I would have given worlds to have realized that this mighty God was near; that he indeed cared with a father's love for the orphan mourner, committed in faith to his all-embracing arms. But I still worshipped him as far-off, enthroned on high, in the heaven of heavens, which cannot contain the full glory of his presence. I saw him on the burning mountain, in the midst of thunder and lightning and smoke,—a God of consuming fire, before whose breath earthly joys and hopes withered and dried, like blossoms cast into the furnace.
But did not God once hide his face of love from his own begotten Son? And shall not the eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani of the forsaken heart sometimes ascend amid the woes and trials and wrongs of life, from the great mountain of human misery, the smoking Sinai, whose clouded summit quakes with the footsteps of Deity?
CHAPTER XXIII.
I again resumed the manuscript, trembling for the revelations which it might make.
"Never again," wrote my mother, "did I behold my noble, gallant father. His death was sudden, as if shot down in the battle field, without one warning weakness or pain. In the green summer of his days he fell, and long did my heart vibrate from the shock. How desolate to me was the home to which I returned! The household fire was indeed extinguished. The household god laid low. I saw at one glance that in my breast alone his memory was enshrined; that there alone was sacred incense burning. Mrs. Lynn, (I will speak of her by her name hereafter,) though only one year had passed since his death, was assuming those light, coquettish airs which accord as little with the robes of widowhood as the hues of the rainbow or the garlands of spring.
"I saw with exquisite pain and shame, that she looked upon me as a rival of her maturer charms, and gladly yielded to my wish for retirement. She always spoke of me as 'the child,' the 'little bookworm,' impressing upon the minds of all the idea of my extreme juvenility. I was young; but I had arrived to years of womanhood, and my stature equalled hers.
"I will pass on to the scene which decided my destiny. I do not wish to swell the volume of my life. Let it be brief as it is sad.
"Very near the fortress is another rocky bulwark, rising out of the waves in stern and rugged majesty, known by the peculiar name of the Rip-Raps. It is the work of man, who paved the ocean bed with rocks, and conceived the design of a lofty castle, from whose battlements the star-spangled banner should wave, and whose massy turrets should perpetuate the honors of Carolina's most gifted son. The design was grand, but has never been completed. It has, however, finished apartments, which form a kind of summer hotel, where many statesmen often resort, that they may lay down, for a while, the burden of care, and breathe an atmosphere pure from political corruption, and cool from party zeal and strife.
"At the time of which I speak the chief magistrate of the nation sought refuge there for a short while, from the oppressive responsibilities of his exalted station, and regardless of his wish for retirement, or rather irresistibly impelled to pay honors to one whose brows were wreathed with the soldier's laurel as well as the statesman's crown, every one sought his rocky and wave-washed retreat.