Kitabı oku: «Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864», sayfa 9

PART SECOND

It is that hour of day's decline when the turbulent roar from the city's busy mart is hushed into a lazy hum, when a peaceful, quiet calm breathes through the atmosphere and settles on the noisy earth, as if all things were hushed into tranquil silence at thought of the coming twilight's holy hour. The sun's red, slanting rays fall on the dusty pavement in front of that gloomy, stately mansion which Harry calls his home, enter a richly furnished room where the blinds are thrown open and the curtains looped back, and with their fervent glow rest compassionately upon a drooping female figure, upon a bent head bowed in shame, a head still young, whose wealth of rich black tresses passion and remorse have already marked with gray. Sin-stricken, woe-stricken, and remorseful, feeling how inefficient is even her mother's love, how powerless every earthly consideration to hold her back from ruin; stretching out palsied hands to Heaven for help; racked by the fierce fires of repentance, her tortured soul corroded by remorse, she mourns passionately but unavailingly.

Oh! there are hours like this in the hidden history of every fallen and degraded son of Adam, when the scales are removed from the spiritual eyes, and the sin-stained soul shiveringly beholds the depth to which it has fallen, and shrinks back appalled at the sight; when the demon has departed for a season, and evil thoughts and evil influences are cast out, and, feeling their power returning with repentance, angels come to minister unto the sorrowing one. Gentle guardians are there, who have watched it all its life through, striven with all the means that lie within the grasp of a spirit's power to stay it on its downward course and bring the lost soul back. Ah! 'Love's labor lost.' Ineffectual these oft-repeated efforts may be, ineffectual through all time they doubtless will be; but who shall say in the 'land of the undying' that the work of ministering love shall not continue? What man is that, that in an hour like this can look upon his brother, prostrate in spirit, racked with remorse, no matter how vile and polluted, and can say anguish like this shall be that soul's undying portion in the long hereafter; that God's justice requires infinite punishment for a finite crime; that, when freed from its earthly body, the ears of the All-Compassionate shut out that soul's despairing cry for pardon? Who shall limit infinite mercy? Who shall set bounds to Divine compassion, or think that, toiling painfully and slowly up the endless heights of progression, there shall not be a time away onward in the solemn future, hidden in the dim mists of ages yet to come, when that soul shall be cleansed from its pollution, freed from its mourning, sin entirely cast out, and God shall be all and in all?

The light breeze, as it sways the loose heavy tresses, wafts to her ear a strain of distant music. All the drowsy afternoon it has been playing, lost almost entirely at first in the busy hum of the streets and in the long lull of the lazy wind—a strain only caught at rare intervals when the breeze is strong enough to bear it to her. It has been slowly approaching as the hours creep on, advancing a few steps at a time. Ballads and simple ditties, dances, waltzes, grand old marches! with that unaccountable attraction for trifles which the mind often experiences in its hours of suffering, mechanically, one after another, she has traced them all. Now the varied tones cease to pervade the atmosphere, and there is a long resting pause. When the music begins again, it is on the pavement, almost beneath the window, and the old musician, perhaps unconsciously wrought upon by the silent influence of the hour, has merged from the gay to the pathetic, and plays only sad little pieces in the minor key. Presently from the multitude of sweet sounds there arises on the air a song lower and sadder than the others—a strange, pathetic melody, falling on the ear like a low, plaintive wail, broken by keen throbs of agony: her whole nature beats in responsive echo. O God! gone so far down the dreary road which has darkly led her from that time of purity and peace when that song was nightly sung to her; after so many weary years of sin and suffering, to hear those notes again! It is but a simple thing which has the power so to move her, a mere nothing; half dirge, half hymn, familiar to her long-forgotten childhood, once sung by her mother as a cradle song! With her wretched face buried in her hands, she hears it, and clearly the past rises before her: her childhood in its innocence; her girlhood in its purity; her womanhood, her motherhood in its degradation! All the holier part of what was once herself; all that was true and noble, womanly and pure, from the deep waters of oblivion to which that damning appetite has consigned them, rise to haunt her now, pale, wan, and spectre-like. Oh! to sit down, side by side with her former self; to see herself as she used to be before the tempter crept into the Eden of her heart; to look despairingly up to the height whence she had fallen, so wrecked in moral strength that she had not the power to retrace a single step! Peace departed, virtue lost, health undermined, affection squandered, ruthlessly murdering the peace of one whose life through all the time of its sad earth-sojourning is linked with hers; cursing the home she should have blessed and brightened, making of that fair garden, wherein sweet domestic graces should have bloomed and blossomed as the rose, but a desolate and barren waste, knowing that hearts, little hearts, that had drawn their life-beat from her own, had starved and sickened for the love which is their rightful food;—with senses bleared and deadened, she had heard them piteously wailing but for a morsel of that bread of life without which even the footsteps of the self-reliant, the strong and brave of heart, faint and falter by the way, and she had cruelly denied them that precious nutriment; she had given them life, but had robbed them of all that makes life endurable. Life's duties unfulfilled, life's high and holy aims trampled under the foot of sensual indulgence, living to blight instead of to bless! O woman, wife, and mother, thy life when lived aright a crucifixion of the flesh, a sublime self-sacrifice—not for thee the pleasures of sense and time, not for thee may peal earth's songs of triumph! Fainting oft beneath the burden of the cross, we trace thy way by bloody footprints, suffering as a saint;—falling from thy estate, how terrible will be thy retribution as a sinner!

