The Minister's Wooing. Гарриет Бичер-Стоу

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СКАЧАТЬ it up all round; and I thought to myself that he’d better tell ’em to look at Mary Scudder, and they’d understand all about it. That was what I was thinking when you talked to me for looking at you in church instead of looking towards the pulpit. It really made me laugh in myself to see what a good little ignorant, unconscious way you had of looking up at the Doctor, as if he knew more about that than you did.

      ‘And now as to your Doctor that you think so much of, I like him for certain things, in certain ways. He is a great, grand, large pattern of a man—a man who isn’t afraid to think, and to speak anything he does think; but then I do believe, if he would take a voyage round the world in the forecastle of a whaler, he would know more about what to say to people than he does now; it would certainly give him several new points to be considered. Much of his preaching about men is as like live men as Chinese pictures of trees and rocks and gardens—no nearer the reality than that. All I can say is, “It isn’t so; and you’d know it, Sir, if you knew men.” He has got what they call a system—just so many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow to take in all I see in my wanderings round this world of ours. Nobody that has a soul, and goes round the world as I do, can help feeling it at times, and thinking, as he sees all the races of men and their ways, who made them, and what they were made for. To doubt the existence of a God seems to me like a want of common sense. There is a Maker and a Ruler, doubtless; but then, Mary, all this invisible world of religion is unreal to me. I can see we must be good, somehow—that if we are not, we shall not be happy here or hereafter. As to all the metaphysics of your good Doctor, you can’t tell how they tire me. I’m not the sort of person that they can touch. I must have real things—real people; abstractions are nothing to me. Then I think that he systematically contradicts on one Sunday what he preaches on another. One Sunday he tells us that God is the immediate efficient Author of every act of will; the next he tells us that we are entire free agents. I see no sense in it, and can’t take the trouble to put it together. But then he and you have something in you that I call religion—something that makes you good. When I see a man working away on an entirely honest, unworldly, disinterested pattern, as he does, and when I see you, Mary, as I said before, I should like at least to be as you are, whether I could believe as you do or not.

      ‘How could you so care for me, and waste on one so unworthy of you such love? Oh, Mary, some better man must win you; I never shall and never can;—but then you must not quite forget me; you must be my friend, my saint. If, through your prayers, your Bible, your friendship, you can bring me to your state, I am willing to be brought there—nay, desirous. God has put the key of my soul into your hands.

      ‘So, dear Mary, good-bye! Pray still for your naughty, loving

      ‘Cousin James.’

      Mary read this letter, and re-read it, with more pain than pleasure. To feel the immortality of a beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that its only communications with Heaven must be through us, is the most solemn and touching thought that can pervade a mind. It was without one particle of gratified vanity, with even a throb of pain, that she read such exalted praises of herself from one blind to the glories of a far higher loveliness.

      Yet was she at that moment, unknown to herself, one of the great company scattered through earth who are priests unto God—ministering between the Divine One, who has unveiled himself unto them, and those who as yet stand in the outer courts of the great sanctuary of truth and holiness. Many a heart, wrung, pierced, bleeding with the sins and sorrows of earth, longing to depart, stands in this mournful and beautiful ministry, but stands unconscious of the glory of the work in which it waits and suffers. God’s kings and priests are crowned with thorns, walking the earth with bleeding feet and comprehending not the work they are performing.

      Mary took from a drawer a small pocket-book, from which dropped a lock of black hair—a glossy curl, which seemed to have a sort of wicked, wilful life in every shining ring, just as she had often seen it shake naughtily on the owner’s head. She felt a strange tenderness towards the little wilful thing, and, as she leaned over it, made in her heart a thousand fond apologies for every fault and error.

      She was standing thus when Mrs. Scudder entered the room to see if her daughter had yet retired.

      ‘What are you doing there, Mary?’ she said, as her eye fell on the letter. ‘What is it you are reading?’

      Mary felt herself grow pale: it was the first time in her whole life that her mother had asked her a question that she was not from the heart ready to answer. Her loyalty to her only parent had gone on even-handed with that she gave to her God; she felt, somehow, that the revelations of that afternoon had opened a gulf between them, and the consciousness overpowered her.

      Mrs. Scudder was astonished at her evident embarrassment, her trembling, and paleness. She was a woman of prompt, imperative temperament, and the slightest hesitation in rendering to her a full, outspoken confidence had never before occurred in their intercourse. Her child was the core of her heart, the apple of her eye, and intense love is always near neighbour to anger; there was therefore an involuntary flash from her eye and a heightening of her colour, as she said—‘Mary, are you concealing anything from your mother?’

      In that moment Mary had grown calm again. The wonted serene, balanced nature had found its habitual poise, and she looked up innocently, though with tears in her large blue eyes, and said—‘No, mother—I have nothing that I do not mean to tell you fully. This letter came from James Marvyn; he came here to see me this afternoon.’

      ‘Here?—when? I did not see him.’

      ‘After dinner. I was sitting here in the window, and suddenly he came up behind me through the orchard-path.’

      Mrs. Katy sat down with a flushed cheek and a discomposed air; but Mary seemed actually to bear her down by the candid clearness of the large blue eye which she turned on her as she stood perfectly collected, with her deadly-pale face and a brilliant spot burning on each cheek.

      ‘James came to say good-bye. He complained that he had not had a chance to see me alone since he came home.’

      ‘And what should he want to see you alone for?’ said Mrs. Scudder, in a dry, disturbed tone.

      ‘Mother—everybody has things at times which they would like to say to some one person alone,’ said Mary.

      ‘Well, tell me what he said.’

      ‘I will try. In the first place he said that he always had been free, all his life, to run in and out of our house, and to wait on me like a brother.’

      ‘Hum!’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘but he isn’t your brother for all that.’

      ‘Well, then he wanted to know why you were so cold to him, and why you never let him walk with me from meetings, or see me alone as we often used to. And I told him why—that we were not children now, and that you thought it was not best; and then I talked with him about religion, and tried to persuade him to attend to the concerns of his soul; and I never felt so much hope for him as I do now.’

      Aunt Katy looked sceptical, and remarked—‘If he really felt a disposition for religious instruction, Dr. H. could guide him much better than you could.’

      ‘Yes—so I told him, and I tried to persuade him to talk with Dr. H.; but he was very unwilling. He said, I could have more influence over him than anybody else—that nobody could do him any good but me.’

      ‘Yes, yes—I understand all that,’ said Aunt Katy—‘I have heard young men say that before, and I know just what it amounts to.’

      ‘But, СКАЧАТЬ