Читать книгу The Gayworthys - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney - Страница 10

Stacy Lawton bade Mrs. Fairbrother a cordial good-by at the Parsonage door; and even bestowed a sudden kiss upon Malviny, who, glancing up in surprised inquiry as it descended, received it upon the snubby end of her little, freckled nose. Then, hastily, she held out a hand to Gordon King.

"Good-night. I'm so much obliged. No, indeed, you mustn't come a step further. I shan't be a bit afraid, now." And, as if she were very honestly in earnest, she turned away, quickly, before the young minister could reply, and took the start of him, resolutely, up the road. How much of this haste and determination might have been accounted for by a glimpse she got of Newell Gibson coming around the corner of the cross-road at the bottom of the hill, and the perception that his approach might presently do away with the necessity for any persistence on the minister's part, I really do not know, and being simple-minded and charitable myself, will not attempt to conjecture; but of course, Gordon King did persist, and follow and join the self-willed damsel, whose trim little figure moved off so prettily and positively before him, in the moonlight, over the long, steep slope.

Newell Gibson knew better than to overtake them. Besides, he had his own thoughts to-night, that lingered pleasantly around the little brown house whence he had just come, down there in the cross-road under the hill. He, too, had been to see somebody home.

"You needn't have come," said Stacy to Gordon King, as he reached her side. "It's as bright as day. Doesn't the moonlight make everything look beautiful?" And she swung by the strings, as she spoke, her muslin cape-bonnet, needless since the summer sun went down, and turned her bright face toward him, above which the night-gleam touched and crowned the full, graceful folds of her uncovered hair. Truly, he thought so, then.

"It's a glorious night," he answered. "It seems a wonder that we can shut our doors, or our eyes, at all."

"I like moonlight," said Stacy. "But the stars seem awful when the sky is full of them. I remember the first time I ever saw them so. I was so frightened. It was when I was a very little girl, and grandma took me out one night to an evening meeting. I had never been kept up so late before; and coming home, they blazed down, so bright and thick! I thought the Day of Judgment was come."

That word of Stacy's changed the tone between them. It pierced the surface, and went down, however heedlessly, into the deeps that lay beneath.

Gordon King believed in his solemn office, and in the things it handled. He gave no look at the pretty face, for a moment. He felt a soul beside him that had trembled at the Judgment.

"You are not afraid in the starlight, now?" This he said, inquiringly, meaningly. After the little pause wherein the thought-current of each had shifted.

They stood, at this moment, on the brow of the long hill. They stopped, involuntarily. Below, lay such a scene as lies, I suppose, hardly anywhere, out of New England. Among abrupt and picturesque heights, whose nearer wooded slopes were thinned and smoothed by cultivation, yet whose far horizon lines bristled everywhere with piney forests, untouched, unthrid; set in the center of the great landscape,—held so in the scoop of the hills as almost in the hollow of an Almighty Hand,—the few white farmhouses that made up this little neighborhood in which was Stacy's home, clustered peacefully, and lay still in the moonlight around Gibson's Pond. So the country people had christened, in their homely, practical fashion, a great, glorious sheet of water that flashed up, now, its flood of silver, meeting and overbrooded by the more ethereal firmamental flood of light, that poured itself down, and rolled and gathered, as it were, in a huge chalice, against these steeps that held it in. A lake, which,—but that Hilbury pond was larger, and Deepwater larger yet, and that every village, almost, had one, greater or less, of its own, between this and the low lands of the sea-coast, where the great cities buzzed and grew,—might have had a name of music and grandeur, and held itself serenely here, in a royalty of beauty, to touch the border of whose robe men might make weary pilgrimage.

"Yes," said Stacy, falteringly, as they looked down on this together, "I am afraid. I am not good."

If there were art in this, it was the instinctive art whereby one soul draws itself toward the recognized and higher sphere of another. The child bethought herself of her soul at that moment. When the heart is stirred, if it lie at any depth at all, that which sleeps beneath must feel the thrill. She believed that he who stood beside her in this glory of the summer night, had a title to come closer to the spirit of it all, than she. In the one great over-shadowing beauty she forgot, for a moment, the little coquetries of her own.

Now that it has come to this, you, Rebecca,—saying, "Thy Will be done" in your chamber, that is like a shrine for the purity of the thought and act it witnesses, and only half glancing, in your secret maidenly soul, at what might befall, to make that Will seem earthly-bitter, may school and strengthen yourself as you can, to bear and to do without. Since Adam followed his erring wife out of Paradise,—dearer to him, doubtless, then when he began to have pity for and patience with her, than when she came to him, faultless, from the hand of God,—there has been more hope, as to the love of man, for the sinning little Eves with the taste and perfume of the world's apple yet clinging to their lips, than for such as you. You are too far above him in your saintliness. You, who do not tremble at the stars, but who bend ever, in a sweet and holy awe, before their Maker,—who need no more the tears of a passionate penitence, because, in your noiseless life, you do daily the work that is given, and feel daily the patience that forgives your shortcomings,—you may not rival with the spiritual, any more than with the earthly witcheries of the pretty unregenerate, who needs yet something done for her; who leans toward a human help; who whispers with a new-born anxiety of her soul and of her sins.

Besides, any sort of professional dealing of man toward woman, where there is beforehand the faintest incipience of tender thought, is tolerably sure to do the business for them both. There is a sentiment in the one which loves to approach, shyly, the mystery of the other's strength and wisdom; there is a pride and chivalry in the other which is stirred pleasantly in the consciousness of extending help or protection. It is the very soul of the whole relation between the two.

"I think you will be," said Gordon King, presently, with a gentleness; and the thought of what she might be—of what he might see her, perhaps help her, to become—was more to him than all the beautiful attainment elsewhere. It was only human. One loves better the slip of green one cherishes in the rooting, than the fair, strong, perfect plant that flowers already without one's help.

So they walked on together, down the hill, in that light of sky and water. Two or three minutes more brought them to Squire Lawton's gateway.

"I think you will be," repeated Gordon King, as their hands met upon the latch, and he held his companion's, for an instant, with a friendly clasp.

And Stacy thought, very honestly, that she would.