The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

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"You love him very much, do you not?" said her mother.

"Very dearly," said Mary.

"Mary, he has asked me, this evening, if you would be willing to be his
wife."

"His _wife_, mother?" said Mary, in the tone of one confused with a new
and strange thought.

"Yes, daughter; I have long seen that he was preparing to make you this
proposal."

"You have, mother?"

"Yes, daughter; have you never thought of it?"

"Never, mother."

There was a long pause,--Mary standing, just as she had been
interrupted, in her night toilette, with her long, light hair streaming
down over her white dress, and the comb held mechanically in her hand.
She sat down after a moment, and, clasping her hands over her knees,
fixed her eyes intently on the floor; and there fell between the two a
silence so profound, that the tickings of the clock in the next room
seemed to knock upon the door. Mrs. Scudder sat with anxious eyes
watching that silent face, pale as sculptured marble.

"Well, Mary," she said at last.

A deep sigh was the only answer. The violent throbbings of her heart
could be seen undulating the long hair as the moaning sea tosses the
rockweed.

"My daughter," again said Mrs. Scudder.

Mary gave a great sigh, like that of a sleeper awakening from a dream,
and, looking at her mother, said,--

"Do you suppose he really _loves_ me, mother?"

"Indeed he does, Mary, as much as man ever loved woman!"

"Does he indeed?" said Mary, relapsing into thoughtfulness.

"And you love him, do you not?" said her mother.

"Oh, yes, I love him."

"You love him better than any man in the world, don't you?"

"Oh, mother, mother! yes!" said Mary, throwing herself passionately
forward, and bursting into sobs; "yes, there is no one else now that I
love better,--no one!--no one!"

"My darling! my daughter!" said Mrs. Scudder, coming and taking her in
her arms.

"Oh, mother, mother!" she said, sobbing distressfully, "let me cry, just
for a little,--oh, mother, mother, mother!"

What was there hidden under that despairing wail?--It was the parting of
the last strand of the cord of youthful hope.

Mrs. Scudder soothed and caressed her daughter, but maintained still in
her breast a tender pertinacity of purpose, such as mothers will, who
think they are conducting a child through some natural sorrow into a
happier state.

Mary was not one, either, to yield long to emotion of any kind. Her
rigid education had taught her to look upon all such outbursts as a
species of weakness, and she struggled for composure, and soon seemed
entirety calm.

"If he really loves me, mother, it would give him great pain, if I
refused," said Mary, thoughtfully.

"Certainly it would; and, Mary, you have allowed him to act as a very
near friend for a long time; and it is quite natural that he should have
hopes that you loved him."

"I do love him, mother,--better than anybody in the world except you. Do
you think that will do?"

"Will do?" said her mother; "I don't understand you."

"Why, is that loving enough to marry? I shall love him more, perhaps,
after,--shall I, mother?"

"Certainly you will; every one does."

"I wish he did not want to marry me, mother," said Mary, after a pause.
"I liked it a great deal better as we were before."

"All girls feel so, Mary, at first; it is very natural."

"Is that the way you felt about father, mother?"

Mrs. Scudder's heart smote her when she thought of her own early
love,--that great love that asked no questions,--that had no doubts,
no fears, no hesitations,--nothing but one great, outsweeping impulse,
which swallowed her life in that of another. She was silent; and after a
moment, she said,--

"I was of a different disposition from you, Mary. I was of a strong,
wilful, positive nature. I either liked or disliked with all my might.
And besides, Mary, there never was a man like your father."

The matron uttered this first article in the great confession of woman's
faith with the most unconscious simplicity.

"Well, mother, I will do whatever is my duty. I want to be guided. If
I can make that good man happy, and help him to do some good in the
world--After all, life is short, and the great thing is to do for
others."

"I am sure, Mary, if you could have heard how he spoke, you would be
sure you could make him happy. He had not spoken before, because he felt
so unworthy of such a blessing; he said I was to tell you that he
should love and honor you all the same, whether you could be his wife
or not,--but that nothing this side of heaven would be so blessed a
gift,--that it would make up for every trial that could possibly come
upon him. And you know, Mary, he has a great many discouragements
and trials;--people don't appreciate him; his efforts to do good are
misunderstood and misconstrued; they look down on him, and despise him,
and tell all sorts of evil things about him; and sometimes he gets quite
discouraged."

"Yes, mother, I will marry him," said Mary;--"yes, I will."

"My darling daughter!" said Mrs. Scudder,--"this has been the hope of my
life!"

