GRACE SEYMOUR'S MISSION.
In a small village of New England, elm-shaded and far from the resorts of travellers, there lived, a great many years ago, two people in easy circumstances, the owners of a lovely cottage—a father and his only daughter.
They were well descended, and fully showed it; moreover, the girl's mother had been an Englishwoman of high birth, the daughter of a great house which, in the past, had also been allied to that of the man she married. Edward Seymour had once been the pastor and the favorite of the village of Walcot, an upright, believing, uncompromising Calvinist, a kind of Cromwell with all the ambition turned heavenwards, and all the hardness tempered by a warm, generous nature. His wife also had been a vigorous believer in the same theology. Sprung from a family noted for its "Low Church" views in England, she had been strongly interested in the narrative of the American missionary, in the days when he, fresh from the university, and filled with vehement but practical enthusiasm, had gone to the "mother country" on a tour of alms-asking and receiving. From interest sprang attraction; then love, with its impulsive and whole-hearted logic, rushed in and pleaded the cause of the disciple with that of the religion, and suggested forcibly that a fortune thrown at the feet of the minister would eventually find its way to the feet of God. Sweet argument of the heart! though in this case an argument misapplied.
So it fell out that, despite warnings and shakings of heads and holding up of hands, Elizabeth Howard and her fortune (not a princely one, though) crossed the seas, and Edward Seymour presented a fair young foreign enthusiast to his congregation as his beloved and hard-won bride, under the fire of a rude battery of eyes belonging to the startled maidens whose charms had long since (in their own individual minds, at least) been destined for the minister's solace and support. She won her way into the hearts of all, this young English Calvinist, full of pure-hearted sincerity, gentle yet steadfast as "Priscilla, the Puritan maiden," courageous in self-denial that the poor might profit by her privations, a confidant the most unhappy ever found sympathetic, and the most guilty, indulgent. Her husband used to say of her that the Scriptures had never received a more fitting and perfect fulfilment, a more ideal accomplishment of true womanhood, as set forth in the many sentences where wise and holy women are depicted, than Elizabeth had proved herself to be.
In household matters she was no less at home than in those graver concerns of the parish and the soul-life of her husband's spiritual people. A good deal of the old earnestness regarding religious truth remained in the little favored community of Walcot, and serious, intelligent investigation was one of the many sturdy though reverential habits of thought that yet lingered with these world-forgotten villages. To Seymour himself the place was a paradise; the work was not such as to overtax his bodily strength to that degree that leaves but little energy for the intellectual requirements of his calling; neither was the stress upon his imagination so unwholesomely great as it is with too many of his successors, whose brain, in order to froth up according to their Sunday audience's expectations, must be in a moral ferment for the previous six days of the week. His wife, no frivolous gossip to whom tea and petty scandal are dear, no mere drudge from whom household cares have worn away the bloom of poetry and the freshness of early enthusiasm, was to him a living guide, a true helpmate, bearing his burdens and sharing his joys, a gospel-law written in sweetest, most natural human characters, and a most winning, womanly embodiment of the stern and glorious word "Excelsior."
Was it a reward for her many virtues, or a trial for his strong and faithful nature, that God should call her hence, and close the book abruptly which had been to her husband a living commentary on the divine law? Yet it happened so, but not at the outset of their purified love-career; for when Elizabeth Seymour came to die, she saw not only her husband near her, with faith subduing sorrow in his inspired eyes, but two children, one a girl of fifteen, the other a boy of four years, the only ones she had had, but upon whom she had lavished the holy mother-love that would have been intense still for each had her children numbered as many as the sons of Jacob.
Grace—she had been called so because it was through earnest prayer alone that her mother had survived her birth—was holding her father's hand, while his other one and her own were clasped in the dying woman's wasted fingers; and as the little one at her feet pulled unconsciously at her long dress, she felt her heart throb strangely, solemnly, when her mother said:
"Grace, I leave you my place; be a helpmate to your father, be a mother to little George. Bring him up a brave, Christian man, like his father—like my father, for whom he is named. Never let him do wrong, though the greatest worldly advantages might be the result. Remember that, my child; offer your life to the Lord sooner than see your brother offend him. God bless you, my precious Grace!"
