around us in the
daily walk of life, ‘written not with ink, but in fleshly tables of the
heart.’ The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it
for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were
written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the
romancer is the second-hand recorder.

So much of a plea we put in boldly, because we foresee grave heads
beginning to shake over our history, and doubts rising in reverend and
discreet minds whether this history is going to prove anything but a
love-story, after all.

We do assure you, right reverend Sir, and you, most discreet Madam,
that it is not going to prove anything else; and you will find, if
you will follow us, that there is as much romance burning under the
snow-banks of cold Puritan preciseness as if Dr. H. had been brought up
to attend operas instead of metaphysical preaching; and Mary had been
nourished on Byron’s poetry instead of ‘Edwards on the Affections.’

The innocent credulities, the subtle deceptions, that were quietly at
work under the grave, white curls of the Doctor’s wig, were exactly of
the kind which have beguiled man in all ages, when near the sovereign
presence of her who is born for his destiny;—and as for Mary, what did
it avail her that she could say the Assembly’s Catechism from end to
end without tripping, and that every habit of her life beat time to
practical realities, steadily as the parlour clock? The wildest Italian
singer or dancer, nursed on nothing but excitement from her cradle,
never was more thoroughly possessed by the awful and solemn mystery of
woman’s life, than this Puritan girl.

It is quite true, that, the next morning after James’s departure,
she rose as usual in the dim gray, and was to be seen opening the
kitchen-door just at the moment when the birds were giving the first
little drowsy stir and chirp,—and that she went on setting the
breakfast-table for the two hired men, who were bound to the fields
with the oxen,—and that then she went on skimming cream for the
butter, and getting ready to churn, and making up biscuit for the
Doctor’s breakfast, when he and they should sit down together at a
somewhat later hour; and as she moved about, doing all these things,
she sung various scraps of old psalm-tunes; and the good Doctor, who
was then busy with his early exercises of devotion, listened, as he
heard the voice, now here, now there, and thought about angels and
the Millennium. Solemnly and tenderly there floated in at his open
study-window, through the breezy lilacs, mixed with low of kine, and
bleat of sheep, and hum of early wakening life, the little silvery
ripples of that singing, somewhat mournful in its cadence, as if a
gentle soul were striving to hush itself to rest. The words were those
of the rough old version of the psalms then in use:—

    ‘Truly my waiting soul relies
       In silence God upon:
     Because from him there doth arise
       All my salvation.’

And then came the busy patter of the little footsteps without, the
moving of chairs, the clink of plates, as busy hands were arranging
the table; and then again there was a pause, and he thought she seemed
to come near to the open window of the adjoining room, for the voice
floated in clearer and sadder:—

    ‘O God, to me be merciful,
       Be merciful to me!
     Because my soul for shelter safe,
       Betakes itself to thee.

    ‘Yea, in the shadow of thy wings
       My refuge have I placed,
     Until these sore calamities
       Shall quite be overpast.’

The tone of life in New England, so habitually earnest and solemn,
breathed itself in the grave and plaintive melodies of the tunes then
sung in the churches; and so these words, though in the saddest minor
key, did not suggest to the listening ear of the auditor anything more
than that pensive religious calm in which he delighted to repose. A
contrast indeed they were, in their melancholy earnestness, to the
exuberant carollings of a robin, who, apparently attracted by them,
perched himself hard by in the lilacs, and struck up such a merry
_roulade_ as quite diverted the attention of the fair singer; in fact,
the intoxication breathed in the strain of this little messenger, whom
God had feathered and winged and filled to the throat with ignorant
joy, came in singular contrast with the sadder notes breathed by that
creature of so much higher mould and fairer clay,—that creature born
for an immortal life.

But the good Doctor was inly pleased when she sung; and when she
stopped, looked up from his Bible wistfully, as missing something, he
knew not what; for he scarce thought how pleasant the little voice
was, or knew he had been listening to it,—and yet he was in a manner
enchanted by it, so thankful and happy that he exclaimed with fervour,
‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly
heritage.’

