THE PACKET OF BELLA
I have not forgotten that packet of Bella; I did not once forget it. And when I saw Lilly—now the grown-up Lilly, happy in her household, and blithe as when she was a maiden—she gave it to me. She told me, too, of Bella’s illness, and of her suffering, and of her manner when she put the little packet in her hand “for Cousin Paul.” But this I will not repeat—I can not.
I know not why it was, but I shuddered at the mention of her name. There are some who will talk, at table and in their gossip, of dead friends; I wonder how they do it? For myself, when the grave has closed its gates on the faces of those I love—however busy my mournful thought may be—the tongue is silent. I can not name their names; it shocks me to hear them named. It seems like tearing open half-healed wounds, and disturbing with harsh, worldly noise the sweet sleep of death.
I loved Bella. I know not how I loved her—whether as a lover, or as a husband loves a wife; I only know this—I always loved her. She was so gentle—so beautiful—so confiding, that I never once thought but that the whole world loved her as well as I. There was only one thing I never told to Bella; I would tell her of all my grief, and of all my joys; I would tell her my hopes, my ambitious dreams, my disappointments, my anger, and my dislikes; but I never told her how much I loved her.
I do not know why, unless I knew that it was needless. But I should as soon have thought of telling Bella on some winter’s day—Bella, it is winter—or of whispering to her on some balmy day of August—Bella, it is summer—as of telling her, after she had grown to girlhood—Bella, I love you!
I had received one letter from her in the old countries; it was a sweet letter, in which she told me all that she had been doing, and how she had thought of me, when she rambled over the woods where we had rambled together. She had written two or three other letters, Lilly told me, but they had never reached me. I had told her, too, of all that made my happiness; I wrote her about the sweet girl I had seen on shipboard, and how I met her afterward, and what a happy time we passed down in Devon. I even told her of the strange dream I had, in which Isabel seemed to be in England, and to turn away from me sadly because I called—Carry.
I also told her of all I saw in that great world of Paris—writing as I would write to a sister; and I told her, too, of the sweet Roman girl, Enrica—of her brown hair, and of her rich eyes, and of her pretty Carnival dresses. And when I missed letter after letter I told her that she must still write her letters, or some little journal, and read it to me when I came back. I thought how pleasant it would be to sit under the trees by her father’s house and listen to her tender voice going through that record of her thoughts and fears. Alas, how our hopes betray us!
It began almost like a diary, about the time her father fell sick. “It is”—said she to Lilly, when she gave it to her, “what I would have said to Cousin Paul if he had been here.”
It begins:“—I have come back now to father’s house; I could not leave him alone, for they told me he was sick. I found him not well; he was very glad to see me, and kissed me so tenderly that I am sure, Cousin Paul, you would not have said, as you used to say, that he was a cold man! I sometimes read to him, sitting in the deep library window (you remember it), where we used to nestle out of his sight at dusk. He can not read any more.
“I would give anything to see the little Carry you speak of; but do you know you did not describe her to me at all; will you not tell me if she has dark hair, or light, or if her eyes are blue, or dark, like mine? Is she good; did she not make ugly speeches, or grow peevish, in those long days upon the ocean? How I would have liked to have been with you, on those clear starlit nights, looking off upon the water! But then I think that you would not have wished me there, and that you did not once think of me even. This makes me sad; yet I know not why it should; for I always liked you best, when you were happy; and I am sure you must have been happy then. You say you shall never see her after you have left the ship; you must not think so, cousin Paul; if she is so beautiful, and fond, as you tell me, your own heart will lead you in her way some time again; I feel almost sure of it.
* * * “Father is getting more and more feeble, and wandering in his mind; this is very dreadful; he calls me sometimes by my mother’s name; and when I say—it is Isabel—he says—what Isabel! and treats me as if I was a stranger. The physician shakes his head when I ask him of father; oh, Paul, if he should die—what could I do? I should die, too—I know I should. Who would there be to care for me? Lilly is married, and Ben is far off, and you, Paul, whom I love better than either, are a long way from me. But God is good, and He will spare my father.
* * * “So you have seen again your little Carry. I told you it would be so. You tell me how accidental it was; ah, Paul, Paul, you rogue, honest as you are, I half doubt you there! I like your description of her, too—dark eyes like mine, you say—’almost as pretty;’ well, Paul, I will forgive you that; it is only a white lie. You know they must be a great deal prettier than mine, or you would never have stayed a whole fortnight in an old farmer’s house far down in Devon! I wish I could see her; I wish she was here with you now; for it is midsummer, and the trees and flowers were never prettier. But I am all alone; father is too ill to go out at all. I fear now very much that he will never go out again. Lilly was here yesterday, but he did not know her. She read me your last letter; it was not so long as mine. You are very—very good to me, Paul.
