Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
The Minister's Wooing
CHAPTER XXI
The next day broke calm and fair. The robins sang remorselessly in the apple-tree, and were answered by bobolink, oriole, and a whole tribe of ignorant little bits of feathered, happiness that danced among the leaves. Golden and glorious unclosed those purple eyelids of the East, and regally came up the sun; and the treacherous sea broke into ten thousand smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, as unconsciously as if no form dear to human hearts had gone down beneath it. Oh! treacherous, deceiving beauty of outward things! beauty, wherein throbs not one answering nerve to human pain!
Mary rose early and was about her morning work. Her education was that of the soldier, who must know himself no more, whom no personal pain must swerve from the slightest minutiæ of duty. So she was there, at her usual hour, dressed with the same cool neatness, her brown hair parted in satin bands, and only the colourless cheek and lip differing from the Mary of yesterday.
How strange this external habit of living! One thinks how to stick in a pin, and how to tie a string, – one busies one’s self with folding robes, and putting away napkins, the day after some stroke that has cut the inner life in two, with the heart’s blood dropping quietly at every step.
Yet it is better so! Happy those whom stern principle or long habit or hard necessity calls from the darkened room, the languid trance of pain, in which the wearied heart longs to indulge, and gives this trite prose of common life, at which our weak and wearied appetites so revolt!
Mary never thought of such a thing as self-indulgence; – this daughter of the Puritans had her seed within her. Aërial in her delicacy, as the blue-eyed flax-flower with which they sowed their fields, she had yet its strong fibre, which no stroke of the flail could break; bruising and hackling only made it fitter for uses of homely utility. Mary, therefore, opened the kitchen-door at dawn, and, after standing one moment to breathe the freshness, began spreading the cloth for an early breakfast. Mrs. Scudder, the meanwhile, was kneading the bread that had been set to rise over-night; and the oven was crackling and roaring with a large-throated, honest garrulousness.
But, ever and anon, as the mother worked, she followed the motions of her child anxiously.
‘Mary, my dear,’ she said, ‘the eggs are giving out; hadn’t you better run to the barn and get a few?’
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. No treatise on the laws of nervous fluids could have taught Mrs. Scudder a better rôle for this morning, than her tender gravity, and her constant expedients to break and ripple, by changing employments, that deep, deadly under-current of thoughts which she feared might undermine her child’s life.
Mary went into the barn, stopped a moment, and took out a handful of corn to throw to her hens, who had a habit of running towards her and cocking an expectant eye to her little hand whenever she appeared. All came at once flying towards her, – speckled, white, and gleamy with hues between of tawny orange-gold, – the cocks, magnificent with the blade-like waving of their tails, – and, as they chattered and cackled and pressed and crowded about her, pecking the corn even where it lodged in the edge of her little shoes, she said, ‘Poor things, I am glad they enjoy it!’ – and even this one little act of love to the ignorant fellowship below her carried away some of the choking pain which seemed all the while suffocating her heart. Then, climbing into the hay, she sought the nest and filled her little basket with eggs, warm, translucent, pinky-white in their freshness. She felt, for a moment, the customary animation in surveying her new treasures; but suddenly, like a vision rising before her, came a remembrance of once when she and James were children together and had been seeking eggs just there. He flashed before her eyes, the bright boy with the long black lashes, the dimpled cheeks, the merry eyes, just as he stood and threw the hay over her when they tumbled and laughed together, – and she sat down with a sick faintness, and then turned and walked wearily in.
CHAPTER XXII
Mary returned to the house with her basket of warm, fresh eggs, which she set down mournfully upon the table. In her heart there was one conscious want and yearning, and that was to go to the friends of him she had lost – to go to his mother. The first impulse of bereavement is to stretch out the hands towards what was nearest and dearest to the departed.