So went the world with him, full of joy and praise, because the voice
and the presence wherein lay his unsuspected life, were securely
near,—so certainly and constantly a part of his daily walk, that he had
not even the trouble to wish for them. But in that other heart how was
it?—how with the sweet saint that was talking to herself in psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs?

The good child had remembered her mother’s parting words the night
before,—‘Put your mind upon your duties,’—and had begun her first
conscious exercise of thought with a prayer that grace might be given
her to do it. But even as she spoke, mingling and interweaving with
that golden thread of prayer was another consciousness, a life in
another soul, as she prayed that the grace of God might overshadow him,
shield him from temptation, and lead him up to heaven; and this prayer
so got the start of the other, that, ere she was aware, she had quite
forgotten self, and was feeling, living, thinking in that other life.

The first discovery she made, when she looked out into the fragrant
orchard, whose perfumes steamed in at her window, and listened to the
first chirping of birds among the old apple-trees, was one that has
astonished many a person before her;—it was this: she found that all
that had made life interesting to her was suddenly gone. She herself
had not known that, for the month past, since James came from sea,
she had been living in an enchanted land; that Newport harbour, and
every rock and stone, and every mat of yellow seaweed on the shore,
that the two-mile road between the cottage and the white house of
Zebedee Marvyn, every mullein-stalk, every juniper-tree, had all had a
light and a charm which were suddenly gone. There had not been an hour
in the day for the last four weeks that had not had its unsuspected
interest,—because he was at the White House; because, possibly, he
might be going by, or coming in: nay, even in church, when she stood
up to sing, and thought she was thinking only of God, had she not been
conscious of that tenor voice that poured itself out by her side? and
though afraid to turn her head that way, had she not felt that he was
there every moment?—heard every word of the sermon and prayer for him?
The very vigilant care which her mother had taken to prevent private
interviews had only served to increase the interest by throwing over it
the veil of constraint and mystery. Silent looks, involuntary starts,
things indicated, not expressed—these are the most dangerous, the most
seductive aliment of thought to a delicate and sensitive nature. If
things were said out, they might not be said wisely,—they might repel
by their freedom, or disturb by their unfitness; but what is only
looked is sent into the soul through the imagination, which makes of it
all that the ideal faculties desire.

In a refined and exalted nature it is very seldom that the feeling of
love, when once thoroughly aroused, bears any sort of relation to the
reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power
of the soul’s love for whatever she considers highest and fairest;
it is, in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly, which,
by a sort of illusion, connects itself with a personality. Properly
speaking, there is but One true, eternal Object of all that the mind
conceives in this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment must come,
of course; and in a love which terminates in happy marriage there is
a tender and gracious process, by which, without shock or violence,
the ideal is gradually sunk in the real, which, though found faulty
and earthly, is still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under the
morning light of that enchantment.

What Mary loved so passionately, that which came between her and God
in every prayer, was not the gay, young, dashing sailor,—sudden in
anger, imprudent of speech, and, though generous in heart, yet worldly
in plans and schemings,—but her own ideal of a grand and noble man,
such a man as she thought he might become. He stood glorified before
her—an image of the strength that overcomes things physical; of the
power of command which controls men and circumstances; of the courage
which disdains fear; of the honour which cannot lie; of constancy which
knows no shadow of turning; of tenderness which protects the weak;
and, lastly, of religious loyalty, which should lay the golden crown
of its perfected manhood at the feet of a Sovereign Lord and Redeemer.
This was the man she loved; and with this regal mantle of glories she
invested the person called James Marvyn: and all that she saw and felt
to be wanting, she prayed for with the faith of a believing woman.

Nor was she wrong; for, as to every leaf and every flower there is an
ideal to which the growth of the plant is constantly urging, so is
there an ideal to every human being,—a perfect form in which it might
appear, were every defect removed and every characteristic excellence
stimulated to the highest point. Once, in an age, God sends to some
of us a friend who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal
character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections,
loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,—loves, not the man that
we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by
a divine gift of prophecy,—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in
the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a
vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right
hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious
foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom
we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow
them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults
and weaknesses, ‘waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.’

