XLI.
In the winter of 1838-9, Adèle, much to the delight of Dr. Johns, avowed at last her wish to join herself to the little church-flock over which the good parson still held serenely his office of shepherd. And as she told him quietly of her desire, sitting before him there in the study of the parsonage, without urgence upon his part, it was as if a bright gleam of sunshine had darted suddenly through the wintry clouds, and bathed both of them in its warm effulgence. The good man, rising from his chair and crossing over to her place, touched her forehead with as tender and loving a kiss as ever he had bestowed upon the lost Rachel.
He had seen too closely the development of her Christian faith to disturb her with various questionings. She rejoiced in this; for even then, with all the calm serenity of her trust, it was doubtful if her answers could have fully satisfied the austerities of his theological traditions. Nay, she doubted, even, if the exuberance of her spirits would not sometimes, in days to come, bound over the formalities of his Sunday observance, and startle a corrective glance; but withal she knew her trust was firm, and on this had full repose. Even the little rosary, so obnoxious to the household of the parsonage, was, by its terrible association with the death-scene of Madame Arles, endeared to her tenfold; and she could not forbear the hope that the poor woman, at the very last, by that clinging kiss upon the image of Christ, told a prayer that might give access to His abounding mercy.
Nor did Adèle seek to comprehend in their entireness all those wearisome dogmatic utterances which were familiar to her tongue, and which she could understand might form the steps to fulness of belief for the rigorous mind of the Doctor: for herself there was other ladder of approach, in finding which the emotional experiences of Reuben had been of such signal service.
To Reuben himself those experiences, brought a temporary exhilaration, but as yet no peace. He has a vague notion creeping over him, with fearfully chilling effect, that his sensibilities have been wrought upon rather than his reason; a confused sense of having yielded to enthusiasms, which, if they once grow cool, will leave him to slump back into a mire worse than the old. Therefore he must, by all possible means, keep them at fever-heat. A dim consciousness, however, possessed him, that, for the feeding of the necessary fires, there would be needed an immense consumption of fuel,—such stock as an ordinary experience could hardly hope to supply. By degrees, this consciousness took the force of conviction, and he became painfully sensible of his own limitations. There was a weary, matter-of-fact world to struggle with, in whose homely cares and interests he must needs be a partner. He could not wear the gyves of a Gabriel on the muddy streets of life, or carry the ecstatic language of praise into the world's talk: if he could, he would be reckoned insane, and not unjustly, since sanity is, after all, but a term to express the average normal condition of mind. He looked with something like envy upon the serene contentment of Adèle. He lived like an ascetic; he sought, by reading of all manner of exultant religious experience, to keep alive the ferment of the autumn. "If only death were near," he said to himself, "with what a blaze of hope one might go out!" But death was not near,—or, at least, life and its perplexing duties were nearer. The intensity of his convictions somehow faded, and they lost their gorgeous hue, under the calm doctrinal sermons of the parson. If the glory of the promises and the tenderness of Divine entreaty were to be always dropping mellifluously on his ear, as upon that solemn Sunday of the summer, it might be well. But it is not thus; and even were the severe quiet of the Ashfield Sundays lighted up by the swift and burning words of such fiery evangelism, yet six solid working-days roll over upon the heel of every Sunday,—in which he sees good Deacon Tourtelot in shirt-sleeves driving some sharp bargain for his two-year-old steers, or the stout Dame hectoring some stray peddler by the hour for the fall of a penny upon his wares, and wonders where their Christian largeness of soul is gone. Is the matter real to him? And if real, where is the peace? Shall he consult the good Doctor? He is met straightway with an array of the old catechismal formulas, clearly stated, well argued, but brushing athwart his mind like a dusty wind. The traditional dislikes of his boyhood have armed him against all such, cap-à-pie. In this strait, he wanders over the hills in search of loneliness, and a volume of Tillotson he carries with him is all unread. Nature speaks more winningly, but scarce more helpfully.
Adèle, with a quick eye, sees the growing unrest, and, with a great weight of gratitude upon her heart, says, timidly,—
"Can I help you, Reuben?"
