[1]Conspicuously inexact; but the reader must judge for herself.—Ed.
[1]
Conspicuously inexact; but the reader must judge for herself.—Ed.
Here I am, then, since it must be.
Every one has heard the story of the Frenchman who, after a tour through America (or was it England?), had but this to say of us: that we were a people with thirty religions and but a single sauce. I hardly think that we in Virginia, at least at the period of this story, were quite so rich in religions as this. Very likely, some of the sects discovered by our observant Gaul had no representatives in the Old Dominion. At any rate, I, after diligent inquiry in many quarters, have not been able to unearth more than fifteen distinct varieties. I did not count, I admit, a certain flock of migratory Mormons that I once encountered on the wing; just as, I presume, a naturalist would hardly class the Canada goose among Virginia birds, from the mere fact that they refresh themselves, in the spring of the year, in our wheat-fields. Nor did I think that a man and his wife and a boy whom I once knew, could fairly claim to be numbered as a sect merely because, as their fellow-villagers asserted, they professed to believe something that nobody could understand. Then I am afraid that even the very sects themselves would insist on my leaving out the Bushwhackers,—slack-twisted Christians like myself, that is, who can’t abide uniforms, and find it hot marching in ranks, and irksome to keep step; though we do cover the flanks of the main column, and, while we don’t attack in line, yet keep up a rattling fire upon such stray sinners as we find prowling about.
And so forth, and so forth.
Still (for I would not incur the suspicion of niggardliness), it is very possible that, had I searched with greater diligence, I should have found more than fifteen. We will allow, then, that, at the period which we are sketching, there were, say, a dozen and a half religions in Virginia.
And when I say religions, I have not in my mind a milk-and-water, namby-pamby, good-enough-for-me kind creed, but one of your up-and-down, robustious, straight-from-the-shoulder dogmas, that could ship off entire churchfuls of heterodoxers to—(but since the Revised Edition the word is scarcely parliamentary) without a wry face. Thither our Virginia Catholics used to despatch all our Protestants, to a man; but, inasmuch as their numbers were few (and, strictly speaking, the thing was, perhaps, contrary to the Constitution of the United States), they did it all very decently and quietly; sending them off by night-train, as it were, and making no loud mention of the fact.
Not so their opponents. Greatly outnumbering the followers of the scarlet woman of Babylon, they rattled them off in broad daylight, by the through mail, making no bones of naming the terminus of the road. Ah, but it was thorough work on both sides!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
But there was one awkward thing about the business: if they kept this thing up, not a solitary Virginian would ever reach heaven. That thought gave me pause, one day; and ever since I have hoped that somebody had made a mistake, somehow. At any rate, said I to myself, in my slack-twisted, Bushwhackerish way, the Jews will get away; and that will be a comfort, considering what an Unrevised Edition of a time they have had for these two thousand years.
But as a guerilla, as a free lance, unattached and un-uniformed, and falling in, as occasion served, now with one regiment and now with another, I found that things were even worse than I have represented them. You see they didn’t mind me, and so talked very freely in my presence; and I was shocked to find that thesevarious companies and battalions privately nourished a keener animosity one against the other than towards the common enemy, Ah Sin. If each could have heard what the others said of them (as I did), and where they sent them! I came to the conclusion, at last, that there was not the shadow of a chance for any Virginia Protestant. There were not enough Catholics to keep them busy; they fell upon one another, and so many cars did they couple on to the through mail (ole Virginny nebber tire!) that it became a most Unlimited Express, choke-full of Virginia gentlemen,—Virginia gentlemen who had erred in the interpretation of a phrase or so, or, it may be, of a word merely, of Holy Writ.
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
I say Virginia gentlemen advisedly.
Environments may have their environments (just as fleas have other fleas to bite ’em, and so we goad infinitum), and, thorough-going as was our theology, it had to succumb in the presence of our chivalry towards the sex; for throughout all our borders there lived not a man, lay or clerical, who would not have scorned to send a woman to the bottomless pit.
But as for the Virginia gentlemen, we shovelled them all in with an industry (ole Virginny nebber tire!) and an undoubting zeal that were above all praise.
That’s the reason I always did love a Virginian; he won’t stand any nonsense. “Do you believe that a prodigious majority of mankind were elected unto damnation, ages before they were born? No?” Swish! and that is the end of you! Another: “And so you say thatbaptizomeans baptize, do you?”—“Why, don’t the dictionaries and all the Greek profess—” budjum! and where are you now?
For, in matters of this kind, we Virginians of that day, if you would agree with us, would agree with you; but—if not—you might go—your way,—for the King James version obtained in those times.