Hark! There is the patter of little feet ascending the staircase, coming down the long upper hall. To the repentant mother's ears what music so sweet as that? She listens breathlessly. Was it thought of her that had impelled them thither? Would they approach her room? Since she had grown more and more repulsive day by day, since those fits of drunken passion had become a thing of fearful frequency, and those little ones had suffered from their violence, and learned to fear her, they had come but seldom—never alone; but they are approaching now, shyly, hesitatingly, as if afraid to come, but still approaching—pausing at the very threshold. The burning tears force their way through the clenched fingers—the sound of the little feet has given her power to pray. Though angels fail in the work of redemption, there may yet be power in the little hands to hold her back. She does not rise to open the door, but sits choking down her sobs, and listening to the turning, twisting, shaking of the door knob, to a dozen failures in unskilful attempts to enter, every movement of the little hand sending a strange thrill of mingled pain and pleasure through the overburdened heart.

It opens at last, and Harry stands upon the threshold, looking timidly in. Ah! no maudlin sorrow, no senseless, idiotic mirth, no disgusting stupor disfigures the face on which he gazes. Its depth of hopeless, despairing tenderness, so eloquently accompanied by the pathetic movement of the outstretched hands, almost frightens him by its intensity; but, in obedience to the motion, he comes forward, half-fearfully proffering the flower he holds in his hand.

'A flower sent to her by a lady who was so kind,' he tremblingly explains, 'one that he loves so dearly!'

It is the lily, the emblem of purity. She takes it from him, lays it on the table behind her, out of sight, a sullen glow of resentment at the gift mingling with the sorrow of her face as she does so. What mother had fathomed her shameful secret, and dared to send her child to her with a gift like that? Some one that is fast gaining the place she should have occupied in his heart! One that is fast winning away from her the love she so much needs to aid her in the desired reformation. She notes how the little face softens and brightens when he speaks of her, and a sharp pang of jealousy shoots through her heart. The fact that she has never sought to win that heart to herself by kindness, that she has forfeited her child's respect, and never deserved its love, only increases her resentment and adds poignancy to the pang. She feels the slight form start and shiver with a strange, fearful repulsion as she places it on her lap. Would the strong natural affection nature had implanted there, so cruelly crushed out, now nearly if not quite dead, arise anew to life, and grow stronger than this repulsion? That is the question to be answered now. Ah! if there were but a spark remaining, were it only a poor, feeble, smouldering flame, it would have the power, she felt, to light her to higher and better things. With a thrill of pure maternal love, a stranger to her heart, whose holiest impulses, deadened by reckless indulgence, have degenerated into instincts, she folds the little form closer to her, in spite of its shuddering, and, looking into the upturned face (O mother, miserably blind), reads understandingly for the first time the hunger of heart so legibly written on every speaking feature. With the sharp arrow of conviction that pierces her soul at the sight, comes a voice appealing to its inmost recesses, a voice speaking those words spoken by the great heart of Divine Compassion, eighteen hundred years ago; those words of tenderest pleading: 'Feed my lambs!' How had she fed those committed to her charge? The wan, thin, sorrowful face, the little heart finding no joy in life, grown weary before its time, best answer that question. Aided by her aroused spiritual perceptions, she reads now all too truthfully the sad, sad record of the heart-breaking loneliness of the life she has made desolate; and, pressing the wronged heart close against her own, the keen remorse of her soul bursts forth in a low moan of irrepressible anguish:

