Chapter XXIX: Everybody’s Chapter (1)

The family had come to Boston, and were settled in their old home. The change had not been effected without emotion, and, to the surprise of all, the one most moved was Mr. Yorke. Whether, with that noble self-control in which men so much excel women, he had carefully concealed the real misery of his life in Seaton, or whether the return to their former home reminded him that it had been lost by his act, we will not attempt to say, for he did not. He was silent and very pale, and, as he entered the house, stood on the threshold a moment, with an expression in his face which touched the hearts of all. One might read in his look the consciousness that a great change had passed over him since last he stood there, and that the return did not bring him the happiness he had anticipated.

Perhaps nothing in life is more sad than to have a boon long sought for at length accorded to us, and to find that we have lost the power to take delight in its possession.

The furniture and baggage had been sent in advance, and Hester and Edith had superintended the arrangement of everything, so that all was ready for them. Their last week in Seaton had been spent with Major Cleaveland, at his house there. He had kept it open for that purpose, and remained to assist and accompany them, while his wife and children had preceded him to the city.

Hester went to meet her family at the depot, and Edith stood in the door when they drove up, and ran joyfully out to embrace them. The house was bright, and dinner was ready. To Mrs. Yorke, there was but one blot on the occasion, and that was her son’s absence. But he had written her with such affection and cheerfulness that she did not grieve too much. Besides, she expected him soon to return.

Dinner over, Hester and her husband went to their own home, and the family sat once more together in their old, familiar sitting-room. The situation was one to provoke emotion or thoughtfulness. Clara set herself to cheer the company, and put sentiment into the background.

“The first trouble in changing one’s residence,” she said, “is to make people remember one’s address. Fortunately, our number, 96, is peculiar. It is the only created thing I know, except the planets, which is not changed nor disconcerted by being turned upside down. Turn it as you will, stand on your head and look at it, tear the house down, still the number 96 smiles on you unchanged, and as changeless as a star. It is a very proper number to have on a house.”

They all sat and looked at her, smiling slightly, glad to be amused.

“The next thing is,” she pursued, “to prevent our friends going to extremes in making their new estimate of us. They must be made to comprehend that, though we have positively renounced the German, we are not Puritans nor ascetics; and that, though we have written, do write, and mean to write in future, and to put ourselves in print whenever we feel so disposed, we do not set up as geniuses. Papa,” she said, suddenly interrupting herself, “why is not the plural of genius genii? I always want to say genii.”

“They mean about the same thing,” Mr. Yorke remarked; and there was silence again for a while.

The night was calm, the street quiet, but there was that unmistakable feeling that a great press of human life is near. It was not the presence which one feels in the woods, where nature is obedient to its Maker, and the soul is lifted by the constantly ascending homage that surrounds it, but a lateral influence, electrical and exciting, of contending human wills.

Clara was again the one to break silence. “Trees, and toads, and mosses, and no market, are all very charming for a change,” she said. “But if one does not live in the city, the city should be near. A man or a woman without society is no better than a vegetable. You remember, papa, how Bolingbroke took root among his trees. And what delights one has in the city! There is music. O the violins!--the soprano witch among instruments! If Pan invented the pipe, the original of the organ, then Æolus invented this instrument of airy octaves. Those old painters were right who put violins into the hands of their musical angels. Give a violin time enough, and the music of it will gradually eat up the whole body, or etherealize it, till some day the musician, touching carefully his precious film of a Cremona, will find it melt in his hands, and disappear in a harmonious sigh. Ladies and gentlemen, I should like to hear this moment a whirlwind of violins, ten thousand, say, blowing through a vast hall with clustered pillars, and dusky nooks and reaches, and arches everywhere, and a sultry, fragrant dimness through it all, and an immense crowd holding their breaths to listen, and, away up in the roof, little birds perched, as they are in Notre Dame, at Paris, and trembling with fear and wonder through all their downy feathers. And when it was over, people would look at each other, and some would smile, and some laugh out with delight; and the birds would venture two or three little silvery peeps, then flutter about as though nothing had happened. Yes, the city is the place to live in.”

“And then,” said Edith, “one can always go to church.”

Clara immediately gave her cousin an enthusiastic embrace. “Oh! you darling little bigoted Papist!” she exclaimed.

Melicent, sitting in the chimney-corner, was engrossed in her own thoughts. She was, perhaps, meditating on that romance of which Clara had written to Edith. A villainously ugly, but tenderly-beloved Scotch terrier lay on the hearth-rug, his eyes fixed on the fire, and seemed to muse. Mrs. Yorke bent toward him, touched him lightly, and quoted Champfleuri, _apropos_ of cats: “‘_A quoi pense l’animal qui pense?_’” and added a definition she had heard somewhere: “‘The brute creation is a syllogism, of which the conclusion is in the mind of God.’”

This brought them to the point to which their thoughts naturally tended that evening. God, and the meanings of God, claimed their attention.

“We are all tired,” Melicent said. “Shall we have prayers now, papa?”

The Bible was brought, Betsey sent for, and they waited in silence for Mr. Yorke to begin the reading. He sat with his hand on the open page, and looked into the fire a moment, then looked at his wife.