Ah, but we were out-and-outers in those good old days!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
Strange! for time was when things were very different in the Old Dominion. Our ancestors had brought over with them the spirit of the merrie old England of hundreds of years ago; and merry men were they, too, for a long time after they landed on these fair shores.
And, after all, what was the harm? for do not philosophers tell us that a people’s conception of the Deity is but the reflex of the powers of nature (be they kindly or hostile) by which they are surrounded? And was not this a fair land? and if their sun was bright, but not too fierce, and their wheat-fields nodded to soft breezes, but knew not the hurricane, and if their snows were a fairy mantle for mother-earth, rather than a shroud, and Jack Frost spread, over pond and creek, ice just thick enough to store against what time the mint—the jolly jolly mint—should sprout,—if all nature smiled, why should these merry Norman-English pull long faces? Nor did they, but laughed and danced, bless their jovial souls!
But a time came when merrie England was merry no longer.
Somebody had invented a new religion.
It floated down upon her, a dense fog, impenetrable to the mild radiance of the star of Bethlehem. Floated across the Atlantic, and darkened our life, too. With us, as well, laughter became frivolity, and dancing blasphemous. There are rifts in the fog now, and here and there the sun is bursting through; but at the period of our story the shadow was unbroken. There was laughter, it is true. Do not the condemned often make merry in their cells? and young people will dance,—just as lambs frisk, even upon a bed of mint—heedless,—for ’tis their nature to. But they laughed and danced under a shadow,—the shadow of the next world. That world, alone, was real,—so we thought,—while this, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, was (though it seemed so solid) but a fleeting show, for man’s illusion given.
And of this theology, which spread, like a black pall, over the land, this was the central conception; and I give it for the reason that you will not find it laid downin the books, or in any single discourse. It is the epitome of the thousands upon thousands of sermons which I (not that I would boast) have heard in my day. Listen; for this was the atmosphere that our Mary breathed:
The world is the battle-ground of two mighty beings, the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil. These two, from the first appearance of man on earth, have unceasingly battled together, the one to save him, the other to destroy. To save mankind—to destroy mankind—that has been the sole contention these thousands of years. Incidentally, of course (for such is war), the Evil Spirit has, beyond the harm done the human family, wrought immense damage to earth’s fauna and flora (as the innumerable imperfections of nature testify), but man, alone, has been the objective point of all his strategy; and with every new soul that comes into the world the conflict is renewed.
And perhaps I am wrong,—for there are those who maintain that I have a bee in my theological bonnet,—but, were I a preacher, I should stand up for my side. I should not go about proclaiming it from the house-tops that in the vast majority of these struggles the good spirit is worsted; nor glory in announcing to the world that Satan held the field, and that the only hope was that a few of us poor captives might elude his vigilance and escape. Captives! They told us that we were his when we were born!
Is there any harm in saying that to a mere Bushwhacker (who has not had the privilege of passing through a theological seminary) it seems that we have hardly a fair chance? It were better we were born orphans! Better that than to be the children of sin and Satan, as those who know tell me we are,—though I will say that I cannot help hoping that there is some mistake about it.
But if it be, indeed, too true,—if it be a fact that all the poor souls that flit darkly, for a season, about this little ball of earth, are, in very deed, condemned before they are born, may we not hope that it is otherwise in Venus, for example, or Mars? I, at least, sometimes,overborne by the immense tragedy of human life, steal forth alone into the night; and lifting my weary eyes to the blue spangled dome above, try to drown the darkness here in the light I see shining there; and ofttimes I find myself wondering whether they be indeed as bright as they seem,—find myself praying, even, that it may be so.
For indeed it were pitiful, were all those worlds such as ours!
And sometimes I have felt, as I swept, with brimming eyes, constellation after constellation, and galaxy after galaxy, that I could bear up with a braver heart could I but know that there was, wandering somewhere in the immensity of space, one little planet, at least, upon which the prince of darkness had not set his foot,—one little world in which poverty and hunger and thirst, and toil and failure, and blood and tears, and disease and eternal farewells were unknown,—one world where a mother could smile back upon her babe, as it lay kicking and crowing in her lap, and laughing in her face, and not feel that the Grip of Hell was upon its throat.
Alice buried her face in her hands; but Charley sat bolt upright in his seat.
For such was our creed in those days. If any one shall say that Virginians do not believe that now, I shall not argue the point. It was notoriously orthodoxthento hold that every infant came into the world under sentence. Not under sentence to be hanged by the neck, as murderers are—
Alice shivered. Charley lifted his hand. I ceased reading.
