Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
Poganuc People
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE FUNERAL
On that morning, before Dr. Cushing had left the Parsonage to go to the bedside of his dying parishioner, Dolly, always sympathetic in all that absorbed her parents, had listened to the conversation and learned how full of peace and joy were those last days.
When her father was gone, Dolly took her little basket and went out into the adjoining meadow for wild strawberries. The afternoon was calm and lovely; small patches of white cloud were drifting through the intense blue sky, and little flutters of breeze shook the white hats of the daisies as she wandered hither and thither among them looking for the strawberries. Over on the tallest twig of the apple-tree in the corner of the lot a bobolink had seated himself, swinging and fluttering up and down, beating his black and white wings and singing a confused lingo about "sweetmeats and sweetmeats," and "cheer 'em and cheer 'em."
This bobolink was one of Dolly's special acquaintances. She had often seen him perched on this particular twig of the old apple-tree, doubtless because of a nest and family establishment that he had somewhere in that neighborhood, and she had learned to imitate his jargon as she crept about in the tall grass; and so they two sometimes kept up quite a lively conversation.
But this afternoon she was in no mood for chattering with the bobolink, for the strings of a higher nature than his had been set vibrating; she was in a sort of plaintive, dreamy revery – so sorry for poor Nabby, who was going to lose her mother, and so full of awe and wonder at the bright mystery now opening on the soul that was passing away.
Dolly had pondered that verse of her catechism which says that "the souls of believers at their death are made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory," and of what that unknown glory, that celestial splendor, could be she had many thoughts and wonderings.
She had devoured with earnest eyes Bunyan's vivid description of the triumphal ascent to the Celestial City through the River of Death, and sometimes at evening, when the west was piled with glorious clouds which the setting sun changed into battlements and towers of silvered gold, Dolly thought she could fancy it was something like that beautiful land. Now it made her heart thrill to think that one she had known only a little while before – a meek, quiet, patient, good woman – was just going to enter upon such glory and splendor, to wear those wonderful white robes and sing that wonderful song.
She filled her basket and then sat down to think about it. She lay back on the ground and looked up through the white daisies into the deep intense blue of the sky, wondering with a vague yearning, and wishing that she could go there too and see what it was all like. Just then, vibrating through the sunset air, came the plaintive stroke of the old Meeting-house bell. Dolly knew what that sound meant – a soul "made perfect in holiness" had passed into glory; and with a solemn awe she listened as stroke after stroke tolled out the years of that patient earth-life, now forever past.
It was a thrilling mystery to think of where she now was. She knew all now! she had seen! she had heard! she had entered in! Oh, what joy and wonder!
Dolly asked herself should she too ever be so happy – she, poor little Dolly; if she went up to the beautiful gate, would they let her in? Her father and mother would certainly go there; and they would surely want her too: couldn't she go in with them? So thought Dolly, vaguely dreaming, with the daisy-heads nodding over her, and the bobolink singing, and the bell tolling, while the sun was sinking in the west. At last she heard her father calling her at the fence, and made haste to take up her basket and run to him.
The day but one after this Dolly went with her father and mother to the funeral. Funerals in those old days had no soothing accessories. People had not then learned to fill their houses with flowers, and soften by every outward appliance the deadly severity of the hard central fact of utter separation.
The only leaves ever used about the dead in those days were the tansy and rosemary – bitter herbs of affliction. Every pleasant thing in the house was shrouded in white; every picture and looking-glass in its winding-sheet. The coffin was placed open in the best front room, and the mourners, enveloped in clouds of black crape, sat around. The house on this occasion was crowded; wagons came from far and near; the lower rooms were all open and filled, and Dr. Cushing's voice came faintly and plaintively through the hush of silence.