“Amy, I would like, for to-night, to have all my family worship together,” he said. “After to-night, we can go our different ways. Let Patrick and Mary and Anne be called in, and, since they cannot unite with us, let us unite with them. Are you willing?”

Mrs. Yorke blushed with surprise, but made no objection. Melicent drew herself up, but no one observed her. Mr. Yorke turned smilingly to his niece. “Well, Edith, if you Catholics will listen to a chapter from me, I will listen to your prayers, and join in them as far as I can.”

She did not say anything as she rose to call the servants, but, in passing her uncle, she laid a loving hand on his shoulder, and looked her gratitude and delight.

Patrick and the girls had too much confidence in Edith to hesitate, though they wondered much at her summons. Seated in the midst of the circle, they listened while Mr. Yorke read a psalm, then they knelt down. There was a moment’s pause. The Yorkes were accustomed to sit while their prayers were read. Then Mr. Yorke knelt, and wife and daughters followed his example, Melicent involuntarily, and making a motion to get up again as soon as she was down, but concluding to stay. Episcopalians kneel, she reflected, and she could mentally kneel with them. Edith led the prayers, and her tremulous voice conciliated the good-will of the listeners.

It was the first time any of this family had ever assisted at a private Catholic devotion, and they were astonished to perceive how every circumstance and need of man was met by this perfect spiritual science. The devotion was not something apart from life, but an aspiration and petition from every thought and act of life. The invocation to the Holy Spirit, the recommendation to place themselves in the presence of God, the pause for the examination of conscience, the act of contrition following it, the preparation for death--a Catholic knows them all, but to a Protestant their effect is startling.

Never again would their own devotions seem to this family other than dry and unsatisfying; never would one of them again be in trouble or danger, but the impulse would be to utter the voice of Catholic prayer.

In taking up their old life again, the Yorkes were surprised to find that they had grown more earnest and simple during the years they had spent in retirement. Mrs. Yorke had lost much of her love for fashion and luxury, the daughters were astonished at the frivolity of some of their former pleasures, and Mr. Yorke cared less for heathen literature, and felt more interest in the poor and ignorant.

Edith was happy in her religion; but, though she went to Mass every day when she could, had a mind too enlightened and well balanced to find her religion only in going to church. She was not in the least a gushing young lady: hers was a deep and silent enthusiasm which moved to action rather than speech. The persecution of Catholics was going on in Massachusetts also, and Governor Gardner and his motley legislature were making juries the judges of the law as well as of the facts, and disbanding Irish regiments (which were allowed to reorganize for 1862), and making a law which would enable them to send a troop of men to search the dormitories and closets and cellars of convent schools. But all this troubled Edith very little. She could laugh at the _Transcript’s_ parody:

“Half a league, half a league out of the city,
All to the boarding-school rode the committee:”

and could see how the enemies of the church were covering themselves with ridicule and disgrace, and securing their own ultimate defeat.

“They’re hanging themselves! They’re hanging themselves!” Mr. Yorke would say with glee, at each new extravagance.

When the Yorkes first returned to the city, Melicent’s affairs chiefly occupied their minds. There was no engagement, and there had been no private intercourse between her and Mr. Griffeth; but she had not broken with him entirely, and had requested permission to receive friendly letters from him. After Mr. Griffeth had been bound over to commit no act and write no word aggressively sentimental, this permission was unwillingly given. One of these friendly missives had come the week after her arrival; and, though the writer had kept the letter of his promise, he had so broken the spirit of it that Mrs. Yorke, to whom the letter was dutifully shown, frowned on reading it, and had a mind to answer it herself. Melicent, indeed, seemed desirous to alarm her family as much as possible regarding this affair, and carried herself with such a conscious, heroine-of-a-novel air as both amused and annoyed her family.

Among their earliest visitors was the Rev. Doctor Stewart, Mrs. Yorke’s former pastor and good friend. The mother confided to him her distress, and besought him to speak to Melicent on the subject.

“She always had a high respect for you and Mrs. Stewart, and would be influenced by what you say,” she concluded.

The minister made inquiries concerning this suitor’s orthodoxy as a Universalist.

“He is orthodox in nothing, doctor!” Mrs. Yorke exclaimed. “He wears his creed as he wears his clothes, changing, when convenient, the one with as little scruple as the other. He is a moral Sybarite, who adjusts his conscience comfortably to his wishes, and looks about with an air of calm rectitude, and an assumption of pitying superiority over people who are so bigoted as to believe the same yesterday and to-day.”

“I know the kind of man,” the minister said, with an expression of severity and mortification. “They are one of the pests of the time, and a disgrace to the ministry. I will do all I can to separate Melicent from him.”

Doctor Stewart was a stately gentleman, something over fifty years of age, gray-haired, rather heavy, and slightly old-fashioned. He was amiable in disposition, believed that great respect should be paid to the clergy, wore a white neck-cloth, and was fairly educated in everything but theology. Since the Yorkes left Boston, he had lost his wife, an excellent lady several years older than himself. He was left with three children, a son of nineteen, who was a student in Harvard College; another son, ten years older, who was making his fortune in the West; and a daughter, the eldest of the family, married to a foreign missionary, and industriously distributing Bibles to the Chinese. Once a month, in the missionary-meeting, the reverend doctor read a letter from this daughter, in which she described the great work she was doing, and asked for more Bibles and money.