{Symphony of Life, Movement 1. The first page of the score of the third movement, Allegro molto, of Beethoven}
SYMPHONY OF LIFE.MOVEMENT III.
It must, in former days, before we Christianized them (at any rate, if we didn’t do that, quite, we did what we could; we cut their throats for their heathenism and lands),—it must have been a comfort to an old Indian brave (before the Pale Faces had taught him what was meant by peace on earth) when his stalwart son, heir to his prowess, returned to the parental wigwam and cast into his veteran lap his first string of scalps. And so, in our day (for conditions change, not man), the youthful sparkle comes back to a mother’s eye, and nascent wrinkles on her fading cheek become twinkling dimples again, when her blooming daughter returns, flushed with victory, from her first campaign. How did you leave your uncle and your aunt? And I hope all the children are well? And so you have had a good time?Glorious!Well, you must be tired; you need not go up-stairs; come into my room and take off your things.
But she has not had time to unbutton her left glove before her mother wants to know all about the scalps: how many and whose.
And here there makes its appearance a seeming difference between our young campaigner and the brave I have mentioned. He, as he dances around the campfire, waving in one hand the sinister trophies of hisvictory, and brandishing his tomahawk in the other, proclaims, not without ingenuous yells, what a singularly Big Injun he conceives himself to be. She, returning from the war-path, has nothing to show; denies everything (as she laughingly unties her bonnet-strings), even to her mother. To the next-door neighbor, who runs in to hear, denies; but smiles mysteriously. Idle tales. Nonsense. Not a word of truth in it. Pooh! He was making love to another girl. But in the end, young man, your scalp is nailed above the door of that young woman’s chamber, where all may see,—nailed up with laughing protests and mysterious smiles.
Which is as it should be. There are ways and ways of blowing one’s little trumpet—or of getting it blown. Conditions change, not man. The vanity of Ajax was not greater than that of a nineteenth century hero. Where, pray, was the son of Telemon to find a bottle of champagne to crack with a war-correspondent?
Alice and Mary managed things economically. Each was the war-correspondent of the other. In their letters to Richmond, during these notable holidays, Mary recounted the victories of the enchantress, while Alice numbered the slain of Mary and her soulful eyes. For be it understood, fair reader, that while as a monographist I have indicated one scalp, merely, apiece, in reality a pile of corses lay in front of each of these lovely archers. They were Big Injuns, both. But this by the way.
“Which one of them all did you like best?” asked Mrs. Rolfe.
“All!” laughed Mary, letting down her hair as she dropped upon a lounge. “How many were there, pray?”
“Alice wrote me that—”
“Oh, she’s been telling tales, has she? And you believed all she wrote?”
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“Oh, yes, I knew his father, when I was a girl, andI don’t wonder at the son’s being stupid, as you say. He could talk of nothing but horses, I remember. By the way, speaking of horses, what has become of that poor Mr. Smith who was so badly hurt last October?”
“He is still at Elmington, I believe; that is—yes, of course he is there. I mean we left him there.”
“Youbelieve!” laughed Mrs. Rolfe. “Upon my word,” added she, “that is a summary way of disposing of a young man. He must be a nonentity indeed. I often wondered that you never mentioned him in your letters. Alice, on the contrary, could write of no one else. It was the Don did this and the Don said that.”
“Her beloved Charley and Mr. Smith are close friends.”
“Oh, I see; but I don’t understand how it was that Alice seemed to take such a lively interest in ‘the Don,’ as she calls him, while you can scarcely remember that he is still at Elmington. She never wrote a letter without singing his praises.”
“As I said just now, ‘the Don’ has the good taste to admire Mr. Frobisher.”
“Ah, that accounts for Alice’s liking ‘the Don.’ Am I to suppose” (something in Mary’s manner made her mother feel sure that she was on the right track)—“am I to suppose, then, that you are interested in some one whom the Don hasnotthe good taste to admire?”
“You are a marvellous guesser, to be sure,” cried Mary, with a bright laugh, and springing from the lounge and into her mother’s lap.
“Ah, I have hit the nail on the head, have I?” asked Mrs. Rolfe, with a pleased look of conscious sagacity.
“What a subtle brain is here!” continued Mary, smoothing back the white hairs from her mother’s forehead, and gazing tenderly into her loving eyes.
“And so you have been hiding something from your poor old mother? But you are going to tell her now, aren’t you?” added she, coaxingly. “Who is this person in whom you are interested?”
“Mary Rolfe!”
“Yourself? Ah, I see. Mr. Smith does not like you, and therefore you do not fancy Mr. Smith. Am I right?”