"Has it, mother?" said Mary, with a faint smile; "I shall make you
happier, then?"

"Yes, dear, you will. And think what a prospect of usefulness opens
before you! You can take a position, as his wife, which will enable you
to do even more good than you do now; and you will have the happiness
of seeing, everyday, how much you comfort the hearts and encourage the
hands of God's dear people."

"Mother, I ought to be very glad I can do it," said Mary; "and I trust I
am. God orders all things for the best."

"Well, my child, sleep to-night, and to-morrow we will talk more about
it."

CHAPTER XXVII.

SURPRISES.

Mrs. Scudder kissed her daughter, and left her. After a moment's
thought, Mary gathered the long silky folds of hair around her head, and
knotted them for the night. Then leaning forward on her toilet-table,
she folded her hands together, and stood regarding the reflection of
herself in the mirror.

Nothing is capable of more ghostly effect than such a silent, lonely
contemplation of that mysterious image of ourselves which seems to look
out of an infinite depth in the mirror, as if it were our own soul
beckoning to us visibly from unknown regions. Those eyes look into our
own with an expression sometimes vaguely sad and inquiring. The face
wears weird and tremulous lights and shadows; it asks us mysterious
questions, and troubles us with the suggestions of our relations to some
dim unknown. The sad, blue eyes that gazed into Mary's had that look
of calm initiation, of melancholy comprehension, peculiar to eyes made
clairvoyant by "great and critical" sorrow. They seemed to say to her,
"Fulfil thy mission; life is made for sacrifice; the flower must fall
before fruit can perfect itself." A vague shuddering of mystery gave
intensity to her reverie. It seemed as if those mirror-depths were
another world; she heard the far-off dashing of sea-green waves; she
felt a yearning impulse towards that dear soul gone out into the
infinite unknown.

Her word just passed had in her eyes all the sacred force of the most
solemnly attested vow; and she felt as if that vow had shut some till
then open door between her and him; she had a kind of shadowy sense of a
throbbing and yearning nature that seemed to call on her,--that seemed
surging towards her with an imperative, protesting force that shook her
heart to its depths.

Perhaps it is so, that souls, once intimately related, have ever after
this a strange power of affecting each other,--a power that neither
absence nor death can annul. How else can we interpret those mysterious
hours in which the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making
our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such
unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal bond? Is
it not deep calling unto deep? the free soul singing outside the cage to
her mate beating against the bars within?

Mary even, for a moment, fancied that a voice called her name, and
started, shivering. Then the habits of her positive and sensible
education returned at once, and she came out of her reverie as one
breaks from a dream, and lifted all these sad thoughts with one heavy
sigh from her breast; and opening her Bible, she read: "They that trust
in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth
forever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is
round about his people from henceforth, even forever."

Then she kneeled by her bedside, and offered her whole life a sacrifice
to the loving God who had offered his life a sacrifice for her. She
prayed for grace to be true to her promise,--to be faithful to the new
relation she had accepted. She prayed that all vain regrets for the past
might be taken away, and that her soul might vibrate without discord in
unison with the will of Eternal Love. So praying, she rose calm,
and with that clearness of spirit which follows an act of uttermost
self-sacrifice; and so calmly she laid down and slept, with her two
hands crossed upon her breast, her head slightly turned on the pillow,
her cheek pale as marble, and her long dark lashes lying drooping, with
a sweet expression, as if under that mystic veil of sleep the soul were
seeing things forbidden to the waking eye. Only the gentlest heaving
of the quiet breast told that the heavenly spirit within had not gone
whither it was hourly aspiring to go.

Meanwhile Mrs. Scudder had left Mary's room, and entered the Doctor's
study, holding a candle in her hand. The good man was sitting alone in
the dark, with his head bowed upon his Bible. When Mrs. Scudder entered,
he rose, and regarded her wistfully, but did not speak. He had something
just then in his heart for which he had no words; so he only looked as a
man does who hopes and fears for the answer of a decisive question.

Mrs. Scudder felt some of the natural reserve which becomes a matron
coming charged with a gift in which lies the whole sacredness of her own
existence, and which she puts from her hands with a jealous reverence.
She therefore measured the man with her woman's and mother's eye, and
said, with a little stateliness,--

"My dear Sir, I come to tell you the result of my conversation with
Mary."