This was the gentleman to whose management Mrs. Yorke entrusted her eldest daughter’s love-affair.

Nothing of their first interview transpired, except that the minister seemed to be hopeful. Melicent became more inscrutable and consequential than ever.

About this time, Miss Clara Yorke began to grow exceedingly merry in her disposition. She would smile in season and out of season, and burst into laughter without apparent cause. At the mention of Doctor Stewart’s name, her eyes always began to dance, and at the sight of him approaching their house her gravity deserted her immediately. Mrs. Yorke was both astonished and puzzled by her daughter’s levity.

“I esteem Doctor Stewart very highly,” the lady said. “He is a dignified and agreeable person. I am glad he feels like running in here often. He must be lonely at home, for Charles is away during the day, and studies all the evening. Poor man! The loss of his wife was a terrible blow to him, but he bears it beautifully.”

The laughter with which Miss Clara was tremblingly full had to be restrained; for at that moment the door opened to give admittance to a smiling elderly gentleman in a white neckcloth. But, glancing at Melicent’s demure countenance a minute after, the young woman’s mirth became audible.

“Clara, you should, at least, give us the opportunity of sharing your amusement,” her mother said, rather chidingly.

Clara stammered out that there was a very witty article in the last _Atlantic_.

“By the way,” the minister said to her pleasantly, “I must compliment you on a very touching story of yours I have read lately. It is ‘Silent Rooms.’ I confess to you, Miss Clara, that I wept over it.”

How exquisite must be the sensibility of that person who weeps over one’s pathetic stories! Clara looked at the reverend doctor with a new interest. He certainly had a most beautiful nose, she observed, and his expression was benign. Moreover, he was a gentleman of good mind.

“I am delighted by what you tell me, doctor,” she said. “For, while such emotion is the highest compliment I could receive, it does not hurt you. Indeed, I thought that sketch would be affecting. I shed tears myself when I was writing it, and I think that a pretty good cry-tear-ion to judge by. Beg pardon, papa! I didn’t mean to. It punned itself.”

The minister then asked her to write a play and a hymn for the Christmas festival of his Sunday-school.

“I should be delighted to, doctor,” she said, but clouded over a little. “I am not much in the way of that sort of composition, but I will try.”

“Then you will succeed.” A bow and a smile accompanied the assertion.

“Do not be too sure of that,” Clara exclaimed with vivacity. “I can write easily enough what is in my own mind, but not what is in other minds; and I haven’t an idea on this subject. I am not a facile writer when I have nothing to say. When I have no thoughts, I find it hard to express them.”

“Oh! dash off some little thing,” said the doctor, with a sweep of the hand, as though he were sowing plays and poems broadcast.

“Dash off some little thing!” repeated the young lady scornfully, when their visitor had left them. “‘_Dash off!_’ That is all he knows. I don’t believe he cried over my story!”

“My daughter!” expostulated Mrs. Yorke; but her husband laughed. Melicent cast an indignant glance on her sister, and went out of the room. At that, Clara’s hilarity returned.

Carl wrote to his mother often, giving her an account of his movements. He stayed nowhere long, and every letter concluded with an announcement of his intention to make a flying visit to some other place. The descriptions he gave and the adventures he related were not those of an ordinary sight-seer. “I should think that the boy were gathering material for a history of the nineteenth century,” his mother said, and was evidently very proud of him.

But after a while she recollected he had not said that any one of these flying visits would be his last, and had never answered plainly her questions as to the time of his return. One day she suspected the truth. She had just received a letter from Carl, dated at Nice, in which he hinted at a projected trip to Asia Minor. After reading the letter through, she dropped it into her lap, and sat looking out through the window and off into distance.

No one else but Edith was in the room, and she had been attentively watching her aunt’s face. Seeing that strange look settle on it, she crossed the room, and seated herself close to Mrs. Yorke’s side.

“Edith,” her aunt said, her eyes still gazing far away, “I think Carl means to be gone a long while.”

Edith called up her powers of self-control; for the time of explanation had come.

“He has already been away a long while,” she said. “It is six months since he went. That is six months taken from the whole.”

Mrs. Yorke’s eyes turned on her niece with a quick searching. “You know all about it!” she exclaimed, and began to breathe quickly.

“Yes, I know all about it,” was the calm reply; “and I was to tell you as soon as it should seem best. Carl is making a long journey, but six months of it are over.”

Mrs. Yorke flung Edith’s hand away. “You knew it, and his own mother did not!” she exclaimed. “You need not tell me. If Carl deceived his mother, I wish to hear no more about it.”

She pressed her hands to her heart, which beat with thick, suffocating throbs.

Nothing but firmness would do. It was necessary to recall her to a sense of the injustice she was doing, and shame her into controlling herself, if no better could be done.

“Aunt Amy,” Edith said, “it seems to me that you should question yourself, rather than reproach others. Never was a woman more tenderly loved and cared for by her family than you are. Your husband, your children, your niece, your servants even, are constantly on the watch lest something should startle or agitate you. A door must not be slammed, the horses must not be driven too fast, ill news must be gently broken, you must not be fatigued nor worried. If we shed tears, we conceal them from you; if one of us is ill, we make light of it to you. We wish to do this, and do it with all our hearts, for your life is most precious to us. But I think that our devotion entails one duty on you, and that is to look on everything as calmly and reasonably as you can, and not agitate yourself without cause.”

