“Your picture!” and such a world of wonderment is expressed in her voice that he thinks she ought to be on the stage for consummate acting.
“Perhaps you do not recognize this,” and he holds before her a picture so like herself that she is confounded. For the moment, she really does not see her cousin Lizzie as plainly as herself. The photograph, like one of those libellous stories which are true in detail, but false in implication, has given the reddish tint in Lizzie’s hair, brows, and lashes dark as her own, and there is the blonde cousin presented, the very counterpart of the brunette, one. The light hazel eyes are in the photograph, dark as Elinor’s own.
Elinor gazes speechless for a moment. Then she recognizes the dress of her cousin, and the expressionnother own which she knows so well. It all rushes upon her perception at once—the cruel mistake—Lizzie’s clandestine correspondence, of which she disapproved so much—the well-known resemblance between them—the picture more like herself than Lizzie—she sees it all, and she seesMr. Schuyler’s triumph in her discomfiture. Guilty Lizzie would not look so guilty as innocent Elinor looks now.
“Checkmate!” says Mr. Schuyler. His tone stings her.
“Mr. Schuyler, this is not my picture. I never sat for it.”
“Miss Lloyd!”
“I repeat, sir! This is not my picture, and I wear no mask.”
“But you are ‘E. L.,’” he says, showing her his last missive with that signature, “and you acknowledge receiving one like this,” and he confronts her with a duplicate of his own picture.
“My name is Elinor Lloyd, and I have never written to you, and this is the first time I have seen either of these pictures,” she replies, glancing disdainfully at each of them.
“Do you know whose this is?” he asks.
At this point-blank question, Elinor bursts into tears. The cruelty of the position in which she finds herself is too much for her. She will not betray her cousin, and she knows that on her own denial alone, against overwhelming evidence, rests her defence of herself. And in tears, distressed beyond measure, she rushes from the room. Mr. Schuyler gives a long, low whistle. He is inclined to believe she has told him the truth, in spite of all he knows and has seen. For why does she wish to deny it? What girl who could do this thing would so spurn the accusation? Her proud assertion, “My name is Elinor Lloyd, and I have never written to you,” rings in his ears. He believes it, as we will all of us sometimes believe, apparently against reason. He knows that he wishes to believe in her truth, despite his vanity.
A little book lies near a roll of music on the piano, with her glovesand hat. He takes up this book and examines it, for no reason except that it appears to belong to her. A copy of Dickens’Barnaby Rudge, with a mark at the description of the Lord George Gordon Riots, and pencil marks on the margin. He turns idly to the fly-leaf, and sees written, “Elizabeth Lennox, from her brother Robert.” O cruel evidence! “Circumstance, that unspiritual god and miscreator,” again shows Elinor as a liar. What can he do now but doubt her word? Elinor meanwhile is pacing her room in a tumult of agitation. Her first impulse is to abandon her engagement with Mrs. Wood at once, and go to her parents. But poverty among other hard impositions forbids us acting on the dictates of pride, be it ever so honorable. Elinor shrinks from staying, but also shrinks from giving her reasons for leaving to her parents or to Mrs. Wood. To give false ones, covering her real one, never for one moment occurs to her. She feels keenly the cruelty, the injustice of the false position in which Lizzie’s folly has placed her. Yet she is too generous at heart to betray Lizzie even to her mother. She knows that when Lizzie told her of this “bit of fun” it was in confidence, and troublesome as the trust has proved, she will keep it until she is released. But she feels how hard it is to know how to act rightly, unaided, uncounselled. One refuge, however, she has—one counsellor who never betrays his trust, and who does not require her cousin’s name or identity. O blessed privilege of a Catholic! The safe, sure refuge of the confessional is Elinor’s. What better human guide and comforter than her pastor can she seek? No fears of a betrayed trust is here. So to him she goes, and from him she receives the needed strength to bear her heavy trial—forheavy trial it is on such a young heart, all the more so because she cannot suppose her silence has put a stop to this disgraceful affair. She has written to Lizzie explaining what has happened, and begging her to lift this weight from her, and at least free her from this blame. And Lizzie has indignantly replied that she will not interfere, and that she believes Elinor to be the betrayer of her name to Fred Schuyler, and moreover hints that it has been done to win him to herself.
This rouses Elinor to such a degree that she nearly forgets her counsel to “return good for evil.” Prayer and meditation, however, those best of medicines for disturbed souls, work their good effect for her, and she is able still to bear in silence, trusting that time will lift the stigma off her. So she shuns as best she can all intercourse with Mr. Schuyler.
And thus about three unhappy weeks pass. Mr. Schuyler gives up trying to enlist Elinor’s attention, and he leaves the last communication of E. L. unanswered. He receives no more of those interesting missives. Lizzie, thoroughly frightened, stops this amusement for herself.
But at last the Nemesis, circumstance, overtakes her—the circumstance of meeting Mr. Frederick Schuyler at a party. A very small circumstance apparently, but pregnant with much for three individuals. He sees her standing not far off from him, in all the blaze of gas-light and full dress. He has never seen Elinor at this advantage, but the perfect profile and the proud carriage of the head impress him at once. Yet those blonde locks and the light laughing eyes—these are neither like Elinor’s nor the picture. Lovely this face certainly is, but he remembers the darker one as pleasing him more.The remarkable resemblance, however, has so startled him, that he actually trembles as he asks a friend who has been talking with her to tell him her name.
“Miss Lennox.”
“Do you know her first name?” he says, with forced composure.
“Oh! yes. Lizzie Lennox and I are old friends; let me introduce you.” And in the brief interval before he is presented, he only remembers that it is L. L. and not E. L., the lady of the photograph but not of the correspondence.
Lizzie passes this ordeal with a frightened, throbbing heart, but a polite, calm exterior, thankful to be very soon claimed for the next dance, and to leave Mr. Schuyler for the present at least. She is a foolish coquette, but not an evil-minded girl. Weak, vain, selfish, but not bad-hearted—she has really felt troubled by the mean way in which she has refused to clear her cousin of the suspicion which she has brought upon her, but her selfishness has prevailed in the matter. To protect herself has seemed to her of more consequence than to clear Elinor. And the possible consequence of her parents knowing all about this little escapade has not seemed to her at all pleasant to contemplate. And so she has been vacillating between the desire to do right and the fear of exposure ever since she has received Elinor’s letter. She is equally ignorant of how much she may be known to Mr. Schuyler, or how far she may be protected by her cousin’s magnanimity. She moreover finds Mr. Schuyler better than his photograph on inspection, as a handsome face generally is better than a photograph of it. Meanwhile, that gentleman has recollected that Elizabeth and Lizzie are the same name. He has been watching this airy, gracefuldancer, and he has seen that she has been observing him. Elinor is absolved from all blame in his mind. The only shred of mystery left is the name in that book of hers. Lizzie, resting after her last round dance, sees him approach with both dread and pleasure. He wastes no time in prefatory remarks, but says, “Miss Lennox, are you related to a Miss Elinor Lloyd?”