Her dove came fluttering down out of the tree and settled on her hand, and began asking in his dumb way to be noticed. Mary stroked his white feathers, and bent her head down over them till they were wet with tears. ‘Oh, birdie, you live, but he is gone!’ she said. Then suddenly putting it gently from her, and going near and throwing her arms around her mother’s neck, – ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I want to go up to Cousin Ellen’s.’ (This was the familiar name by which she always called Mrs. Marvyn.) ‘Can’t you go with me, mother?’
‘My daughter, I have thought of it. I hurried about my baking this morning, and sent word to Mr. Jenkyns that he needn’t come to see about the chimney, because I expected to go as soon as breakfast should be out of the way. So hurry, now, boil some eggs, and get on the cold beef and potatoes, for I see Solomon and Amaziah coming in with the milk. They’ll want their breakfast immediately.’
The breakfast for the hired men was soon arranged on the table, and Mary sat down to preside while her mother was going on with her baking, introducing various loaves of white and brown bread into the capacious oven by means of a long iron shovel, and discoursing at intervals with Solomon with regard to the different farming operations which he had in hand for the day.
Solomon was a tall, large-boned man, brawny and angular, with a face tanned by the sun, and graven with those considerate lines which New England so early writes on the faces of her sons. He was reputed an oracle in matters of agriculture and cattle, and, like oracles generally, was prudently sparing of his responses. Amaziah was one of those uncouth over-grown boys of eighteen, whose physical bulk appears to have so suddenly developed that the soul has more matter than she has learned to recognize, so that the hapless individual is always awkwardly conscious of too much limb; and in Amaziah’s case this consciousness grew particularly distressing when Mary was in the room. He liked to have her there, he said, ‘but somehow she was so white and pretty, she made him feel sort o’ awful-like.’
Of course, as such poor mortals always do, he must, on this particular morning, blunder into precisely the wrong subject.
‘S’pose you’ve heerd the news that Jeduthan Pettibone brought home in the “Flying Scud,” ’bout the wreck o’ the “Monsoon;” it’s an awful providence, that ’ar’ is – a’n’t it? Why Jeduthan says she jest crushed like an egg-shell’ – and with that Amaziah illustrated the fact by crushing an egg-shell in his great brown hand.
Mary did not answer. She could not grow any paler than she was before; a dreadful curiosity came over her, but her lips could frame no question. Amaziah went on:
‘Ye see, the cap’en he got killed with a spar when the blow fust come on, and Jim Marvyn he commanded; and Jeduthan says that he seemed to have the spirit of ten men in him. He worked, and he watched, and he was everywhere at once, and he kep’ ’em all up for three days, till finally they lost their rudder, and went drivin’ right onto the rocks. When they come in sight, he come up on deck, and says he, “Well, my boys, we’re headin’ right into eternity,” says he, “and our chances for this world a’n’t worth mentionin’, any on us; but we’ll all have one try for our lives. Boys, I’ve tried to do my duty by you and the ship – but God’s will be done! All I have to ask now is, that if any of you git to shore, you’ll find my mother and tell her I died thinkin’ of her and father and my dear friends.” That was the last Jeduthan saw of him, for in a few minutes more the ship struck, and then it was every man for himself. Laws! Jeduthan says there couldn’t nobody have stood beatin’ agin them rocks unless they was all leather and inger-rubber like him. Why, he says the waves would take strong men and jest crush ’em against the rocks like smashin’ a pie-plate!’
Here Mary’s paleness became livid; she made a hasty motion to rise from the table, and Solomon trod on the foot of the narrator.
‘You seem to forget that friends and relations has feelin’s,’ he said, as Mary hastily went into her own room.
Amaziah, suddenly awakened to the fact that he had been trespassing, sat with mouth half open and a stupefied look of perplexity on his face for a moment, and then, rising hastily, said: ‘Well, Sol, I guess I’ll go an’ yoke up the steers.’
At eight o’clock all the morning toils were over, the wide kitchen cool and still, and the one-horse waggon standing at the door, into which climbed Mary, her mother, and the Doctor, for, though invested with no spiritual authority, and charged with no ritual or form for hours of affliction, the religion of New England always expects her minister as a first visitor in every house of mourning.