He spoke tenderly of the departed: – "We have seen our sister for many weeks waiting in the land of Beulah by the River of Death. Angels have been coming across to visit her; we have heard the flutter of their wings. We have seen her rejoicing in full assurance of hope, having laid down every earthly care; we have seen her going down the dark valley, leaning on the Beloved; and now that we have met to pay the last tribute to her memory, shall it be with tears alone? If we love our sister, shall we not rejoice because she has gone to the Father? She has gone where there is no more sickness, no more pain, no more sorrow, no more death, and she shall be ever with the Lord. Let us rejoice, then, and give thanks unto God, who hath given her the victory, and let us strive like her, by patient continuance in well-doing, to seek for glory and honor and immortality."
And then arose the solemn warble of the old funeral hymn:
"Why should we mourn departing friends
Or shake at death's alarms?
'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
To call them to his arms.
"Why should we tremble to convey
Their bodies to the tomb?
There the dear form of Jesus lay,
And scattered all the gloom.
"Thence He arose, ascending high,
And showed our feet the way;
Up to the Lord we, too, shall fly
At the great rising day.
"Then let the last loud trumpet sound,
And bid our kindred rise;
Awake! ye nations under ground;
Ye saints! ascend the skies!"
The old tune of "China," with its weird arrangement of parts, its mournful yet majestic movement, was well fitted to express that mysterious defiance of earth's bitterest sorrow, that solemn assurance of victory over life's deepest anguish, which breathes in those words. It is the major key invested with all the mournful pathos of the minor, yet breathing a grand sustained undertone of triumph – fit voice of that only religion which bids the human heart rejoice in sorrow and glory in tribulation.
Then came the prayer, in which the feelings of the good man, enkindled by sympathy and faith, seemed to bear up sorrowing souls, as on mighty wings, into the regions of eternal peace.
In a general way nothing can be more impressive, more pathetic and beautiful, than the Episcopal Church funeral service, but it had been one of the last requests of the departed that her old pastor should minister at her funeral; and there are occasions when an affectionate and devout man, penetrated with human sympathy, can utter prayers such as no liturgy can equal. There are prayers springing heavenward from devout hearts that are as much superior to all written ones as living, growing flowers out-bloom the dried treasures of the herbarium. Not always, not by every one, come these inspirations; too often what is called extemporary prayer is but a form, differing from the liturgy of the church only in being poorer and colder.
But the prayer of Dr. Cushing melted and consoled; it was an uplift from the darkness of earthly sorrow into the grand certainties of the unseen; it had the undertone that can be given only by a faith to which the invisible is even more real than the things that are seen.
After the prayer one and another of the company passed through the room to take the last look at the dead. Death had touched her gently. As often happens in the case of aged people, there had come back to her face something of the look of youth, something which told of a delicate, lily-like beauty which had long been faded. There was too that mysterious smile, that expression of rapturous repose, which is the seal of heaven set on the earthly clay. It seemed as if the softly-closed eyes must be gazing on some ineffable vision of bliss, as if, indeed, the beauty of the Lord her God was upon her.
Among the mourners at the head of the coffin sat Zeph Higgins, like some rugged gray rock – stony, calm and still. He shed no tear, while his children wept and sobbed aloud; only when the coffin-lid was put on a convulsive movement passed across his face. But it was momentary, and he took his place in the procession to walk to the grave in grim calmness.
The graveyard was in a lovely spot on the Poganuc River. No care in those days had been bestowed to ornament or brighten these last resting-places, but Nature had taken this in hand kindly. The blue glitter of the river sparkled here and there through a belt of pines and hemlocks on one side, and the silent mounds were sheeted with daisies, brightened now and then with golden buttercups, which bowed their fair heads meekly as the funeral train passed over them.
Arrived at the grave, there followed the usual sounds, so terrible to the ear of mourners – the setting down of the coffin, the bustle of preparation, the harsh grating of ropes as the precious burden was lowered to its last resting-place. And then, standing around the open grave, they sang:
"My flesh shall slumber in the ground
Till the last trumpet's joyful sound.
Then burst the chains, with sweet surprise,
And in my Saviour's image rise."
Then rose the last words of prayer, in which the whole finished service and all the survivors were commended to God.