Lizzie has the command of this situation better than Mr. Schuyler. She knows the full purport of the question, but being asked by Elinor in a letter to speak the truth while she can yet hide it, and by handsome Fred Schuyler looking into her eyes, and knowing her for the girl he has been flirting with, are two very different matters. Here she may make a virtue of necessity, and perhaps a conquest at the same time. Ah! if our good deeds are viewed by the light of our motives, how very much the virtue in them seems to pale.
Lizzie says with charming candor, “Oh! yes, she is my cousin; do you know her?”
“Yes, Miss Lennox, and I saw your name in a book she had—Barnaby Rudge—and it appeared to have been quite attentively read, from the marginal notes I saw.”
Lizzie shows a momentary astonishment. “Why, Mr. Schuyler, the only copy of Dickens’Barnaby RudgeI have is at home in the New Riverside set papa gave me only lately—since”—she pauses a little confused—“since I have seen Elly last. Besides, I don’t make notes on the margins of my books, and I am quite sure Elly would not in mine. I think it could not have been my name you saw.”
“Indeed, I saw it, ‘Elizabeth Lennox,’ and from your ‘brother Robert.’”
Lizzie laughs merrily, and she looksthe very image of innocent fun as she responds to this triumphant assertion.
“Oh! that’s a good joke! MybrotherRobert! Why, that’s papa! And the name is his sister’s. She is Elinor’s mother. Why didn’t she tell you! I hate such mysteries.” And she shoots such a glance as would once have been a challenge irresistible. He keeps up the badinage, but he is answering that question, “Why did she not tell you?” in a manner not flattering to Miss Lennox, but very much so to Miss Lloyd. The former young lady is not quite pleased with his abstracted manner. True, he dances with her, chats with her, compliments her, but she is not satisfied. She is wishing that this was the first intercourse she has had with Mr. Schuyler, and that he had nothing to remember of Lizzie Lennox, and no previous knowledge of her—she has an intuitive sense that she does not stand as well as her cousin in his estimation, and that her chance would have been better if she had never written to him. He, however, generously makes no allusion to that correspondence. He is ashamed of it for her, and heartily wishes it had never been. He is thinking how he can make his peace with her cousin, of whom he feels glad to think so well, when he is startled by the words.
“Elinor and I are not friends now as we were once—before she became a Catholic.”
“Miss Lloyd a Catholic!”
“Yes, Mr. Schuyler, did you not know that? All of the family are Protestants except her. Her mother was so very liberal as to allow her to be educated at a convent of those Sisters of Charity, and this is the result. I have never been intimate with her since.”
Mr. Schuyler is very uncomfortablyastonished by this information. He has had pleasant thoughts of the possible consequence of his reconciliation with Elinor. She has so much risen in his estimation by this solution of the picture mystery and her generous, honorable forbearance toward Lizzie, that he is thinking how very pleasant it would be to pass his life with such a companion. She certainly has proved herself very trustworthy. But a Catholic! That changes the aspect of affairs. Does he want a wife of that faith? Would not the coquettish blonde beauty be more desirable? And yet he cannot say that the ways of Miss Lennox altogether please him. He has been willing to amuse himself by a clandestine correspondence with the unknown beauty, but the known writer of those entertaining epistles does not seem to him just the one to trust with his life’s chance of domestic bliss. The trust is not for just such as she. He really believes no harm of Lizzie, but he knows a worse man might think worse of her than she deserves. He wishes she were the Catholic and Elinor the Protestant. Why now, for the upholding of all his cherished beliefs and prejudices, could not the result of the two different systems of education have been reversed? Surely, he thinks, “Popery would, as a rule, have made such a girl as Lizzie rather than one like Elinor. After all,” he concludes, “the difference is in their own natures, and would have shown itself had they both had the same training,” and in this we cannot dispute him. But possibly, although Elinor might never have condescended to such a course, Lizzie might with better teaching have been saved from it also. The girl is not evil, only young, weak, vain, and she has needed just that which Elinor has had to sustain and strengthen her. Lizzie relies onherself, on her own crude knowledge of the world, and on just as much advice as she chooses to accept. She never bares her conscience and her soul, as Elinor does, to any one. Therefore, she not only robs herself of the counsel of wiser heads, but she never brings upon herself that searching self-examination necessary to the seeing of herself rightly. Had she done that, had she been forced to look with this introverted gaze upon herself, she would have shrunk from placing herself in this doubtful position. She will remember this in after years with a sense of annoyance, if not of any deeper sentiment. And yet her present feeling toward Elinor is one of irritation. She knows that Elinor was right in her advice to her, and that she can look down upon her from a more exalted height. The fact that she has not taken airs of superiority on herself has not lessened Lizzie’s resentment. The feeling that she is on a lower moral plane than that of her Catholic, convent-educated cousin, is a sufficient grievance of itself, and admits to her unregulated mind of no extenuation in Elinor’s behalf.
It is not very easy for Mr. Schuyler to find an opportunity to explain to Elinor his enlightenment and change of views. She shuns him so sedulously that he begins to think he will have to tell her at the table, in the presence of the family, that he has met her cousin. True, he could do this without any indelicacy, but he has planned a little programme of atête-à-tête, which he thinks more pleasant, to himself at least, than leaving her to draw her own conclusions from such meagre information as he can give her in the presence of others. Moreover, he does not wish to startle her before others by mentioning Lizzie’s name—a sore subject to her, he suspects.So he bides his time, although impatiently. If Elinor were like her cousin, he thinks he would not wait so long for opportunity to speak. His man’s nature is aroused by the necessity of pursuing.
But Mr. Schuyler has not made up his mind that he is willing to take a Catholic wife. He is at present only desirous of establishing the old pleasant, friendly footing between Elinor and himself—possibly a more tender one; but he will not yet commit himself. Not until he has seen how deeply rooted is her Catholicism—only an ism, it seems to him. He is getting impatient, however, at her continued indifference toward him. He sees that he must make his opportunity; and, being a young gentleman fertile in expedients, he resorts to waylaying her at the hour when her last music lesson is ended for the day.
Elinor’s face flushes and her brow contracts—a little indignant flash is in her brown eyes as he confronts her. She remembers the last scene between them at that hour by the piano, and it does not tend to soften her manner. Evidently he has got all the work to do, unhelped by her. So he starts off, as is his usual manner, with an abrupt introduction of the subject.
“Miss Lloyd, I owe you an apology for declaring that I had your picture in my possession. I know now whose picture it is.”
“You should have known it was not mine, sir, when I told you so,” and she blushes again at the thought of Lizzie’s being known. Even when the blame is lifted from herself, she does not rejoice in her cousin’s exposure.
“I did know it, Miss Lloyd; I did believe you, on my soul, against all the wonderful evidence of the remarkable likeness to you. I did believethat picture was not yours, or that at least you did not send me it, or know of my having it. But how could I know that it was your mother’s name in your book?”