'Oh, my child! my little, little, little child!'

Studying the face bent over him as children learn to study the faces of those whom they have reason to fear, whose kindness is at best capricious, and finding nothing but sorrow and tenderness in it, he began to fear it less: thankful even for a brief season of kindness, the solitary child laid the pale cheek close against his mother's, and twined the thin arms about her neck. It was a strange and blissful sensation for that mother to feel them clinging there. In her softened mood it made the tears fall hot and fast, to think how strange it was.

'What made Harry think of coming to see ma to-day?' she said at last, brushing them hurriedly away.

'A lady gave me that flower, mamma, and told me to bring it to you.'

A pause and a closer pressure—then she questioned nervously:

'What lady is it, Harry? Where does she live? How came you to know her, darling?'

Harry hesitated. He noticed the dark shadow that swept across her face at every reference to his new-found friend, and, with a child's intuitive perception, he saw the subject gave her pain. Striving with ready tact to draw her attention from it to himself, he went back to the beginning, to give her a sort of history of how he came to form the acquaintance.

'Mamma,' he said timidly, twining his arms still closer around her neck, and speaking in a slow, hesitating way, as if he feared that this would give her pain also, 'our house, you know, is a very lonesome place. Oh, so very lonesome!—just like a day when the sun won't shine, and the rain comes dark and slow. Well, ma, it was always bad enough, but when Charley went away to school, and you stayed up here more than ever, and Betty got crosser than ever, you can't think how lonesome it was! Pa used to bring me playthings at first, but I felt so bad I couldn't play with them. I felt all the time as if I wanted something, and,' glancing piteously up into his mother's face, and laying his little hand upon his heart, 'as if I was so hungry here. Well, I used to climb up at the window and watch the people going by, and wonder and wonder what the matter was.' He waited as if half expecting an answer; but a stifled sob was the only reply. 'Looking out the window and seeing other people, I found out after a while that we were different from everybody else. Other mothers who had little boys like me, always took their little boys with them when they went to walk. All the sunshiny days they went walking up and down—walking up and down; and the mothers were not cross like Betty, and the little boys were not lonesome like me, but had such red, chubby cheeks, and looked happy 'most all the time. The first day I found this out, when Betty took me away from the window, and stood me up before the glass to comb my hair, and I looked in and saw what a face I had, I cried and cried. Then the mothers would smile and look pleased whenever their little boys spoke to them, and seemed to love them so much, that I wanted them to love me too; and I used to throw little things out of the window sometimes, so that they would look up and smile at me.'

Ah! the young, tender heart, living, as yet, only by the affections, that required such a wealth of love to fill it! The little outcast heart depending on casual passers by for a stray word or look of comfort, striving to feed itself on such poor, miserable crumbs as these! It made the mother's face grow white with anguish to think of that.

'Well, about just such a time every morning, when Charley had gone to school, and I sat by the window as lonesome as lonesome could be, on the sidewalk under the window there always came a lady who was kinder to me than the other ladies, who always looked up and smiled. Such a beautiful lady, ma, with a face as kind as pa's, and a great deal more smiling; you'd love her if you saw her; I know you would—you couldn't help it. And ma,' and here Harry's enthusiasm died out, and his voice took a sadder tone, 'she's got a little boy, just about as big as I am, and she always takes him with her when she goes out, just like the other ladies. And—and ma'—the low voice had a frightened tone in it, as if the little one feared he was venturing too far.

'Yes, Harry.'