The ride was a sorrowful and silent one. The Doctor, propped upon his cane, seemed to reflect deeply.
‘Have you been at all conversant with the exercises of our young friend’s mind on the subject of religion?’ he asked.
Mrs. Scudder did not at first reply. The remembrance of James’s last letter flashed over her mind, and she felt the vibration of the frail child beside her, in whom every nerve was quivering. After a moment she said: ‘It does not become us to judge the spiritual state of any one. James’s mind was in an unsettled way when he left; but who can say what wonders may have been effected by Divine grace since then?’
This conversation fell on the soul of Mary like the sound of clods falling on a coffin to the ear of one buried alive; she heard it with a dull, smothering sense of suffocation. That question to be raised! – and about one, too, for whom she could have given her own soul! At this moment she felt how idle is the mere hope or promise of personal salvation made to one who has passed beyond the life of self, and struck deep the roots of his existence in others. She did not utter a word – how could she? A doubt – the faintest shadow of a doubt – in such a case, falls on the soul with the weight of mountain certainty, and in that short ride she felt what an infinite pain may be locked in one small, silent breast.
The waggon drew up to the house of mourning. Cato stood at the gate, and came forward, officiously, to help them out. ‘Mass’r and Missis will be glad to see you,’ he said. ‘It’s a drefful stroke has come upon ’em.’
Candace appeared at the door. There was a majesty of sorrow in her bearing as she received them. She said not a word, but pointed with her finger towards the inner room; but as Mary lifted up her faded, weary face to hers, her whole soul seemed to heave towards her like a billow, and she took her up in her arms and broke forth into sobbing, and, carrying her in, as if she had been a child, set her down in the inner room and sat down beside her.
Mrs. Marvyn and her husband sat together, holding each other’s hands, the open Bible between them. For a few moments nothing was to be heard but sobs and unrestrained weeping, and then all kneeled down while the Doctor prayed.
After they rose up, Mr. Zebedee Marvyn stood for a moment thoughtfully, and then said: ‘If it had pleased the Lord to give me a sure evidence of my son’s salvation, I could have given him up with all my heart; but now, whatever there may be, I have seen none.’ He stood in an attitude of hopeless, heart-smitten dejection, which contrasted painfully with his usual upright carriage and the firm lines of his face.
Mrs. Marvyn started as if a sword had pierced her, passed her arm round Mary’s waist, with a strong, nervous clasp, unlike her usual calm self, and said, ‘Stay with me, daughter, to-day! – stay with me!’
‘Mary can stay as long as you wish, cousin,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘we have nothing to call her home.’
‘Come with me!’ said Mrs. Marvyn to Mary, opening an adjoining door into her bedroom, and drawing her in with a sort of suppressed vehemence, ‘I want you! – I must have you!’
‘Mrs. Marvyn’s state alarms me,’ said her husband, looking apprehensively after her when the door was closed; ‘she has not shed any tears nor slept any since she heard this news. You know that her mind has been in a peculiar and unhappy state with regard to religious things for many years. I was in hopes she might feel free to open her exercises of mind to the Doctor.’
‘Perhaps she will feel more freedom with Mary,’ said the Doctor. ‘There is no healing for such troubles except in unconditional submission to Infinite Wisdom and Goodness. The Lord reigneth, and will at last bring infinite good out of evil, whether our small portion of existence be included or not.’
After a few moments more of conference, Mrs. Scudder and the Doctor departed, leaving Mary alone in the house of mourning.
CHAPTER XXIII
We have said before, what we now repeat, that it is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for superficial thought or shallow feeling. They who would fully understand the springs which moved the characters with whom we now associate must go down with us to the very depths.
Never was there a community where the roots of common life shot down so deeply, and were so intensely grappled around things sublime and eternal. The founders of it were a body of confessors and martyrs, who turned their backs on the whole glory of the visible to found in the wilderness a republic of which the God of heaven and earth should be the sovereign power. For the first hundred years grew this community, shut out by a fathomless ocean from the existing world, and divided by an antagonism not less deep from all the reigning ideas of nominal Christendom.