But these wonderful soul-friends, to whom God grants such perception,
are the exceptions in life; yet, sometimes are we blessed with one who
sees through us, as Michel Angelo saw through a block of marble when he
attacked it in a divine fervour, declaring that an angel was imprisoned
within it: and it is often the resolute and delicate hand of such a
friend that sets the angel free.

There be soul-artists, who go through this world, looking among
their fellows with reverence, as one looks amid the dust and rubbish
of old shops for hidden works of Titian and Leonardo; and, finding
them, however cracked or torn, or painted over with tawdry daubs
of pretenders, immediately recognise the divine original, and set
themselves to cleanse and restore. Such be God’s real priests, whose
ordination and anointing are from the Holy Spirit; and he who hath not
this enthusiasm is not ordained of God, though whole synods of bishops
laid hands on him.

Many such priests there be among women; for to this silent ministry
their nature calls them, endowed, as it is, with fineness of fibre and
a subtile keenness of perception outrunning slow-footed reason,—and she
of whom we write was one of these.

At this very moment, while the crimson wings of morning were casting
delicate reflections on tree, and bush, and rock, they were also
reddening innumerable waves round a ship that sailed alone, with a wide
horizon stretching like an eternity around it; and in the advancing
morning stood a young man, thoughtfully looking off into the ocean,
with a book in his hand—James Marvyn,—as truly and heartily a creature
of this material world as Mary was of the invisible and heavenly.

There are some who seem made to _live_,—life is such a joy to them;
their senses are so fully _en rapport_ with all outward things; the
world is so keenly appreciable, so much a part of themselves; they
are so conscious of power and victory in the government and control
of material things, that the moral and invisible life often seems to
hang tremulous and unreal in their minds, like the pale, faded moon in
the light of a gorgeous sunrise. When brought face to face with the
great truths of the invisible world, they stand related to the higher
wisdom much like the gorgeous, gay Alcibiades to the divine Socrates,
or like the young man in Holy Writ to Him for whose appearing Socrates
longed;—they gaze, imperfectly comprehending, and at the call of
ambition or riches turn away sorrowing.

So it was with James: in full tide of worldly energy and ambition there
had been forming over his mind that hard crust—that scepticism of the
spiritual and exalted which men of the world delight to call practical
sense. He had been suddenly arrested and humbled by the revelation
of a nature so much nobler than his own that he seemed worthless in
his own eyes: he had asked for love; but when _such_ love unveiled
itself, he felt like the disciple of old in the view of a diviner
tenderness,—‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.’

But it is not often that all the current of a life is reversed in one
hour: and now, as James stood on the ship’s deck, with life passing
around him, and everything drawing upon the strings of old habits,
Mary and her religion recurred to his mind, as some fair, sweet,
inexplicable vision. Where she stood he saw; but how _he_ was ever to
get there seemed as incomprehensible as how a mortal man should pillow
his form on sunset clouds.

He held the little Bible in his hand as if it were some amulet charmed
by the touch of a superior being; but when he strove to read it, his
thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and unsatisfied. Yet there
were within him yearnings and cravings, wants never felt before, the
beginning of that trouble which must ever precede the soul’s rise to a
higher plan of being.

There we leave him. We have shown you now our three different
characters, each one in its separate sphere, feeling the force of that
strongest and holiest power with which it has pleased our great Author
to glorify this mortal life.




CHAPTER IX.

WHICH TREATS OF THINGS SEEN.


AS, for example, the breakfast. It is six o’clock,—the hired men and
oxen are gone,—the breakfast-table stands before the open kitchen-door,
snowy with its fresh cloth, the old silver coffee-pot steaming up a
refreshing perfume,—and the Doctor sits on one side, sipping his coffee
and looking across the table at Mary, who is innocently pleased at
the kindly beaming in his placid blue eyes,—and Aunt Katy Scudder
discourses of housekeeping, and fancies something must have disturbed
the rising of the cream, as it is not so thick and yellow as wont.