“Not entirely.”
“Oho! Then he is another of those upon whom you have found it impossible to smile. Well, I cannot blame him, poor fellow.” And she kissed her daughter’s forehead. “The idea of your having never—but why did Alice never allude to this affair? She gave me an account of all the others.”
“I can’t say,” replied Mary, leaving her mother’s lap for the lounge.
“So you did not fancy him. Of course not, of course not. He is a handsome fellow,—very; but really, I cannot see how he could have had the hardihood to make love to you while maintaining his incognito, as Alice writes that he still does.”
“Hardihood in making love is just what some girls would like.”
“Of course,—somegirls; but not a girl brought up as you have been. Did he make no apology? Yes? Well, that was to his honor. He is a gentleman, there can be no doubt about that. And you?”
Mary was lying at full length upon the lounge. “I forgave him,” said she, averting her face.
“Ah, we can’t help that, my daughter. A woman would not be a woman unless”—and reminiscent lights and shadows flitted across her face—“unless she kept a soft place in her heart for every man who ever loved her. But forgiveness and love are different parts of speech.”
No answer.
“To pardon, I say, and to love, are different things,” repeated she; and her heart began to throb, she hardly knew why.
“Sometimes,” said Mary, covering her face with her hands.
It was not many minutes after this before Mrs. Rolfe found herself across the street and closeted with Alice. “I am too tired and nervous to talk now,” Mary had said; “wait till to-morrow; or, if you are very impatient, ask Alice to tell you. She knows all.”
“My dear Alice,” asked Mrs. Rolfe, for the twentieth time, at the close of a two-hours’ investigation, “whoisthis Mr. Don or Smith? Who is his father? Who is his mother? How am I to know that my daughter is not interested in an adventurer or an escaped lunatic?”
Alice did her best to reassure Mrs. Rolfe on this point; adding, with a becoming little blush, that she did not rely upon her own judgment, solely,—that e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y was sure that the Don was all that he should be.
“E-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y! Then why don’t you take him yourself? I suppose this same e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y objected!”
“Oh!”
That was all that this whilom merry babbler could say. Her chin (just as though it thought itself the most highly improper little chin in the world) tried to hide between her shoulder and her throat, nestling down somewhere. In those days we thought it was becoming,—that sudden rush of roses to a young girl’s cheek. Now she will look you straight in the face, and tell you without blinking that next spring she is to marry a man weighing (just as likely as not) two hundred pounds. It is straightforward, and manly, and “good form,”—but some of us can’t forget the old way, and like it still.
“I must confess, Alice, that I can make nothing of the whole business. You tell me that Mary’s suitor is entirely devoted to her, and that every one has the highest respect for him. His incognito need not trouble me, you say, since its removal is only delayed,—anddelayed, too, through some romantic whim or other of Mary herself. But there is one thing which nothing you say explains; that everything you say darkens; why is the poor child so wretched?”
Alice was silent.
“Alice,” continued Mrs. Rolfe, placing her hand affectionately on the young girl’s shoulder, “have you told me all? It is Mary’s express injunction that you do so, you know.”
Alice seemed to have something to say, but hesitated.
“Ah, I see,” cried Mrs. Rolfe, jumping to a conclusion. “Hehasthrown off his incognito, and there was something dreadful,—a living wife in a lunatic asylum—or—”
Alice smiled. “No, it is nothing of that kind. To tell you the truth, it is all nonsense. Mary is making a mountain of a mole-hill.”
“A mountain of a mole-hill?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“It is all perfectly absurd—”
“What disturbs the poor child,—tell me?”
“Some nonsensical fears as to his religious tendencies.”
“His religious tendencies?” echoed Mrs. Rolfe, puzzled. Suddenly light seemed to break upon her. “For heaven’s sake, Alice,” she cried, pale with anxiety, “you do not mean to say that he is a Catholic! Don’t tell me that. Tell me that he is a—a—an Atheist,—anything but a Catholic!”
“An Atheist rather than a Catholic?” said Alice, raising her eyes to those of Mrs. Rolfe for the first time for several minutes.
“Most assuredly; a thousand times rather. Why, when I was a girl, several of my acquaintances married young men who were pleased to consider themselves sceptics,—it was rather the fashion in those days,—but, bless you, the last one of them was a vestryman before five years of married life had passed. But a Catholic! Heaven forbid! One of two things, Alice, invariably happens to a Protestant girl who marries aCatholic. Either, halting between opposing claims, she loses all interest in religion itself, or else she goes over to the enemy. Oh, Alice, Alice,” cried she, with sudden vehemence, “do not tell me that my poor Mary loves a Catholic! Lost to me in this world—and—”
I will tell you, my Ah Yung Whack, what Mrs. Rolfe was going to say when Alice interrupted her with a merry laugh. She was going to add, “lost in the next.”