He stops confused. Elinor has never yet known of that added testimony against her. Had she known it, she would at once have told him it was her mother’s name. There was no reason for any mystery concerning that, it being no part of Lizzie’s confidences to her. If he had had that clue, perhaps he might have come to some imperfect glimpse of the truth. In answer to her wondering inquiry, “What book?” he says now humbly:
“You left a book you appeared to own on the piano. I took the liberty of looking at it, and read a name in it which I knew belonged to her whose picture I mistook for yours. Your cousin, Miss Lloyd, is very like and very unlike yourself. I met her a short time since at a party; and even seeing her before me, the original of that picture, I could scarcely believe it was those fair locks which the sun made so dark in her picture. I may certainly be excused for not remembering this trick of photography, especially when you two are in features so very similar.” He says this last pleadingly, because the displeased look is not gone from her face.
“Mr. Schuyler,” she says, “your mistake concerning that picture was more natural and more excusable than your supposing me the writer of that letter, or the giver of that picture. I think, whatever the evidence you may have supposed yourself to possess, my uniform bearing and manner toward you should have freed me from any such supposition on your part. I could not tell you whose picture you had, but I was free to tell you whose name was in my book.”
“But, Miss Lloyd, even if you had given me the chance to ask you, I could scarcely take upon myself the liberty of seeming to make you accountable to myself for any name written in your book. The very asking of that would have seemed an accusation.”
Elinor’s quick sense of justice sees this readily, and her brow clears. Hard as it has been against herself, she admits that it was an entanglement for him. So she says more graciously: “We will let it pass, Mr. Schuyler. I wish the whole matter for all parties could be disposed of as easily as I can pass out of it.” And she endeavors to leave him, with a provoking air of taking no further interest in him or his changed footing toward herself. He gently makes a motion of barring her way. She stands waiting to hear what he has further to say to her, but there is no evidence of any desire to remain.
“It is so long since we have spoken together in this friendly fashion, that I think you need not be in such haste to shorten our conversation.”
He says this in such a flattering way, implying that to talk with her is the one great delight for him, that her girl’s sense of pleasing and being pleased is quickened, but she only toys with the tassel of the curtain near which she is standing, and says nothing.
Again Mr. Frederick finds he has all the advances to make toward conversation, unaided by her.
“Miss Lennox tells me you were educated at a convent. Is that the reason you are so shy of me, or is it because I am a Protestant, Miss Lloyd?”
“My parents are Protestants, and all my relatives. It would be strange for me to be afraid of a Protestant.”
“And yet you can be of so very different a faith. May I ask, is it a matter of conscience with you, or only one of taste?”
“I do not understand religion being a matter of only taste, Mr. Schuyler,” she says simply.
“Why, don’t you think it is taste, preference only for the gorgeous and ceremonial, which makes the Ritualists ofSt.Alban’s andSt.Mary’s do as they do?”
“I cannot decide upon their motives, Mr. Schuyler. I only know that if my conscience were not in this, I should not separate myself in my faith from that of my family.” She says this with a firm bearing and a lofty look at him which abashes him. He begins to suspect that this young convertwill notswerve from her path from any regard for him. He has a full share of conceit, fed by his success with the girls of his acquaintance. He has won their smiles so readily heretofore, and he has pleased and flattered them so easily, that he is piqued at making no better impression now when he really tries.
Again Elinor moves to the door. He lets her pass with the words, “We are friends now, are we not?”
“Friends, oh! certainly,” she says, but her tone does not seem so delighted at this change in their relations as he thinks it should be.
The truth is, Elinor has thought much over Mr. Schuyler’s little flirtation with her cousin, and he has notcome out from that inspection of his conduct with any great credit, in her way of looking at it. She thinks that although he may pass unscathed by such indulgence, it is not honorable in him to tempt one younger and weaker than himself into such practices. She thinks if Lizzie could find no one like him to entice her into this folly, she must perforce amuse herself in some other way. It seems to her that his motives were bad. And she suspects that if she would have lent herself to this sort of thing, he would have been just as ready to conduct an affair of the kind with herself. Her native good sense shows her this, and she is thankful for the different example and teaching which has hedged her in from ever giving a chance for such a thing. The amount of all this is, that the little inclination to like Mr. Fred Schuyler which she had once is now gone, she has no trust in him, and without, trust there can be no abiding love.
Therefore, when, some days after that gentleman overcomes his dislike of her religion so far as to absolutely offer his heart, hand, and fortune to her, this disdainful Catholic astonishes him with these words:
“I think, Mr. Schuyler, that these protestations are more due to my cousin Lizzie than to me. If you speak truth to me, you have spoken false to her. If it is truth to her, what am I to believe? Mr. Schuyler, ‘I must trust all in all,’ or not at all.”
Mr. Owen, though he has since been a member of Congress, and an American minister at Naples, was formerly well known in this city as associated with Frances Wright in editing theFree Enquirer, as the author of an infamous work on moral physiology, and as an avowed atheist. He now claims to be a believer in the existence of God, and in the truth of the Christian religion; but his God has no freedom of action, being hedged in and bound hand and foot by the laws of nature, and his Christianity is a Christianity without Christ, and indistinguishable from unmitigated heathenism. How much he has gained by his conversion, through the intervention of the spirits, from atheism to demonism and gross superstition, it is not easy to say, though it is better to believe in the devil, if one does not mistake him for God, than it is to believe in nothing.
Mr. Owen makes, as do hundreds of others, a mistake in using the wordspiritualismforspiritism, and spiritual for spirital or spiritalistic. Spiritualism is appropriated to designate a system of philosophy opposed to sensism or materialism, and spiritual stands opposed to sensual or carnal, and is too holy a term to be applied to spirit-rapping, table-tipping, and other antics of the spirits. Mr. Owen is unhappy in naming his books. Heholds that the universe is governed by inflexible, immutable, and imperishable physical laws; that all events or manifestations take place by the agency of these laws; that the future is only the continuation and development of the present; and that death is only the throwing off of one’s overcoat, and the life after death is the identical life, without any interruption, that we now live. We see not well how he can assert another world, or a debatable land between this world and the next. If all things and all events are produced by the agency of natural laws, and those laws are universal and unchangeable, we are unable to conceive any world above or beyond nature, or any world in any sense distinguishable from the present natural world. His books are therefore decidedly misnamed, and so named as to imply the existence of another world and a world after this, which cannot on his principles be true.
Mr. Owen’s first book was mainly intended to establish the fact and to show the character of the spirit-manifestations; in his last work, his design is to show that these manifestations take place by virtue of the physical law of the universe, that they are of the same nature and origin with the Christian miracles, inspiration, and revelation, and are simply supplementary to them, or designed to continue, augment, and develop them; and to show, especially to Protestants, that, if they mean to make theology a progressive science, and win the victory over their enemy the Catholic Church, they must callin the spirits to their aid, and accept and profit by their inspirations and revelations.
This shows that the author leans to Protestantism, and seeks its triumph over Catholicity; or that he regards Protestantism as offering a more congenial soil for the seed he would sow than the old church with her hierarchy and infallibility. Certainly, he holds that, as it is, Protestantism is losing ground. In 1580 it held the vast majority of the people of Europe, but is now only a feeble minority. Even in this country, he says, if Catholics continue to increase for a third of a century to come in the same ratio that they have for the last three-fourths of a century, they will have a decided majority. As things now go, the whole world will become Catholic, and the only way to prevent it, he thinks, is to accept the aid of the spirits. We are not so sure that this aid would suffice, for Satan, their chief, has been the fast friend of Protestants ever since he persuaded Luther to give up private Masses, and has done his best for them, and it is difficult to see what more he can do for them than he has hitherto done.