Now the Doctor, it is to be confessed, was apt to fall into a way
of looking at people such as pertains to philosophers and scholars
generally, that is, as if he were looking through them into the
infinite,—in which case, his gaze became so earnest and intent that it
would quite embarrass an uninitiated person; but Mary, being used to
this style of contemplation, was only quietly amused, and waited till
some great thought should loom up before his mental vision,—in which
case, she hoped to hear from him.

The good man swallowed his first cup of coffee and spoke:—

‘In the Millennium, I suppose, there will be such a fulness and plenty
of all the necessaries and conveniences of life, that it will not be
necessary for men and women to spend the greater part of their lives in
labour in order to procure a living. It will not be necessary for each
one to labour more than two or three hours a day,—not more than will
conduce to health of body and vigour of mind; and the rest of their
time they will spend in reading and conversation, and such exercises as
are necessary and proper to improve their minds and make progress in
knowledge.’

New England presents probably the only example of a successful
commonwealth founded on a theory, as a distinct experiment in the
problem of society. It was for this reason that the minds of its great
thinkers dwelt so much on the final solution of that problem in this
world. The fact of a future Millennium was a favourite doctrine of the
great leading theologians of New England, and Dr. H. dwelt upon it
with a peculiar partiality. Indeed, it was the solace and refuge of
his soul, when oppressed with the discouragements which always attend
things actual, to dwell upon and draw out in detail the splendours of
this perfect future which was destined to glorify the world.

Nobody, therefore, at the cottage was in the least surprised when there
dropped into the flow of their daily life these sparkling bits of ore,
which their friend had dug in his explorations of a future Canaan,—in
fact, they served to raise the hackneyed present out of the level of
mere commonplace.

‘But how will it be possible,’ inquired Mrs. Scudder, ‘that so much
less work will suffice in those days to do all that is to be done?’

‘Because of the great advance of arts and sciences which will take
place before those days,’ said the Doctor, ‘whereby everything shall
be performed with so much greater ease,—also the great increase of
disinterested love, whereby the skill and talents of those who have
much shall make up for the weakness of those who have less.

‘Yes,’—he continued, after a pause,—‘all the careful Marthas in those
days will have no excuse for not sitting at the feet of Jesus; there
will be no cumbering with much serving; the church will have only
Maries in those days.’

This remark, made without the slightest personal intention, called
a curious smile into Mrs. Scudder’s face, which was reflected in a
slight blush from Mary’s, when the crack of a whip and the rattling of
waggon-wheels disturbed the conversation and drew all eyes to the door.

There appeared the vision of Mr. Zebedee Marvyn’s farm-waggon, stored
with barrels, boxes, and baskets, over which Candace sat throned
triumphant, her black face and yellow-striped turban glowing in the
fresh morning with a hearty, joyous light, as she pulled up the reins,
and shouted to the horse to stop with a voice that might have done
credit to any man living.

‘Dear me, if there isn’t Candace!’ said Mary.

‘Queen of Ethiopia,’ said the Doctor, who sometimes adventured a very
placid joke.

The Doctor was universally known in all the neighbourhood as a sort of
friend and patron-saint of the negro race; he had devoted himself to
their interests with a zeal unusual in those days. His church numbered
more of them than any in Newport; and his hours of leisure from study
were often spent in lowliest visitations among them, hearing their
stories, consoling their sorrows, advising and directing their plans,
teaching them reading and writing, and he often drew hard on his
slender salary to assist them in their emergencies and distresses.

This unusual condescension on his part was repaid on theirs with all
the warmth of their race; and Candace, in particular, devoted herself
to the Doctor with all the force of her being.