The sick woman turned her longing eyes earnestly upon her husband, and he, half kneeling, sank on the floor, and supported her head on his shoulder. The burden was featherlight, but the strong man shook and swayed as in mortal weakness, and his voice was low and broken. Grace took the child's hand, and turned away. Those last moments were too sacred even for a daughter's eye to gaze upon; angels alone listened to the secret heart-speech of those two, whose lives had been as the two strands of one rope. They had been all in all to each other. The husband's love, if the greatest, had not been the less faithful; but the burden was now for him, the reward for her. Strange dispensation—and yet one that no lover would alter if he could—that the deepest love should be but an earnest of the deepest suffering; that the higher the heart goes in its sublime learning, the greater should be its privilege of agony. And yet this thorny path is a very Via Triumphalis, and those who tread it would not give one drop of the royal purple that dyes their weary feet for all the kingly mantles of rare and costly hue that grace the throne of the earthly monarch or strew the path of the earthly victor. Edward Seymour had a double right to this brotherhood of sublimest sorrow; for in his heart his love had grown so strong that not once, but many times, it had held unholy struggles with the higher, wider Love, to whom he had vowed himself from his childhood, and he had had to wrestle mightily with its strength, and had only overcome because, after all, the enemy he fought was human, and the weapons he used were of God's eternal fashioning. In Elizabeth's calmer, more even nature, love had never risen to that height; it had flowed a tranquil stream in the channel of duty, and, if deep, had never been turbulent. The trial had never come to her which had threatened shipwreck to her husband; she had never even known of it, for it had been the one secret of his frank and pure life. The awful moment came at last; Grace and little George had come nearer again, and all three said afterwards that "Jesus" was the last sound that passed the dying woman's lips. For a few minutes a trembling stillness reigned; it was as if those left behind were listening to the feet of the bearer-angels that had come to carry their mate away. Could they but have listened at the same time to the wondrous revelation of lightning-like truth that flashed from those angels' solemn eyes, and transformed the blind belief of the living woman into the exultant faith of the heaven-illumined Catholic! Strange and awful thought! that those from whose mortal sight the scales have only just been taken by death should, on the instant, enter into such communion with the unknown, unsuspected truth, and be borne so far deeper in its blessed knowledge than those who spend lives of long and humble search on earth. Elizabeth Seymour knew now where truth had always been, and yet she must look with spirit-eyes on her loved ones bending over her beautiful, senseless body, all unconscious of that truth, all unknowing of their dark and dangerous pathway. Would her agonized prayers ever bring them to her new resting-place? Would God ever allow them to join her in the other world? And meanwhile, the minister, with his dear burden still in his clasped arms, lifted his head, and poured forth a prayer into which his very life was breathed, ending with a passionate flinging of his whole nature into the bosom of the all-knowing, all-loving Father—"Thy will be done, not mine!"
As he lifted the inanimate form gently on the pillows, closed the eyes, and pressed a kiss of all but despairing grief upon the white, warm forehead of the lost one, his daughter, letting the child go, seized his hand, and pressed it to her bosom, kissing it passionately, as if, from the very instant of her mother's departure, she was taking possession of the precious trust made over to her on the same spot only a few short moments before.
He, ever mindful of others before himself, felt his child's signal, and pressed her hand in return, leading her gently from the room, while the old nurse, his wife's attendant from her early childhood by the sunny brooks and fragrant meadows of Gloucestershire, performed the last necessary duties towards the loved remains.
Day after day the dead lay in a darkened room, with flower-wreaths framing her simple coffin, a queen in death as she had been in life, with a touching court about her of widows and orphans, of mourners comforted, of children and old men, of strong young laborers whose minds she had turned soul-wards, and whose reverence for her had been little less than that—so misconstrued by those very men—of Catholics for a patron saint. At night, when the stream of villagers would cease, the husband and the daughter watched hand-in-hand by the one they could not think of as really gone from them while her sleeping form lay so near their own resting-place. Now and then the minister would say a few words, half in soliloquy, half to his companion, and she, with her clear, pitying gray eyes upturned, would look at him in dumb sympathy, and a pang would shoot through his heart, as he read the mother's expression in the daughter's face. They renewed the flowers and rearranged the internal draperies of the coffin; they spoke in whispers, as one does in a sick-room, fearing to wake the happy dreamer whom the first sleep has just come to relieve from a load of burning pain and constant restlessness; little George was even allowed to bring his quiet toys, and crawl over the floor round the strange bed where he was told his mother was sleeping—at first sight of the coffin, he had asked gravely, Was that a cradle, and had a new baby come to play with him?—and, in a word, the death-veiled chamber seemed more like home than any other part of the cottage. Then came the last day, and the lid was to be fastened over the white-robed, white-crowned sleeper. Grace brought her father a bunch of heliotrope to lay in her mother's hands; it had been her own and her husband's favorite flower in life; and just over her heart, together with a heart-shaped paper, on which the name "Jesus" was illuminated in red and gold, was placed a triple tress of hair, and attached to it a scroll with the names of "Edward—Grace—George." Thus something living, something of her earthly treasures, went down with her to the tomb; and on the day of the great awakening, who shall say that those tokens will not make the wife and mother's heart throb with a deeper joy, as she rouses herself to meet those whose last pledge of undying love she will find thus laid on her breast?
Slowly the procession moved to the meeting-house, and slowly on to the churchyard; a neighboring minister performed the simple service, and the three bereaved ones walked immediately behind the coffin. The villagers were more awed by the face of the husband than by the black-palled coffin of the wife; and some one remarked, "It was more as if the minister had been walking between two angels to the judgment-seat of the Almighty than as if, a father and a widower, he was leading his orphan children to a new-made grave."
The silent cottage, buried under its wealth of flowering creepers, seemed very cold and desolate when the mourners returned; tea was laid in the cosey library, the blinds were drawn up, and the little birds twittered in the veranda; everything was ordinary and as usual again, the same it had been just one week ago, the day before she died; but it seemed so different! Mr. Seymour threw himself in an arm-chair by the window, and took up a paper-knife mechanically; little George had been taken up-stairs, and the third chair at the tea-table was for the kind clergyman who had come to help his brother in his affliction.
Grace had taken off her bonnet and shawl, and was making tea in the tea-pot that, together with the high, old-fashioned English urn, had been one of her mother's most cherished wedding-gifts. Tears came to her eyes and blinded her, and her hand shook as she touched the tea-caddy of old English oak and wrought iron. Still, with all these homely mementos rendering her sad inauguration of new duties sadder still, she bravely thought of her trust, and struggled successfully to be calm, at least in outward seeming. Her father's friend now came in, and sat down in silence in a low chair opposite Mr. Seymour. Grace laid her hand on her father's arm:
"Will you have your tea here by the window, on the little, low table?" she said tremulously.
