Читать книгу A Woman of Yesterday - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 4

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I rise and raise my claspèd hands to Thee!

Henceforth, the darkness hath no part in me,

Thy sacrifice this day,—

Abiding firm, and with a freeman’s might

Stemming the waves of passion in the fight.

—John Henry Newman.

Where the Monk River makes its way through the mountain wall in one of the northern counties of Vermont, lies the small, white village of Haran. Although isolated and remote from the world, unknown and unconsidered beyond certain narrow limits, this village possessed, forty years ago, a local importance as being the county town, the seat also of a Young Ladies’ Seminary of some reputation, and an Orthodox church which boasted a line of ministers of exalted piety and scholarly attainment.

The incumbent in the year 1869 was the Rev. Samuel Mallison. His pastorate had now extended over twenty years, and he was reverenced far beyond the bounds of his parish for learning and godliness.

It was a June Saturday night in that year, and the hour was late. In the low-roofed garret of the parsonage of Haran the figure of a tall, thin girl with a candle in her hand moved swiftly and softly to the head of a steep flight of stairs, which gave access to the garret from the floor below. Some one had called her name.

“Yes, father,” she returned, and a certain vibration of restrained feeling was perceptible in her voice, “it was I. I am sorry I disturbed you. Were you asleep?”

All was dark below, and no person could be seen, but again came the man’s voice.

“What were you doing, Anna?” was the question.

“Only putting away—” here the girl faltered and stopped speaking. The candle in her hand shook, and threw a strange, wavering shadow of her shape upon the long, rough timbers of the wall. The roof was so low where she stood that of necessity her head was bent sharply forward. The outline of her shoulders was meagre and angular; her arms and body had neither the grace of a girl nor the curves of a woman; they were simply lean and long. There was something of loftiness, and even of beauty, in the face, but the cheeks were hollow, the lines all lacking in softness. The ensemble was grave and strenuous for a girl of eighteen.

She began again.

“I was nailing up that box of books, you remember. I thought now, you know, I ought to do it.”

Something like a groan seemed to float up from the darkness below. There was no other reply for a moment, and then the father’s voice said slowly:—

“To take back later such an action is a greater violation of the moral nature than to avoid performing it. If it has been given you as duty, it is well done, but be very sure.”

A smile, brooding, and even sad, altered the girl’s face as she reflected for a little.

“I am very sure,” she said softly, but without hesitation.

“Then, good night. Sleep, now. Let to-morrow take thought for the things of itself, Anna.”

“Good night, father.” The little lingering of her voice on the last word gave to it the force of a term of endearment, which it would not have occurred to Anna Mallison at that time to add.

A door closed below, presently, and the house was still.

The garret extended over the entire house, and its unlighted spaces seemed to stretch indefinitely on all sides from the little circle of light shed by the one candle. The place was wholly open, save that at the front gable, below the highest point in the peak of the roof, a partition of planed but unpainted boards enclosed a small chamber. The narrow door of it stood open.

As Anna approached this door she cast her glance to a far, dim corner, where in stiff order a wooden box of moderate size stood upon a chest. She crossed to the place, passed her hand over the lid of this box, satisfied herself that it was firmly and evenly fastened, and then gathered up some nails and a hammer, which she put away on the ledge formed by a square, projecting rafter. This accomplished, she came back and entered the chamber, which was sparely enough furnished, undressed, put out her candle, and sat down in the open gable window.

Even if to-morrow were left to take thought for the things of itself, there were many yesterdays which she wished to meet to-night. And for that to-morrow,—she was hardly ready to leave all thought of it yet, for she regarded it as the most solemn and important crisis in her eighteen years of life. On the Sabbath, which a few hours would bring, she was to be received into the village church of which her father was pastor, and this event would signify that all her previous existence, the time past of her life, was a closed and finished chapter, and that henceforth all things were to become new. Life was to be furnished now with new pleasures, new pains, new motives, new mental occupations. A somewhat sterner and sadder life she fancied it, full of self-examination, sacrifice, and high endeavour, for she felt it must suffice her to have wrought her own will in the past, “the will of the flesh,” as her father and the Apostle Paul termed it; a phrase which had but a vague import to her own understanding, and yet exerted a powerful influence upon her conscience.

To her mind there was an intimate connection between that now sealed box and “the will of the flesh.”

It was when she was fifteen years old that Anna had discovered one day among the ranks of chests and trunks which lined the outer stretches of the garret, this small box of books, thickly covered with dust. At first she had been greatly surprised, since books were the things her father most earnestly desired and needed, his scanty collection being quite insufficient for his use, and being helped out by no village library. Every book in the house had borne to Anna’s imagination a potent dignity and value, for each one embodied a persistent need, and represented an almost severe economy before its possession had been achieved.

And here were nearly thirty respectably bound volumes packed away for moth and dust alone to live upon—what could it mean? Had they been forgotten? Anna had devoured their titles with consuming wonder and curiosity, and with the ardour of the instinctive book-lover. Like Aurora Leigh, she had “found the secret of a garret room.”

There was a volume of Ossian,—heroic, sounding words caught her eye as she turned the rough, yellow leaves; Landor’s “Hellenics and Idylls”; a copy bound in marred, brown leather of Pope’s translation of the “Iliad,” published, she noted, in 1806, almost fifty years before she was born; the poems of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and of the earlier American poets; and a thin gilded volume of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence.”