There was a legend current in the neighbourhood, that the first
efforts to catechize Candace were not eminently successful, her modes
of contemplating theological tenets being so peculiarly from her own
individual point of view that it was hard to get her subscription
to a received opinion. On the venerable clause in the Catechism, in
particular, which declares that all men sinned in Adam and fell with
him, Candace made a dead halt:—

‘I didn’t do dat ar’, for one, I knows. I’s got good mem’ry,—allers
knows what I does,—nebber did eat dat ar’ apple,—nebber eat a bit ob
him. Don’t tell me!’

It was of no use, of course, to tell Candace of all the explanations
of this redoubtable passage,—of potential presence, and representative
presence, and representative identity, and federal headship. She met
all with the dogged,—

‘Nebber did it, I knows; should ’ave ’membered, if I had. Don’t tell
me!’

And even in the catechizing class of the Doctor himself, if this answer
came to her, she sat black and frowning in stony silence even in his
reverend presence.

Candace was often reminded that the Doctor believed the Catechism, and
that she was differing from a great and good man; but the argument
made no manner of impression on her, till, one day, a far-off cousin
of hers, whose condition under a hard master had often moved her
compassion, came in overjoyed to recount to her how, owing to Dr. H.’s
exertions, he had gained his freedom. The Doctor himself had in person
gone from house to house, raising the sum for his redemption; and when
more yet was wanting, supplied it by paying half his last quarter’s
limited salary.

‘He do dat ar’?’ said Candace, dropping the fork wherewith she was
spearing doughnuts. ‘Den I’m gwine to b’liebe ebery word _he_ does!’

And accordingly, at the next catechizing, the Doctor’s astonishment was
great when Candace pressed up to him, exclaiming,—

‘De Lord bress you, Doctor, for opening de prison for dem dat is bound!
I b’liebes in you now, Doctor. I’s gwine to b’liebe ebery word you say.
I’ll say de Catechize now,—fix it any way you like. I _did_ eat dat ar’
apple,—I eat de whole tree, an’ swallowed ebery bit ob it, if you say
so.’

And this very thorough profession of faith was followed, on the part of
Candace, by years of the most strenuous orthodoxy. Her general mode of
expressing her mind on the subject was short and definitive.

‘Law me! what’s de use? I’s set out to b’liebe de Catechize, an’ I’m
gwine to b’liebe it,—so!’

While we have been telling you all this about her, she has fastened
her horse, and is swinging leisurely up to the house with a basket on
either arm.

‘Good morning, Candace,’ said Mrs. Scudder. ‘What brings you so early?’

‘Come down ’fore light to sell my chickens an’ eggs,—got a lot o’ money
for ’em, too. Missy Marvyn she sent Miss Scudder some turkey-eggs, an’
I brought down some o’ my doughnuts for de Doctor. Good folks must lib,
you know, as well as wicked ones,’—and Candace gave a hearty, unctuous
laugh. ‘No reason why Doctors shouldn’t hab good tings as well as
sinners, is dere?’—and she shook in great billows, and showed her white
teeth in the _abandon_ of her laugh. ‘Lor’ bress ye, honey, chile!’ she
said, turning to Mary, ‘why, ye looks like a new rose, ebery bit! Don’t
wonder _somebody_ was allers pryin’ an’ spyin’ about here!’

‘How is your mistress, Candace?’ said Mrs. Scudder, by way of changing
the subject.

‘Well, porly,—rader porly. When Massa Jim goes, ’pears like takin’ de
light right out her eyes. Dat ar’ boy trains roun’ arter his mudder
like a cosset, he does. Lor’, de house seems so still widout him!—can’t
a fly scratch his ear but it starts a body. Missy Marvyn she sent
down, an’ says, would you and de Doctor an’ Miss Mary please come to
tea dis arternoon?’

‘Thank your mistress, Candace,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘Mary and I will
come,—and the Doctor, perhaps,’ looking at the good man, who had
relapsed into meditation, and was eating his breakfast without taking
note of anything going on. ‘It will be time enough to tell him of it,’
she said to Mary, ‘when we have to wake him up to dress; so we won’t
disturb him now.’