Mrs. Yorke looked at her niece in astonishment. This tone of firm reproof was new to her, and, from its strangeness, effective.

“Carl did not deceive you,” Edith went on. “He has told you nothing but the truth.”

“A half-truth is a lie!” Mrs. Yorke interrupted. “I see plainly in this the influence of that pernicious Mr. Griffeth. I well remember one of his sayings: ‘As the doctors give poisons to a sick body,’ he said, ‘so we must sometimes give lies to a sick mind.’ I have a sick mind, it seems.”

“It is for you to prove whether you have or not,” Edith replied quietly.

The reproof was severe, and Mrs. Yorke’s heightened color told that she felt it. She leaned back in her chair, and was silent.

“Carl told me,” Edith said, “because I am healthy, and cannot be endangered by sorrow; and he knew, too, that I would not require any man to sacrifice his duty and prospect of a high career merely that I might have the pleasure of being always with him. When a man is twenty-nine years old, if he is not going to throw himself away, and be a miserable failure, it is time for him to go out into the world, and live his own life. Carl would gladly have told you all his plans, and it was cruel that he should be obliged to go away without your blessing, and to carry with him, as he must, this constant anxiety about you. He was doubtful and unhappy, but did what he thought was best. He told no one but me. Now, be fair, Aunt Amy, and ask yourself what you would have done if Carl had come to you and said that he was going away on a two-years’ journey?”

Mrs. Yorke put her hands over her face, and sat breathing heavily, and without uttering a word. Edith trembled. Would she see the pale hands fall nerveless, and her aunt drop dead in her arms? She sent up a silent prayer to her ever dear Mother of Perpetual Succor, then gently loosened a golden locket from Mrs. Yorke’s belt, and opened it.

“Dear Carl!” she said tenderly, kissing the miniature, “how could your mother misunderstand you so, when your true and loving face was so close to her heart? Is it only Edith who never mistakes you?”

The frail hands slipped down to hers, as she leaned on her aunt’s lap, and she looked up to meet a faint and tearful smile.

“You are all so tender, my dear, that I am afraid it makes me selfish,” Mrs. Yorke said. “Now tell me the whole story. See! I am reasonable.”

“You are an angel to let me talk so, and not be angry!” Edith answered joyfully. “Wait till I get you a granule of digitaline; then I will tell you all about Carl. You will be proud of your son, my lady.”

A few days after, Doctor Stewart proposed for Melicent, greatly to her mother’s astonishment. “Why, doctor, I am proud to consent, if Melicent does,” she said. “But I never dreamed of such a thing!”

“Melicent assures me that, with her parents’ consent, she is willing to entrust her happiness in my hands,” the minister said. “She does not find my age any obstacle. You must be aware, indeed, that your eldest daughter’s disposition is grave and dignified. My impression is, that the only attraction Mr. Griffeth had for her was through his clerical office. She has confided to me that she wrote him a decided dismissal the very day after my first conversation with her.”

Of course, if Melicent was satisfied, no one else could object; and Melicent radiated satisfaction.

“I am sure you have chosen wisely, my daughter,” her mother said.

“I never really thought I should marry Mr. Griffeth, mamma,” the daughter answered, blushing. “And I never said any more to him than that I would consider his offer.”

That very evening the engagement was tacitly announced to the public, by Mrs. Yorke and Melicent appearing at a lecture at Music Hall, escorted by Doctor Stewart. Mr. Yorke, Clara, and Edith went early, and took seats in the side balcony, overlooking the platform, where the rest of their party had places reserved.

“It will just suit Mel,” Clara said gleefully. “I saw it from the first minute, and have been laughing over it all winter, while you stupid folks never had a suspicion. Mel was cut out for just such a fate. She likes to be lofty and sphynx-like, and to sit on platforms with everybody staring at her, and to come sweeping in at the last minute, and take the highest place. The doctor, too, is just to her mind. He is tall, and large, and slow. His voice is sonorous, he has a nice nose and finger-nails, and his neckcloth compels respect. Oh! there is no fear but Mel will be happy. The only danger is on our side. For I tell you, papa, those two will walk over us in their smooth, grand way, if we are not careful. I must study how to take them down a peg.”

There was a smile in the corners of Mr. Yorke’s mouth, but he spoke reprovingly. “It doesn’t sound well for you to talk in that way of your sister, Clara,” he said.

Clara gave a little impatient sigh. “I sometimes wish that I could not see so plainly the difference between solid people and inflated people,” she said. “It is a misfortune; but I cannot help it.”

Mr. Yorke said nothing. He had already learned that there was one point on which he would have to resist encroachment. More than once he had seen Doctor Stewart turn a severe glance on the shelf where stood the numbers of _Brownson’s Review_ left by Carl; and only that day Melicent had proposed that the books should be carried up-stairs.

“Up-stairs!” Mr. Yorke had repeated. “What for?”

“Why, on account of the doctor,” Melicent had answered, disconcerted by the sharpness of her father’s astonishment. “He does not like them, and their being here might lead to unpleasant controversy.”

