“There!” called Sally after him, “I’ve made you mad and I didn’t mean to a bit. That’s always the way with you religious people! You can’t take a joke. It’s maybe good for the soul, but it’s mighty bad on the temper, religion is! And sakes! You mustn’t mind me. I can’t help being cheeky, ‘’tis my nature to.’” She finished with irate mockery, as the distance widened between them, and he did not reply. She was still looking after him, as he reached the abrupt bend in the road, and there he turned and bade her farewell in a gesture of unmistakable kindliness.
“Well!” said Sally, arresting her nonchalant swinging, with a jerk, “well, he ain’t cross-grained, that’s serting—Laws, I wish I had a civil tongue, but I hain’t, so Sigh no more, my honey,” with which she broke into a darkey song.
Sidney Martin went blindly along the path which chance had chosen for him, led by no other instinct save the old pathetic one, which prompts wounded creatures to crawl away to suffer unseen. Long ago, the human was equally sensitive, equally reticent; we are so no longer, but lay bare the plague spots on our soul with shameless candour.
But the nearer we are to God and Nature, the more prone we are to flee away into the bosom of the stillness, there to agonize alone; and not in vain do we put our trust in its tender sublimity. Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
When Sidney paused, arrested more by an increasing sense of physical effort, which encroached upon his bitter self-communings, than by any conscious volition, he found himself upon a little wooded hill high above Dole.
Behind him stretched the whispering galleries of the wood, before him lay Dole, all its insignificance revealed.
The bird in the air is but a speck to our eyes; but how completely the position is reversed when from its airy altitude it deigns to stay its soaring wings and look beneath!
The greatest cities upon earth become but inconsequent masses when viewed from above. To Sidney’s eyes, Dole looked scarce big enough to hold a heartache, yet how keenly its atoms felt!
And how little it disturbed the quiet heavens, the serene hills, all the suffering in the valley! This thought which, in one less in love with nature, might have unsealed fresh founts of bitterness, brought to Sidney’s soul a beneficent sense of ultimate peace and strength. To him, one of Nature’s own children, the mother tongue was very eloquent. And even in this hour of tense personal perplexity, he was able to gather some measure of consolation from the thought that in the end the jarring discordances of individual life would be absorbed into the grand symphonic song of Nature.
Nature is often impiously charged with unsympathetic indifference, by those who would wish to see all the heaven clouded over by their sorrow, a new deluge upon the earth because of their tears. But Sidney regarded his mother with reverent eyes, seeing in her seeming impassivity to his pain but a manifestation of the strenuous patience with which she waited to be renewed, looking towards that day when once again she would shine forth in all her pristine beauty, as she had been when first she was the bride of the sun.