* * * “For a long time I have written nothing; my father has been very ill, and the old housekeeper has been sick, too, and father would have no one but me near him. He can not live long. I feel sadly—miserably; you will not know me when you come home; your ‘pretty Bella’—as you used to call me—will have lost all her beauty. But perhaps you will not care for that, for you tell me you have found one prettier than ever. I do not know, Cousin Paul, but it is because I am so sad and selfish—for sorrow is selfish—but I do not like your raptures about the Roman girl. Be careful, Paul; I know your heart; it is quick and sensitive; and I dare say she is pretty and has beautiful eyes; for they tell me all the Italian girls have soft eyes.
“But Italy is far away, Paul; I can never see Enrica; she will never come here. No—no, remember Devon. I feel as if Carry was a sister now. I can not feel so of the Roman girl; I do not want to feel so. You will say this is harsh, and I am afraid you will not like me so well for it; but I can not help saying it. I love you too well, Cousin Paul, not to say it.
* * * “It is all over! Indeed, Paul, I am very desolate! ‘The golden bowl is broken’—my poor father has gone to his last home. I was expecting it; but how can we expect that fearful comer—death? He had been for a long time so feeble that he could scarce speak at all; he sat for hours in his chair, looking upon the fire or looking out at the window. He would hardly notice me when I came to change his pillows or to smooth them for his head. But before he died he knew me as well as ever. ‘Isabel,’ he said, ‘you have been a good daughter. God will reward you!’ and he kissed me so tenderly, and looked after me so anxiously, with such intelligence in his look that I thought perhaps he would revive again. In the evening he asked me for one of his books that he loved very much. ‘Father,’ said I, ‘you can not read; it is almost dark.’
“‘Oh, yes,’ said he, ‘Isabel, I can read now.’ And I brought it; he kept my hand a long while; then he opened the book—it was a book about death.
“I brought a candle, for I knew he could not read without.
“‘Isabel, dear,’ said he, ‘put the candle a little nearer.’ But it was close beside him even then.
“‘A little nearer, Isabel,’ repeated he, and his voice was very faint, and he grasped my hand hard.
—“‘Nearer, Isabel!—nearer!’
“There was no need to do it, for my poor father was dead! Oh! Paul, Paul!—pity me. I do not know but I am crazed. It does not seem the same world it was. And the house, and the trees, oh, they are very dismal!
“I wish you would come home, Cousin Paul; life would not be so very, very blank as it is now. Lilly is kind—I thank her from my heart. But it is not her father who is dead!
* * * “I am calmer now; I am staying with Lilly. The world seems smaller than it did; but heaven seems a great deal larger; there is a place for us all there, Paul—if we only seek it! They tell me you are coming home. I am glad. You will not like, perhaps, to come away from that pretty Enrica you speak of; but do so, Paul. It seems to me that I see clearer than I did, and I talk bolder. The girlish Isabel you will not find, for I am much older, and my air is more grave, and this suffering has made me feeble—very feeble.
* * * “It is not easy for me to write, but I must tell you that I have just found out who your Carry is. Years ago, when you were away from home, I was at school with her. We were always together. I wonder I could not have found her out from your description; but I did not even suspect it. She is a dear girl, and is worthy of all your love. I have seen her once since you have met her; we talked of you. She spoke kindly—very kindly; more than this I can not tell you, for I do not know more. Ah, Paul, may you be happy! I feel as if I had but a little while to live.
* * * “It is even so, my dear Cousin Paul—I shall write but little more; my hand trembles now. But I am ready. It is a glorious world beyond this—I know it is! And there we shall meet. I did hope to see you once again, and to hear your voice speaking to me as you used to speak. But I shall not. Life is too frail with me. I seem to live wholly now in the world where I am going—there is my mother, and my father, and my little brother—we shall meet—I know we shall meet!
* * * “The last—Paul. Never again in this world! I am happy—very happy. You will come to me. I can write no more. May good angels guard you, and bring you to Heaven!”
—Shall I go on?
But the toils of life are upon me. Private griefs do not break the force and the weight of the great—present. A life—at best the half of it, is before me. It is to be wrought out with nerve and work. And—blessed be God! there are gleams of sunlight upon it. That sweet Carry, doubly dear to me now that she is joined with my sorrow for the lost Isabel—shall be sought for!
