Chapter XXXIV: “take Up the Burthen of Life Again.”

“Blaspheme not thou thy sacred life, nor turn
O’er joys that God hath for a reason lent,
Perchance to try thy spirit and its bent,
Effeminate soul and base! weakly to mourn.

“Art thou already weary of the way—
Thou who hast yet but half the way gone o’er?
Get up and lift thy burthen; lo, before
Thy feet the road goes stretching far away.”—_Fanny Kemble._

Oh life! Oh world and worldly honour! how poor and vain, how worthless and worse than worthless, how bitterly mocking do ye seem in the presence of death, the death of the best-beloved! What now to him was his political victory? what the success of his party? the cause of the country? aye, of the world, or of humanity? Nothing, and less than nothing! if that could be. He had called her “immortal”—making what stand he could against the overwhelming sense of annihilation that had fallen upon him. Alas! alas! he felt now as if nothing were immortal but his own bitter, insupportable grief; as if with her all things had passed from him—leaving only insufferable sorrow. And he lifted up his voice, and wept—“Oh, Rosalie! Rosalie! life of my life!” But let us not intrude upon a grief so sacred.

Pass we by the next few mournful days. Pass we by the funeral, where all who had known the angel in her mortal life, gathered around to gaze once more upon her sweet face, drop a tear to her lovely memory, and go away, haply, wiser, and more loving than they came.

Pass by the time when the news of her departure from this earth reached her distant Western home, and many other homes that felt the blessing of her influence and mourned her loss; and where to this day the memory of Rosalie is still fresh and beautiful, sweet and fragrant—even as that of some fair saint, who lived, and loved, and toiled, and suffered to benefit humanity, to whom she was given; and where the present thought of Rosalie is as that of some bright guardian angel, still blessing from heaven those she loved upon the earth.

Pass to the time when Mr. Sutherland’s official duties called him to Washington City. The first vehemence and severity of his sorrow was over—but not the sorrow: it had settled rather into a fixed and silent melancholy, from which no earthly interest was strong enough to arouse him. Even the fine powers of his mind seemed palsied for a time.

He reached Washington, the goal of his young ambition; was duly sworn in, and took his appointed seat in the Senate Chamber. But all this passed to him like a dream, or at least like a form in which he had no vital interest. It was well for Mark Sutherland that he was a man of very imposing presence—that his bearing was dignified and commanding, and his fine Roman features, even in the deepened repose, as in a painting, or a marble bust, still expressed a high degree of intellect; as, through that fortuitous accident of physique, taken together with his antecedents, which were not those of a negligent politician—his mental abstraction passed for the pride and reserve of a lofty mind—which it was _not_—rather than for the profound indifference, amounting almost to apathy, of a deeply stricken heart—as it _was_.

Time passed, and the “affairs of the nation” got slowly under way. And the “assembled wisdom” of the commonwealth took up its profoundest problems. Debate after debate arose, and questions in which he had once taken the profoundest interest—but they had now no power to affect or inspire him.

Into society he did not go at all; but left the Capitol only for his boarding-house, and his boarding-house only for a ride or a walk out into the country.

So the session passed, and Mr. Sutherland had failed to distinguish himself, or to do credit to his constituents. He had apparently done no service to himself, his party, humanity or heaven. His best friends were surprised, grieved and disappointed in him.

He returned home; met his constituents with the same apathetic, frozen indifference.

What was the matter?

It was scarcely credible even to himself that the sorrow that had fallen upon him—a sorrow no heavier apparently than that which falls upon many a man and woman, who nevertheless “take up their burden of life again,” and go on—should have so paralyzed his intellect and his will.

Had all his motive power departed with Rosalie? Had she been the secret and the fountain of his mental and moral force? He had often said so and thought so, during her mortal life; and now it seemed to be demonstrated. He once thought of resigning his seat in the Senate, and spoke of his failing health as a reason for doing so; but his personal friends dissuaded him from his half-formed purpose. And about this time Lincoln Lauderdale wrote and invited Mark Sutherland to join him in a trip to England. Mr. Sutherland accepted the invitation.