Mr. Owen, since he holds the spirit-manifestations take place by a natural law, always operative, and always producing the same effects in the same or like favorable circumstances, of course cannot recognize in them anything miraculous or supernatural; and, as he holds the alleged Christian miracles, the wonderful things recorded in the Old and New Testaments, are of the same order, and produced by the same agency, he, while freely admitting them as facts, denies their miraculous or supernatural character. He thinks that the circumstances when these extraordinary events occurred werefavorable to spirit-manifestations; the age was exceedingly ignorant, superstitious, and semi-barbarous, and needed new accessions of light and truth, and the spirits, through our Lord and his apostles as medium—God forgive us for repeating the blasphemy—made such revelations as that age most needed or could bear or assimilate. This age also needs further revelations of truth, especially to enable it to throw off the incubus of a fixed, permanent, non-progressive, infallible church, and secure an open field, and a final victory for the rational religion and progressive theology implied in the Protestant Reformation. So the spirits once more kindly come to our assistance, and reveal to us such further portions of truth as man is prepared for and especially needs. Very generous in them.
This is the doctrine, briefly and faithfully stated, of Mr. Owen’sDebatable Land, which he sets forth with a charmingnaïveté, and a self-complacency little short of the sublime. There is this to be said in his favor—the devil speaks better English through him than through the majority of the mediums he seems compelled to use; yet not much better sense. But what new light have the spirits shed over the great problems of life and death, time and eternity, good and evil, or what new revelations of truth have they made? Here is the author’s summary of their teaching:
“1. This is a world governed by a God of love and mercy, in which all things work together for good to those who reverently conform to his eternal laws.
“2. In strictness there is no death. Life continues from the life which now is into that which is to come, even as it continues from one day to another; the sleep which goes by the name of death being but a brief transition-slumber, from which, for the good, the awakening is immeasurably more glorious than is thedawn of earthly morning, the brightest that ever shone. In all cases in which life is well-spent, the change which men are wont to call death is God’s last and best gift to his creatures here.
“3. The earth-phase of life is an essential preparation for the life which is to come. Its appropriate duties and callings cannot be neglected without injury to human welfare and development, both in this world and in the next. Even its enjoyments, temperately accepted, are fit preludes to the happiness of a higher state.
“4. The phase of life which follows the death-change is, in strictest sense, the supplement of that which precedes it. It has the same variety of avocations, duties, enjoyments, corresponding, in a measure, to those of earth, but far more elevated; and its denizens have the same variety of character and of intelligence; existing, too, as men do here, in a state of progress. Released from bodily earth-clog, their periscope is wider, their perceptions more acute, their spiritual knowledge much greater, their judgment clearer, their progress more rapid, than ours. Vastly wiser and more dispassionate than we, they are still, however, fallible; and they are governed by the same general laws of being, modified only by corporaldisenthralment, to which they weresubjectedhere.
“5. Our state here determines our initial state there. The habitual promptings, the pervading impulses, the lifelong yearnings, in a word the moving spirit, or what Swedenborg calls the ‘ruling loves’ of man—these decide his condition on entering the next world: not the written articles of his creed, nor yet the incidental errors of his life.
“6. We do not, either by faith or works,earnheaven, nor are we sentenced, on any day of wrath, to hell. In the next world we simply gravitate to the position for which, by life on earth, we have fitted ourselves; and we occupy that positionbecausewe are fitted for it.
“7. There is no instantaneous change of character when we pass from the present phase of life. Our virtues, our vices; our intelligence, our ignorance; our aspirations, our grovellings; our habits, propensities, prejudices even—all pass over with us: modified, doubtless (but to what extent we know not), when the spiritual body emerges, divested of its fleshly encumbrance; yet essentially the sameas when the death slumber came over us.
“8. The sufferings there, natural sequents of evil-doing and evil-thinking here, are as various in character and in degree as the enjoyments; but they are mental, not bodily. There is no escape from them, except only, as on earth, by the door of repentance. There as here, sorrow for sin committed and desire for an amended life are the in dispensable conditions-precedent of advancement to a better state of being.
“9. In the next world love ranks higher than what we call wisdom; being itself the highest wisdom. There deeds of benevolence far outweigh professions of faith. There simple goodness rates above intellectual power. There the humble are exalted. There the meek find their heritage. There the merciful obtain mercy. The better denizens of that world are charitable to frailty, and compassionate to sin far beyond the dwellers in this: they forgive the erring brethren they have left behind them, even to seventy times seven. There, is no respect of persons. There, too, self-righteousness is rebuked and pride brought low.
“10. A trustful, childlike spirit is the state of mind in which men are most receptive of beneficent spiritual impressions; and such a spirit is the best preparation for entrance into the next world.
“11. There have always existed intermundane laws, according to which men may occasionally obtain, under certain conditions, revealings from those who have passed to the next world before them. A certain proportion of human beings are more sensitive to spiritual perceptions and influences than their fellows; and it is usually in the presence, or through the medium, of one or more of these, that ultramundane intercourse occurs.
“12. When the conditions are favorable, and the sensitive through whom the manifestations come is highly gifted, these may supply important materials for thought and valuable rules of conduct. But spiritual phenomena sometimes do much more than this. In their highest phases they furnish proof, strong as that which Christ’s disciples enjoyed—proof addressed to the reason and tangible to the senses—of the reality of another life, better and happier than this, and of which our earthly pilgrimage isbut the novitiate. They bring immortality to light under a blaze of evidence which outshines, as the sun the stars, all traditional or historical testimonies. For surmise they give us conviction, and assured knowledge for wavering belief.
“13. The chief motives which induce spirits to communicate with men appear to be—a benevolent desire to convince us, past doubt or denial, that thereisa world to come; now and then, the attraction of unpleasant memories, such as murder or suicide; sometimes (in the worldly-minded) the earth-binding influence of cumber and trouble: but, far more frequently, the divine impulse of human affections, seeking the good of the loved ones it has left behind, and, at times, drawn down, perhaps, by their yearning cries.
“14. Under unfavorable or imperfect conditions, spiritual communications, how honestly reported soever, often prove vapid and valueless; and this chiefly happens when communications are too assiduously sought or continuously persisted in: brief volunteered messages being the most trustworthy. Imprudence, inexperience, supineness, or the idiosyncrasy of the recipient may occasionally result in arbitrary control by spirits of a low order; as men here sometimes yield to the infatuation exerted by evil associates. Or, again, there may be exerted by the inquirer, especially if dogmatic and self-willed, a dominating influence over the medium, so strong as to produce effects that might be readily mistaken for what has been called possession. As a general rule, however, any person of common intelligence and ordinary will can, in either case, cast off such mischievous control: or, if the weak or incautious give way, one who may not improperly be called an exorcist—if possessed of strong magnetic will, moved by benevolence, and it may be aided by prayer, can usually rid, or at least assist to rid, the sensitive from such abnormal influence.”—(Debatable Land,pp.171-176.)