And with her sweet image floating before me, the Noon wanes, and the shadows of Evening lengthen upon the land.
III
EVENING
The future is a great land; how the lights and the shadows throng over it—bright and dark, slow and swift! Pride and ambition build up great castles on its plains—great monuments on the mountains, that reach heavenward, and dip their tops in the blue of Eternity! Then comes an earthquake—the earthquake of disappointment, of distrust, or of inaction, and lays them low. Gaping desolation widens its breaches everywhere; the eye is full of them, and can see nothing beside. By and by the sun peeps forth—as now from behind yonder cloud—and reanimates the soul.
Fame beckons, sitting high in the heavens; and joy lends a halo to the vision. A thousand resolves stir your heart; your hand is hot and feverish for action; your brain works madly, and you snatch here and you snatch there, in the convulsive throes of your delirium. Perhaps you see some earnest, careful plodder, once far behind you, now toiling slowly but surely over the plain of life, until he seems near to grasping those brilliant phantoms which dance along the horizon of the future; and the sight stirs your soul to frenzy, and you bound on after him with the madness of a fever in your veins. But it was by no such action that the fortunate toiler has won his progress. His hand is steady, his brain is cool; his eye is fixed and sure.
The Future is a great land; a man can not go round it in a day; he can not measure it with a bound; he can not bind its harvests into a single sheaf. It is wider than the vision, and has no end.
Yet always, day by day, hour by hour, second by second, the hard present is elbowing us off into that great land of the future. Our souls, indeed, wander to it, as to a home-land; they run beyond time and space, beyond planets and suns, beyond far-off suns and comets, until, like blind flies, they are lost in the blaze of immensity, and can only grope their way back to our earth, and our time, by the cunning of instinct.
Cut out the future—even that little future which is the Evening of our life—and what a fall into vacuity. Forbid those earnest forays over the borders of Now, and on what spoils would the soul live?
For myself, I delight to wander there, and to weave every day the passing life into the coming life—so closely that I may be unconscious of the joining. And if so be that I am able, I would make the whole piece bear fair proportions and just figures—like those tapestries on which nuns work by inches and finish with their lives, or like those grand frescos which poet artists have wrought on the vaults of old cathedrals, gaunt and colossal—appearing mere daubs of carmine and azure, as they lay upon their backs, working out a hand’s breadth at a time—but when complete, showing symmetrical and glorious.
But not alone does the soul wander to those glittering heights where fame sits, with plumes waving in zephyrs of applause; there belong to it other appetities, which range wide and constantly over the broad future-land. We are not merely working, intellectual machines, but social puzzles, whose solution is the work of a life. Much as hope may mean toward the intoxicating joy of distinction, there is another leaning in the soul, deeper and stronger, toward those pleasures which the heart pants for, and in whose atmosphere the affections bloom and ripen.
The first may indeed be uppermost; it may be noisiest; it may drown with the clamor of midday the nicer sympathies. But all our day is not midday, and all our life is not noise. Silence is as strong as the soul; and there is no tempest so wild with blasts but has a wilder lull. There lies in the depth of every man’s soul a mine of affection, which from time to time will burn with the seething heat of a volcano and heave up lava-like monuments, through all the cold strata of his commoner nature.
One may hide his warmer feelings—he may paint them dimly—he may crowd them out of his sailing chart, where he only sets down the harbors for traffic; yet in his secret heart he will map out upon the great country of the Future fairy islands of love and of joy. There he will be sure to wander when his soul is lost in those quiet and hallowed hopes which take hold on heaven.
Love, only, unlocks the door upon that futurity where the isles of the blessed lie like stars. Affection is the stepping-stone to God. The heart is our only measure of infinitude. The mind tires with greatness; the heart—never. Thought is worried and weakened in its flight through the immensity of space; but love soars around the throne of the Highest, with added blessing and strength.
I know not how it may be with others, but with me the heart is a readier and quicker builder of those fabrics which strew the great country of the Future than the mind. They may not indeed rise so high as the dizzy pinnacles that ambition loves to rear; but they lie like fragrant islands in a sea whose ripple is a continuous melody.
And as I muse now, looking toward the Evening, which is already begun—tossed as I am with the toils of the past, and bewildered with the vexations of the present, my affections are the architect that build up the future refuge. And, in fancy at least, I will build it boldly—saddened, it may be, by the chance shadows of evening; but through all I will hope for a sunset, when the day ends, glorious with crimson and gold.