To Mary the prospect of the visit was a pleasant one, for reasons
which she scarce gave a definite form to. Of course, like a good girl,
she had come to a fixed and settled resolution to think of James as
little as possible; but when the path of duty lay directly along scenes
and among people fitted to recall him, it was more agreeable than if
it had lain in another direction. Added to this, a very tender and
silent friendship subsisted between Mrs. Marvyn and Mary; in which,
besides similarity of mind and intellectual pursuits, there was a deep,
unspoken element of sympathy.

Candace watched the light in Mary’s eyes with the instinctive
shrewdness by which her race seem to divine the thoughts and feelings
of their superiors, and chuckled to herself internally. Without ever
having been made a _confidante_ by any party, or having a word said
to or before her, still the whole position of affairs was as clear to
her as if she had seen it on a map. She had appreciated at once Mrs.
Scudder’s coolness, James’s devotion, and Mary’s perplexity,—and inly
resolved, that, if the little maiden did not think of James in his
absence, it should not be her fault.

‘Laws, Miss Scudder,’ she said, ‘I’s right glad you’s comin’, ’cause
you hasn’t seen how we’s kind o’ splendified since Massa Jim come
home. You wouldn’t know it. Why, he’s got mats from Mogadore on all
de entries, and a great big ’un on de parlour; and ye ought to see de
shawl he brought Missus, an’ all de cur’us kind o’ tings to de Squire.
’Tell ye, dat ar’ boy honours his fader and mudder, ef he don’t do
nuffin else,—an’ dat’s de fus’ commandment wid promise, ma’am; and to
see him a-settin’ up ebery day in prayer-time, so handsome, holdin’
Missus’s han’, an’ lookin’ right into her eyes all de time! Why, dat
ar’ boy is one o’ de ’lect,—it’s jest as clare to me; and de ’lect has
got to come in,—dat’s what I say. My faith’s strong,—real clare, ’tell
ye,’ she added, with the triumphant laugh which usually chorused her
conversation, and turning to the Doctor, who, aroused by her loud and
vigorous strain, was attending with interest to her.

‘Well, Candace,’ he said, ‘we all hope you are right.’

‘_Hope_, Doctor!—I don’t hope,—I _knows_. ’Tell ye, when I pray for
him, don’t I feel enlarged? ’Tell ye, it goes wid a rush. I can feel it
gwine up like a rushin’, mighty wind. I feels strong, I do.’

‘That’s right, Candace,’ said the Doctor, ‘keep on; your prayers stand
as much chance with God as if you were a crowned queen. The Lord is no
respecter of persons.’

‘Dat’s what he a’n’t, Doctor,—an’ dere’s where I ’gree wid him,’ said
Candace, as she gathered her baskets vigorously together, and, after
a sweeping curtsy, went sailing down to her waggon, full laden with
content, shouting a hearty ‘Good mornin’, Missus,’ with the full power
of her cheerful lungs, as she rode off.

As the Doctor looked after her, the simple, pleased expression with
which he had watched her, gradually faded, and there passed over his
broad, good face, a shadow, as of a cloud on a mountain-side.

‘What a shame it is,’ he said; ‘what a scandal and disgrace to the
Protestant religion, that Christians of America should openly practise
and countenance this enslaving of the Africans! I have for a long time
holden my peace—may the Lord forgive me!—but I believe the time is
coming when I must utter my voice. I cannot go down to the wharves, or
among the shipping, without these poor dumb creatures look at me so
that I am ashamed; as if they asked me what I, a Christian minister,
was doing, that I did not come to their help. I must testify.’

Mrs. Scudder looked grave at this earnest announcement; she had
heard many like it before, and they always filled her with alarm,
because——Shall we tell you why?