"No, thank you, Adèle. I understand you; I'm in a boggle,—that's all."
The father, too, at a hint from Adèle, (whose perceptions are so much quicker,) sees at last how the matter stands.
"Reuben," he says, "these struggles of yours are struggles with the Great Adversary of Souls. I trust, my son, you will not allow him to have the mastery."
It was kindly said and earnestly said, but touched the core of the son's moral disquietude no more than if it were the hooting of an owl. Yet, for all this, Reuben makes a brave struggle to wear with an outward calm the burden of the professions he has made,—a terrible burden, when he finds what awful chasms in his faith have been overleaped by his vaulting Quixotic fervor. Wearily he labors to bridge them across, with over-much reading, there in the quiet study of the parsonage, of Newton and Tillotson and Butler; and he takes a grim pleasure (that does not help him) in following the amiable argumentation of Paley. It pains him grievously to think what humiliation would possess the old Doctor, if he but knew into what crazy currents his boy's thoughts were drifting over the pages of his beloved teachers. But a man cannot live a deceit, even for charity's sake, without its making outburst some day, and wrecking all the fine preventive barriers which kept it in.
The outburst came at last in the quiet of the Ashfield study, Reuben had been poring for hours—how wearily! how vainly!—over the turgid dogmas of one of the elder divines, when he suddenly dashed the book upon the floor.
"Confound the theologies! I'll have no more of them!"
The Doctor dropped his pen, and stared as if a serpent had stung him.
"My son! Reuben! Reuben!"
It was not so much the expression that had shocked him, as it was the action and the defiance in his eye.
"I can't help it, father. It's the Evil One, perhaps. If it be, I'll cheat him, by making a clean breast of it. I can't abide the stuff; I can't see my way through it."
"My son, it is your sin that blinds you."
"Very likely," says Reuben.
"It was not thus with you three months ago, Reuben," continues the Doctor, in a softened tone.
"No, father, there was a strange light around me in those days. It seemed to me that the path lay clear and shining through all the maze. If Death had caught me then, I think I could have sung hosannas with the saints. It was a beautiful dream. It's faded dismally, father,—as if the Devil had painted it."
The old man shuddered, and lifted his hands, as he was wont to do in his most earnest pleas at the Throne of Grace.
"The muddle of the world and the theologies has come in since," continued Reuben, "and the base professions I see around me, and the hypocrisies and the cant, have taken away the glow. It's all a weariness and a confusion, and that's the solemn truth."
The Doctor said, measuredly, (as if the Book were before him,)—
"'Some seeds fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.' Reuben! Reuben! we must agonize to enter into the strait gate!"
"It's a long agony," said Reuben; and he rose and paced back and forth for a time; then suddenly stopping before the Doctor, he laid his hand upon his shoulder, (the boy was of manly height now, and overtopped the old gentleman by an inch,)—"Father, it grieves me to pain you,—indeed it does; but truth is truth. I have told you my story; but if you wish it, I will live outwardly as if no such talk had passed. I will respect as much as ever all your religious observances, and no person shall be the wiser."
"I would not have you practise hypocrisy, my son; but I would not have you withdraw yourself from any of the appointed means of grace."
And at this Reuben went out,—out far upon the hills, from which he saw the village roofs, and the spire, and the naked tree-tops, the fields all bare and brown, the smoke of a near house curling lazily into the sky; and the only sound that broke the solemn stillness was the drumming of a partridge in the woods or the harsh scream of a belated jay.
Never had Reuben been more kind or attentive to the personal wants of the old gentleman than on the days which followed upon this interview. There was something almost like a daughter's solicitude in his watchfulness. On the next Sunday the Doctor preached with an emotion that was but poorly controlled, and which greatly mystified his people. Twice in the afternoon his voice came near to failing. Reuben knew where the grief lay, but wore a composed face; and as he supported the old gentleman home after service, he said, (but not so loudly that Adèle could hear, who was tripping closely behind,)—
"Father, I grieve for you,—upon my soul I do; but it's fate."