"No, my pet," he answered, taking her hand, and stroking it gently; "let us sit down together, as usual." And he led her to her new place at the head, as if he wished her to see that he would not shrink from the everyday details of sorrow that each triviality of life would be too certain to throw into relief.
They made no pretence of talking beyond the few necessary questions of even the smallest assemblage at tea; but when Mr. Ashmead, their guest and the minister of the neighboring parish, said that he thought he must leave on the morrow early, both his host and his young, grave hostess begged he would stay for a few more days, till next Sunday even, if he could.
And so the new life began—the life we meant to start with at the beginning of our story, but which has seemed so to need its introduction, to be so much more interesting through it, that we could not help putting in this long, explanatory prelude.
The long days of winter passed, and a year was gone since the day that saw Elizabeth Seymour's burial. Grace was growing tall and womanly, and had taken her mother's place with as great seriousness as success. She it was who taught her little brother all he was capable of learning at his age; she who helped the worn-out teacher in the school; she who copied out her father's sermons, and looked out his texts and quotations.
The father and daughter, now knit together by a doubly tender tie, and fully realizing all its happy solemnity, turned to the welcome occupations of study to fill the many vacant hours their duties allowed them. Mr. Seymour's library was extensive, and every month brought from Boston some valuable and interesting additions. Of course, theology figured mainly among the subjects treated of in these old and new books; but not alone the theology of his own sect, for he had the early fathers' magnificent works, those Thebaids of literature where the vastness of the seemingly endless desert is only a veil for the innumerable caves of deepest science, and hidden recesses filled with most beautiful dogmas. The councils, too, were not unrepresented on his shelves, though the earlier ones were to him the best known and the least obnoxious. Among them was a dusty little book, in ancient type, evidently a very hermit of a book, whose solitude had not been disturbed since, by some accident, it had once made its way there among the miscellaneous collection of a small library purchased nearly twenty years ago. We may have occasion to refer to it again.
Mr. Seymour, confident of the truth of his own doctrines, never hesitated to simulate doubts and ask questions, or propound religious problems for the further mental training of his daughter's inquiring disposition; but this habit of constant investigation at last produced in her a tumult of the brain which she found she no longer had the power to quell. Questions forced themselves upon her, doubts wrestled for mastery in her mind, all things began to take strange, hitherto undreamt-of shapes, and truths, elusory yet alluring, seemed to rise out of axioms which she thought she had long ago laid aside as proved and dangerous errors. She strove to hold on to her once blind and unreasoning acceptance of her father's teaching. She would have welcomed any superstition, could it only have promised her peace; but the restless spirit, once roused in her, hurried her remorselessly, till at last, in sheer despair, she turned to sweeping and systematic denial of everything she had been taught to look upon as truth.
At first she did not speak to her father about these strange experiences; she clung to the idea that it was physical excitement, a fever of the brain, which would subside and let her see her landmarks plainly once more. But the tempest grew wilder and more hopeless; questions rose up, and would not be crushed out of existence—faced her and mocked her, and would not be answered by the catechism formulas she strove to oppose to them; her life seemed resolving itself into an eternal, tormenting, unspoken, but ever suggested "why?" that rose and took the shape of a demon she could not lay nor yet would listen to. Importunate voices were all around her, chasms opened on every side; and while she taught her little brother, and wrote out her father's sermons, it seemed as if a stern and pitiless query sounded within her very heart, demanding why she abetted the enslaving of other minds to codes of which she herself felt the utter insufficiency. The keenest misery to her was that this mocking voice, whose every vibration pulled down a stone of her former religious temple, and sent it echoing in hollow tones of fiendish triumph down the recesses and depths of her torn heart—this voice never suggested one idea upon which she might have seized and made the corner-stone of a new organization of truth. The strange demon that beset her seemed, to her agonized mind, the spirit of heartless destruction only, not even of the most perishable and paltry substitution. Hollow, empty, heartless, seemed life to her; faith gone, or proved an illusion good only for those whose weak brain could not bear the spiritual loneliness of unbelief; the world a charnel-house, in which death-doomed fools quarrelled about precedence in another world, whose very existence was a myth of their own miserable creation; life a journey aimless and useless, and the faiths men carried through it only so many wind-threatened torches they bore for their own deception—was this all, was this the beginning and the end? Blindly her heart cried out, "Somewhere there must be a God, somewhere there must be happiness!" and the fiend within her brain made answer: "There is no God save the one the coward imagines; there is no happiness save that which the fool finds in ignorance."
One day, after many months of this life-wearing struggle, Grace spoke of her state to her father; and strange indeed was the shock to the earnest, clear-thinking minister. Grave and tender, he tried to handle the wounded child, but Grace was not to be soothed into faith; it was conviction she required. Firmly yet patiently she heard him, and answered:
"All that I have said to myself, but it is of no avail."
He tried to speak to her of her mother—of her belief, her unwavering hope in God, her sure knowledge of Jesus, her feeling of rock-bound security at the moment of her death; but to all this Grace answered: "I know it all, but I cannot feel it; tell me something else, something more."