She made a little pause,--and the Doctor stood before her as humbly as
if he had not weighed and measured the universe; because he knew,
that, though he might weigh the mountains in scales and the hills in a
balance, yet it was a far subtiler power which must possess him of one
small woman's heart. In fact, he felt to himself like a great, awkward,
clumsy, mountainous earthite asking of a white-robed angel to help him
up a ladder of cloud. He was perfectly sure for the moment, that he was
going to be refused; and he looked humbly firm,--he would take it like
a man. His large blue eyes, generally so misty in their calm, had a
resolute clearness, rather mournful than otherwise. Of course, no such
celestial experience was going to happen to him.

He cleared his throat, and said,--

"Well, Madam?"

Mrs. Scudder's womanly dignity was appeased; she reached out her hand,
cheerfully, and said,--

"_She has accepted_."

The Doctor drew his hand suddenly away, turned quickly round, and walked
to the window,--although, as it was ten o'clock at night and quite dark,
there was evidently nothing to be seen there. He stood there, quietly,
swallowing very hard, and raising his handkerchief several times to his
eyes. There was enough went on under the black coat just then to make
quite a little figure in a romance, if it had been uttered; but he
belonged to a class who _lived_ romance, but never spoke it. In a few
moments he returned to Mrs. Scudder, and said,--

"I trust, dear Madam, that this very dear friend may never have reason
to think me ungrateful for her wonderful goodness; and whatever sins
my evil heart may lead me into, I _hope_ I may never fall so low as to
forget the undeserved mercy of this hour. If ever I shrink from duty
or murmur at trials, while so sweet a friend is mine, I shall be vile
indeed."

The Doctor, in general, viewed himself on the discouraging side, and
had berated and snubbed himself all his life as a most flagitious and
evil-disposed individual,--a person to be narrowly watched, and capable
of breaking at any moment into the most flagrant iniquity; and therefore
it was that he received his good fortune in so different a spirit from
many of the lords of creation, in similar circumstances.

"I am sensible," he added, "that a poor minister, without much power of
eloquence, and commissioned of the Lord to speak unpopular truths, and
whose worldly condition, in consequence, is never likely to be very
prosperous,--that such an one could scarcely be deemed a suitable
partner for so very beautiful a young woman, who might expect proposals,
in a temporal point of view, of a much more advantageous nature; and I
am therefore the more struck and overpowered with this blessed result."

These last words caught in the Doctor's throat, as if he were
overpowered in very deed.

"In regard to _her_ happiness," said the Doctor, with a touch of awe in
his voice, "I would not have presumed to become the guardian of it, were
it not that I am persuaded it is assured by a Higher Power; for 'when
he giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?' (Job, xxxiv. 29.) But
I trust I may say no effort on my part shall be wanting to secure it."

Mrs. Scudder was a mother, and had come to that stage in life where
mothers always feel tears rising behind their smiles. She pressed the
Doctor's hand silently, and they parted for the night.

We know not how we can acquit ourselves to our friends of the great
world for the details of such an unfashionable courtship, so well as by
giving them, before they retire for the night, a dip into a more modish
view of things.

The Doctor was evidently green,--green in his faith, green in his
simplicity, green in his general belief of the divine in woman, green in
his particular humble faith in one small Puritan maiden, whom a knowing
fellow might at least have maneuvered so skilfully as to break up her
saintly superiority, discompose her, rout her ideas, and lead her up and
down a swamp of hopes and fears and conjectures, till she was wholly
bewildered and ready to take him at last--if he made up his mind to
have her at all--as a great bargain, for which she was to be sensibly
grateful.

Yes, the Doctor was green,--_immortally_ green, as a cedar of Lebanon,
which, waving its broad archangel wings over some fast-rooted eternal
old solitude, and seeing from its sublime height the vastness of the
universe, veils its kingly head with humility before God's infinite
majesty.

He has gone to bed now,--simple old soul!--first apologizing to Mrs.
Scudder for having kept her up to so dissipated and unparalleled an hour
as ten o'clock on his personal matters.

Meanwhile our Asmodeus shall transport us to a handsomely furnished
apartment in one of the most fashionable hotels of Philadelphia, where
Colonel Aaron Burr, just returned from his trip to the then aboriginal
wilds of Ohio, is seated before a table covered with maps, letters,
books, and papers. His keen eye runs over the addresses of the letters,
and he eagerly seizes one from Madame de Frontignac, and reads it; and
as no one but ourselves is looking at him now, his face has no need
to wear its habitual mask. First comes an expression of profound
astonishment; then of chagrin and mortification; then of deepening
concern; there were stops where the dark eyelashes flashed together, as
if to brush a tear out of the view of the keen-sighted eyes; and then
a red flush rose even to his forehead, and his delicate lips wore a
sarcastic smile. He laid down the letter, and made one or two turns
through the room.