We have no intention of criticising this creed of the spirits as set forth by their learned medium. It is heathen, not Christian, and we have discovered in it nothing new, true or false. It denies the essential points of the Christian faith, and what few thingsit affirms that Christianity denies are affirmed on no trustworthy or sufficient authority. A man must have little knowledge of human nature, and have felt little of the needs, desires, and aspirations of the human soul, who can be satisfied with this spirits-creed. In it all is vague, indefinite, and as empty as the shades the heathen imagined to be wandering up and down on this side the Styx. But in it we find a statement that dispenses us from the necessity of examining and refuting it. In Article 4 we find it said: “Vastly wiser and more dispassionate than we, they [the spirits] are still, however,fallible.”
Whether the spirits are wiser and more dispassionate than we or not may be questioned; they do not seem to be so in the author’s illustrative narrations, and the fact that they have undergone no essential change by throwing off their overcoat of flesh, and living the same life they lived here, and are in the sphere for which they were fitted before entering the spirit-land, renders the matter somewhat doubtful, to say the least. But it is conceded that they arefallible. Who or what, then, vouches for the fact that they are not themselves deceived, or that they do not seek to deceive us? By acknowledging the fallibility of the spirits, Mr. Owen acknowledges that their testimony, in all cases, when we can have nothing else on which to rely, is perfectly worthless. We can bring it to no crucial test, and we have no vouchers either for their knowledge or their honesty. Even supposing them to be what they profess to be, which we by no means concede, it were sheer credulity to take their word for anything not otherwise verifiable.
Mr. Owen and all the spiritists tell us that the spirit-manifestations prove undeniably the immortality ofthe soul; but they prove nothing of the sort. We need, in the first place, no ghost from hell to assure us that the immortality of the soul follows necessarily from the immateriality of the soul; for that is demonstrable from reason, and was generally believed by the heathen. What was not believed by the heathen, and is not provable by reason, is the Christian doctrine of the resurrection; and this, and supernatural life and immortality, the spirits do not even pretend to teach. Look through Mr. Owen’s statement of their teaching, and you will find no hint of the “resurrectionem carnis” or “vitam æternam” of the apostolic symbol. Are we to reject the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel—which is something far different from a simple continuation of the soul’s physical existence—a doctrine so necessary to virtue, and so dear and consoling to the afflicted, on the authority of fallible spirits, whose knowledge or veracity nothing vouches for, and who prove themselves not seldom to be lying spirits?
In the second place, what proof have we that those rapping or table-tipping spirits are the spirits of men and women once in the flesh? Mr. Owen undertakes to establish their identity, but he does not do it and cannot do it; for no proof in the case is possible except by a miracle, and miracles the author rejects, and declares the argument from them in all cases anon-sequitur. The spirit-manifestations of which the spiritists make so much, and in which they fancy they have a new inspiration and revelation, are nothing new in history, and are not more frequent now than they have been at various other epochs. They were more common amongst the polished pagan Greeks and Romansthan they are in any real or nominally Christian nation now. They are nothing new or peculiar to our times. Tertullian speaks of them, the author of theClementine Recognitionswas acquainted with them, and so wasSt.Augustine. The trance was one of the five faculties or states of the soul recognized by the Neo-Platonists, and was the principle of the Alexandrine theurgy. The church has in every age encountered them, been obliged to deal with them, and she has uniformly ascribed them to Satan and his angels. She has had from the first, and still has, her forms of exorcism against them, to cast them out, and relieve those who are troubled by them. Every day she in some locality even now exorcises them, compels them to acknowledge the power of the name of Jesus, and sends them back discomfited to hell.
The spiritists cannot say the doctrine of the church is impossible or prove that it is not true. It certainly is a possible hypothesis, if nothing more. Then spiritists cannot say that Satan does not personify the spirits of the departed, or that it is not Satan or some one of his angels that speaks in those pretending to be the spirit of Washington, of Jefferson, of Franklin, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Byron, or of some near and dear deceased relative? You must prove that it is not so, before you can affirm the identity claimed. The great Tichborne case now before the English courts proves that it is no easy matter to establish one’s own identity even while in the flesh, and it must be much more difficult for a ghost, which is not even visible.
The spiritists admit that the spirits are fallible; that there are among them lying, malevolent spirits. A gentleman with whom we were well acquainted, a firm believer in the spirits, and himself a medium, holdingfrequent communications with them, assured us that he held them to be evil spirits, and knew them to be lying spirits. “I asked them,” he said, “at an interview with them, if they could tell me where my sister then was. ‘Your sister,’ I was answered, ‘has some time since entered the spirit-world, and is now in the third circle.’ It was false: my sister was alive and well, and I knew it. I told them so, and that they lied; and they laughed at me: and then I asked whose spirit was speaking with me. I was answered, ‘Voltaire.’ ‘That is a lie, too, is it not?’ Another laugh, or chuckle rather. “I assure you,” said our friend, “one can place no confidence in what they say. In my intercourse with them, I have found them a pack of liars.”
This pretension of the spiritists that the spirits that manifest themselves through nervous, sickly, half-crazy mediums, or mediums confessedly in an abnormal or exceptional state, are really spirits who once lived in the flesh, is not sustainable; for they cannot be relied on, and nothing hinders us from holding them to be devils or evil demons, personating the spirits of deceased persons, as the church has always taught us. This, certainly, is very possible, and the character of the manifestations themselves favors such an interpretation; for only devils, and very silly devils too, dealing with very ignorant, superstitious, and credulous people, would mingle so much of the ludicrous and ridiculous in their manifestations, as the thumping, knocking, rollicking spirits, tipping over chairs and tables, and creating a sort of universal hubbub wherever they come. The spirits of the dead, if permitted at all to communicate with the living for any good purpose, we may well believe, would be permitted to do it more quietly, more gravely,and in a more open and direct way; it is only the devil or his subjects that would turn all their grave communications into ridicule by their antics or comic accompaniments. These considerations, added to the fact that the spirits communicate nothing not otherwise known or knowable, that is not demonstrably false, and that they tell us nothing very clear or definite about the condition of departed souls, nothing but what their consultors are predisposed to believe, convince us that, if they prove the existence of powers in some sense superhuman, they prove nothing for or against the reality of a life after this life. They leave the question of life and immortality, of good and evil, rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, where they were.