'I thought—that—that—'

'What, darling?'

'That if you would go out to walk yourself sometimes, and take us with you, Charley and me, that we shouldn't be so different from everybody else, and it wouldn't be quite so lonesome here.'

A long pause followed—a frightened pause on Harry's part. Venturing, after a little while, to look into his mother's face, its sadness, unmixed with anger reassured him, and he proceeded:

'That was the lady who sent you the flower. She lives in a little white house just across the road. One day, when Betty took me out for a walk, I ran away and went there; and I have been there a good many times since. It's a little house, ma, a very little house. There are no bright pictures or beautiful carpets in it; but they are never lonesome there. She is as kind to her little boy every day as you are to me now. It's a long time, ma, since you kissed me and held me on your lap, and acted as if you loved me! Oh, mamma!' He laid the pale cheek, wet with grateful tears, close against her own. 'Why a'n't you good to me always? I love you now, but I don't love you always; I can't love you always, ma. That day when you frightened me so, when you pulled my hair, threw me down on the floor, and whipped me till the blood ran, I didn't like you for a long time then, you hurt me so.'

The grief of the wretched mother burst forth anew in sobs and tears.

'Oh, Harry! oh, my poor, poor child! Did ma do that?'

'Don't cry, ma, oh, don't cry; I don't think you meant to do it. There is something that changes you, that makes you cross and strange. And ma'—the timid voice sank away to a low, frightened whisper, broken and tremulous with tears.

'Yes, dearest.'

'You won't be angry, dear mamma?'

'No, love, no.'

He hid his face on her shoulder, sobbing:

'It's something that you drink. They never have it there, in that little house,' pursued Harry in a voice choked with rushing tears. 'They never have it anywhere where they are happy. Oh, mamma! If you'd only send it away, if you'd throw it away, if you would put it out of sight; oh, my dear, dear mamma, if you would never look at it, never taste it, never, never drink it any more!' In the energy of his supplication he twined the little arms still closer and closer about her neck—his tears fell like rain upon her bosom. That baby face, eloquent with entreaty and wet with tears! She could not bear to see it. Crimson with shame, she hid her own in her outstretched hands. 'She never drinks it. I've watched her; she drinks coffee sometimes, water sometimes, tea 'most always. Ma, if you must drink something, why wouldn't tea do just as well?'

She folded her arms about the little form, and clasped it to her bosom. Her face was lighted with a high resolve, the heart against which her child's was pressed was throbbing with a lofty impulse.

'It would, my darling, it would; with God's help, it shall. Here in His holy presence, I solemnly promise, if there is any strength in good resolutions, if there is any power of good left within me, if God will not utterly forsake one who has so long forsaken her better nature, never, never, from this time, henceforth and forever, to touch, taste, or look upon the accursed thing.'

That night, at the foot of the tall poplar, the flickering sunlight falling through the leaves on his head, making the brown hair golden where it fell, Harry sat watching the coming of his brother. He had not long to wait; in a little while the red, slanting rays fell on that other head of darker brown. The well-known form appeared at the gateway, and Harry went bounding down the gravel walk to meet him.

'Ma wants to see you,' panted the little brother. 'She wanted you to come up to her room as soon as ever you got home. She sent me to tell you so.'

The message was such an unusual one, he was so flushed and excited, so proud to give it, and the look of joy shining in the pale face was such a stranger to it, that the great brown eyes of the elder brother opened wide in silent wonder, and the excited Harry had caught him by both hands, and was dragging him by main force toward the house before he had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to speak.

'I don't want to go,' cried the unwilling Charley, ruefully drawing back. 'I don't want to go, Harry. Why does she want to see me? What makes her want to see me? I a'n't done nothing to be whipped for!'

'Oh! it isn't that,' returned the little fellow eagerly. 'We a'n't going to be whipped any more, unless we're real naughty, and then not very hard; and ma is going to send Betty away, and we a'n't going to be scolded any more; and she's going to take us to walk and ride with her sometimes, as the other mothers do. Why,' cried the eager child, all glowing at the delightful prospect, 'Why, Charley, we're going to be happy now.'