The man had felt the dashing against his own of a strong, generous,
indignant woman's heart fully awakened, and speaking with that
impassioned vigor with which a French regiment charges in battle. There
were those picturesque, winged words, those condensed expressions, those
subtile piercings of meaning, and, above all, that simple pathos, for
which the French tongue has no superior; and for the moment the woman
had the victory; she shook his heart. But Burr resembled the marvel
with which chemists amuse themselves. His heart was a vase filled with
boiling passions,--while his _will_, a still, cold, unmelted lump of
ice, lay at the bottom.

Self-denial is not peculiar to Christians. He who goes downward often
puts forth as much force to kill a noble nature as another does to
annihilate a sinful one. There was something in this letter so keen, so
searching, so self-revealing, that it brought on one of those interior
crises in which a man is convulsed with the struggle of two natures, the
godlike and the demoniac, and from which he must pass out more wholly to
the dominion of the one or the other.

Nobody knew the true better than Burr. He _knew_ the godlike and the
pure; he had _felt_ its beauty and its force to the very depths of his
being, as the demoniac knew at once the fair Man of Nazareth; and even
now he felt the voice within that said, "What have I to do with thee?"
and the rending of a struggle of heavenly life with fast-coming eternal
death.

That letter had told him what he might be, and what he was. It was as if
his dead mother's hand had held up before him a glass in which he saw
himself white-robed and crowned, and so dazzling in purity that he
loathed his present self.

As he walked up and down the room perturbed, he sometimes wiped tears
from his eyes, and then set his teeth and compressed his lips. At last
his face grew calm and settled in its expression, his mouth wore a
sardonic smile; he came and took the letter, and, folding it leisurely,
laid it on the table, and put a heavy paperweight over it, as if to
hold it down and bury it. Then drawing to himself some maps of new
territories, he set himself vigorously to some columns of arithmetical
calculations on the margin; and thus he worked for an hour or two, till
his mind was as dry and his pulse as calm as a machine; then he drew the
inkstand towards him, and scribbled hastily the following letter to
his most confidential associate,--a letter which told no more of the
conflict that preceded it than do the dry sands and the civil gossip of
the sea-waves to-day of the storm and wreck of last week.

"Dear ------. _Nous voici_--once more in Philadelphia. Our schemes in
Ohio prosper. Frontignac remains there to superintend. He answers our
purpose _passablement_. On the whole, I don't see that we could do
better than retain him; he is, besides, a gentlemanly, agreeable person,
and wholly devoted to me,--a point certainly not to be overlooked.

"As to your railleries about the fair Madame, I must say, in justice
both to her and myself, that any grace with which she has been pleased
to honor me is not to be misconstrued. You are not to imagine any but
the most Platonic of _liaisons_. She is as high-strung as an Arabian
steed,--proud, heroic, romantic, and _French!_ and such must be
permitted to take their own time and way, which we in our _gaucherie_
can only humbly wonder at I have ever professed myself her abject slave,
ready to follow any whim, and obeying the slightest signal of the
jewelled hand. As that is her sacred pleasure, I have been inhabiting
the most abstract realms of heroic sentiment, living on the most diluted
moonshine, and spinning out elaborately all those charming and seraphic
distinctions between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee with which these
ecstatic creatures delight themselves in certain stages of _affaires du
coeur_.

"The last development, on the part of my goddess, is a fit of celestial
anger, of the cause of which I am in the most innocent ignorance. She
writes me three pages of French sublimities, writing as only a French
woman can,--bids me an eternal adieu, and informs me she is going to
Newport.

"Of course the affair becomes stimulating. I am not to presume to dispute
her sentence, or doubt a lady's perfect sincerity in wishing never to see
me again; but yet I think I shall try to pacify the 'tantas in animis
coelestibus iras.'

"If a woman hates you, it is only her love turned wrong side out, and you
may turn it back with due care. The pretty creatures know how becoming a
_grande passion_ is, and take care to keep themselves in mind; a quarrel
serves their turn, when all else fails.