In a community thus unworldly must have arisen a mode of thought, energetic, original, and sublime. The leaders of thought and feeling were the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle of the early ministry of New England was one to which the world gives no parallel. Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling the earth with their own hands, they yet carried on the most startling and original religious investigations with a simplicity that might have been deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All old issues relating to government, religion, ritual, and forms of church organization having for them passed away, they went straight to the heart of things, and boldly confronted the problem of universal being. They had come out from the world as witnesses to the most solemn and sacred of human rights. They had accustomed themselves boldly to challenge and dispute all sham pretensions and idolatries of past ages – to question the right of kings in the State and of prelates in the Church; and now they turned the same bold inquiries towards the Eternal Throne, and threw down their glove in the lists as authorized defenders of every mystery in the Eternal Government. The task they proposed to themselves was that of reconciling the most tremendous facts of sin and evil, present and eternal, with those conceptions of Infinite Power and Benevolence which their own strong and generous natures enabled them so vividly to realize. In the intervals of planting and harvesting they were busy with the toils of adjusting the laws of a universe. Solemnly simple, they made long journeys in their old one-horse chaises to settle with each other some nice point of celestial jurisprudence, and to compare their maps of the Infinite. Their letters to each other form a literature altogether unique. Hopkins sends to Edwards the younger his scheme of the universe, in which he starts with the proposition that God is infinitely above all obligations of any kind to his creatures. Edwards replies with the brusque comment: – ‘This is wrong; God has no more right to injure a creature than a creature has to injure God;’ and each probably about that time preached a sermon on his own views, which was discussed by every farmer, in intervals of plough and hoe, by every woman and girl, at loom, spinning-wheel, or wash-tub. New England was one vast sea, surging from depths to heights with thought and discussion on the most insoluble of mysteries. And it is to be added that no man or woman accepted any theory or speculation simply as theory or speculation; all was profoundly real and vital – a foundation on which actual life was based with intensest earnestness.
The views of human existence which resulted from this course of training were gloomy enough to oppress any heart which did not rise above them by triumphant faith, or sink below them by brutish insensibility; for they included every moral problem of natural or revealed religion, divested of all those softening poetries and tender draperies which, forms, ceremonies, and rituals had thrown around them in other parts and ages of Christendom. The human race, without exception, coming into existence ‘under God’s wrath and curse,’ with a nature so fatally disordered, that, although perfect free agents, men were infallibly certain to do nothing to Divine acceptance until regenerated by the supernatural aid of God’s Spirit, this aid being given to a certain decreed number of the human race only; the rest, with enough free agency to make them responsible, but without this indispensable assistance exposed to the malignant assaults of evil spirits versed in every art of temptation, were sure to fall hopelessly into perdition. The standard of what constituted a true regeneration, as presented in such treatises as Edwards on the Affections, and others of the times, made this change to be something so high, disinterested, and superhuman, so removed from all natural and common habits and feelings, that the most earnest and devoted, whose whole life had been a constant travail of endeavour, a tissue of almost unearthly disinterestedness, often lived and died with only a glimmering hope of its attainment.
According to any views then entertained of the evidences of a true regeneration, the number of the whole human race who could be supposed as yet to have received this grace was so small, that, as to any numerical valuation, it must have been expressed by an infinitesimal. Dr. Hopkins, in many places, distinctly recognizes the fact, that the greater part of the human race, up to his time, had been eternally lost; and boldly assumes the ground, that this amount of sin and suffering, being the best and most necessary means of the greatest final amount of happiness, was not merely permitted, but distinctly chosen, decreed, and provided for, as essential in the schemes of Infinite Benevolence. He held that this decree not only permitted each individual act of sin, but also took measures to make it certain, though, by an exercise of infinite skill, it accomplished this result without violating human free agency.
