The anguish, and disappointment of the lover, and my own despair, maybe better imagined than portrayed. My baby died a few weeks later—partly, I think, from the effect of my own condition on her frail organization, and the hope of years was blighted in this fragile blossom—the first that had blessed our union.
The little Constance slumbered by Mabel's side, and a slip from that bunch of white roses, the last my sister had gathered, shadows the marbles that guard both of those now-distant, yet not neglected graves. Thus death at last entered our happy household!
A great shadow fell over me, which I vainly strove to dispel with all the effort of my reason and my will. Physicians, remembering my mother's inscrutable melancholy—a part of that mysterious malady that consumed her life—whispered their warnings in my husband's ears, and he resolved, with that energy which belongs to men of his nature, to lay the axe at once to the root of this evil in the only way that presented itself to his mind—as possible of accomplishment.
At first I resisted faintly the coincidence of his will, which he knew was sure to come sooner or later; and to the very last it was agony unspeakable to me, to think that my father's house should pass into the hands of strangers, and that the place that knew me should know me no more!
Very resolutely and calmly did Wardour endure and stem my opposition. Swift and strong as the current of my will flowed naturally, he was ever its master, as the stone dam can stay and lull the fiercest rivers. He persisted, knowing well what was at stake, and to my surprise Dr: Pemberton and Mr. Gerald Stansbury cooperated with his decision. Nor did Mr. Lodore oppose it, though losing thereby one of his most liberal parishioners.
A great struggle was going on in my heart just then—that I think would have perished in darkness, had I not found myself free and emancipated from all fetters of custom and observance by our change of residence.
From the shallow streams of conventional Christianity, moving with tardy current, and full of shoals and sandbanks, I was drifting down, slowly but surely, with that great ocean of deep and unsounded religion, to which all profound natures, that have suffered, do, I believe—if left to themselves—inevitably tend.
In this new land of promise—the golden California—lying like a bride by the side of her bridegroom—the great Pacific Ocean—and shut away by deserts and mountains, from all old conventional cliques and prejudices of our Eastern cities, my soul took wing. What poetry was in me found its outlet; what religious capacity God had endued me with, went forth from the clash of cymbals and the sound of the sackbut, that ever had reminded me, in all seasons of sorrow, or even of joyous excitement, that I was one of an ancient people, astray in foreign pastures—went forth (even as the compromise was made at first by Christ and his apostles with the magnificent but soulless worship of the Jews) to merge these sounds of ancient rite and form in the deep roll of the organ, that fills the churches where the Host is present.
I needed this abiding miracle to stay my faith—to give it a new rapture, never experienced before—to sustain me in my sorrow. In the presence of the holy Eucharist—in the sweet belief that saints communed with me, and that the Mother of God, who, like me, had wept and suffered, interceded for me at the throne of Christ, I regained the vitality that seemed gone forever.
There is no cup like this for the lips of the parched and weary wayfarer—none!