Then the father, roused out of his half-hopeful state as to her difficulties, and out of his hitherto so sweet reliance upon her kindred strength, turned to the dogmatic aspect of his faith, and prayed fervently that the Lord would open his child's eyes once more, and draw her in out of the cold desert where her soul wandered, a shivering stranger. But, alas! those apparently clear-cut arguments, those knife-like dogmas, so trenchant, so uncompromising, those technicalities of crystallized religion, so satisfying to the old exiles and first settlers of New England, fell unheeded on the ear of Grace, who, had she believed them, would have been as competent a teacher of them as her own father, as far as her thorough knowledge of their slightest details went. Mr. Seymour was trying to do God's work; he was trying to create, to give life to a lifeless organization, to put a quivering human soul into a shapely but ice-cold form.
Grace had once said she did not want example nor personal experience, but clear, frigid demonstration. She was right as to the seeming want in her soul—the want of absolute, incontrovertible truth; she was wrong as to the fire from heaven, which was her real want—the purely personal gift of faith, direct from God, which only can descend and strike the waiting soul as a sacrifice, and enkindle it for ever, no more to be extinguished by error or by doubt.
Another year passed, and things were unchanged. No, not unchanged, for Mr. Seymour, in his great anxiety to bring his daughter back to the old belief in which he and his ever-remembered wife had been so carefully reared, had explored hitherto sealed books and commentaries in the vain hope that, since none of the old arguments touched her, some newly suggested ones might. He did not expect to find anything in these works which would strike him as either proving or disproving his settled belief; still, he thought chance might throw into his hands some demonstration that would have the desired effect upon Grace. She seemed to be inclined to magnify beyond his utmost powers of toleration the absolute independence and free will of man; she proudly took her stand on human reason, insisting that if there were a creative God, and if it were really he who had given reason to man, it followed that this regal gift must be allowed full play in determining the object of faith. His Calvinism rebelled and retreated to its old entrenchments, denouncing reason as the natural enemy of faith, as an inventive principle ever actively evil and godless. But he once read in a work of one of the "great" reformers these strange and somewhat coarse words:
"The devil's sole occupation is to get the Romish priests to measure God's will in his works, with reason."
He was staggered. He searched his book-shelves for some work of Catholic theology. As he was passing his hand along the volumes, and running his eye down their titles, the little, dusty book we have mentioned fell down. He picked it up, and, looking at it carelessly, saw its name, Catechism of the Council of Trent. Curiosity at once made him forget the first motive of his expedition among the books, and he sat down to examine the newly-found volume. By and by he got interested, and from page to page his eyes ran eagerly, now sparkling with defiance, now widening in astonishment, and anon his brow contracting with intense earnestness, as clear dogmas revealed themselves from out the ancient text—dogmas directly opposite to his own, it is true, yet at every moment appealing to rational and unbiassed human nature.
Here man was represented as a grand monument of God's glory, a being worth redemption in the eyes of God, a creature endowed with intellectual gifts to lead him rationally towards faith and virtue, even as he was provided with feet to carry him to the clear mountain-spring, and with hands wherewith to till the yielding, fruitful soil. Here he beheld a humanity not degraded to brutishness by the fall, but redeemable through the very qualities God's grace had yet left to it; here he saw reconciled man's dignity and God's majesty; here, in a word, a religion which, claiming to be divine, was consequently not afraid to acknowledge and to guide the good tendencies whose very humanness put them beyond the pale of competition with herself. Mr. Seymour had always been taught to adhere to the Bible as the one infallible rock of salvation; he now saw the Bible merged into a system he had once called idolatrous, but could not at present stigmatize as such. He determined to read the Bible from the point of view of the Council of Trent, for pure intellectual curiosity's sake, he said to himself. Alone and almost hiding from his daughter's still hopeless but always eager inquiries, he began this study, with what result would be almost useless to mention. The Council of Trent had seemed plausible when studied by itself; but when referred to the book he had always called the rule of faith, this council was irrefutable. Could he have been mistaken all his lifetime? could it be that God had purposely left him in ignorance so long? Or was not his belief at least as good as the faith of the Council of Trent? But then came his clear philosophical training to the rescue; for, it said, how can contradictory axioms both be true? Hitherto he had unhesitatingly held the Catholic doctrines to be intrinsically, nay blasphemously untrue, and it followed that his own, their direct contradictories, must be right; but if, upon examination, the reverse was evidently the case, then his former opinions—for doctrines he could no longer call them—must be radically, irredeemably false. One day he spoke to Grace about it, and was surprised at the calm manner in which she received a communication whose mere rudiments had been such a shock to him. To her mind, this curious development of her father's researches was a really interesting study, quite apart from its religious bearing, and considered principally as a logical passe-temps. But to her father it was a heart-stirring reality, which he pursued with all the hitherto pent-up passion that his cold creed had forced to run in such narrow channels. Once he said to his child:
"Grace, I used to believe the Bible was the only rule of faith; but I never saw that the Bible presupposed a church, a heaven-ordained society to shelter it from the conflicting explanations and interpolations of men; presupposed, also, a willing obedience on the part of the faithful to believe it as it is written, not a desire to shrink from its plain teachings and explain away its doctrines. How could we, without a church to interpret it to us, be sure that we were not following some far-fetched human adaptation of its teaching, or pandering to some cowardly modification of its code of morals? No; the Bible presupposes the church, and, without it, would be more of a dead letter than the Hebrew is a dead language."