The preaching of those times was animated by an unflinching consistency which never shrank from carrying an idea to its remotest logical verge. The sufferings of the lost were not kept from view, but proclaimed with a terrible power. Dr. Hopkins boldly asserts, that ‘all the use which God will have for them is to suffer; this is all the end they can answer; therefore all their faculties, and their whole capacities, will be employed and used for this end… The body can by omnipotence be made capable of suffering the greatest imaginable pain without producing dissolution, or abating the least degree of life or sensibility… One way in which God will show his power in the punishment of the wicked, will be in strengthening and upholding their bodies and souls in torments which otherwise would be intolerable.’
The sermons preached by President Edwards on this subject are so terrific in their refined poetry of torture, that very few persons of quick sensibility could read them through without agony; and it is related that when in those calm and tender tones, which never rose to passionate enunciation, he read these discourses, the house was often filled with shrieks and wailings, and that a brother minister once laid hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in an involuntary agony, ‘Oh! Mr. Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?’
Not that these men were indifferent or insensible to the dread words they spoke; their whole lives and deportment bore thrilling witness to their sincerity. Edwards set apart special days of fasting, in view of the dreadful doom of the lost, in which he was wont to walk the floor, weeping and wringing his hands. Hopkins fasted every Saturday. David Brainerd gave up every refinement of civilized life to weep and pray at the feet of hardened savages, if by any means he might save one. All, by lives of eminent purity and earnestness, gave awful weight and sanction to their words.
If we add to this statement the fact, that it was always proposed to every inquiring soul, as an evidence of regeneration, that it should truly and heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared right and lovely, and from the heart submit to Him as the only just and good, it will be seen what materials of tremendous internal conflict and agitation were all the while working in every bosom. Almost all the histories of religious experience of those times relate paroxysms of opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language which appals the very soul, followed at length by mysterious elevations of faith and reactions of confiding love, the result of Divine interposition, which carried the soul far above the region of the intellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.
President Edwards records that he was once in this state of enmity, that the facts of the Divine administration seemed horrible to him, and that this opposition was overcome by no course of reasoning, but by an ‘inward and sweet sense’ which came to him once when walking alone in the fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he saw the blending of the Divine majesty with a calm, sweet, and almost infinite meekness.
The piety which grew up under such a system was, of necessity, energetic; it was the uprousing of the whole energy of the human soul, pierced and wrenched and probed from her lowest depths to her topmost heights, with every awful life-force possible to existence. He whose faith in God came clear through these terrible tests, would be sure never to know greater ones. He might certainly challenge earth or heaven, things present or things to come, to swerve him from this grand allegiance.
But it is to be conceded that these systems, so admirable in relation to the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, when received as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, on minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing life-habits of morbid action very different from any which ever followed the simple reading of the Bible. They differ from the New Testament as the living embrace of a friend does from his lifeless body, mapped out under the knife of the anatomical demonstrator; every nerve and muscle is there, but to a sensitive spirit there is the very chill of death in the analysis.
All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth’s dust, in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly orbs as a frightful monster.
Thus it happened that while strong spirits walked, palm-crowned, with victorious hymns, along these sublime paths, feebler and more sensitive ones lay along the track, bleeding away in life-long despair. Fearful to them were the shadows that lay over the cradle and the grave. The mother clasped her babe to her bosom, and looked with shuddering to the awful coming trial of free agency, with its terrible responsibilities and risks, and, as she thought of the infinite chances against her beloved, almost wished it might die in infancy. But when the stroke of death came, and some young, thoughtless head was laid suddenly low, who can say what silent anguish of loving hearts sounded the dread depths of eternity with the awful question, Where?
In no other time or place of Christendom have so fearful issues been presented to the mind. Some church interposed its protecting shield; the Christian born and baptized child was supposed in some wise rescued from the curse of the fall, and related to the great redemption, to be a member of Christ’s family, and, if ever so sinful, still infolded in some vague sphere of hope and protection. Augustine solaced the dread anxieties of trembling love by prayers offered for the dead, in times when the Church above and on earth presented itself to the eye of the mourner as a great assembly with one accord lifting interceding hands for the parted soul.