It was, indeed, as I have hinted in earlier chapters of this work, the settled conviction of the Protestants of Virginia, at that day, that all Catholics were as surely destined to the bottomless pit as the very heathen who had never so much as heard a whisper of the Glad Tidings. (My Catholic friends often complained to me of this bigotry. For my part, I hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep when I remembered that they had made precisely the same arrangements for my Protestant acquaintance.)
“Why, who told you he was a Catholic?”
“Heaven be praised! Then whatishe, pray?”
“I am afraid he is a little sceptical,—or—or—something.”
“And is that all? Sceptical or something! Capital, Alice!” cried she, with a bright laugh. “You have hit them off to a nicety. Sceptical or something,—that’s just it. You see, my dear, when the beard begins to sprout on a youth’s chin, he fancies that it is time he had opinions of his own. At this period he begins to sneer at the ‘fiery furnace’ story, and discovers that whales, though their mouths be large, have small throats, and could never have swallowed Jonah.Histhroat, at any rate, is too small to swallow such musty tales,—leave that to the old women! Sceptical or something! Excellent, excellent, Alice! Ah, that merry tongue of yours!”
“I am delighted that you take so philosophical a view of the case,” said Alice, much taken aback at this unexpected praise of her wit. She might have added that she was amazed. How often do those we knowbest utterly confound us in this way! Mrs. Rolfe was what some lukewarm people called fanatically pious; and Alice had been looking forward with dread to the scene that poor Mary must have with her when she learned that her daughter had given her heart to a sceptic (or something). Strange! it was the very energy of this fanaticism which wrought the result which so surprised Alice. It is possible for convictions to be so strong as to inspire a merry incredulity touching the honesty of opposing beliefs.
“Why, of course,” rejoined Mrs. Rolfe, smiling complacently. (It was the word philosophical that did the business.) “The fact is, my dear, thereareno infidels. It is all the merest affectation. Most young men pass through an attack of scepticism, just as, earlier in life, teething must be gone through with. It is a cheap mode of earning a reputation for brains. With girls, this striving to be brilliant takes a different shape. Many young women cultivate sarcasm for a year or so after leaving school, not having seen enough of mankind to know that a satirical turn infallibly indicates the combination of a bad heart with an empty head. But people of experience learn to pardon these foibles of youth. The fact is, Alice,” added Mrs. Rolfe, smiling, “I know nothing in life more deliciously comic than a young graduate posing as a ‘thinker.’ Of course, if they are loud-mouthed—”
“That, at least, he is not.”
“Of course not, of course not; since I hear he is a gentleman. But how, pray, does he show that he is a sceptic, or something? (Capital phrase, upon my word, Alice!) How do you know it?”
“During the whole time that he has been at Elmington he has never once—I am afraid it is more serious than you imagine—”
“Go on!”
“Never once put his foot inside the church.”
“Impossible!” cried Mrs. Rolfe. “Why, ’tisn’t genteel!”
“Neveronce!”
“And his apology?”
“The Don apologizing!” broke in Alice, with a little laugh. “You don’t know him!”
“What! paying court to my daughter, and allowing her to go to church, Sunday after Sunday, without ever offering to attend her? I should just have liked Mr. Rolfe to have tried that game withme! Even now,—and we have been married thirty years! just fancymemarching off to church alone!”
To do Mr. Rolfe justice, those who knew him and the partner of his bosom best would never have suspected him of trying to play any such game on Mrs. Rolfe in their courting days, still less now. He discovered during the first month of the first year of the thirty alluded to, that his Araminta was a woman of views; and he had spent the twenty-nine years and eleven months immediately preceding these observations of Mrs. Rolfe in learning just what those views were, that he might the better conform to the same.
“The i-d-e-a!” chirped Alice.
“Yes, indeed. And if Mary will be guided byme— Upon my word, Alice, aren’t we both too absurd! Has the wedding-day been fixed? If so, I have not heard of it. Beforethathappens, your Mr. Don, or whatever he is, will have to have a talk withme—I mean Mr. Rolfe.” (Which, as she went on to explain, was, as in all harmonious households, one and the same thing. She could not remember, in fact,whenshe had expressed an opinion different from Mr. Rolfe’s.)
Sly was Mr. Rolfe, they say; who always let his wife have the first say,—and then he had her just where he wanted her.