"To another point. I wish you to advertise S------, that his
insinuations in regard to me in the 'Aurora' have been observed, and
that I require that they be promptly retracted. He knows me well enough
to attend to this hint. I am in earnest when I speak; if the word does
nothing, the blow will come,--and if I strike once, no second blow will
be needed. Yet I do not wish to get him on my hands needlessly; a duel
and a love affair and hot weather, coming on together, might prove too
much even for me.--N.B. Thermometer stands at 85. I am resolved on
Newport next week.

"Yours ever,

"BURR.

"P.S. I forgot to say, that, oddly enough, my goddess has gone and
placed herself under the wing of the pretty Puritan I saw in Newport.
Fancy the _melange_! Could anything be more piquant?--that cart-load of
goodness, the old Doctor, that sweet little saint, and Madame Faubourg
St. Germain shaken up together! Fancy her listening with well-bred
astonishment to a _critique_ on the doings of the unregenerate, or
flirting that little jewelled fan of hers in Mrs. Scudder's square pew
of a Sunday! Probably they will carry her to the weekly prayer-meeting,
which of course she will contrive some fine French subtilty for
admiring, and find _revissant_. I fancy I see it."

When Burr had finished this letter, he had actually written himself into
a sort of persuasion of its truth. When a finely constituted nature
wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never
embraced undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind
accepts and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself
in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one's self is an
essential preliminary to imposing on others. The man first argues
himself down, and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature
to deceiving others. This letter ran so smoothly, so plausibly, that it
produced on the writer of it the effect of a work of fiction, which we
_know_ to be unreal, but _feel_ to be true. Long habits of this kind of
self-delusion in time produce a paralysis in the vital nerves of truth,
so that one becomes habitually unable to see things in their verity, and
realizes the awful words of Scripture,--"He feedeth on ashes; a deceived
heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say,
Is there not a lie in my right hand?"

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE BETROTHED.

Between three and four the next morning, the robin in the nest above
Mary's window stretched out his left wing, opened one eye, and gave
a short and rather drowsy chirp, which broke up his night's rest and
restored him to the full consciousness that he was a bird with wings
and feathers, with a large apple-tree to live in, and all heaven for an
estate,--and so, on these fortunate premises, he broke into a gush
of singing, clear and loud, which Mary, without waking, heard in her
slumbers.

Scarcely conscious, she lay in that dim clairvoyant state, when the
half-sleep of the outward senses permits a delicious dewy clearness
of the soul, that perfect ethereal rest and freshness of faculties,
comparable only to what we imagine of the spiritual state,--season
of celestial enchantment, in which the heavy weight "of all this
unintelligible world" drops off, and the soul, divinely charmed, nestles
like a wind-tossed bird in the protecting bosom of the One All-Perfect,
All-Beautiful. What visions then come to the inner eye have often no
words corresponding in mortal vocabularies. The poet, the artist, and
the prophet in such hours become possessed of divine certainties which
all their lives they struggle with pencil or song or burning words to
make evident to their fellows. The world around wonders; but they are
unsatisfied, because they have seen the glory and know how inadequate
the copy.

And not merely to selectest spirits come these hours, but to those
humbler poets, ungifted with utterance, who are among men as fountains
sealed, whose song can be wrought out only by the harmony of deeds, the
patient, pathetic melodies of tender endurance, or the heroic chant of
undiscouraged labor. The poor slave-woman, last night parted from her
only boy, and weary with the cotton-picking,--the captive pining in his
cell,--the patient wife of the drunkard, saddened by a consciousness of
the growing vileness of one so dear to her once,--the delicate spirit
doomed to harsh and uncongenial surroundings,--all in such hours feel
the soothings of a celestial harmony, the tenderness of more than a
mother's love.

It is by such seasons as these, more often than by reasonings or
disputings, that doubts are resolved in the region of religious faith.
The All-Father treats us as the mother does her "infant crying in the
dark"; He does not reason with our fears, or demonstrate their fallacy,
but draws us silently to His bosom, and we are at peace. Nay, there have
been those, undoubtedly, who have known God falsely with the intellect,
yet felt Him truly with the heart,--and there be many, principally among
the unlettered little ones of Christ's flock, who positively know that
much that is dogmatically propounded to them of their Redeemer is cold,
barren, unsatisfying, and utterly false, who yet can give no account of
their certainties better than that of the inspired fisherman, "We know
Him, and have seen Him." It was in such hours as these that Mary's
deadly fears for the soul of her beloved had passed all away,--passed
out of her,--as if some warm, healing nature of tenderest vitality had
drawn out of her heart all pain and coldness, and warmed it with the
breath of an eternal summer.

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