It was customary in those days for the head of a family to return thanks at the grave to the friends and neighbors who had joined in the last tribute of respect to the departed. There was a moment's pause, and every eye turned on Zeph Higgins. He made a movement and stretched out his hands as if to speak; but his voice failed him, and he stopped. His stern features were convulsed with the vain effort to master his feeling.
Dr. Cushing saw his emotion and said, "In behalf of our brother I return thanks to all the friends who have given us their support and sympathy on this occasion. Let us all pray that the peace of God may rest upon this afflicted family." The gathered friends now turned from the grave and dispersed homeward.
With the instinct of a true soul-physician, who divines mental states at a glance, Dr. Cushing forbore to address even a word to Zeph Higgins; he left him to the inward ministration of a higher Power.
But such tact and reticence belong only to more instructed natures. There are never wanting well-meaning souls who, with the very best intentions, take hold on the sensitive nerves of sorrow with a coarse hand.
Deacon Peaslee was inwardly shocked to see that no special attempt had been made to "improve the dispensation" to Zeph's spiritual state, and therefore felt called on to essay his skill.
"Well, my friend," he said, coming up to him, "I trust this affliction may be sanctified to you."
Zeph glared on him with an impatient movement and turned to walk away; the Deacon, however, followed assiduously by his side, going on with his exhortation.
"You know it's no use contendin' with the Lord."
"Well, who's ben a contendin' with the Lord?" exclaimed Zeph, "I haint."
The tone and manner were not hopeful, but the Deacon persevered.
"We must jest let the Lord do what he will with us and ours."
"I hev let him – how was I goin' to help it?"
"We mustn't murmur," continued the Deacon in a feebler voice, as he saw that his exhortation was not hopefully received.
"Who's ben a murmurin? I haint!"
"Then you feel resigned, don't you?"
"I can't help myself. I've got to make the best on't," said Zeph, trying to out-walk him.
"But you know – "
"Let me alone, can't ye?" cried Zeph in a voice of thunder; and the Deacon, scared and subdued, dropped behind, murmuring, "Drefful state o' mind! poor critter, so unreconciled! – really awful!"
CHAPTER XXVIII.
DOLLY AT THE WICKET GATE
The next Sunday rose calm and quiet over the hills of Poganuc.
There was something almost preternatural in the sense of stillness and utter repose which the Sabbath day used to bring with it in those early times. The absolute rest from every earthly employment, the withholding even of conversation from temporal things, marked it off from all other days. To the truly devout the effect was something the same as if the time had been spent in heaven.
On this particular dewy, fresh summer morning it seemed as if Nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of a higher sphere. Dolly stood at her open window looking out on the wooded hills opposite, feathered with their varied green, on the waving meadows with their buttercups and daisies, on the old apple tree in the corner of the lot where the bobolink was tilting up and down, chattering and singing with all his might. She was thinking of what she had heard her father saying to her mother at breakfast: how the sickness and death of one good woman had been blessed to all that neighborhood, and how a revival of religion was undoubtedly begun there.
All this made Dolly very serious. She thought a great deal about heaven, and perfectly longed to be quite sure she ever should get there. She often had wished that there were such a thing in reality as a Wicket Gate, and an old Interpreter's house, and a Palace Beautiful, for then she would set right off on her pilgrimage at once, and in time get to the Celestial City. But how to get this spiritual, intangible preparation she knew not. To-day she knew was a sacramental Sunday, and she should see all the good people taking that sacrificial bread and wine, but she should be left out.
And how to get in! There were no Sunday-schools in those days, no hymns or teachings specially adapted to the child; and Dolly remembered to have heard serious elderly people tell of how they were brought "under conviction" and suffered for days and weeks before the strange secret of mercy was revealed to them, and she wondered how she ever should get this conviction of sin. Poor Dolly had often tried to feel very solemn and sad and gloomy, and to think herself a dreadful sinner, but had never succeeded. She was so young and so healthy – the blood raced and tingled so in her young veins; and if she was pensive and sad a little while, yet, the first she knew, she would find herself racing after Spring, or calling to her brothers, or jumping up and down with her skipping rope, and feeling full as airy and gay as the bobolink across in the meadow. This morning she was trying her best to feel her sins and count them up; but the birds and the daisies and the flowers were a sad interruption, and she went to meeting quite dissatisfied.