The reply had been decisive:

“If Doctor Stewart does not like what he finds in my house, he is at liberty to remain out of it. And if he should forget himself so far as to begin any unpleasant controversy, I shall recommend him to increase his stock of theological knowledge by a careful study of the same _Review_.”

Mr. Yorke said nothing of this conversation, and Melicent had not mentioned it; but it was a warning to both.

“Papa,” Clara said, after looking down on the audience awhile, “did you ever observe how bald heads light up an assembly like this? They reflect the gas, and have a very cheerful effect. Oh! there is Mel. Attention! See, the conquering hero comes. My poor little mother is nearly invisible. Such a small duenna! How frightfully conspicuous! See the doctor smile, and show them to the very front chairs, and see the filial manner in which he behaves to Mrs. Yorke. Suppose he should take to coloring his hair! There! they are seated at last, after that display, and I must own that Mel’s stage-manners are very good. If only they would not look so conscious! Edith, why is Doctor Stewart like a verd-antique? It’s a conundrum.”

That night, after Melicent had gone to her room, the others sat talking over the wedding. Doctor Stewart had desired that it might be soon. Edith proposed to give the trousseau.

“We cannot allow you, my dear,” her aunt said. “Your uncle and I have something, and Melicent must take what we can give her. You are too bountiful already!”

Edith drew writing materials toward her, and began to make out a bill.

MISS EDITH YORKE,
_To_ Charles Yorke and family, _Dr._
To seven years’ board and tuition, $7,000
“ “ “ clothing, 1,400
“ Instruction in her religion, 20,000,000
“ Kindness to Father Rasle, 10,000,000
“ Never being anything but kind to her, 10,000,000
“ Sundries, 10,000,000
“ Joining her once in Catholic prayer, 100,000,000,000,000,000
-------------------------
$100,000,000,050,008,400

“I think that is correct,” she said, showing the bill to her uncle. “I am mathematical in my tastes, you know. I do not like the dollars, though, the association is so vulgar. We will put it in some classical gold coin. It shall be rose-nobles.”

Looking in Mr. Yorke’s face as he smiled on her, she exclaimed, “Uncle, you have a look of my father, now!”

“And you have a look of my brother,” he returned. “Your eyes are changeful, like his, and your hair has a sunny hue. When you coax, too, your ways are like his. Robert was very winning.”

She put her arm in his, and looked reproachfully across the table to her aunt. “And yet,” she said, “you are not willing that I should give Melicent a few pocket-handkerchiefs to be married with!”

Mrs. Yorke laughed. “You shall give her as many handkerchiefs as you please,” she said.

* * * * *

But what, meantime, of Dick Rowan?

Mrs. Yorke had called at once to see him on her arrival, but he had already gone to make a retreat, and they did not see him afterward.

The first part of that retreat was to him heavenly; but, when it came to making definite plans for the future, then he found himself in cruel doubt.

“Oh! if I could have had a Catholic training in early life!” he said to Father John. “It seems to me now that heaven has been within my reach, and has slipped away, without my knowing it. I do not wish to be presuming. I do not try to think of it; the thought haunts me.”

“Tell me freely all that is in your mind,” the priest said. “I am here to help you.”

Dick Rowan’s head drooped, and he spoke rapidly, as if afraid to speak: “It seems to me, father, that if I had been brought up a strict Catholic--any sort of Catholic--I should have been--” He lifted his face, looked at Father John with eyes that could not bear suspense, and added, “I should have been a priest!”

Then, since he found neither astonishment nor displeasure in that face, his distress broke forth. “And now, O God! it is too late!” he said, and wrung his hands.

“You think that you had a vocation, my son?” the priest asked calmly.

“I believe it!” he answered. “What has my whole life been but a searching and striving after some great and glorious happiness, something different from the common happiness of earth, some one delight which was to be mine here, and still more mine in the world to come? It was always my way to have but one wish, and to expect from its fulfilment what nothing on earth can give. I believe, sir, that when a man has that way of concentrating all his hopes and desires on one object, that object should be God. Otherwise, there is nothing but ruin for him. Such an end was once possible to me, and now it is lost!”

Father John laid his hand on the young man’s. “My son,” he said, “it is not lost!”

Dick uttered not a word, but gazed steadily into the priest’s face.

“I believe that you have a divine vocation.”

“You believe that I _had_!” Dick cried out sharply.

“I believe that you _have_!” the priest replied.

Dick drew a deep breath, and his pale face blushed all over with a sudden delight; but said nothing.

“When a man first thinks of choosing God,” the priest said, “he may mistake. But when God chooses a man, and tears away from him every other tie, and sets him in a place where he can see nothing surrounding him but a great solitude filled with God, then there is no mistake. I believe that God chooses you.”

“God chooses me!” repeated Dick Rowan, blenching a little, like one dazzled by a great light. “God chooses me!” he said again, and stood up, as if his swelling heart had lifted him. “Then I choose him!” He put his hands over his lifted face, and tears of joy dropped down. Father John, deeply affected, spoke to him, but he did not hear. He was repeating the words of the marriage-service: “‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us’--_unite_!”

The priest spoke afterward to Edith on the subject. Dick had requested him to tell her and his mother whatever they wished to know.