Well, then, it was not because she was not a thoroughly indoctrinated
anti-slavery woman. Her husband, who did all her thinking for her, had
been a man of ideas beyond his day, and never for a moment countenanced
the right of slavery so far as to buy or own a servant or attendant
of any kind: and Mrs. Scudder had always followed decidedly along the
path of his opinions and practice, and never hesitated to declare the
reasons for the faith that was in her. But if any of us could imagine
an angel dropped down out of heaven, with wings, ideas, notions,
manners, and customs all fresh from that very different country, we
might easily suppose that the most pious and orthodox family might
find the task of presenting him in general society, and piloting him
along the courses of this world, a very delicate and embarrassing one.
However much they might reverence him on their own private account,
their hearts would probably sink within them at the idea of allowing
him to expand himself according to his previous nature and habits in
the great world without. In like manner, men of high, unworldly natures
are often reverenced by those who are somewhat puzzled what to do with
them practically.

Mrs. Scudder considered the Doctor as a superior being, possessed by a
holy helplessness in all things material and temporal, which imposed
on her the necessity of thinking and caring for him, and prevising the
earthly and material aspects of his affairs.

There was not in Newport a more thriving and reputable business at that
time than the slave-trade. Large fortunes were constantly being turned
out in it, and what better Providential witness of its justice could
most people require?

Beside this, in their own little church, she reflected with alarm, that
Simeon Brown, the richest and most liberal supporter of the society,
had been, and was then, drawing all his wealth from this source; and
rapidly there flashed before her mind a picture of one and another,
influential persons, who were holders of slaves. Therefore, when the
Doctor announced, ‘I must testify,’ she rattled her tea-spoon uneasily,
and answered,—

‘In what way, Doctor, do you think of bearing testimony? The subject, I
think, is a very difficult one.’

‘Difficult? I think no subject can be clearer. If we were right in our
war for liberty, we are wrong in making slaves or keeping them.’

‘Oh, I did not mean,’ said Mrs. Scudder, ‘that it was difficult to
understand the subject; the _right_ of the matter is clear, but what to
_do_ is the thing.’

‘I shall preach about it,’ said the Doctor; ‘my mind has run upon it
some time. I shall show to the house of Judah their sin in this matter.’

‘I fear there will be great offence given,’ said Mrs. Scudder. ‘There’s
Simeon Brown, one of our largest supporters,—he is in the trade.’

‘Ah, yes,—but he will come out of it,—of course he will,—he is all
right, all clear. I was delighted with the clearness of his views
the other night, and thought then of bringing them to bear on this
point,—only, as others were present, I deferred it. But I can show him
that it follows logically from his principles; I am confident of that.’

‘I think you’ll be disappointed in him, Doctor;—I think he’ll be angry,
and get up a commotion, and leave the church.’

‘Madam,’ said the Doctor, ‘do you suppose that a man who would be
willing even to give up his eternal salvation for the greatest good of
the universe could hesitate about a few paltry thousands that perish in
the using?’

‘He may feel willing to give up his soul,’ said Mrs. Scudder, naïvely,
‘but I don’t think he’ll give up his ships,—that’s quite another
matter,—he won’t see it to be his duty.’

‘Then, ma’am, he’ll be a hypocrite, a gross hypocrite, if he won’t,’
said the Doctor. ‘It is not Christian charity to think it of him. I
shall call upon him this morning and tell him my intentions.’

‘But, Doctor,’ exclaimed Mrs. Scudder, with a start, ‘pray, think a
little more of it. You know a great many things depend on him. Why! he
has subscribed for twenty copies of your “System of Theology.” I hope
you’ll remember that.’

‘And why should I remember that?’ said the Doctor,—hastily turning
round, suddenly enkindled, his blue eyes flashing out of their usual
misty calm,—‘what has my “System of Theology” to do with the matter?’

[Illustration: _The Minister is moved._

_Page 90._

Sampson Low, Son & Co. March, 25th, 1859]

‘Why,’ said Mrs. Scudder, ‘it’s of more importance to get right views
of the gospel before the world than anything else, is it not?—and
if, by any imprudence in treating influential people, this should be
prevented, more harm than good would be done.’