When she saw the white simple table and the shining cups and snowy bread of the Communion she inly thought that the service could have nothing for her – it would be all for those grown-up, initiated Christians. Nevertheless, when her father began to speak she was drawn to listen to him by a sort of pathetic earnestness in his voice.
The Doctor was feeling very earnestly and deeply, and he had chosen a theme to awaken responsive feeling in his church. His text was the declaration of Jesus: "I call you not servants, but friends;" and his subject was Jesus as the soul-friend offered to every human being. Forgetting his doctrinal subtleties, he spoke with all the simplicity and tenderness of a rich nature concerning the faithful, generous, tender love of Christ, how he cared for the soul's wants, how he was patient with its errors, how he gently led it along the way of right, how he was always with it, teaching its ignorance, guiding its wanderings, comforting its sorrows, with a love unwearied by faults, unchilled by ingratitude, till he brought it through the darkness of earth to the perfection of heaven.
Real, deep, earnest feeling inclines to simplicity of language, and the Doctor spoke in words that even a child could understand. Dolly sat absorbed, her large blue eyes gathering tears as she listened; and when the Doctor said, "Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful Friend," Dolly's little heart throbbed "I will." And she did. For a moment she was discouraged by the thought that she had not had any conviction of sin; but like a flash came the thought that Jesus could give her that as well as anything else, and that she could trust him for the whole. And so her little earnest child-soul went out to the wonderful Friend. She sat through the sacramental service that followed, with swelling heart and tearful eyes, and walked home filled with a new joy. She went up to her father's study and fell into his arms, saying, "Father, I have given myself to Jesus, and he has taken me."
The Doctor held her silently to his heart a moment, and his tears dropped on her head.
"Is it so?" he said. "Then has a new flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day."
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CONFLICT
There is one class of luckless mortals in this world of ours whose sorrows, though often more real than those of other people, never bring them any sympathy. It is those in whom suffering excites an irritating conflict, which makes them intolerable to themselves and others. The more they suffer the more severe, biting and bitter become their words and actions. The very sympathy they long for, by a strange contrariness of nature they throw back on their friends as an injury. Nobody knows where to have them, or how to handle them, and when everybody steers away from them they are inwardly desolate at their loneliness.
After the funeral train had borne away from the old brown farm-house the silent form of her who was its peace, its light, its comfort, Zeph Higgins wandered like an unquiet spirit from room to room, feeling every silent memorial of her who was no longer there as a stab in the yet throbbing wound. Unlovely people are often cursed with an intense desire to be loved, and the more unlovely they grow the more intense becomes this desire. His love for his wife had been unusually strong in the sense of what is often called loving – that is, he needed her, depended on her, and could not do without her. He was always sure that she loved him; he was always sure of her patient ear to whatever he wished to say, of her wish to do to her utmost whatever he wanted her to do. Then he was not without a certain sense of the beauty and purity of her character, and had a sort of almost superstitious confidence in her prayers and goodness, like what the Italian peasant has in his patron saint. He felt a sort of helplessness and terror at the idea of facing life without her. Besides this, he was tormented by a secret unacknowledged sense of his own unloveliness: he was angry with himself – cursed himself, called himself hard names; and he who quarrels with himself has this disadvantage, that his adversary is inseparably his companion – lies down and rises, eats, drinks and sleeps with him.
What intensified this conflict was the remembrance of his wife's dying words, enjoining on him the relinquishment of the bitter quarrel which had alienated him from his church and his neighbors, and placed her in so false a position.