The friends met by appointment at St. Louis, and travelled in company to New York, and embarked together for Liverpool.

The voyage was made. The summer was spent in travelling through England, Scotland and Ireland.

And in the autumn they returned to the United States, and reached Washington City just before the meeting of Congress.

The trip had been made without much benefit to the health and spirits of Mr. Sutherland. And Mr. Lauderdale, with much uneasiness in regard to the state of his friend, took leave of him in Washington, and departed for the South.

The two Houses of Congress organized, in the course of time, and the nation’s business commenced. And again Mr. Sutherland sat a mere silent, handsome figure-head in his seat.

In fact, it required—not travel and change of scene, not the offices of friendship, nor the distinctions of society, but some powerful emotion, something that should sound a trumpet-call to his heart and brain—some mental or moral shock—to rouse that dormant mind to life and action.

And it came! In the midst of a calm as profound as a sleep of peace, the thunderbolt fell that struck consternation, not only among all right-thinking men upon the floor of Congress, but all honest souls to the remotest bounds of the Union. It was in the midst of the temporary calm I have just mentioned, that a Senator arose and presented a bill for the repeal of a treaty hitherto held so sacred that the most reckless of political adventurers had not dared to dream of meddling with it until now.

It was no very extravagant figure of speech to call that event a thunderbolt. It took the Senate, the House, and the nation by surprise. It had the momentary stunning effect of a thunderbolt when it fell. Men were struck with consternation, heard as doubting the evidence of their own senses, and for a time remained dumb with astonishment.

Then followed indignation which we all know to be anything but a “dumb devil,” whether it possess a man or a body of men. And a tempest of opposition arose that in its turn provoked a storm of assault from the friends of the bill, and then the war raged fast and furious. Not very “parliamentary” was the character of the debates upon that question, for it was indeed a time that “tried men’s souls,” “what manner of spirit they were of.”

Mr. Sutherland was among the foremost, most earnest and strenuous among the opponents of the bill. I have said elsewhere that if Mark Sutherland were remarkable for one trait above all others it was for his severe sense of _justice_. It was this that had led, or rather driven him to his early sacrifices; it was this that had governed all his conduct and changed the whole current of his life. And it was this sense of justice stung to the quick that had roused the dormant faculties of his mind, and woke his spirit “all the stronger that it slept so long.” With all his strength of intellect and will, he wrought in the cause of national good faith and political righteousness, both at stake in the issue of the pending act. Other men, abler men, older men, veterans in the political arena, toiled with equal zeal and greater power, and long and faithfully was the contest kept up. All that man could do to prevent that breach of political faith was done; but, alas! the powers of evil carried the day: the bill was passed, the sacred treaty repealed, and the cause of justice lost at least for the time.

At the close of this the second session of his services, Mr. Sutherland returned once more to his home and to his constituents, who received him with cordiality; he had done what was possible for the cause of right. Thus six years passed in the distracting life of a politician, six years since his Rosalie went to heaven, and still Mark Sutherland was a lonely man. He now entered society freely, both in Washington City, during the session of Congress, and at the various watering-places, or at home in his own adopted State. But neither the rustic beauty of the country maidens in his own neighbourhood, nor the refined grace of the city belles that yearly congregate at the capital, had been able to attract his heart from its fidelity to the memory of his sainted Rosalie. And at the end of six years’ widowhood, though still in the early prime of life, eminently handsome and graceful, and as distinguished for elegance and accomplishments in the drawing-room as for talent and eloquence in the Senate chamber; though honoured by the country and courted by society; though constantly thrown among the young, the beautiful, the gay and the fascinating; though admired by women as well as distinguished by men—Mark Sutherland was still alone—still faithful to an earthly memory that had also become a heavenly hope, and his angel wife, Rosalie, had no mortal rival.