"Fate, Reuben?" said the Doctor, but with a less guarded voice,—"fate? God only is fate!"
The Doctor was too much mortified by this revelation of Reuben's present state of feeling to make it the subject of conversation, even with Miss Eliza, and much less with the elders of his flock. To Squire Elderkin, indeed, whose shrewd common-sense he had learned to value even in its bearings upon the "weightier matters of the law," he had dropped some desponding reflections in regard to the wilful impetuosity of his poor son Reuben, from which the shrewd Squire at once suspected the difficulty.
"It's the blood of the old Major," he said. "Let it work, Doctor, let it work!"
From which observation, it must be confessed, the good man derived very little comfort.
Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidant in these latter secrets of the study, cannot, however, fail to see that Reuben's constancy to the Doctor's big folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under the reserve which had grown out of his later experiences. She has hopes from this—true to her keen worldly wisdom—that the abandoned career of the city may yet win his final decision. But her moral perceptions are not delicate enough to discover the great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from sharp sense of duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious reflections, which set his whole moral nature on edge. Nor is this the limit of her blindness: perceiving, as she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans with respect to himself and Adèle, she thinks to further the matter by dropping hints of the rare graces of Adèle and of her brilliant prospects,—assuring him how much that young lady's regard for him has been increased since his conversion, (which word has to Reuben just now a dreary and most detestable sound,) and in a way which she counts playful, but which to him is agaçant to the last degree, she forecasts the time when Reuben will have his pretty French wife, and a rich one.
Left to himself, the youth would very likely have found enough to admire in the face and figure and pleasantly subdued enthusiasm of Adèle; but the counter irritant of the spinster's speech drove him away on many an evening to the charming fireside of the Elderkins, where he spent not a few beguiling hours in listening to the talk of the motherly mistress of the household, and in watching the soft hazel eyes of Rose, as they lifted in eager wonderment at some of his stories of the town, or fell (the long lashes hiding them with other beauty) upon the work where her delicate fingers plied with a white swiftness that teased him into trains of thought which were not wholly French.
Adèle has taken a melancholy interest in decking the grave of the exiled lady, which she has insisted upon doing out of her own resources, and thus has doubled the little legacy which Madame Aries had left to the outcast woman and child with whom she had joined her fate, and who, with good reason, wept her death bitterly. Hour upon hour Adèle pondered over that tragic episode, tasking herself to imagine what message the dying woman could have had to communicate, and wondering if the future would ever clear up the mystery. To the good Doctor it seemed only a strange Providence, by which the religious convictions of Adèle should be deepened and made sure. And in no way were the results of those convictions more beautifully apparent than in the efforts of Adèle to overcome her antipathies to the spinster. It is doubtful, indeed, if a bolder challenge can be made to the Christian graces of any character whatever than that which demands the conquest of social prejudices which have grown into settled aversion. With all the stimulus of her new Christian endeavor, Adèle sought to think charitably of Miss Eliza. Yet it was hard; always, that occasional cold kiss of the spinster had for Adèle an iron imprint, which drove her warm blood away, instead of summoning it to response.
For her, Miss Eliza's staple praises of Reuben, and her adroit stories of the admiration and attachment of Mrs. Brindlock for her nephew, were distasteful to the last degree. Coarse natures never can learn upon what fine threads the souls of the sensitive are strung.
Adèle felt a tender gratitude toward Reuben, which it seemed to her the boisterous affection of the spinster could never approach. She apprehended his spiritual perplexities more keenly than the austere aunt, and saw with what strange ferment his whole nature was vexed. Had he been a brother by blood, she could not have felt for him more warmly. And if she ever allowed herself to guess at a nearer tie, it was not to Miss Eliza that she would have named the guess,—not even, thus far, to herself. As yet there was a soft fulness in her heart that felt no wound,—at least no wound in which her hope rankled. Whether Reuben were present or away, her songs rose, with a sweeter, a serener, and a loftier cheer than of old under the roof of the parsonage; and, as of old, the Doctor laid down his book and listened, as if an angel sang.