Grace was silent, and wondered. Her own feelings were as unsettled as ever, but she tried to live less in her own hopeless struggle than in the noble, fruitful, self-forgetting life that was dawning for her father. As his convictions grew deeper and took stronger root, his anxiety for his child waxed more and more terrible. Would the grace of God that had come to him through the yellow pages of an old book never touch her with its rod of power? Had reason no influence on her logical-seeming mind, had sentiment no power on her undoubtedly loving heart? She went about her self-imposed duties as usual, bringing consolation wherever she went, cheering others with words that were powerless to cheer her own heart, kind and considerate to the poor, amiable to all. Her father, smitten with dread as to her bodily as well as spiritual welfare, asked himself how he could expose her at this moment to the poverty that must result from the only step he knew he ought to take. To leave Walcot as a convert meant to throw himself and his children—Grace especially—into the most absolute penury. He could endure it, George would hardly feel it, but his daughter, brave and affectionate as she was, could her shattered heart bear up under so unexpected a necessity? So he cheated himself and hesitated yet; but the evil spirit was to be defeated soon. God could not allow his returning son and no longer blinded servant to wander long in human weakness outside the holy fold.
Grace was sitting at a reading-desk in her father's library one Sunday evening in June, the purple sunset streaming in and giving the lilacs a deeper hue, and the laburnums a more burnished shade, when a young man swung open the garden gate, and, with free and unfettered step, almost ran up to the house-door.
Seeing he was a stranger and a gentleman, Mr. Seymour opened the library window, and leaned out, saying in a courteous tone:
"I am Mr. Seymour, if you are looking for me. I'll let you in directly."
The young man paused with his hand on the door-knocker, and waited till his host came round.
"You must excuse my abruptness," he said pleasantly, as he handed his card to Mr. Seymour. "I am already presuming on a relationship you may choose to ignore."
"Why ignore it? The nephew of my dear wife is as welcome to my house as if he were my own son," answered Mr. Seymour, laying the card on the table. "Come," he continued, "let us be at home at once. I'll introduce you to my daughter, your cousin."
They went into the library together, and the father, turning to Grace, said:
"Here is a cousin from over the sea, child—George Charteris."
Grace had heard her mother talk of her younger sister's marriage to a Mr. Charteris years before she herself was married, so the name was familiar to her.
"I wish, my boy," said the host, "that God had spared your dear aunt to see you here; but he knows best. And you have come to stay with us a little before you go home again, I hope? Have you seen anything yet?"
"I only landed in Boston yesterday," answered the young man, "and have had hard work to get here so soon. I came on business, to tell the truth."
"Really!"
"You see, letters are very uncertain; and I just felt in the humor, so I came across myself. I have got important papers for you. My uncle, George Howard, died five weeks ago at his place in Gloucestershire, and, as he left no children, the estate goes to the next of kin—your son, George Seymour."
Grace and her father looked at each other in solemn, strange wonderment.
"My son!" he said slowly, "my son!"
"Yes, the son of the eldest sister. My mother was the younger sister, you know. And so I came over about it; I am supposed to be a lawyer, but the fact is, business is not overpowering with us young fellows, and, as I had enough money to spare, I thought I would sooner go myself than pay a man to make a mess of it. You and my father are appointed guardians during the minority of the heir."
"And they will expect him to go and live in England?" said the father thoughtfully.
"Of course; will there be any difficulty about that?"
Seymour did not reply; he only glanced at his daughter with an awed expression about his face. She was looking at him intently. Young Charteris noticed how ill she seemed.
The rest of the evening passed very sociably, and, having shown his young guest his room, Seymour returned in his dressing-gown and slippers to the library. Grace stole in softly, still dressed, and looking anxious. She drew a chair beside him, and, taking his hand in her own, said solemnly:
"Dear father, it was ordained we should leave this place."
"Was such your idea also, my child?" her father asked.
"Of course; and if I have not spoken of it before, my dear father, it was only because I was waiting for you to mention it first."
It seemed a reproach! Was God using this blind instrument to show him more forcibly where his duty lay?
"I know, father," continued Grace, "what that means for you in the circumstances you newly stand in. It means that you will not be allowed to be guardian to your son, that you will be denied access to him, that he will be brought up a Protestant before your eyes, and that practically you will be as homeless as the outcast you would have made yourself from this village and this church. But remember, whatever happens, Grace is always with you—will always be, whether she believes or not, happy or wretched, poor or rich, until it shall be your own pleasure to drive her from your side. Although thy God may not be my God, yet thy people shall be my people, and we will stand or fall together!"
"My brave child!" was all the father could answer through his tears.
"But, father dearest," she resumed in a quick, decided voice, "if George is to be brought up as you wish, the first thing to secure is his being rightly baptized; and you can do that this very next day. I shall be allowed to see George, and thus my mother's trust will be in my hands yet."
"O my girl! it is hard, you cannot tell how hard."
"I have lost what you have won, father. Think you the loss of faith a lesser evil than the changing of it?"
"Poor child! poor child! God grant you may see it one day."
"God grant I may," she answered frankly, "if it be the truth."