'Oh, I don't believe we are,' sadly sighed the more experienced Charley, scratching his curls disconsolately, and looking at his brother in a maze of perplexity and doubt. 'I've thought we were going to be happy a great many times, but we a'n't been never, and I don't believe we ever will be. The first thing I remember was being lonesome, and I've been as lonesome as could be ever since. No, no; we shall never be happy. Ta'n't no use thinking about being happy,' and the forlorn child threw himself upon the grass in a hopeless and dejected manner. 'But they do say, Harry,' he continued, looking up through the leaves at the blue vault above him, 'that there's a place up yonder somewhere where good people go when they die, and where everybody is happy. I've thought, since I heard about it, that perhaps some people went there without dying. If they do, Harry, and I can only find out the way, I'd leave this mean old place, and go there straight, this very minute. I'd like to have you and pa come, Harry; but ma is always scolding or whipping us for something. I don't like ma, and I don't care whether she ever gets there or not. Come to think of it,' pursued Charley, as a new thought seemed to strike him, 'I had a good deal rather she wouldn't come; for if she did find out the way, and come up there after a while, like as any way she'd bring a switch with her.'

'You shouldn't talk so about ma, Charley,' said his meek-eyed brother. 'She isn't cross always. She has been kind to me to-day, so kind,' said the little fellow, stemming with his fingers two great round drops that were slowly running down his cheeks, 'that it makes the tears come to think about it. I was with her a great long while, and she didn't scold or speak cross once. Why, only think, Charley,' he proceeded, opening his eyes, as if the fact about to be communicated could never be sufficiently wondered at, 'we were all alone together for ever so long, and she might have got angry and whipped me just as well as not, and pa would never know anything about it.'

'It's a wonder she didn't,' scornfully returned his brother; 'it would have been such a nice chance. She don't get such a chance as that every day. There wouldn't have been any fun in it if she had, though; for I tell you what it is,' he continued, looking about on his hands for sundry marks and dents left thereon by the nails of his mother, 'I tell you what it is, Harry, when she gets hold of a feller, she digs right in. She pounds us more than half the time for just nothing at all, only because she gets mad and likes to do it. To be sure, I get mad myself sometimes, and say ugly words, and ought to be whipped; but you, you never do anything to be whipped for, and she,' proceeded the indignant little fellow, with an emphasis of immeasurable scorn on that personal pronoun, 'she to go to work and pound a little, pale fellow like you! Why, she ought to be ashamed of herself. I get so mad sometimes when she gets to whipping us, and pa comes to take us away, that I think if he would pound her just as hard as she pounds us, and just long enough to let us see how good it feels, I wouldn't care a bit—I'd just like it: but he don't never; he only trembles all over and gets very white, sets her down in a chair, and takes us out of the room—buys us playthings, or tells us stories to stop our crying, and that's the end of it until next time.'

Poor Harry! the color had faded from his face, the light from his eyes. That deep shadow of inexpressible mournfulness had again crept into them. Memory of such scenes, as are never garnered up in the breasts of happy childhood, shadowed his face and heart. His short-lived happiness was over. He made no reply to his brother, but sat motionless, gazing at the sky with a searching, yearning, far-off gaze. Looking at the two young faces turned upward, it would have been hard to say which was the saddest. Young as they were, traces of the working of the curse which had blighted their lives, were plainly visible in both. Both were equally pale and thoughtful, both robbed of the brightness and gayety belonging to their years, only varying in expression as they varied in temperament. The look of meek and patient endurance on the face of the younger spoke of a nature that wrong and suffering might crush, but could never rouse to anger or resentment—of a heart that would break, if must be, but would patiently lie down and die. The scornful defiance flashing ever and anon in the face of the elder brother, the immeasurable bitterness mingling with its sadness, showed a proud and fiery temperament that could be goaded to desperation.

'But she shall never strike me many times more,' continued Charley, with suppressed indignation. After a pause, during which, with compressed lip and clouded brow, he had been resentfully dwelling upon the pain and humiliation consequent upon the blows he had received: 'Never! never! for I don't care if it is wrong, if pa does tell me not to do it, I don't care if she is my mother; after I get just a little bigger, when she strikes me, I'm going to strike back again.'