“Never was there a soul more ardent and single,” Father John said. “His only difficulty arose from a tender regard for the honor of God, and a great reverence for the sacred office. He fancied that it would be an insult to both for a man to seek to enter the priesthood of whom people could say that he did so because he was disappointed in love, and that he gave to God the remnant of a heart which a woman had rejected.”

“Dick rejected me,” Edith interposed hastily.

“I told him,” the priest resumed, “that if God had called him, he had no right to think of any coarse and uncharitable remarks which might be made. I reminded him that his life-long devotion to you had been a life without faith, and that, after one year in the church, he had given you up willingly. His idea of the true priest was this: one for whose sacred vocation his pious parents had prayed and hoped from the hour of his birth, who had lived from his childhood cloistered in retirement and sanctity, who had never cherished worldly hopes or desires, but, walking apart, had thus approached the altar that had never ceased to shine before him from the hour of his baptism. I owned to him that such a vocation is beautiful, and is often seen by men and angels; but told him that there are others whom the Almighty leads differently. He hides from such souls that he has sealed them also from the beginning, he allows them to drag in the mire of earth, to feel its temptations, to share in its weaknesses. We cannot penetrate the designs of God, but we may well believe that his motive is to humble that soul, and to teach it through its own failings a greater pity and tenderness for the weak and the erring. I warned him that this fear of his might be a temptation of the devil, who saw that his pride was not broken, and who pursuaded him that he was jealous for the honor of God, when in reality he thought but of his own. He was happy at that. ‘If it is nothing but my own pride,’ he said, ‘I have no more trouble.’

“And he has no more trouble, my child,” the priest concluded. “He is the happiest man I ever saw!”

SUPER OMNES SPECIOSA.

Is any face that I have seen--
Some perfect type of girlhood’s face:
Some nun’s, soul-radiant, full of grace--
Like thine, my beautiful, my Queen?

Of all the eyes have paused on mine--
And these have met some wondrous eyes;
So large and deep, so chaste and wise--
Have any faintly imaged thine?

The chisel with the brush has vied,
Till each seems victor in its turn:
And love is ever quick to learn,
Nor throws the proffered page aside:

Yet few the glimpses it has caught,
For thou transcendest all that art
Can show thee--even to the heart
Most skilled to read the poet’s thought.

That thought can pierce its native sky
Beyond the artist’s starry guess:
But all that it may dare express,
Is through the worship of a sigh.

And this thou art, a sigh of love--
Love that created as it sighed;
And shaped thee forth a peerless bride
Dowered for the spousals of the Dove.

To set the music of thy face
To earthly measure, were to give
Th’ informing soul, and make it _live_
As there--God’s uttermost of grace.

THE MOTHER OF LAMARTINE.[54]

M. de Lamartine tells us in his _Confidences_ that, as the sages pause for reflection between life and death, so his mother was in the habit of devoting an interval at the close of the day in looking back on its vanished hours, and seizing its impressions before night should have dispersed them for ever.

When all the household had retired to rest, and no sound was to be heard but the breathing of her children in their little beds around her, or the howling of the wind against the casement and the bark of the dog in the court, she would softly open the door of a little closet of books, and seat herself before an inlaid cabinet of rose-wood to record the events of the day, pour out her anxieties and sorrows, her joy and gratitude, or utter a prayer all warm from her heart. Her son says: “She never wrote for the sake of writing, still less to be admired, though she wrote much for her own satisfaction, that she might have, in this register of her conscience and the domestic occurrences of her life, a moral mirror in which she could often look and compare herself with what she had been in other days, and thus constantly amend her life. This custom of recording what was passing in her soul--a habit she retained to the end--produced fifteen or twenty little volumes of intimate communings with herself and God, which I have the happiness to preserve, and where I find her once more, living and full of affection, when I feel the need of taking refuge in her bosom.”

Of course, such a journal was not intended for the public eye, and her son is so conscious of this that, even while editing this volume of extracts from his mother’s manuscripts, he says it has no interest but for those who are allied to her by blood or sympathy of soul, and prays all others to abstain from reading it. M. de Lamartine’s financial difficulties obliging him to make capital, not only out of the private emotions and experiences of his own heart, but even of his family archives, the publication of this volume was announced previous to his death, but was deferred at his earnest request.

The interest in everything connected with so eminent a poet, the charming pictures he has drawn of his mother in his _Confidences_, and the influence she had in moulding his character, made us look forward with interest to this work, that we might have a clearer insight into the soul to which he owed his poetical and imaginative nature. It is always refreshing and useful whenever one ventures to lift the veil of a pure soul and allows us to read its passing emotions. But such a soul should not be exposed to the eye of curiosity, but only to that of sympathy. To scan such a book--the outpourings of a mother’s heart, written solely for her own satisfaction and her children’s--with the cool eye of a critic, would be as profane as to jeer over the grave of one whose remains have just been exhumed.

But let every tender, religious heart--especially every maternal heart--that loves the sweet odor of flowers that still give out their fragrance when drawn forth from some old drawer in which they have long lain, reverently open this volume, sacred to all the outpourings of a mother’s tenderness. In her transparent nature they can read the unusual strength of the domestic affections, but a heart large enough to take in the poor and the sufferer of every grade, a charity that constantly found excuses for the asperities of others, and a piety that breathed all through her sweet life and crowned her death.