“He won’t findme,—or, rather, Mr. Rolfe,—so sentimental as to refuse to hear who he is!”
In the end our spirited matron was much mollified at learning that the Don had not been “paying court” to her daughter, and yet, at the same time, publicly slighting her. The affair had been so sudden, etc., etc. But Alice’s master-stroke was delivered when she told how the Don had fought against the avowal of his love.
Ah! they never, as we men do, get so old as quite to forget all their romance, these women!
“Honor is a good thing to begin with,” said she. “As to the church business, I think we shall be able to managethat,” she added, with a slightly influential expression about those lips which had so often carried conviction to the peace-loving bosom of the harmonious Mr. Rolfe.
“Provided, of course—” continued she.
“Oh, of course,” chimed in Alice.
If there was one feeling which swayed Mrs. Rolfe quite as strongly as her religious fanaticism (to use the word of the lukewarm), it was her absorbing love and admiration of her daughter. Not a specially intellectual woman herself, Mary’s gifts and wide culture were a source of continual exultation to her. “She gets her literary turn from her father,” she used to say, truly enough; for he was a cultivated man (there were no “cultured” men in existence then, thank God), who would have made his mark in letters had he lived in a more stimulating atmosphere. In fact (though Mrs. R. always denied it with a blush), he had carried the day over more than one suitor for her hand, and won her young heart by means of his endowments in this very direction; for whiletheyhad been confined, by the limitations of their several geniuses, to sighing like furnaces,hehad made a woful ballad to his mistress’s eyebrow; bringing victory; and the defeated went their way, full of strange oaths.
So that a sort of sentimental interest in literature heightened Mrs. Rolfe’s admiration for her daughter’s accomplishments.
She was her only child, too; and no one can blame her for looking upon it as axiomatic that few men were good enough for her Mary.
Judge of her dismay, then, when she learned so suddenly that her daughter was profoundly interested ina man whom it was quite natural for her to look upon as a suspicious character. No wonder, then, that she surprised her neighbors by the rapid pace at which she had crossed the street. She walked briskly, too, when she returned from her long talk with Alice, but her face wore a different expression.
For she was rehearsing a pleasant little drama as she hurried back across the street.
Her daughter’s sad face had deeply pained her. It was plain to see that if she loved not wisely, she loved, at least, too well; and she pitied her from the bottom of her heart. Perhaps some anger had been mingled with the softer feeling at first; but Alice had put a new face upon the matter; and she was hurrying home to say to her daughter that she for one (and her father for another) looked upon the alleged scepticism of young men as the most harmless of eccentricities; and her face wore a determined smile. She did not intend to commit herself. It would be time enough to express her views (that is to say, Mr. Rolfe’s) when this Enigma had given an account of himself. But ifthatwas all that could be said against him, etc., etc., etc., etc.
And, would you believe it? the very incognito of our hero had begun to make the imagination of this staid matron cut fantastic capers. Who could tell? Strange things had happened before. Why not?
“Sceptic or something!” She almost laughed as she turned the knob of the door. “The poor child should laugh, too!”
The poor child did not laugh!
The poor child did not laugh.
“You do not know him, you do not know him,” again and again she replied, wearily.
She might have added,—but she did not,—“You do not know me.” And after all, what mother, of them all, knows her daughter, enveloped as she is in a double veil? For between the old heart and the young lies the mist of the years; and what eye can pierce aright the diffracting medium of maternal love?
Even Doctor Alice, when called in consultation, next day, could not probe to the bottom of the mystery.
And are there not ever some little nooks and corners of our hearts unsuspected by our dearest friends, even?—aspirations that they would have laughed at, perhaps,—fears which we should have blushed to confess,—hopes, alas, withered and fallen now,—that we have never revealed to mortal ears?
Now, within our Mary’s breast there was, I shall not say a nook or a recess, but a dark and dismal chamber, the key of which had never left her keeping.
Let us call it the Cavern of Religious Terror, and cut the allegory short.
Suppose we try to put ourselves in her place, and see how things looked, not to an average girl of that period (still less to any one of this), but to one such as Mary was.
At the time in question, the dogma of what is known among theologians, I believe, as that of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, was held from one end of Virginia to the other.
That is to say, my Ah Yung, that every chapter, every sentence, every word, and every syllable of the Bible had been literally inspired, and was absolutely true. This we were expected to believe and did believe; and by what ingenuity we were to escape the dogma of eternal damnation I, for one, cannot see.But we made no effort to escape it, regarding it, to a man, as the mainstay of society and the sheet-anchor of all the virtues. A belief in hell was ranked among the necessaries of life.