He knew that he was in the wrong; he knew that she was in the right, and that those words spoken on her death-bed were God's voice to him. But every nerve and fiber in him seemed to rebel and resist; he would not humble himself; he would not confess; he would not take a step toward reconciliation.
The storm that was raging within expressed itself outwardly in an impatience and irritability which tried his children to the utmost. Poor Nabby did her best to assume in the family all her mother's cares, but was met at every turn by vexatious fault-finding.
"There now!" he said, coming out one morning, "where's my stockings? Everything's being neglected – not a pair to put on!"
"Oh yes, Father, I sat up and mended your stockings last night before I went to bed. I didn't go into your room, because I was afraid of waking you; but here they are on my basket."
"Give 'em here, then!" said Zeph harshly. "I want my things where I know where they are. Your mother always had everything ready so I didn't have to ask for it."
"Well, I never shall be as good as Mother if I try till I'm gray," said Nabby, impatiently.
"Don't you be snapping back at me," said Zeph. "But it's jest so everywhere. Nobody won't care for me now. I don't expect it."
"Well, Father, I'm sure I try the best I can, and you keep scolding me all the time. It's discouraging."
"Oh, yes, I'm a devil, I suppose. Everybody 's right but me. Well, I shall be out of the way one of these days, and nobody'll care. There ain't a critter in the world cares whether I'm alive or dead – not even my own children."
The sparks flashed through the tears in Nabby's eyes. She was cut to the soul by the cruel injustice of these words, and a hot and hasty answer rose to her lips, but was smothered in her throat.
Nabby had become one of the converts of the recently-commenced revival of religion, and had begun to lay the discipline of the Christian life on her temper and her tongue, and found it hard work. As yet she had only attained so far as repression and indignant silence, while the battle raged tempestuously within.
"I'd like just to go off and leave things to take care of themselves," she said to herself, "and then he'd see whether I don't do anything. Try, and try, and try, and not a word said – nothing but scold, scold, scold. It's too bad! Flesh and blood can't stand everything! Mother did, but I ain't Mother. I must try to be like her, though; but it's dreadful hard with Father. How did Mother ever keep so quiet and always be so pleasant? She used – to pray a great deal. Well, I must pray."
Yet if Nabby could have looked in at that moment and seen the misery in her father's soul her indignation would have been lost in pity; for Zeph in his heart knew that Nabby was a good, warm-hearted girl, honestly trying her very best to make her mother's place good. He knew it, and when he was alone and quiet he felt it so that tears came to his eyes; and yet this miserable, irritable demon that possessed him had led him to say these cruel words to her – words that he cursed himself for saying, the hour after. But on this day the internal conflict was raging stronger than ever. The revival in the neighborhood was making itself felt and talked about, and the Friday evening prayer-meeting in the school-house was at hand.
Zeph was debating with himself whether he would take the first step towards reconciliation with his church by going to it. His wife's dying words haunted him, and he thought he might at least go as far as this in the right direction; but the mere suggestion of the first step roused a perfect whirlwind of opposition within him.
Certain moral conditions are alike in all minds, and this stern, gnarled, grizzled old New England farmer had times when he felt exactly as Milton has described a lost archangel as feeling:
"Oh, then, at last relent! Is there no place
Left for repentance? none for pardon left?
None left but by submission, and that word
Disdain forbids me and my dread of shame."
It is curious that men are not generally ashamed of any form of anger, wrath or malice; but of the first step towards a nobler nature – the confession of a wrong – they are ashamed.
Never had Zeph been more intolerable and unreasonable to his sons in the field-work than on this day.
He was too thoroughly knit up in the habits of a Puritan education to use any form of profane language, but no man knew so well how to produce the startling effect of an oath without swearing; and this day he drove about the field in such a stormy manner that his sons, accustomed as they were to his manners, were alarmed.
"Tell you what," said one of the boys to Abner, "the old man's awful cranky to-day. Reely seems as if he was a little bit sprung. I don't know but he's going crazy!"