Mr. Owen places the spirit manifestations, and the Biblical miracles, and Christian inspiration and revelation, in the same category, attributes them all alike to the agency of the spirits, and thinks he has discovered a way in which one may accept the extraordinary events and doings recorded in the Old and New Testaments as historical facts, without being obliged to recognize them as miracles. This is absurd. The resemblance between the two classes of facts is far less than honest Fluellen’s resemblance of Harry of Monmouth to Alexander of Macedon, “There is a river in Macedon, so is there a river also in Wales.” The man who can detect any relation between the two classes of facts, but that of dissimilarity and contrast, is the very man to believe in the spirit-revelations, to mistake evil for good, darkness for light, and the devil for God. We find both classes of facts in the New Testament. The Christian miracles are all marked by an air of quiet power. There is no bluster, no rage, no foaming at the mouth,no fierceness of look or gesture, no falling, or rending, as in the case of the demoniacs; and no rapping, no table-tipping, no antics, no stammering, no half-utterances, no convulsions, no disturbance, as in the case of the spirit-manifestations described by Mr. Owen in his books. In the one case, all is calm and serene, pure and holy; there is no effort, no straining, but a simple, normal exercise of power. Our Lord rebukes the winds and the waves, and there comes a great calm; he speaks, the leper is cleansed, the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead live. What like this is there in Mr. Owen’s ghostly or ghastly narratives of trances, thundering noises, and haunted houses? Every one of his narratives shows, so far as it shows anything not explicable by simple psychical states and powers, the marks which the church has always regarded as signs of the presence of the devil. Some of the cases he describes are clearly cases of possession, and others are as clearly cases of obsession. Unhappily, Mr. Owen, who formerly believed in no God, now takes, knowingly or not, the devil to be God.
Mr. Owen has hardly improved on the heathen Celsus, who was refuted by Origen. Celsus charged the miracles of our Lord to magic. Mr. Owen ascribes them to necromancy, and regards the apostles and saints each as a person with a familiar spirit, or, in the language of the spiritists, a medium. The Jews also ascribed the miracles of our Lord to the agency of the devil, and charged that it was by Beelzebub, the prince of devils, that he did his wonderful works. But there is a striking difference between the Jews and Celsus and our late minister to Naples. They sought to prove the satanic origin of the miracles of our Lord as a reason for rejecting him and his teaching; heattempts to do it as a reason for believing him and reverencing his doctrine and character. But they lived in an age of darkness, superstition, and semi-barbarism, and he in an age of light, reason, and civilization, and the distance between him and them is the measure of the progress the world has made since their time—a mighty progress indeed, but a progress backward. The Bible tells us all the gods of the heathen were devils, and Mr. Owen agrees and takes the devil for God, and demon worship as true divine worship. What the Jews and Celsus falsely alleged against our Lord as an objection, he reasserts as a recommendation. He has discovered that evil is good.
The class of facts which the spiritists call spirit-manifestations are recognized in the Bible from beginning to end, but always as the works of the devil or evil spirits, always as works to be condemned and to be avoided; and any communication with those who do them is forbidden. Necromancers, or those who consult the spirits of the dead, are mentioned and condemned in the Book of Genesis. The Mosaic law ordained that a witch or a woman with a familiar spirit—that is, a medium, whether a rapping or a clear-seeing, a talking or a writing medium—should not be suffered to live. The church has always condemned everything of the sort, and requires a candidate for baptism to renounce the devil and his works, and expels the devil from him by her exorcisms, before receiving the postulant to her communion. And yet Mr. Owen would have us believe that the Bible and the church sanction his doctrine, that the Christian miracles and the spirit-manifestations are produced by one and the same agency! Verily, Mr. Owen throws a strong light on the origin of the great Gentile apostasy,and shows us how easily men who break from the unity of divine tradition, and set up for themselves, can lose sight of God, and come step by step to worship the devil in his place. The thing seemed incredible, and we had some difficulty in taking the assertion of the Holy Scriptures literally, “All the gods of the gentiles are devils”; but since we see apostasy from the church running the same career, and actually inaugurating the worship of demons, actually exalting the devil above our Lord, the Mystery of Iniquity is explained, and the matter becomes plain and credible.
It is curious to see what has been the course of thought in the Protestant apostasy in regard to the class of facts in question. Having lost the power of exorcism with their loss of the true faith, the Protestant nations had no resource against the invasions of the spirits but to carry out the injunction of the Mosaic law, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch”—that is, a medium—“to live.” Hence we find their annals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries blackened with accounts of the trials and cruel punishments of persons suspected of witchcraft, sorcery, or dealings with the devil, especially in England, Scotland, and the Anglo-American colonies. Having no well-defined and certain criteria, as the church has, by which to determine the presence of Satan, many persons, no doubt, were put to death who were innocent of the offences of which they were accused. This produced a reaction in the public mind against the laws and against the execution of persons for witchcraft or dealing with the devil. This reaction was followed by a denial of witchcraft, or that the devil had anything to do with matters and things on earth, and a shower of ridicule fell on all whobelieved in anything of the sort. Then came the general doubt, and then the denial of the existence of the devil and all infernal spirits, save in human nature itself. Finally came the spirit-manifestations, in which Satan is no longer regarded as Satan, but is held to be divine, and worshipped as God, by thousands and millions.
We must be excused from entering into any elaborate refutation of Mr. Owen’s blasphemous attempt to bring the Christian miracles under the general law, as he regards it, of spirit-manifestations. He has proved the reality of no such law, and if he had, the spirit-manifestations themselves would prove nothing more than a gale of wind, a shower of rain, a flash of lightning, or the growth of a spire of grass. Could we prove the Christian miracles to be facts in the order of nature, or show them as taking place by a general law, and not by the immediate act of God, and therefore no miracles at all, we should deprive them of all their importance. The value of the facts is not in their being facts, but in their being miraculous facts, which none but God can work. The author does not understand this, but supposes that he has won a victory for Christianity when he has proved the miracles as facts, but at the same time that they are no miracles.
It is clear from his pages that the author does not know what Christians understand by a miracle. He citesSt.Augustine to prove that a miracle is something that may take place by some law of nature to us unknown, butSt.Augustine, in the passage he cites, is not speaking of miracles at all; he is speaking of portents, prodigies, or extraordinary events, which the ignorant, and the superstitious ascribe to a supernatural agency; but which may, after all, howeverwonderful, be produced by a natural cause, as in our days not a few believe to be the case with the spirit-manifestations themselves, and no doubt is the case with most of the wonders the spiritists relate. The devil may work portents or prodigies, but not miracles, because he has no creative power, and can work only with materials created to his hand.
It is necessary also to distinguish between what is simply superhuman and what is supernatural. Whatever is creature is in the order of nature. Nature embraces the entire creation—whatever exists that is not God or distinguishable from him. Whether the created powers are above man or below him in the scale of existence, they are equally natural, and so is whatever they are capable, as second causes, of doing. The angels in heaven, the very highest as the lowest, are God’s creatures, distinguishable from him, and therefore included in nature. The same must be said of the devils in hell, or the ghosts, if the spirits of the departed, and hence whatever they do is within the natural order. The devil is superior, if you will, by nature to man—for man is made little lower than the angels, and the devil is an angel fallen; he may know many things beyond human intelligence, and do many things beyond the power of man; but what the devil does, is, if superhuman, not in any sense supernatural, but as natural as what man himself does. We agree with Mr. Owen, though not for the same reason, that there is nothing miraculous in the spirit-manifestations, even supposing them to be facts, and therefore are of no value in relation to the truth or falsehood of Christianity as a revelation of and by the supernatural.