“’Twas the merest luxury,” quoth Charley.
Now, what is the imagination but a kind of inner eye, revealing to us, often with fearful distinctness, that which may be, but is not. And imagination was, as we know, an overshadowing trait of Mary’s mind.
And what a training that imagination had! Her mother thought it was her duty, so let that pass; but hardly had she shed her long clothes when her precocious little head began to teem with burning lakes, and writhing souls, and mocking demons, and worms that die not. And, ofttimes, her little heart almost ceased to beat, as she lay in her trundle-bed, and, with wide-staring eyes, saw her own baby-self engirdled with unquenchable flames. For had she not fretted over her Sunday-school lesson that very morning (longing to dress her new doll), and said it was too long, and oh! that she hated the catechism?
Now, among those who accept this dogma, there are various ways of dealing with it. The immense majority inscribe it among the articles of their creed, fold the paper, label it, and file it away in some dusty pigeon-hole, in an out-of-the way corner of their heads, and go about their business. They are satisfied to know that it is there, and that there is no heresy about them. A true Virginian looks upon his faith much as he does upon a Potomac herring, and would no more think of finding fault with the one because of a knotty point or so, than with the other for the bones it contains. He wouldn’t be caught carrying a stomach about with him that was capable of making wry faces over such spiculæ, not he. Look at that noble roe, that firm flesh, as stimulating as cognac! No cod-fish, no heresy for him!
So with the vast majority.
Then, there is another class of minds, with which to believe is to realize. To such this article of their faith assumes abnormal proportions, dwarfing all others.Upon this alone their glassy eyes are fixed. Let us pass them by with bowed heads. Seeking heaven in the world to come, they have found a hell in this.
Our Mary stood between these two classes, belonging to neither; but by the nature of her mental constitution she leaned fearfully towards the latter. Seeing is believing; but with Mary to believe was to see. And from her infancy to her womanhood her fond mother had done all that in her lay, unwittingly, to overthrow her reason. That that fair mind did not become as sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh, was due to her father. It was he that saved, her,—unwittingly as well,—saved her through books.
Mr. Rolfe had no son, and Mary was his only daughter. He made her his companion in his walks and in his study; and she became, like him, an omnivorous reader; and the baleful phantasms of her distempered spirit grew paler in the presence of other and brighter thoughts. The process went further. As she read and read, drawing upon all the great literatures (when she could, in the original—else in translations), there gradually dawned upon her a sense of the immense diversity of human opinion.
And yet, with what undoubting tenacity each people clung to its faith! Hindu, Turk, Greek, Spaniard, Scotchman,—each was in exclusive possession of the Eternal Verities!
The materials of the generalization were all there; and one fine morning she said to herself: Religious truth is simply a question of geography.
Mary Rolfe was a sceptic!
And yet she had not read one sceptical book. Where was she to find such in Richmond?
But this demure little miss of sixteen summers did what she could to keep her doubts to herself. How shockingly ungenteel to be an infidel! And a female infidel! An agnostic would have been different. The very sound of the word is ladylike; but, unhappily for our heroine, their day had not yet come. And for a whole year there was not a more wretched little woman in all Richmond.
Two clocks shall stare at each other, from opposite walls, year in and year out, and agree to disagree without the least discomfort to either. And would that we men were even as these serenely-ticking philosophers! Alas for the shadow that falls on the friendship of Mrs. A. and Mrs. B., when they become adherents of rival sewing-machines! And why, because our whilom chum now goes about with the pellets of the Homœopath in his vest-pocket, forsaking the boluses of the Regulars, why should we turn and rend him?
Dreading to be rent, our sweet-sixteener kept her daring speculations locked within her bosom, and was wretched; for man’s opinions, like man himself, are gregarious,—and a thought is as restless in solitude as a bird cut off from its mate.
So this state of things could not last. And when Alice, after looking very serious for a week, announced her intention of being confirmed on the approaching visitation of the bishop, Mary had to speak. Alice was horrified at first; but, being a plucky little soul, more given to acting, under difficulties, than repining, she posted off to their pastor.
He made short work of Mary’s difficulties; and, being well up in evidential polemics, battered down her vague objections to the credibility of Christianity with such ease, that, at the close of a two-hours’ interview, she begged, in deep humiliation, that he would not consider her an entirely brainless creature; so utterly frivolous had all her objections been made to appear. Two or three books, left in her hands, finished the business. And, a few weeks later, Mary and Alice knelt side by side, and took upon themselves their baptismal vows.
