Margaret Smith's Journal, and Tales and Sketches Part 14

The Deacon's daughters--the tall, blue-eyed, brown-locked girls you noticed in meeting the other day--set the example among the young people of treating her as their equal and companion. The dear good girls!

They reminded me of the maidens of Naxos cheering and comforting the unhappy Ariadne.

"One mid-winter evening I took Julia with me to a poor sick patient of mine, who was suffering for lack of attendance. The house where she lived was in a lonely and desolate place, some two or three miles below us, on a sandy level, just elevated above the great salt marshes, stretching far away to the sea. The night set in dark and stormy; a fierce northeasterly wind swept over the level waste, driving thick snow-clouds before it, shaking the doors and windows of the old house, and roaring in its vast chimney. The woman was dying when we arrived, and her drunken husband was sitting in stupid unconcern in the corner of the fireplace. A little after midnight she breathed her last.

"In the mean time the storm had grown more violent; there was a blinding snow-fall in the air; and we could feel the jar of the great waves as they broke upon the beach.

"'It is a terrible night for sailors on the coast,' I said, breaking our long silence with the dead. 'G.o.d grant them sea-room!'

"Julia shuddered as I spoke, and by the dim-flas.h.i.+ng firelight I saw she was weeping. Her thoughts, I knew, were with her old friend and playmate on the wild waters.

"'Julia,' said I, 'do you know that Robert Barnet loves you with all the strength of an honest and true heart?'

"She trembled, and her voice faltered as she confessed that when Robert was at home he had asked her to become his wife.

"'And, like a fool, you refused him, I suppose?--the brave, generous fellow!'

"'O Doctor!' she exclaimed. 'How can you talk so? It is just because Robert is so good, and n.o.ble, and generous, that I dared not take him at his word. You yourself, Doctor, would have despised me if I had taken advantage of his pity or his kind remembrance of the old days when we were children together. I have already brought too much disgrace upon those dear to me.'

"I was endeavoring to convince her, in reply, that she was doing injustice to herself and wronging her best friend, whose happiness depended in a great measure upon her, when, borne on the strong blast, we both heard a faint cry as of a human being in distress. I threw up the window which opened seaward, and we leaned out into the wild night, listening breathlessly for a repet.i.tion of the sound.

"Once more, and once only, we heard it,--a low, smothered, despairing cry.

"'Some one is lost, and peris.h.i.+ng in the snow,' said Julia. 'The sound conies in the direction of the beach plum-bushes on the side of the marsh. Let us go at once.'

"She s.n.a.t.c.hed up her hood and shawl, and was already at the door. I found and lighted a lantern and soon overtook her. The snow was already deep and badly drifted, and it was with extreme difficulty that we could force our way against the storm. We stopped often to take breath and listen; but the roaring of the wind and waves was alone audible. At last we reached a slightly elevated spot, overgrown with dwarf plum- trees, whose branches were dimly visible above the snow.

"'Here, bring the lantern here!' cried Julia, who had strayed a few yards from me. I hastened to her, and found her lifting up the body of a man who was apparently insensible. The rays of the lantern fell full upon his face, and we both, at the same instant, recognized Robert Barnet. Julia did not shriek nor faint; but, kneeling in the snow, and still supporting the body, she turned towards me a look of earnest and fearful inquiry.

"'Courage!' said I. 'He still lives. He is only overcome with fatigue and cold.'

"With much difficulty-partly carrying and partly dragging him through the snow--we succeeded in getting him to the house, where, in a short time, he so far recovered as to be able to speak. Julia, who had been my prompt and efficient a.s.sistant in his restoration, retired into the shadow of the room as soon as he began to rouse himself and look about him. He asked where he was and who was with me, saying that his head was so confused that he thought he saw Julia Atkins by the bedside.

'You were not mistaken,' said I; 'Julia is here, and you owe your life to her.' He started up and gazed round the room. I beckoned Julia to the bedside; and I shall never forget the grateful earnestness with which he grasped her hand and called upon G.o.d to bless her. Some folks think me a tough-hearted old fellow, and so I am; but that scene was more than I could bear without shedding tears.

"Robert told us that his vessel had been thrown upon the beach a mile or two below, and that he feared all the crew had perished save himself.

a.s.sured of his safety, I went out once more, in the faint hope of hearing the voice of some survivor of the disaster; but I listened only to the heavy thunder of the surf rolling along the horizon of the east.

The storm had in a great measure ceased; the gray light of dawn was just visible; and I was gratified to see two of the nearest neighbors approaching the house. On being informed of the wreck they immediately started for the beach, where several dead bodies, half buried in snow, confirmed the fears of the solitary survivor.

"The result of all this you can easily conjecture. Robert Barnet abandoned the sea, and, with the aid of some of his friends, purchased the farm where he now lives, and the anniversary of his s.h.i.+pwreck found him the husband of Julia. I can a.s.sure you I have had every reason to congratulate myself on my share in the match-making. n.o.body ventured to find fault with it except two or three sour old busybodies, who, as Elder Staples well says, 'would have cursed her whom Christ had forgiven, and spurned the weeping Magdalen from the feet of her Lord.'"

