Harriet Beecher Stowe : Three Novels (124 page)

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Authors: Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Page 718
Then fell that long, hopeless silence, broken only by hysteric sobs from Miss Prissy, and answering ones from the mother; but
she
lay still and quiet, her blue eyes wide and clear, making an inarticulate moan.
"Oh! are they
sure?can
it be?
is
he dead?" at last she gasped.
"My child, it is too true; all we can say is, 'Be still, and know that I am God!'"
"I shall
try
to be still, mother," said Mary with a piteous, hopeless voice, like the bleat of a dying lamb; "but I did not think he
could
die! I never thought of that!I never
thought
of it!Oh! mother! mother! mother! oh! what shall I do?"
They laid her on her mother's bed,the first and last resting-place of broken hearts,and the mother sat down by her in silence. Miss Prissy stole away into the Doctor's study, and told him all that had happened.
"It's the same to her," said Miss Prissy, with womanly reserve, "as if he'd been an own brother."
"What was his spiritual state?" said the Doctor, musingly,
Miss Prissy looked blank, and answered mournfully,"I don't know."
The Doctor entered the room where Mary was lying with closed eyes. Those few moments seemed to have done the work of years,so pale, and faded, and sunken she looked; nothing but the painful flutter of the eyelids and lips showed that she yet breathed. At a sign from Mrs. Scudder, he kneeled by the bed, and began to pray,"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations,"prayer deep, mournful, upheaving like the swell of the ocean, surging upward, under the pressure of mighty sorrows, toward an Almighty heart.
The truly good are of one language in prayer. Whatever lines or angles of thought may separate them in other hours,
when they pray in extremity,
all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles V. and Martin Luther, two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed out their dying struggle in the self-same words.
There be many tongues and many languages of men,but the language of prayer is one by itself,
in
all and
above
all. It is the inspiration of that Spirit that is ever working with our

 

Page 719
spirit, and constantly lifting us higher than we know, and, by our wants, by our woes, by our tears, by our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us, with mightier and mightier force, against those chains of sin which keep us from our God. We speak not of
things
conventionally called prayers,vain mutterings of unawakened spirits talking drowsily in sleep,but of such prayers as come when flesh and heart fail, in mighty straits;
then
he who prays is a prophet, and a Mightier than he speaks in him; for the
"Spirit
helpeth our infirmities; for we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us, with groanings which cannot be uttered."
So the voice of supplication, upheaving from that great heart, so childlike in its humility, rose with a wisdom and a pathos beyond what he dreamed in his intellectual hours; it uprose even as a strong angel, whose brow is solemnly calm, and whose wings shed healing dews of paradise.

 

Page 720
XXI.
The Bruised Flax-Flower
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 colorless 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. Aerial 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

 

Page 721
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 mean while, 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.

 

Page 722
XXII.
The House of Mourning
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 consid-

 

Page 723
erate 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 overgrown 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 Jeduthun 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, Jeduthun says she jest crushed like an egg-shell";and with that Amaziah illustrated the fact by crushing an egg 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 Jeduthun 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 Jeduthun saw of him; for in a few minutes more the ship struck, and then it was every man for himself. Laws! Jeduthun says there couldn't nobody have stood beatin' agin them rocks, unless they was all leather

 

Page 724
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 wagon 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

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