They spoke far into the night, and Seymour determined to announce from the pulpit next Sunday his unshaken conviction of the truth of the Catholic faith, and to take a final leave of his congregation. Young Charteris knew nothing of it. George was baptized the following morning. The week passed by, and the young English cousin was more than ever attracted by the strange, silent, preoccupied manner and the serious, anxious beauty of his girl-companion. A gay young man, with hardly any surface of religion about him, he yet had that deep observative faculty which renders some men's perceptions so acute and true in the field of religion. Half an unbeliever himself for fashion's sake, he was yet quick to detect how really far from unbelief the seemingly cold, doubting girl's heart was; and he smiled to himself as he shrewdly thought how both Puritanism and this present phase of feeling would be rudely shaken when brought face to face with the hot-pressed life of wealthy, bewildering London. But something whispered to him that neither father nor daughter would allow the brilliant world to stand between them and their convictions, whatever those might be. Meanwhile, Charteris romped with little George, who was wisely kept in ignorance as to his new honors, and the days sped fast towards the eventful Sunday which was to have so strange and stormy an ending.
The Saturday previous, Mr. Seymour sat at the window of his library, in his favorite arm-chair, his daughter leaning her head upon his knee, and holding one of his hands clasped to her bosom. For a long time there was a silence; then, like the evening breeze just born among the tree-tops, a faint whisper of conversation began to stir the quiet of the darkened room. The sun was gone down, and the crescent moon was rising in white mistiness behind the shrubbery.
"It was just such a night, Grace," said the minister, "that we sat here with Ashmead more than two years ago—the day we began our new life without your dear mother; and now we have turned another leaf already, and are on the threshold of another new life!"
"Yes, my own darling," said his child; "but it is not without me that you are going to begin it. In any case, I shall never leave you. And if we are parted from little George, why, what can we do but cling more and more to each other?"
"Have you thought, Grace, that it may be a life of toil that we are going to meet?" asked her father earnestly.
"Father dearest, would my mother have shrunk from entering it with you? And do you think I love you less than she did?"
"My brave girl!" he answered, with a soft light coming into his dreamy eyes. Presently he said: "But, Grace, you will have little consolation, little support, for my principles are leading me; but you?"
"My love for you is my guide!" she said fervently.
"Truly, my child, you are even as Ruth, who clung to Naomi for very love, and thereby reaped the reward of faith. God grant you may be led to the same end through my humble instrumentality."
There was a pause. The father, after a few moments' earnest thought, spoke again.
"Grace, darling," he said, and she started, as if collecting her runaway thoughts.
"Yes," she answered, with a loving look.
"Do not blame me for speaking abruptly, Grace," her father resumed; "for circumstances are such as allow us little spare time for forms of speech. Has it ever struck you that you will most likely marry? And have you noticed your cousin's manner towards you?"
At the first hint of marriage Grace had lifted her great, startled eyes to her father's face; then, on the second and more personal question, she looked quickly down, and a burning blush came like sunset hues over her usually pale cheeks. But she never hesitated nor wavered in her answer, for the blush was more that of surprise than consciousness.
"I never thought of my cousin in that way. Did you? And I have thought vaguely some day I might be a good man's wife—a minister's, most likely; but now these strange doubts have come to me, I could have no peace in any new relation in life. In conscience, my father, I could enter upon none."
"Well, child, I am glad so far. But if your cousin had many opportunities, depend upon it he would love you. I only say this to caution you. You know your own heart; you know I could approve such a marriage under certain circumstances, always provided you do not come to the happy truth I have reached. Now, you can act as your conscience and your reason impel you; but it is always better, I think, to work in the full daylight."
"I could not marry as I am now. Besides, I could not leave you."
"You might have to leave me."
"Father!" cried the girl, startled.
"Never mind," he said soothingly, but not offering to explain himself, and then went on: "Supposing a thing to be possible, still, in the case that you remained out of the church, would you let your cousin be your helpmate and your protector?"
"If you wish it, I will think of it, and question my own heart," said Grace; but the words were measured, and the tone was cold. Her father felt it.
"Grace, I did not wish to hurt you, child. I cannot tell you all I meant, for I hardly discern yet what is God's voice within me, and what the voice of my own earthly enthusiasm, perhaps even ambition. But, my own precious daughter, our hearts will always be one; and after God, there is no one on earth more dear to me than you are."
Grace laid her head on her father's knee again.
"So if your cousin Charteris should speak to you on the subject of marriage before your views of religion are changed, you will answer deliberately and calmly, will you not, having searched your innermost feelings well?" said the father.
"I will," said Grace firmly.
The next day dawned fair and bright; the very air had a holiday feel about its quiet, fresh-scented crispness; the birds sang softly in the vivid-painted trees, and it seemed as if nature had reserved a very jubilee of delights for the lovely summer afternoon. Crowds came soberly to church, the children glancing longingly at the tempting hedges, the young people now and then looking into each other's eyes the things they dared not put in words, and would have spoilt in the saying had they done so; to some, older and more spiritually-minded persons, came, on the fragrant breeze, faint suggestions of the fabled millennium, in which they believed with the grasping faith of disappointed souls; to all came, on the wings of this Sunday morning, impressions of peace, of happiness; perceptions of a life holier and higher than that of the present; vague stirrings of the soul, as if some mystery, both dread and beautiful, were coming out to meet them from the unusual radiance of this never-to-be-forgotten day.