God alone, and what he does immediately by his direct act and immediate act, is supernatural. Godalone can work a miracle, which is a supernatural effect wrought without any natural medium, law, or agency, in or on nature, and is, as far as it goes, a manifestation of creative power.
Miracles do what portents, prodigies, spirit-rappings, etc., do not—they manifest the supernatural, or the existence of a real order above nature. They do not indeed directly prove the truth of the Christian mysteries, but they do accredit our Lord as a teacher sent from God. As Nicodemus said when he came by night to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that thou art come a teacher from God, for no man can do the miracles thou doest, unless God were with him,” God in the miracles accredits the teacher, and vouches for the truth of what he in whose favor they are wrought teaches. What our Lord teaches, then, is true. If he teaches that he is perfect God and perfect man in hypostatic union, then he is so, and then is to be believed, on his own word, whatever he teaches, for “it is impossible for God to lie.” The facts, then, are of no importance if not miracles. Hence the “natural-supernaturalism” of theSartor Resartusis not only a contradiction in terms, but utterly worthless, as are most of the admired utterances of its author, and aid us not in solving a single problem for which revelation is needed.
Deprive us of the prophecies under the Old Law and the miracles under the New, and we should be deprived of all means of proving Christianity as a supernatural religion, as supernaturally inspired and revealed, and should be reduced, as Mr. Owen is, to naked rationalism, or downright demonism. The prodigies of the devil do not carry us above nature. They are indeed Satan’s efforts to counterfeit genuine miracles, but atbest they only give us the superhuman for the supernatural. If the author could prove the Christian miracles are not miracles, though credible as facts, or if he could bring them into the category of the spirit-manifestations, he would in effect divest Christianity of its supernatural character, and render it all as worthless as any man-constructed system of ethics or philosophy. His Christianity, as set forth in his pages, has not a trace of the Christianity of Christ, and is as little worthy of being called Christian as the bald Unitarianism of Channing, or the Deism of Rousseau, Tom Paine, or Voltaire, or the Free Religion of Emerson, Higginson, and Julia Ward Howe.
What Mr. Owen regards as a highly important fact, and which he urges Protestants to accept as the means of triumphing over the Catholic Church, namely, that the Christian miracles and the spirit-manifestations are worthy of precisely the same respect and confidence in a Christian point of view, is far less important than he in his profound ignorance of Christianity imagines. How far he will be successful with Protestants we know not; but his success, we imagine, will be greatest among people of his own class, who, having no settled belief in any religion, who know little of the principles of Christianity, are, as all such people are, exceedingly credulous and superstitious. These people hover on the borders of Protestantism, have certain sympathies with the Reformation, but it would be hardly just to call them in the ordinary sense of the term Protestants. Yet Protestantism, being substantially a revival in principle of the ancient Gentile apostasy which led to the worship of the devil in the place of God before our Lord’s advent, there can be no doubt that Protestants are peculiarly exposed to Satanic invasions, and there is no certainty that they may not follow Mr. Owen back to the devil-worship from which Christianity rescued the nations that embraced it. But we have said enough for the present. Perhaps we may say more hereafter.
[159]1.The Debatable Land between this World and the Next.With Illustrative Narratives. By Robert Dale Owen. New York: Carleton & Co. 1872.16mo, pp.542.
2.Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World.With Narrative Illustrations. By Robert Dale Owen. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co. 1860.16mo, pp.528.
MARCH 27TH.
She kneels in prayer—a childlike, virgin form;What purity is mirrored in her eyes!Her dove-like glances, with devotion warm,Are raised in worship, to the midnight skies—But look! a heavenly radiance bright has shoneAround the virgin chosen of the Lord;In her rapt prayer she hears the angel’s tone,“Hail! full of grace! for lo! upon the wordOf thy consent waits now the heavenly dove,Whose wings o’ershadowing thee shall lightly restOne moment on thy pure and humble breast,And make thee by that awful seal of loveThe mother of thy God!” She bows her head,Whilefiat mihiin meek tones is said.
BY MRS. CRAVEN, AUTHOR OF “A SISTER’s STORY.”
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, WITH PERMISSION.
When daylight appeared, Fleurange awoke first, but in a few minutes, while she was admiring the child still sleeping in her arms, his large eyes opened in their turn. Their first expression was one of extreme surprise, somewhat mingled with fear, but Fleurange’s look and voice soon had a reassuring effect. His eyes grew smiling, his mouth half opened, his little arms stretched towards her and were soon clasped around her neck, and the acquaintance was made. During this time the pale and languid young mother was endeavoring to shake off a heaviness more difficult to overcome than sleep. She slightly blushed and murmured some words of excuse when she perceived her child in the arms of the beautiful stranger. But Fleurange protested with an accent of indubitable truth that the child did not trouble her in the least. She soon perceived she could be of some service to the poor convalescent. The children, aroused from a long night’s sleep, were now wholly awake. Every one knows that children awake, and, confined within a narrow space, soon arrive at a degree of turbulence whose only advantage is to produce lassitude and then sleep. During the first of these two phases, the poor mother made a vain and feeble effort to restrain them. After a few minutes she fell back, not only exhausted, but faint. Fleurange drew near, and began to improvise a pillow for her head out of the shawls scattered around. Then she opened the small basket Mademoiselle Josephine had given her, and took out a flask, the contents of which, poured on a handkerchief and applied to the sick woman’s pale face and temples, soon revived her.
“Thank you,” she said; “you have done me a great deal of good. I am feeble, that is all, but I did not suppose myself so much so.”
“Do not exert yourself,” replied Fleurange. “I will take care of the children.”
The mother smiled, and touched her head, showing by this gesture how fatiguing she found the noise she had not succeeded in quieting. At that very moment, the younger of the two children was standing on the seat, trying to reach the net, of painful memory, suspended like the sword of Damocles over the travellers’ heads, and which served as a receptaclefor everything that could not be stowed away elsewhere. The child was not climbing without a motive. His brother had already successfully preceded him, and found means of seizing, through the meshes of the net, a small hunting-horn, on which he was now executing a flourish. Why could not he also get his drum, almost within reach? If he could only stretch a little farther—and he looked at Fleurange with a supplicating air; but the latter, instead of heeding his mute appeal, laughingly laid hold of him and drew him on her lap; then skilfully bearing off the hunting-horn from the other, she promised to relate them the most charming of stories if they would be quiet. In an instant they were both leaning beside her, and then, in a low tone, she related one story after another, keeping them silent and attentive till the hour of sleep returned.
By the end of the second day the travellers had made great progress in their acquaintance. “How can I thank you sufficiently?” said the young mother. “How fortunate I was to meet you!”
“Do not thank me: your children have done me more good than I can return.”
This reply, of course, did not at all diminish the gratitude mingled with admiration with which she had inspired her companion, and as there is only a step from attraction to confidence, the latter soon related the whole story of her uneventful life to Fleurange. She had met with a severe fall three months before, and her life was despaired of; then her husband took her to Paris to consult Dr. Leblanc, who effected a cure. Fleurange’s eyes brightened. It was such a gratification to be able to talk about her dear old friends!