But the clear logic and intense individualism of New England deepened the problems of the Augustinian faith, while they swept away all those softening provisions so earnestly clasped to the throbbing heart of that great poet of theology. No rite, no form, no paternal relation, no faith or prayer of church, earthly or heavenly, interposed the slightest shield between the trembling spirit and Eternal Justice. The individual entered eternity alone, as if he had no interceding relation the universe.
This, then, was the awful dread which was constantly underlying life. This it was which caused the tolling bell in green hollows and lonely dells to be a sound which shook the soul and searched the heart with fearful questions. And this it was that was lying with mountain weight on the soul of the mother, too keenly agonized to feel that doubt in such a case was any less a torture than the most dreadful certainty.
Hers was a nature more reasoning than creative and poetic; and whatever she believed bound her mind in strictest chains to its logical results. She delighted in the regions of mathematical knowledge, and walked them as a native home; but the commerce with abstract certainties fitted her mind still more to be stiffened and enchained by glacial reasonings, in regions where spiritual intuitions are as necessary as wings to birds.
Mary was by nature of the class who never reason abstractly, whose intellections all begin in the heart, which sends them coloured with its warm life-tint to the brain. Her perceptions of the same subjects were as different from Mrs. Marvyn’s as his who revels only in colour from his who is busy with the dry details of mere outline. The one mind was arranged like a map, and the other like a picture. In all the system which had been explained to her, her mind selected points on which it seized with intense sympathy, which it dwelt upon and expanded till all else fell away. The sublimity of disinterested benevolence, the harmony and order of a system tending in its final results to infinite happiness, the goodness of God, the love of a self-sacrificing Redeemer, were all so many glorious pictures, which she revolved in her mind with small care for their logical relations.
Mrs. Marvyn had never, in all the course of their intimacy, opened her mouth to Mary on the subject of religion. It was not an uncommon incident of those times for persons of great elevation and purity of character to be familiarly known and spoken of as living under a cloud of religious gloom; and it was simply regarded as one more mysterious instance of the workings of that infinite decree which denied to them the special illumination of the Spirit.
When Mrs. Marvyn had drawn Mary with her into her room, she seemed like a person almost in frenzy. She shut and bolted the door, drew her to the foot of the bed, and, throwing her arms round her, rested her hot and throbbing forehead on her shoulder. She pressed her thin hand over her eyes, and then, suddenly drawing back, looked her in the face as one resolved to speak something long suppressed. Her soft brown eyes had a flash of despairing wildness in them, like that of a hunted animal turning in its death-struggle on its pursuer.
‘Mary,’ she said, ‘I can’t help it, – don’t mind what I say, but I must speak or die! Mary, I cannot, will not, be resigned! – it is all hard, unjust, cruel! – to all eternity I will say so! To me there is no goodness, no justice, no mercy in anything! Life seems to me the most tremendous doom that can be inflicted on a helpless being! What had we done that it should be sent upon us? Why were we made to love so, to hope so, – our hearts so full of feeling, and all the laws of Nature marching over us, – never stopping for our agony? Why, we can suffer so in this life that we had better never have been born!
‘But, Mary, think what a moment life is! think of those awful ages of eternity! and then think of all God’s power and knowledge used on the lost to make them suffer! think that all but the merest fragment of mankind have gone into this, are in it now! The number of the elect is so small we can scarce count them for anything! Think what noble minds, what warm, generous hearts, what splendid natures are wrecked and thrown away by thousands and tens of thousands! How we love each other! how our hearts weave into each other! how more than glad we should be to die for each other! And all this ends – O God, how must it end? Mary! it isn’t my sorrow only! What right have I to mourn? Is my son any better than any other mother’s son? Thousands of thousands, whose mothers loved them as I loved mine, are gone there! Oh, my wedding-day! Why did they rejoice? Brides should wear mourning, the bells should toll for every wedding; every new family is built over this awful pit of despair, and only one in a thousand escapes!’