‘Madam,’ said the Doctor, ‘I’d sooner my system should be sunk in the
sea than it should be a millstone round my neck to keep me from my
duty. Let God take care of my theology; I must do my duty.’

And as the Doctor spoke, he straightened himself to the full dignity
of his height, his face kindling with an unconscious majesty, and, as
he turned, his eye fell on Mary, who was standing with her slender
figure dilated, her large blue eye wide and bright, in a sort of
trance of solemn feeling, half-smiles, half-tears,—and the strong,
heroic man started, to see this answer to his higher soul in the
sweet, tremulous mirror of womanhood. One of those lightning glances
passed between his eyes and hers which are the freemasonry of noble
spirits,—and, by a sudden impulse, they approached each other. He took
both her outstretched hands, looked down into her face with a look full
of admiration, and a sort of naïve wonder,—then, as if her inspired
silence had been a voice to him, he laid his hand on her head, and
said,—

‘God bless you, child! “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast
thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest
still the enemy and the avenger.”’

In a moment he was gone.

‘Mary,’ said Mrs. Scudder, laying her hand on her daughter’s arm, ‘the
Doctor loves you!’

‘I know he does, mother,’ said Mary, innocently; ‘and I love
him,—dearly!—he is a noble, grand man!’

Mrs. Scudder looked keenly at her daughter. Mary’s eye was as calm as a
June sky, and she began, composedly, gathering up the teacups.

‘She did not understand me,’ thought the mother.




CHAPTER X.

THE TEST OF THEOLOGY.


THE Doctor went immediately to his study and put on his best coat and
his wig, and, surmounting them by his cocked hat, walked manfully out
of the house, with his gold-headed cane in his hand.

‘There he goes!’ said Mrs. Scudder, looking regretfully after him. ‘He
is _such_ a good man!—but he has not the least idea how to get along in
the world. He never thinks of anything but what is true; he hasn’t a
particle of management about him.’

‘Seems to me,’ said Mary, ‘that is like an Apostle. You know, mother,
St. Paul says, “In simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly
wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the
world.”’

‘To be sure,—that is just the Doctor,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘that’s as
like him as if it had been written for him. But that kind of way,
somehow, don’t seem to do in our times; it won’t answer with Simeon
Brown,—I know the man. I know just as well, now, how it will all seem
to him, and what will be the upshot of this talk, if the Doctor goes
there! It won’t do any good; if it would I would be willing. I feel as
much desire to have this horrid trade in slaves stopped as anybody;
your father, I’m sure, said enough about it in his time; but then I
know it’s no use trying. Just as if Simeon Brown, when he is making his
hundreds of thousands in it, is going to be persuaded to give it up!
He won’t—he’ll only turn against the Doctor, and won’t pay his part of
the salary, and will use his influence to get up a party against him,
and our church will be broken up and the Doctor driven away,—that’s
all that will come of it; and all the good that he is now doing to
these poor negroes will be overthrown,—and they never did have so good
a friend. If he would stay here and work gradually, and get his System
of Theology printed,—and Simeon Brown would help at that,—and only drop
words in season here and there, till people are brought along with him,
why, by-and-by something might be done; but now, it’s just the most
imprudent thing a man could undertake.’

‘But, mother, if it really is a sin to trade in slaves and hold them, I
don’t see how he can help himself. I quite agree with him. I don’t see
how he came to let it go so long as he has.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Scudder, ‘if worst comes to worst, and he will do it,
I, for one, shall stand by him to the last.’

‘And I, for another,’ said Mary.

‘I would like him to talk with Cousin Zebedee about it,’ said Mrs.
Scudder. ‘When we are up there this afternoon, we will introduce the
conversation. He is a good sound man, and the Doctor thinks much of
him, and perhaps he may shed some light upon this matter.’

Meanwhile the Doctor was making the best of his way in the strength of
his purpose to test the orthodoxy of Simeon Brown.

Honest old granite boulder that he was, no sooner did he perceive a
truth than he rolled after it with all the massive gravita

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