“He is so skilful and kind,” she said.
“Oh! yes, indeed! he is more than a physician: he is a benefactor, and yet I disobeyed him in starting so soon! He said I was still too feeble, which I denied; but I see he was right.”
“Why did you do so?”
“Because my poor Wilhelm is alone and impatiently awaiting me.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Could he not have come for you?”
“No; he is M. Dornthal’s head clerk, and it is very difficult for him to leave his post.”
Fleurange’s heart gave a leap at this name. “Are you alluding to M. Ludwig Dornthal?” said she.
“No; to his brother, the rich banker.”
“And the other—the professor—do you know him?”
“I have never seen him, but Wilhelm is well acquainted with him, and is sometimes invited to the soirées he gives. They are not balls—they are not fond of dancing there—but réunions for conversation, reading, music, and looking at engravings. Wilhelm says they are all learned, the girls as well as the boys, and madame as much so as her husband.”
Fleurange slightly shuddered at this brief communication respecting her uncle’s family. She was very fond of study, still more so of the arts; she had a taste for reading she was often obliged to repress, but this word “learned” she did not find attractive.
“Learned!” she said to herself. “That means pedantic, grave, and tiresome. Well, I must make the best of it. Perhaps that does not prevent them from being good, which is the essential point, and I certainly should not aim at amusement in this short life.”
Another night—another long daynow drawing to a close—when lights more frequent and bright, and more numerous dwellings, announced the vicinity of a large city. As each moment brought them nearer their destination, the joy of the mother and her children became more expansive.
“He will be waiting for us, will he not?” said the elder of the children.
“Yes, yes, we shall see him as soon as the carriage stops, but that will not be for an hour.” Soon the cry was: “In half an hour, now!” and at last: “Here we are!”
Poor Fleurange listened to her travelling companions, and envied them the certainty of being greeted at their journey’s end by a dear and well-known face. Sadness and a fearful timidity came over her. At last, the carriage stopped. As at their departure, there was a great uproar, a variety of cries, and vacillating lights, which illuminated everything, but nothing distinctly. Fleurange sought in vain among all the persons who crowded around the carriage, for a face that might be her uncle’s. The door opened. A tall man with flowing hair and a long blonde beard presented himself. “Was it he?” No, the joyful cries of the children at once informed Fleurange it was their father.
“Bertha, Bertha!” he exclaimed, and, even before embracing his children, he pressed both her hands and looked anxiously in her face.
“You are very pale, dear Bertha.”
“It is only with joy, Wilhelm,” replied she, weeping. “I am cured, and I behold you once more!”
He then stretched out his arms to his children, but before leaving the carriage they both cried “Adieu! adieu!” in childlike tones and threw their arms around Fleurange’s neck.
“Wilhelm,” said his wife in a low tone, “thank this kind young lady, who has been an angel of goodness to them and to me on the way.”
He turned with a soft and grateful look toward Fleurange: “May God reward you, fair and gentle maiden,” said he, taking off his hat. Then he added hesitatingly:
“Doubtless some one is waiting for you here, and I cannot have the pleasure of rendering you any service?”
“I thank you,” said Fleurange quickly. “I am, indeed, expected by my relatives.” While speaking she anxiously cast her eyes around. No one seemed to be seeking her in the crowd of unknown faces that surrounded her. Was there any mistake? Had they forgotten her? What should she do?
Meanwhile her travelling companions left the carriage, and the happy group was already at a distance. She followed them with her eyes, her heart sinking within her. At that instant a small open carriage, drawn by a fine horse, drove swiftly up. In it was a youth of eighteen or nineteen years. He threw the reins to some one standing near and sprang out. Seeing him, Bertha’s husband took off his hat, and a cap is hastily raised in return, displaying an abundance of light hair of rather a warm shade. But the new-comer did not stop. He was in a great hurry and out of breath. He ran up to the diligence and said inquiringly:
“Mademoiselle Gabrielle!”
“That is my name,” said Fleurange, at first struck dumb at hearing herself so-called, and especially at the sight of him who had come to meet her.
“Very well,” said he, “let me help you descend.”
Fleurange silently prepared to obey, but after another glance at him as he held out a firm hand, she said: “There is no mistake, is there? It is my uncle, M. Ludwig Dornthal, who has sent for me?”
The only reply she received was an affirmative nod of the head; a moment after, a concise order, promptly obeyed, brought down from the heights of the imperial the modest luggage belonging to Fleurange. In an instant it was fastened behind the light carriage which he afterward assisted her in entering, then, carefully and silently wrapping around her a large fur cloak which he had brought, he took his seat, and the horse set off, as he came, at a fast trot.
Fleurange at first felt giddy with the rapid motion of the carriage, but it soon became agreeable, contrasted with the heavy movements and violent jolting of the diligence. The weather was sharp, but the warm cloak that covered her prevented her from feeling it, and, thus protected, the keen air, so far from being unpleasant, gave her, on the contrary, an unaccustomed animation which was like a fresh infusion of youth and life. The sky above was sparkling with stars. It was one of those brilliant winter nights which we love to imagine like that which witnessed the coming of Christ, and saw angels hovering over the heights that surround Bethlehem, to convey the glad tidings to the shepherds, and sing on earth their divine hymn.
In about twenty minutes the horse slackened his pace a little, and the young coachman turned around and seemed to make some attempt at an explanation which Fleurange tried her best to comprehend, but the rattling over the pavements rendered this nearly impossible, and she only seized the words “My father” and “Christ Kindchen!” after which his head, turned around for an instant, resumed its former position, and the horse his usual pace.
But Fleurange gathered from this that the youth was one of M. Dornthal’s sons, and her uncle had notbeen able to meet her for some reason connected with the festival of the following day. Her first impression was that her cousin’s manners were rather abrupt, and his face somewhat peculiar, but on the whole he had shown himself very efficient and attentive. As for his skill in driving it was unrivalled, the reins could not have been in better hands.
After this short interruption, they kept on their way without slackening an instant, notwithstanding more than one turn through the winding streets, and at length arrived at a place planted with trees, where the carriage stopped before a flight of steps leading to an oaken door adorned with a massive brass knocker.
Some one was evidently watching for them, for the door instantly flew open. Fleurange caught the glimpse of a bright light and many forms! Her cousin hastened to aid her in alighting. Confused voices were audible, all having a cordial accent of welcome. A strong hand supported Fleurange as she ascended the six stone steps and entered the passage. A tall woman dressed in gray, and wearing a cap trimmed with flowers, approached and embraced her. “It is my turn now!” said a deep and sonorous voice, “for I am her uncle.” Fleurange raised her eyes toward a noble countenance which had too young a look to be crowned with such white hair, and her uncle embraced her, murmuring in a softened tone the name of Margaret. Beside him stood a lovely young girl, grave and blonde, while another, fair as her sister but younger, divested Fleurange of the heavy fur cloak and untied her bonnet. A boy of seven years ran out into the street to aid his brother, and a little girl of four or five clung to her mother’s skirts, looking curiously, but with delight, at the strange visitor.