Very solemn indeed did the day's brightness seem to the earnest minister; a new bridal, far different from the bridal eighteen years before in the very country for which he was now again bound—a bridal of the soul with sorrow and with sacrifice, a taking up of the crown of thorns and the cross of dereliction. He would walk into the old meeting-house, a hero among his people; he would leave it, an outcast and a leper among his brethren. He would meet his flock a revered pastor, an acknowledged guide; he would go out of that pulpit, his no longer, an exile, a suspected impostor, an accursed and condemned man. And not there only was the sting; beyond and far above it was the human sense of deep humiliation at having to unsay his teaching, to renounce the doctrines he had taught for twenty years, to warn his people of the very faith he had believed in from his cradle. It is no slight thing for a man, learned and looked up to, an eager and practical theologian, to stand before a congregation of intelligent, sharp-witted hearers, and say, "I was mistaken!" For when you feel that every word you speak is changed, as it falls on their ears, into a barbed weapon against yourself, and will be handled by remorseless and unsympathizing fellow-men until twisted into meanings you never dreamed of and deceptions you would scorn, then it is that the painful, human side of the great and heroic sacrifice is revealed, and that our fleshly weakness has to turn perforce in helpless and blind reliance upon God.
Solemn also, and far sadder, seemed the glorious beauty of that Sunday morning to Grace Seymour by her open window, through which came the scent of lilacs and blossoming horse-chestnuts; her books ranged in melancholy silence on the shelf above the mantel, the old family Bible lying solitary and unopened on a little table by itself, an air of desolateness hanging over the simple, innocent-looking room, with its chintz hangings and two or three old prints and faded pictures. Some were of sacred subjects, and these, unless this were the spectator's fancy, seemed more forlorn than any others; Grace herself thought so sometimes, as she would give a pathetic survey to the room that had known no change since her childhood, save when the great change of death had wafted into it some of the old mementos of her English mother's youth.
On the eve of this last change, that was almost another death, the young girl sat with clasped hands on the wide window-sill, and gazed with sad yet steadfast eyes on the beauty of the breaking day. To her it was indeed a setting forth on a journey without scrip or staff, without guide or compass. In her love for her father, she gloried in his grand, manly act, though it drove her forth into the desert world; but though she rejoiced at his stern following of principle, as at a deed of heroism in itself, yet what comfort was there for her in the dreary waste of an untried world? To set out on the road to heaven, leaving the paths of men, was one thing; but to leave the known for the unknown, the real life of human sympathy for a dark, companionless one among things that were only shadows and mocking figures of mist—what was that? And would human love carry her through? Could she follow, by the glow-worm light of an earthly though hallowed feeling, the same path in which a fiery pillar preceded her father's soul, and angels guided his footsteps? But come what might, she would try; so she had resolved from the beginning. Besides, was it not she who had, according to the instinct of her true nature, decided for her father the step his own conscience had counselled, but from which his human love still weakly recoiled? And, therefore, was she not bound to share his fortunes, even though love had not impelled her to do so? She could not pray that this day's work might end in good, she could not pray for strength or guidance; she could only helplessly gaze upon the familiar home-scene she had watched so often from that window—the spread of orchard and garden and meadow-land beyond, the golden lights flickering among the shrubs, and playing with the soft, changing shadows—all the beauty that had been her soul's book for years, and was now the only book she could still read and love as of old. A sort of dumb prayer was that wistful gaze, the hopeless, half-conscious murmur of paralyzed lips striving to form once more sounds that long ago, they remember, used to mean something to the understanding. Little George at this moment ran across the lawn after a yellow butterfly, and looked up fearfully at the library-window, as if expecting to be reproved for such unwonted exercise on the sacred day.
Grace started and looked at her watch. It was time; the bells had been ringing some minutes, and the hour was drawing nigh. She stole down to her father's side, very solemn and quiet, and took his hand. He turned and clasped her in his arms.
"God will bless you yet, my little one," he said, with an earnest look into her brave eyes, "for all you are to me."
Hand-in-hand they walked the short distance between their cottage and the meeting-house. The great trees stood protectingly round the little church, shading it like a temple, with broad shadows flung like curtains before its doors, as if to supplement the bareness in which human hands had left it. The people were crowding in; some stepped aside as the minister passed, making room for him; others nodded to him, and were startled at the unwonted look in his far-searching eyes. Grace, on the contrary, seemed almost defiant, as if she thought of nothing save the storm which one short hour would bring about her darling's head. The congregation seated themselves with that undertone of quiet rustling peculiar to country audiences. Grace sat directly facing her father; but she had turned herself so that her features were visible to those who sat in the nearest pews behind. Edward Seymour slowly came up the pulpit stairs, and stood before his people. One long, sweeping glance he gave them, then his eyes went upward, and a light came into them, as of something more than human.
The crowd was thrilled, and men and women gazed at each other inquiringly.
Then he began: "My friends, I have come to say farewell to you. This is no sermon, but an explanation which is due to you. I am not going to leave you for the city, nor for another flock, nor for the retirement of a college-life. It is not a man who has called me, it is not the world or my own interests that have bidden me leave you; it is God.
"Truly, 'God's ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts.' If you will bear with me, I will show you how this has been borne in upon me, and will give you, what you have a right to hear, the brief history of the change which is calling me away from you."
The interest of his hearers was acutely, if not painfully, awakened; every one waited breathlessly for the novel experiences of one who had always seemed so strong in the belief he taught. Some thought he had turned to the Methodist views, some suspected him of Episcopalian leanings; of the truth, not one had the slightest inkling, for, to their minds, such a change was more irrational than suicide, and more awful a judgment than insanity.