This book is a new proof of the tender piety and sincere faith among the old noblesse of France. Madame de Lamartine is worthy of being classed with the family of the Duke d’Ayen, the La Ferronnays, and the De Guérins. The simple grace of her style, the religious element so strongly infused into her daily life, the development of her emotional nature, and the intensity of her love for her family, all remind us of Eugénie de Guérin. And like her, she had one of those sweet, pensive natures that need the retirement of country life or the shade of the cloister for full development. They were similarly demonstrative in their affections and in their piety. And where one loves and follows with anxious prayer a gifted brother, the other, with the devotedness of St. Monica, weeps and prays for her son.

M. de Lamartine, after passing one gloomy All Souls’ day in recollection near his mother’s grave at St. Point, ended it by taking out the eighteen _livrets_ in which all her thoughts and feelings had been buried for so many years, and, while the church-bell was mournfully tolling above her grave as if to reproach the living for their silence and admonish them to pray for their dead, he opened these books one after the other, and read, sadly smiling, but oftener weeping the while. It is with some such a feeling the reader will follow him. The drama of the heart is always touching, the genuine tear, even in the eye veiled in domestic obscurity, always appealing, and in this page of life’s drama there is many a one dropped. But the eyes from which they fell are always turned heavenward, and such tears have always a gleam of heaven in them, without which the sorrows of life would be unendurable.

* * * * *

Madame de Lamartine was the daughter of M. des Roys, intendant-general of finances to the Duke of Orleans. Madame des Roys was the under-governess of the children of that prince, and so great a favorite of the duchess that she was employed as the confidential agent of the latter during her exile, as we learn from this volume. After the execution of Philippe Egalité and the dispersion of his family, the duchess took refuge in Spain. Her daughter, afterwards known as Madame Adelaide, who displayed so much character and exerted so great a political influence during the reign of her brother Louis Philippe, was in a German or Swiss convent. The duchess, suspicious of Madame de Genlis’ influence over her daughter, and perhaps fearful she might be made a tool of the Orleans faction, with whose aims she did not sympathize, commissioned her devoted follower, Madame des Roys, to bring her daughter to Spain. Madame des Roys succeeded in her mission. She embarked at Leghorn about the beginning of January, 1802, and arrived safely at Barcelona with her charge. Madame de Lamartine, who had all this from her mother’s lips, says the meeting of the duchess and Mademoiselle d’Orleans was extremely affecting. Madame des Roys subsequently returned to France, and died on her estates in June, 1804, worn out with fatigue, and troubles resulting from the revolution. She gave her daughter a portrait of Mademoiselle d’Orleans--a present from the duchess, and Madame de Lamartine always showed herself loyal to that family. When the poet wrote his _Chant du Sacre_ without mentioning the Duke of Orleans among the other members of the royal family, she entreated him with tears to be mindful of what she owed the family. Lamartine yielded, but with so ill a grace that his allusion displeased the duke. Madame de Lamartine, fearful of being thought ungrateful to the family, wrote Mademoiselle d’Orleans a full explanation of the affair.

But to go back to the time when Madame des Roys was still governess in the Duke of Orleans’ family. She and her husband had apartments at that time in the Palais Royal in winter, and at St. Cloud in summer. It appears Madame des Roys and Madame de Genlis had some pitched battles in those days, or, as Madame de Lamartine afterward expresses it, _deux camps opposés_. Madame de Genlis kept up the grudge after the death of her former rival, and, years after, severely attacked M. de Lamartine’s poems by way of satisfaction.

Madame de Lamartine was born at the palace of St. Cloud, and passed her childhood there with Louis Philippe, sharing the lessons and sports of the Orleans children. All her earliest recollections were connected with St. Cloud, its fountains, and broad alleys, and velvet lawns, and lovely park. Many years after (in 1813), she tells in her journal that, being at Paris, her son drove her to St. Cloud in a cabriolet, and she thus writes of her visit: “This is the place where I passed so much of my childhood when my mother was bringing up the Duke of Orleans’ children. I was very happy there. I left when fifteen years old, and had not seen the place since, though I longed to, for I retained a delightful remembrance of it. I walked all over the park with Alphonse and Eugénie, pointing out tree after tree where I played when a child. I wished to see our apartments once more, but it was impossible, as they are occupied by the Empress Maria Louisa.”

When fifteen years of age, Alix des Roys was nominated by the Duke of Orleans to a vacancy in the noble Chapter of Salles, where she was placed under the protection of the Countess Lamartine de Villars, a canoness of that chapter. The Chevalier de Lamartine, visiting his sister, fell in love with the beautiful Alix, who is said to have resembled Madame Récamier, and, instead of embracing that semi-monastic life, she ultimately married him, March 6, 1790.

We can imagine the contrast between her life in the _maisons de plaisance_ of one of the wealthiest princes in Europe, and that she afterward led in a plain country residence a hundred miles from Paris, and in limited circumstances. She afterward alludes in her journal to this change: “In my childhood I imagined it impossible to exist unless at court, in a palace like the Palais Royal, or the park at St. Cloud, where I lived with my mother. Now, O my God, I wish to be content in every place where thy will places me!”