These vengeful threats exciting no answering comments from his brother, Charley turned to look at him. A strange prophetic chill swept across the intuitional soul, and filled it with vague, shuddering apprehension.

'Harry, don't look that way; Harry, come back to yourself! Oh, Harry! take your eyes from the sky and look at me. You frighten me so!' cried Charley, in a voice tremulous with agitation.

The consciousness of his surroundings had dawned so slowly on the rapt soul, the patient face had turned toward his brother's so calmly, he was so meek and quiet, so undemonstrative usually, that he was totally unprepared for the wild burst of passionate weeping with which Harry threw himself upon his neck.

'Oh! Charley, Charley, I cannot find it, I cannot see the land you talk of. I know it must be there, where the sky is clear and the sun is shining; but I've been looking, and I can't see it anywhere. Oh! Charley, where is it? Where is the place up yonder where they are good and happy? Show me the way there, show me the way. I don't want to stay here,' sobbed Harry, coming back to his own hopeless self again; 'I want to go somewhere where folks don't have to be lonesome all the time; I don't know what dying is, but if dying will do it, I want dying to take me there.'

He had drawn his brother toward him, wiped his tears away with his own little apron, and soothed him as well as his agitation would permit, striving, amid the tumult of his thoughts, to gather up such meagre scraps of information as he had gleaned upon the subject, and put it into intelligible words, when, from a window almost hidden by the leaves of the tree under which they were sitting, they heard a voice calling to them, a familiar voice, but with a new tone in it, which quickens their pulse-beat, and makes their hearts throb with a sweet joy. Dimly visible through the foliage, a familiar face is looking down upon them, loving and tender as any mother's face should be; and with that look, the strong instinctive love for her which nature had implanted in their hearts awoke in all its strength. Pride, anger, sorrow, were all alike forgotten. To her loving call there came from eager lips the ready response:

'Yes, mamma; we are coming, dear mamma.'

Those who are blessed with golden memories of a happy childhood, perchance but lightly prize Heaven's brightest, choicest gift. Those who have never felt the hungering and thirsting of a heart deprived of sympathy and kindness, the desolate pining of that state more sorrowful than orphanage, can but feebly, faintly guess how tender tones and soft caresses, loving words and looks, such common blessings as awaken in the happy thought of gratitude, were treasured up in these lonely hearts as gifts of priceless value, or measure the deep thankfulness which thrilled them as they knelt side by side at their mother's knee, and said their prayers in the deepening twilight that summer night.

They had a table spread before the open window, and had their supper in their mother's room, and, as the light sank into darkness, with an arm thrown around each little form caressingly, and a brown head resting on each shoulder, they sat beside her on the sofa, and listened as she told them, in language suited to their childish comprehension, of the coming joys in store for them, of what a happy home their future home should be, now that she had resolutely parted from the curse that had destroyed their peace, and forever turned her back against it;—listened as she drew glowing pictures of the walks and rides they would take, of the varied pleasures they would enjoy together, pleasures it should be her pleasing task to plan. They had nothing to damp their enjoyment, for she had dismissed Betty, and with her own hands undressed and bathed them, and robed them for the night; and they enjoyed it all, not with the keen zest, the careless hilarity of childhood, but with the subdued and thoughtful gravity seen in beings of maturer years, to whose lot has fallen more of the sorrows than the joys of life, and who receive happiness, when at rare intervals it comes to them, with a tremulous thankfulness, as if fearful of entertaining so strange a guest; and when at last it ended, as all happy seasons must, and both tired heads rested on one pillow, Harry whispered to his brother:

'There is nothing to be sorry for now, Charley. She will never drink that dark stuff any more—I know she never will; she will never forget the promise she has made.'

Then the drowsy eyes, ere they closed, sought the dim night sky for that star, the brightest in the blue above him, which had revealed itself through his tears, when alone in the darkness he had first learned to pray, and, gazing on it, and on the sky beyond, where a happier home than any earthly one is proffered, murmured to himself, with a peaceful smile:

'Oh! we shall be so happy, so very, very, very happy!'