Besides these were worn volumes of Plato, of Greek and Latin poets, and German editions of Faust and Nathan der Weise. At the bottom of the box Anna found a faded commonplace book with her father’s name inscribed on the first page, and the date 1840. It contained translations of Greek poetry which she supposed to have been made by her father, although of this she was not sure. She did not read them, for she felt that she had no right to explore anything so personal without his permission. This scruple, however, did not extend to the books which filled the box, although Anna felt rather than understood that they had not been packed away together thus by accident, or left by forgetfulness. She perceived that they denoted some decisive experience in her father’s inner life, that spiritual personality of the man, which possessed to the young girl’s thought an august and even mysterious sacredness.

Whatever these books had meant to him, and for whatever reason they had been exiled from his meagre library, they became to his daughter the most brilliant and alluring feature of a somewhat colourless girlhood, the charm of them enhanced by secrecy; for, with the reticence characteristic of the family life, Anna never alluded to her discovery. Neither did she ever remove these literary remains from their seclusion in the garret; this would have seemed an act of violence, but around the box which held them she formed a kind of enclosing barricade of chests and old furniture. The little nook thus formed she regarded as her place of refuge, of private and unguessed delight. A candle at night, and rays of light piercing the wide cracks under the eaves by day, made reading easy to her clear young eyes, even in the dust and dusk of the dim place. And so for two years, through biting cold and searing heat, Anna fed her mind and heart on the poetry which had ruled her father’s generation, unknown and unsanctioned by any one. Then one day came a strange event; she never recalled it without a sense of unshed tears.

It was late one August afternoon, and, her day’s work faithfully performed, Anna had gone up to her garret room to make her simple toilet for the evening meal. There were a few moments to spare, and, as usual, she hastened to her nook, and was soon deep in Prometheus, for Shelley just then controlled her imagination. Her father came into the garret behind her, a very unwonted thing, and Anna heard the sharp, scraping sound as he drew out from the recesses where it had stood for years, a small, brown, hair-covered trunk, studded with brass nails, forming the initials S. D. M. It had been his own during his college days, and had seen but little service since. One of Anna’s brothers was to start for college in a day or two, and the old trunk was to serve a second generation in its quest for learning.

Startled by the unusual noise, Anna rose in her place, and, seeing her father, spoke to him, whereupon he crossed the garret to where she stood; a small, thin man, bent a little, with a pale brown skin, prominent eyes, and a dome-shaped head, the hair thin on the crown even to baldness, but soft and silken and long enough behind the ears to show its tendency to curl.

“What have you there, Anna?” Samuel Mallison had asked, peering with short-sighted, searching eyes between the bars of a battered crib which Anna had used as a part of her wall of partition.

“Poetry, father,” she had replied, handing him the book with eager, innocent enthusiasm; “oh, it is very beautiful! I love it so.”

Her father, looking at the book, flushed strangely, and a sudden, indescribable change passed over his face. Pushing aside the rubbish which separated him from Anna, he was immediately at her side, and in silence had bent over the box. He had drawn it nearer the light, and seemed looking on the side for some sign or inscription. There was a piercing eagerness in his eyes. Then Anna had noticed what had escaped her hitherto, the initials, S. D. M., followed by the reference, Matthew v. 29, and the date, 1848, written in ink on the lower corner, dim with dust stains and faded with the processes of time.

Still her father had not spoken, but, sitting down on a chest, he had bent over the box, and had drawn from it one after the other the buried books, with a hand as gentle as if he were touching the tokens of a dead love. Anna had stood aside, silent and abashed, a strange tightening sensation in her throat. Her father seemed to have forgotten her. At last he had reached the old commonplace book underneath all. The flush on his face had deepened, and Anna had thought there were tears in his eyes as he glanced rapidly over its yellowed pages, with the verses in fine, stiff writing and faded ink. Then he had closed the book with a long sigh, had laid it carefully back in its place, and rising, had walked up and down in the low garret for many minutes in some evident agitation.

A sense of guilt and apprehension had fallen upon Anna in her perplexity, but when, in the end, he had come and stood beside her, there was a great gentleness on his face.

“And so you love those books, my child?” he had asked her briefly.

“Yes, father.”

“I understand. I loved them, but I gave them up—twenty years ago, almost. They became a snare.” He had been, then, silent a moment, while a peculiar conflict of thought was reflected in his face. “Yes,” he continued, as if convinced of something called in doubt, “they became a snare—to me—but for you I cannot decide. It may not be for you to drink of my cup. Who knows?” and with that he had turned and left her, and left the garret, the trunk forgotten; and Anna had laid the books back, soberly and with a great heartache, almost as if she were laying dust dear and sacred in its coffin.

The matter had never been alluded to again between the father and daughter, but Anna knew that she was free to read, and so read on. And still her unalloyed happiness in her hidden treasure was gone. A question, a suspicion, a disturbing doubt, was now attached to it. It was not wrong to read this poetry, but plainly there was a more excellent way, a higher ground which her father had reached, and which, with her inborn passion for perfection, she, too, must some day attain. Slowly and silently this conviction matured within her.

And so to-night, on the eve of her day of supreme consecration, Anna, in her turn, had buried out of her sight, as her father had before her, the poetry into which she had been pouring her young awakening life, silently and secretly, but with a fervour which the reader of many books can never know. They had spoken to her in mighty voices, these great spirits, so free, joyous, and mysterious in their power; but they were not the voice of God, and therefore she must listen to them no more. This had been a tree of life to her, but its fruit was forbidden. The axe must thenceforth be laid unflinchingly at the root of the tree. Such was the initial impulse, single, stern, and absolute, of Anna’s awakening religious nature.

Theologians in the sixties did not talk of the immanence of God.