Now, among the various phases of infidelity, there are two forms which are strongly antithetical,—the scepticism of the body and the scepticism of the mind. Who has not seen a vigorous young animal of our species, his head as void of brains as his body is full of riotous passions,—who has not seen such a one masquerading as a freethinker? Never fear, reverend and dear sir; thinking will have to be wondrous freebefore any of it passeshisway. Sooner or later you shall number him among the meekest of your lambs. A hemorrhage—a twinge of gout in the stomach—any reminder that he is mortal—and you shall see him passing the plate along the aisles, and offering to take a class in your Sunday-school. In fact, a few such reclaimed sheep are a positive necessity in every flock. They point a moral. Remember what he was, and see what he is. And the blasphemer of yesterday becomes the beacon-light of to-day.
But when doubts have their origin in the higher rather than the lower nature,—when a mind, at once candid and searching, gradually finds itself forced to question dogmas learned from a mother’s lips,—for this phase of scepticism, the cure is far more difficult, and rarely radical. You may mow down the doubts with irresistible logic, they may be crushed into the very earth by the enormous weight of unanimous opposing opinion, but they are not dead. Remove the pressure, and the mind bristles, instantly, with interrogation-points.
“No,” said her kindly pastor, patting her brown hair, “I am far from thinking that this little head is brainless. The trouble lies in the opposite direction. Stop thinking about things that are above the reach of the human mind,—above it, for the very reason that they are of God. Honestly, now, if we could grasp the meaning of every word in that Bible of ours, as though it were a human production, would not that, of itself, prove that it was of man? To be of God is to be inscrutable. Is not that what a fair mind should expect? Undoubtedly. But my advice to you is, not to bother your head about such subtleties. Stop thinking, and go to work. You will find that a panacea worth all the logic in the world.”
And such Mary found it to be. And her class in the Sunday-school was soon recognized as the best. And she taught the servants of her mother’s household, and read to them till they nodded again.
And so, when she went down to spend Christmas in Leicester, after a year spent in these works of charity,she had forgotten that she had ever been a doubter. Two months had passed, and she was all at sea again. She felt that her faith was slipping from beneath her feet. She repeated to herself, over and over again, the arguments of her pastor; she read and re-read his books. Their logic seemed irresistible; yet it did not give her rest. Her head was convinced,—’twas her heart that was in rebellion. And she was woman enough to know the danger of that.
Faith or love,—which should it be? One cannot serve two masters.
“Nonsense!” said the cheery Alice, one day. “I can imagine now how he will look, marching to church with your prayer-book in his hand!”
“No, it is not nonsense.”
“Pooh! we shall have him singing in the choir before you have been married six months.”
Mary laughed (for who could resist the Enchantress?); and Alice, seizing her advantage, drew picture after picture of the reclaimed Don, each more ludicrous than the other (throwing in parenthetical glimpses of her own Charley), till both girls were convulsed with merriment.
“No, Alice,” said Mary, at last, wiping the tears from her eyes, “it is a very serious matter. Do you know what would happen?Hewould not be saved, butIshould be lost.”
That was what troubled Mary. That was why she could not laugh when her mother made merry over sceptical youths. He who had spoken so well and so strangely, down there by the Argo, was not a sceptical youth, but a man of most vehement convictions. And she felt that she would be clay in his hands. His faith, was formed; hers would be formed upon it. Formed upon it? Crushed against it, rather! For, after all, though of a deeply religious nature, as was plain, had he any religion?
That was the way we Virginians[1]looked at it. Ifyou were not orthodox, you didn’t count. If you were not for us, you were against us. “I look upon all Protestant ministers as wolves in sheep’s clothing,” said a Catholic to me. Per contra, I once asked a Presbyterian minister—a friend of mine—how he rated Catholicism. “What do you mean?” “Do you look upon it as a religion, for example?” He was a good fellow, and wished to be charitable. He hung his head. He felt half ashamed of what he was going to say. But he said it. Slowly raising his eyes to mine, he answered, in a voice full of sadness, “I do not. I regard it as worse than nothing.”
Ah, we were out-and-outers in those days! An error was worse than a crime.Thatcould be atoned for, with the one, by confession and absolution; with the other by repentance, even at the eleventh hour. But getting into the wrong pew! “A blind horse tumbles headforemost into a well. He did not know it was there! Does that save his neck?”
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
Such was the atmosphere which our Mary breathed. And—strange psychological paradox—just in proportion as her faith weakened did its terrors grow darker to her mind. That yawning gulf, upon the brink of which she used to tremble as a little child, seemed to have opened again. She believed less—she feared more. The peace she had gained was gone. The old dark days had come back. One cannot serve two masters; for either—
But faith or love—which?