CHAPTER IV. BY THE SPRING.

IT was one of the very brightest and breeziest of summer mornings that the Doctor and myself walked homeward from the town poor-house, where he had always one or more patients, and where his coming was always welcomed by the poor, diseased, and age-stricken inmates. Dark, miserable faces of lonely and unreverenced age, written over with the grim records of sorrow and sin, seemed to brighten at his approach as with an inward light, as if the good man's presence had power to call the better natures of the poor unfortunates into temporary ascendency.

Weary, fretful women--happy mothers in happy homes, perchance, half a century before--felt their hearts warm and expand under the influence of his kind salutations and the ever-patient good-nature with which he listened to their reiterated complaints of real or imaginary suffering.

However it might be with others, he never forgot the man or the woman in the pauper. There was nothing like condescension or consciousness in his charitable ministrations; for he was one of the few men I have ever known in whom the milk of human kindness was never soured by contempt for humanity in whatever form it presented itself. Thus it was that his faithful performance of the duties of his profession, however repulsive and disagreeable, had the effect of Murillo's picture of St. Elizabeth of Hungary binding up the ulcered limbs of the beggars. The moral beauty transcended the loathsomeness of physical evil and deformity.

Our nearest route home lay across the pastures and over Blueberry Hill, just at the foot of which we encountered Elder Staples and Skipper Evans, who had been driving their cows to pasture, and were now leisurely strolling back to the village. We toiled together up the hill in the hot suns.h.i.+ne, and, just on its eastern declivity, were glad to find a white-oak tree, leaning heavily over a little ravine, from the bottom of which a clear spring of water bubbled up and fed a small rivulet, whose track of darker green might be traced far down the hill to the meadow at its foot.

A broad shelf of rock by the side of the spring, cus.h.i.+oned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his st.u.r.dy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coa.r.s.e stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his keen gray eyes, flas.h.i.+ng under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by the softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial and generous nature. A small, sinewy figure, half doubled up, with his chin resting on his rough palms, Skipper Evans sat on a lower projection of the rock just beneath him, in an attentive att.i.tude, as at the feet of Gatnaliel. Dark and dry as one of his own dunfish on a Labrador flake, or a seal-skin in an Esquimaux hut, he seemed entirely exempt from one of the great trinity of temptations; and, granting him a safe deliverance from the world and the devil, he had very little to fear from the flesh.

We were now in the Doctor's favorite place of resort, green, cool, quiet, and sightly withal. The keen light revealed every object in the long valley below us; the fresh west wind fluttered the oakleaves above; and the low voice of the water, coaxing or scolding its way over bare roots or mossy stones, was just audible.

"Doctor," said I, "this spring, with the oak hanging over it, is, I suppose, your Fountain of Bandusia. You remember what Horace says of his spring, which yielded such cool refreshment when the dog-star had set the day on fire. What a fine picture he gives us of this charming feature of his little farm!"

The Doctor's eye kindled. "I'm glad to see you like Horace; not merely as a clever satirist and writer of amatory odes, but as a true lover of Nature. How pleasant are his simple and beautiful descriptions of his yellow, flowing Tiber, the herds and herdsmen, the harvesters, the grape vintage, the varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summer heats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets!

Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addresses to his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches of rural beauty, each a picture in itself."

"It is long since I have looked at my old school-day companions, the cla.s.sics," said Elder Staples; "but I remember Horace only as a light, witty, careless epicurean, famous for his lyrics in praise of Falernian wine and questionable women."

"Somewhat too much of that, doubtless," said the Doctor; "but to me Horace is serious and profoundly suggestive, nevertheless. Had I laid him aside on quitting college, as you did, I should perhaps have only remembered such of his epicurean lyrics as recommended themselves to the warns fancy of boyhood. Ah, Elder Staples, there was a time when the Lyces and Glyceras of the poet were no fiction to us. They played blindman's buff with us in the farmer's kitchen, sang with us in the meeting-house, and romped and laughed with us at huskings and quilting- parties. Grandmothers and sober spinsters as they now are, the change in us is perhaps greater than in them."

"Too true," replied the Elder, the smile which had just played over his pale face fading into something sadder than its habitual melancholy.

"The living companions of our youth, whom we daily meet, are more strange to us than the dead in yonder graveyard. They alone remain unchanged!"

"Speaking of Horace," continued the Doctor, in a voice slightly husky with feeling, "he gives us glowing descriptions of his winter circles of friends, where mirth and wine, music and beauty, charm away the hours, and of summer-day recreations beneath the vine-wedded elms of the Tiber or on the breezy slopes of Soracte; yet I seldom read them without a feeling of sadness. A low wail of inappeasable sorrow, an undertone of dirges, mingles with his gay melodies. His immediate horizon is bright with suns.h.i.+ne; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof is darkness. It is walled about by the everlasting night. The skeleton sits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all his pleasant pictures. He was without G.o.d in the world; he had no clear abiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close. Eat and drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviate present evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music, and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die. Death was in his view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of all. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic fictions for ill.u.s.tration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, be sadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends.

Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius. He tells his ill.u.s.trious friend simply that his calamity is without hope, irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the G.o.ds to restore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet than that of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend nor persuade 'the ghost-compelling G.o.d' to unbar the gates of death. He urges patience as the sole resource. He alludes not unfrequently to his own death in the same despairing tone. In the Ode to Torquatus,--one of the most beautiful and touching of all he has written,--he sets before his friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and of the moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into the endless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows. He then, in the true spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hour and wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no a.s.surance of to-morrow."

"In something of the same strain," said I, "Moschus moralizes on the death of Bion:--

Our trees and plants revive; the rose In annual youth of beauty glows; But when the pride of Nature dies, Man, who alone is great and wise, No more he rises into light, The wakeless sleeper of eternal night.'"

"It reminds me," said Elder Staples, "of the sad burden of Ecclesiastes, the mournfulest book of Scripture; because, while the preacher dwells with earnestness upon the vanity and uncertainty of the things of time and sense, he has no apparent hope of immortality to relieve the dark picture. Like Horace, he sees nothing better than to eat his bread with joy and drink his wine with a merry heart. It seems to me the wise man might have gone farther in his enumeration of the folly and emptiness of life, and p.r.o.nounced his own prescription for the evil vanity also. What is it but plucking flowers on the banks of the stream which hurries us over the cataract, or feasting on the thin crust of a volcano upon delicate meats prepared over the fires which are soon to ingulf us? Oh, what a glorious contrast to this is the gospel of Him who brought to light life and immortality! The transition from the Koheleth to the Epistles of Paul is like pa.s.sing from a cavern, where the artificial light falls indeed upon gems and crystals, but is everywhere circ.u.mscribed and overshadowed by unknown and unexplored darkness, into the warm light and free atmosphere of day."

"Yet," I asked, "are there not times when we all wish for some clearer evidence of immortal life than has been afforded us; when we even turn away unsatisfied from the pages of the holy book, with all the mysterious problems of life pressing about us and clamoring for solution, till, perplexed and darkened, we look up to the still heavens, as if we sought thence an answer, visible or audible, to their questionings? We want something beyond the bare announcement of the momentous fact of a future life; we long for a miracle to confirm our weak faith and silence forever the doubts which torment us."

"And what would a miracle avail us at such times of darkness and strong temptation?" said the Elder. "Have we not been told that they whom Moses and the prophets have failed to convince would not believe although one rose from the dead? That G.o.d has revealed no more to us is to my mind sufficient evidence that He has revealed enough."

"May it not be," queried the Doctor, "that Infinite Wisdom sees that a clearer and fuller revelation of the future life would render us less willing or able to perform our appropriate duties in the present condition? Enchanted by a clear view of the heavenly hills, and of our loved ones beckoning us from the pearl gates of the city of G.o.d, could we patiently work out our life-task here, or make the necessary exertions to provide for the wants of these bodies whose enc.u.mbrance alone can prevent us from rising to a higher plane of existence?"

"I reckon," said the Skipper, who had been an attentive, although at times evidently a puzzled, listener, "that it would be with us pretty much as it was with a crew of French sailors that I once s.h.i.+pped at the Isle of France for the port of Ma.r.s.eilles. I never had better hands until we hove in sight of their native country, which they had n't seen for years. The first look of the land set 'em all crazy; they danced, laughed, shouted, put on their best clothes; and I had to get new hands to help me bring the vessel to her moorings."

"Your story is quite to the point, Skipper," said the Doctor. "If things had been ordered differently, we should all, I fear, be disposed to quit work and fall into absurdities, like your French sailors, and so fail of bringing the world fairly into port."

"G.o.d's ways are best," said the Elder; "and I don't see as we can do better than to submit with reverence to the very small part of them which He has made known to us, and to trust Him like loving and dutiful children for the rest."

CHAPTER V. THE HILLSIDE.

THE pause which naturally followed the observation of the Elder was broken abruptly by the Skipper.

"Hillo!" he cried, pointing with the glazed hat with which he had been fanning himself. "Here away in the northeast. Going down the coast for better fis.h.i.+ng, I guess."

"An eagle, as I live!" exclaimed the Doctor, following with his cane the direction of the Skipper's hat. "Just see how royally he wheels upward and onward, his sail-broad wings stretched motionless, save an occasional flap to keep up his impetus! Look! the circle in which he moves grows narrower; he is a gray cloud in the sky, a point, a mere speck or dust-mote. And now he is clean swallowed up in the distance.

The wise man of old did well to confess his ignorance of 'the way of an eagle in the air.'"