But her new home was not without its attractions for a nature like hers. Leaving the banks of the Saône where it winds among the fertile hills of Mâcon, and going toward the old Abbey of Cluny, where Abélard breathed his last, the traveller, turning aside into a winding mountain-path, comes after an hour or two to a sharp spire of gray stone towering above a group of peasants’ houses. Beyond these, nestling in a hollow at the foot of a mountain, is Milly, familiar to every reader of Lamartine. Five broad steps lead to the door, which opens into a corridor full of presses of carved walnut containing the household linen. From it doors open into the various apartments, and access is had to the one story above. The mountain almost insensibly begins its ascent directly back of the house. Its slope is luxuriant with vines, on which depended mainly the subsistence of the family. A small garden is in the rear of the house, with its vegetables and flower-beds and clumps of trees, and its secluded “Alley of Meditation” where Madame de Lamartine walked at sunset, saying her rosary and giving herself up to holy recollections.

She seems to have taken Milly at once to her heart. She affectionately calls it her Jerusalem--her abode of peace. She often said to her son: “It is very small, but large enough if our wishes and habits are in proportion. Happiness is from within. We should not be more so by extending the limits of our meadows and vineyards. Happiness is not measured by the acre, like land, but by the resignation of the heart; for God wishes the poor to have as much as the rich, that neither may dream of seeking it elsewhere than from him!”

And again she says: “If people were convinced that, by submissively receiving all the difficulties of the position in which they are placed, they would be at peace everywhere; they would allow themselves to be sweetly guided without anxiety by circumstances and the persons to whom they owe deference. Since I decided on this, I have been infinitely more happy. There was a time when I wished everything to yield to me, and absolutely subordinate to my will. I was then incessantly tormented about the present and the future. I often saw afterward it would have been a misfortune to have had my own way. Now I abandon myself to the Infinite Sovereign Wisdom, I feel at peace exteriorly and interiorly! God be praised for ever! He alone is wise, and should overrule all!”

Poor woman, she had enough to try her flexible will. Her husband’s elder brother, who, according to the ancient _régime_, was regarded as the head and guide of the family, was not disposed to give up his rights. He was unmarried, and particularly fond of interfering in the domestic regulations of the family whose future prospects somewhat depended on him, particularly those of Alphonse, who was to perpetuate the name. Another brother, the Abbé de Lamartine, lived further off, and was, of course, less tempted to interfere, but seems to have given his voice on extraordinary occasions. And then there were two unmarried aunts whom Madame de Lamartine seems to have been attached to, and whom in her charity she calls saints, but very trying saints they were with their strictures on her dainty ways, her careful dress, and her indulgence to her children. To do them justice, however, they all seem to have been sincerely anxious for the prosperity of the family.

Madame de Lamartine brought up one son and five daughters, concerning whom she gives many interesting details in her journal. The daughters appear to have been lovely in person and character. Their brother has given a delightful description of them in his _Nouvelles Confidences_, which is confirmed by his mother’s journal.

But M. de Lamartine makes a very strange mistake in saying his mother derived her notions of educating her children from the works of Rousseau (particularly from _Emile_) and St. Pierre, whom he calls “the favorite philosophers of women because the philosophers of feeling,” and “whose works,” he says, “she had read and admired.”

Some of Madame de Lamartine’s earliest recollections were certainly of Gibbon, D’Alembert, Rousseau, and others of the same stamp who frequented the society of Madame des Roys. She even remembered seeing Voltaire when but seven years of age, and “his attitude, his costume, his cane, his gestures, and his words remained imprinted on my memory as the foot of some antediluvian monster on the rocks of our mountains.” But she certainly did not esteem these men or imbibe any of their opinions, and so far from having “_conservé une tendre admiration pour ce grand homme_,” Jean Jacques Rousseau, as her son declares, she regarded him with a certain horror, and his genius as allied to lunacy.

In the first place, Madame de Lamartine seems to have been very scrupulous about reading dangerous books. In her journal of the year 1801, she makes a resolution to deny herself all useless reading for her children’s sake, and declares frivolous books “one of the most dangerous pleasures in the world.”

Some years after, she visits her son’s chamber, during his absence, to examine his books. Among others she finds Rousseau’s _Emile_. She regrets it is “empoisoned with so many inconsistencies and extravagances calculated to mislead the good sense and faith of young men. I shall burn this book,” she adds, “and particularly the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, still more dangerous because it inflames the passions as much as it warps the mind. What a misfortune that so much talent should be allied to madness! I have no fears for myself, for my faith is beyond temptation and not to be shaken; but my son ----”

And when toward the close of her life she saw by her son’s poem _Childe Harold_ that he had imbibed the pernicious ideas of French philosophy, she says: “I knew these famous philosophers in my youth. Grant, O my God! he may not resemble them. I firmly represent to him the danger of such ideas, but, in the language of Scripture, the wind bloweth where it listeth. When a mother has brought a son into the world, and instilled her own faith into him, what can she do? Only put her feeble hand continually between the light of this faith and the breath of the world that would extinguish it! Ah! I am sometimes proud of my son, but I am well punished afterward by my apprehensions as to his independence of mind!

“As for me, to submit and believe seems the only true wisdom in life. They say it is less poetic, but I find as much poetry in submission as in rebellion. Are the faithful angels less poetical than those who rose up against God? I would rather my son had none of these vain talents of the world than to turn them against the dogmas that are my strength, my light, and my consolation!”