Step by step, with clear, sharp-cutting words, he developed the doubts and fears of his soul; he dissected his life for the last year, and showered Bible texts upon his hearers in his rapid way that would have been impassioned had he let it be; and when, one after the other, he had sapped all the axioms his former teaching had rested on, and had carried the mind of his audience, against its will, out of the sphere of certainty, he then paused a moment, and said in a more gentle voice than he had used in his dogmatic course:
"And now, my friends, what remains to be said? This: to confess my mistake before you all, to humble myself at the feet of God, whom I have so long misunderstood and mistaught, and to ask your forgiveness for having given you, in my ignorance, stones when you asked for bread, serpents when you cried for food. You know the church which alone teaches all that God has now shown me to be true; you know that it is a church flouted and condemned, persecuted and poor—none other than the Holy Roman Catholic Church (here the stir was like an electric shock among the rapt audience, and Grace half rose up in her seat, and looked defiance from her flashing eyes upon her nearest neighbors), none other than was founded in the poverty of Bethlehem, the ignominy of Calvary, the secrecy of the catacombs.
"I have but few words left to say to you, my friends. We have walked together for many years, seeking God. I knew not that I had not found him; now I know that I walked in darkness and in the shadow of death. I pray that each of you, in God's appointed time, may be led, like me, to find him. I thank him that this grace should come with sorrow, exile, and poverty in its train. I take up the cross willingly, and leave home and country, and a beloved grave, and a people to whom my soul was knit, to follow humbly where God shall lead me. And now, once again farewell, and may God bless you, every one, and reward you for all that your friendship and your fidelity have ever done for him who was once your pastor."
With a grave and simple salutation, he went down the pulpit stairs, passed out of the church, his daughter eagerly joining him and linking her arm in his. Her English cousin, who had come in late to the service, hastened after them, and frankly expressed his astonishment at the sudden turn of affairs. The people, who streamed out after them in hurried groups, as if anxious to get into the air, that they might talk over this extraordinary event, eyed them askance as they walked home; the deacons spoke together in shocked whispers, and the older men and women quoted texts about wolves in sheeps' clothing. Some of the younger church members were scared and disturbed more by the uncompromising arguments than by the tangible result; while others, the reckless and the more "unregenerate," boldly said they admired the minister's "pluck."
George Charteris dwelt very seriously on the exclusion from the guardianship of his son which this course of Mr. Seymour's would inevitably entail; but the father only answered sadly: "The Lord did not speak to me of such things; those affairs are in his hands, and his secrets are not for us to inquire into. So far as I saw my way clear, I have answered the call of God."
Several friends called in the evening to speak to the minister about the incredible announcement he had made that morning; they found him the same as ever, patient, kind, and courteous, and his young daughter more beautiful and more attractive than before; for the determined way in which she supported her father's conduct gave her a touch of the heroine.
Late that night the two visited the moonlit grave near the little church. Great elm-shadows veiled it, and the night-wind rustled the violet and primrose leaves that bordered it all round. In the summer a cross of heliotrope grew at its head, but as yet it had been too cold to put the plants out. In his new-found faith, the husband could now kneel and pray, and speak to the angel guardian of his lost wife, and send messages to the soul that knew all he had so lately learnt, and knew it so much better than he. But the great thing of which he spoke was the future of his children and hers, praying that they too, especially Grace, should be brought to the same knowledge and saved through the same faith. Grace stood like a statue, her hands clasped and resting on her father's shoulder, her slight form bending forward as he knelt. When he rose, she pressed his arm and drew him towards her, looking up into his tear-veiled eyes with looks of hungry love. It was a rare and a piteous sight to see the strong man weep, to see the wave-like emotion of this solemn hour bow the head of the deep thinker, the calm and kingly scholar. It made him more sacred in her sight, and kindled her rapturous feelings to that degree that she could gladly have died, that he might be spared one pang more in his future path of thorns.
He hardly suspected all that he was to his child; for great though his love was, broad, and deep, and still, it was silent as the great ocean that sleeps round the islands of coral, beneath the changeless radiance of southern constellations. But few outward signs passed between father and daughter, for his grand, noble nature was self-contained and grave; and for that very reason Grace honored him in her heart, calling him to herself a hero among men. Was it strange that, by his side, other men seemed dwarfed, that their virtues seemed shallow, and their very vices more contemptible than horrible? Was it strange that his intellect, so far-reaching, and his practical business abilities, so clear and straight-forward, should make other men seem only half men, with one side of their nature alone monstrously developed, till it grew to overbalance the other, and make the whole into a grotesque travesty of humanity, a moral satyr, more beast than man, and more fool than either?
I do not say that such ungracious thoughts came to her when she noticed her cousin, George Charteris; but something hollow and unreal suggested itself to her, as she listened to his brilliant, frivolous talk or his cynical, off-hand observations. She thought, if that is what modern fashion breeds in men, the world of to-day is no better than a smelting-furnace, obliterating all but the changing current of mingled ore and dross constantly running with aimless speed through its many channels. She looked forward to any contact with it as a trial, and only stayed herself with the idea that everything noble and pure and dignified was embodied in her father's life, in which she would always be wrapped up. Yet she had promised to think of marriage!
The day following this eventful Sunday the Seymour family left Walcot. Their cottage, which was their own property, was to be let for a year, as their affairs were still unsettled and their plans quite undecided. From that day Edward Seymour again felt that a new journey had begun for him; and where his soul would be landed he knew not, nor cared to know, so God was before him and his daughter at his side.
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.