“That is quite sufficient. I have already heard more than I relish of such silly and sacrilegious chat. At least, you might have more prudence and discretion than to hold forth so disgracefully in the hearing of your little brother.”
Miss Jane’s cheek flushed, and her feeble voice faltered.
“He has fallen fast asleep over the bean-pods; and, even if he had not, how much of the conversation do you imagine he would comprehend? His sole knowledge of Grecian theogony consists of a brief acquaintance with a bottle of pseudo Greek fire which burnt the pocket out of his best pantaloons.”
“Salome, you distress me; and, if Ulpian had not left us, you would have kept all such heathenish stuff shut up in your sinful and wayward heart.”
“Dr. Grey is no Gorgon, having power to petrify my tongue. I am not afraid of him; and my respect for your feelings is much stronger than my dread of his.”
“Hush, child! You are afraid of him, and well you may be. I fear that all your Sabbath-school advantages—all your Christian privileges—have been wofully wasted; and I shall ask Ulpian to talk to you.”
“No, thank you, Miss Jane. You may save yourself the trouble, for he has given me over to hardness of heart and ‘a reprobate mind,’ and his patience is not only ‘clean gone forever,’ but he has carefully washed his hands of all future interest in my rudderless and drifting soul. Let me speak this once, and henceforth I promise to hold my peace. I do not require to be ‘talked to’ by anybody,—I only need to be let alone. Sabbath-schools are indisputably excellent things,—and I can testify that they are ponderous ecclesiastical hammers, pounding creeds and catechisms into the mould of memory; but these nurseries of the church nourish and harbor some Satan’s imps among their half-fledged saints; and while they certainly accomplish a vast amount of good, they are by no means infallible machines for the manufacture of Christians,—of which fact I stand in melancholy attestation. I 68 have a vague impression that piety does not grow up in a night, like Jonah’s gourd or Jack the Giant-killer’s beanstalk; but is a pure, glittering, spiritual stalactite, built by the slow accretion of dripping tears. Do you suppose that you can successfully train my soul as you have managed my body?—that you can hold my nose and pour a dose of faith down my throat, like ipecac or cod-liver oil? In matters of theology I am no ostrich, and, if you afflict me ad nauseam with religious dogmas, you must not wonder that my moral digestion rebels outright. I shall not dispute the fact that in justice to your precepts and example I ought to be a Christian; but, since I am not, I may as well tell you at once and save future trouble, that I can neither be baited into the church like a hawk into a steel-trap, nor scared and driven into it like bees into a hive by the rattling of tin pans and the screaking of horns. Don’t look at me so dolefully, dear Miss Jane, as if you had already seen my passport to perdition signed and sealed. You, at least, have done your whole duty,—have set all the articles of orthodoxy, well-flavored and garnished, before me; and, if I am finally lost, my spiritual starvation can never be charged against you in the last balance-sheet. I am not ignorant of the Bible, nor altogether unacquainted with the divers creeds that spring from its pages as thick, as formidable, as ferocious, as the harvest from the dragon’s teeth; and, thanking you for all you have taught me, I here undertake to pilot my own soul in this boiling, bellowing sea of life. I doubt whether some of the charts you value will be of any service in my voyage, or whether the beacons by which you steer will save me from the reefs; but, nevertheless, I take the wheel, and, if I wreck my soul,—why, then, I wreck it.”
In the magic evening light, which touches all things with a rosy, transitory glamour, the fresh young face with its daintily sculptured lineaments seemed marvellously and surpassingly fair; but, like morbidezza marble, hopelessly fixed and chill, and might have served for some image of Eve, when, standing on the boundary of eternal beatitude, she daringly put up her slender womanly fingers to pluck the fatal fruit. 69 Her large, brilliant eyes followed the sinking sun as steadily—as unblinkingly—as an eagle’s; but the gleam that rayed out was baleful, presaging storms, as infallibly as that sullen, lurid light, which glares defiantly over helpless earth when to-day’s sun falls into the cloudy lap of to-morrow’s tempest.
A heavy sigh struggled across Miss Jane’s unsteady lips, as, removing her glasses, she wiped her eyes, and said, slowly,—
“Yes; I am a stupid, unsuspecting old dolt; but I see it all now.”