"The strong man wept! the very man, too, who, a few brief hours before, had heaped up curses, for trifling reasons, upon the heads of others; but now, in this hour of agony and mortal terror, fell upon his knees in the sublime presence of God's insulted majesty; who now, in the deadly peril, lashed to the pump, trembling to his soul's deep centre, cried aloud to Him for—Mercy! God's ears are never deaf! At that moment one of His Angels—Sandalphon—the Prayer-bearer, in passing by that way, chanced to behold the sublime and moving spectacle. And his eyes flashed gladness, even through his tears; and he could scarcely speak for the deep emotion that stirred his angel heart; but still he pointed with one hand at the prostrate penitent, and with the other he placed the golden trumpet to his lips, and blew a blast that woke the sleeping echoes throughout the vast Infinitudes; and he cried up, cried up from his very soul: 'Behold! he prayeth!' And the Silence of the upper courts of Heaven started into Sound at the glad announcement, 'Behold! he prayeth!' And the sentence was borne afar on the fleecy pinions of the Light, from Ashtoreth to Mazaroth, star echoing to star. And still the sound sped on, nor ceased its flight until it struck the pearly Gates of Glory—where was an Angel standing—the Recording Angel—writing in a Book; and, oh! how eagerly he penned the sentence, right opposite Tom Clark's name: 'Behold! he prayeth!' and the tears—great, hot, scalding tears, such as, at this moment, I am shedding—rolled out from the angel's eyes, so that he could scarcely see the book—mine own eyes are very dim—but still he wrote the words. God grant that he may write them opposite your name and mine—opposite everybody's, and everybody's son and daughter—opposite ALL our names!
"'Behold! he prayeth!' And lo! the Angels and the Cherubim, the Seraphs and the Antarphim, caught up the sound, and sung through the Dome; sung it till it was echoed back from Aidenn's golden walls, from the East to the West, and the North and South thereof; until it echoed back in low, melodious cadence from the Veiled Throne, on which sitteth in majesty the Adonai of Adonim, the peerless and ineffable Over Soul, the gracious Lord of both the Living and the Dead! Are there any Dead? No! except in sin and guiltiness!... And there was much joy in the Starry World over one sinner that had in very truth repented.
"And still the ship drove on, and on, and on—great heaven! right on to a shelving ledge of rock, where she was almost instantly dashed into a million fragments; masts, hull, sails, freight, men, all, all swept and whirled with relentless fury into one common gulf of waters; and yet, despite the din and roar, there rose upon the air, high and clear, and shrill:
"'The startling shriek—the bubbling cry
Of one strong swimmer in his agony.'
"And that swimmer was Tom Clark. Thrice had he been thrown by the surf upon a jutting ledge of rock; thrice had he, with the strength of despair, clung to it, and seized upon the sea-weed growing on its edges, with all the energy of a drowning man. In vain; the relentless sea swept him off again, broke his hold, and whirled him back into the brine. His strength was almost gone; exhaustion was nigh at hand; and he floated, a helpless, nerveless mass at the mercy of the tide. And yet, so wonderful a thing is a human soul!—in that dreadful moment, when Hope herself was dead, and he was about to quit forever and forever this earth of sin and sorrow, and yet an earth so fair and bright, so lovely and so full of love, teeming so with all that is heroic and true, so friendly and so kind; his soul, even then, his precious and immortal soul, just pluming its wings for a flight to the far-off regions of the Living Dead—that soul for which God Himself had put forth all His redemptive energy—had abundant time to assert its great prerogative, and bid Death himself a haughty, stern defiance. With the speed of Light his mental vision flashed back along and over the valley of the dead years, and saw arrayed before it all the strange phasmaramas of the foretime. Deeds, Thoughts, and Intuitions never die! They are as immortal as the imperishable souls that give them life and being!
"And in that wondrous vision Tom Clark was young again; his childhood, youth, maturity; his sins, sorrows, virtues, and his aspirations, all, all were there, phototyped upon the walls of the mystic lane through which his soul was gazing—a lane not ten inches long, yet stretching away into the immeasurable deeps of a vast Infinitude. A Paradox! I am speaking of the Soul!—a thing whereof we talk so much, and know so very little.
"The spectres of all his hours were there, painted on the Wall of Memory's curved lane; his joys, his weary days of grief—few of the first, many of the latter—were there, like green and smiling oases, standing out in quick relief against the desert of his life. His anxious eyes became preternaturally acute, and seemed to take cognizance both of fact and cause—effect and principle at the same glance. His marriage life—even to its minutest circumstance—stood revealed before him. He saw Betsey as she had been—a girl, spotless, artless, intelligent, ambitious; beheld her married; then saw her as she was when she joined her lot with his own. He beheld her as she had become—anything but a true wife and woman, for only her surface had been reached by either husband. There was a fountain they had neither tapped nor known. Her heart had been touched, indeed; but her soul, never. He was amazed to find that a woman can give more than a husband is supposed to seek and find. More, did I say? My heaven! not one man in ten thousand can think of a line and plummet long enough to fathom the vast ocean of a woman's affection; cannot imagine the height and depths—the unfathomable riches of a woman's Love. Not a peculiar woman's—but any, every woman's love; your sister's, sir, or your wife's, sir, or mine, or anybody's sister or wife—anybody's daughter.
"It appeared to Clark's vision that a vast deal of his time had been worse than wasted, else had he devoted a portion of it to the attentive study of the woman whom he had, in the presence of God and man, sworn to love, honor, and protect; for no man is fit for Heaven who does not love his wife, and no man can love his wife unless he carefully studies her nature; and he cannot study her nature unless he renders himself lovable, and thus calls out her love; and until her love is thus called out, the office of husband is a suicidal sham. Thus saith the canons of the Rosicrucian philosophy. Are they bad?
"And he gazed in the depths of her spirit, surprised beyond measure to find that God had planted so many goodly flowers therein—even in virago Betsey's soul! And he said to himself—as many another husband will, before a hundred years roll by—'What a precious fool I've been! spending all my time in cultivating thistles—getting pricked and cursing them—when roses smell so very well, and are so easily raised? fool! I wish'——and he blamed his folly for not having nurtured roses—for not having duly cultivated the rich garden God had intrusted him with; execrated himself for not having cherished and nursed this garden, and availed himself of its golden, glorious fruitage. It was as a man who had willfully left down the bars for the free entrance of his neighbor's cattle, and then wondering that his harvest of hay was not quite so heavy as desired.... Clark saw that it had been in his power—as it unquestionably is in that of every married man—by a few kind acts, a few tender, loving words, to have thawed and melted forever the ice collected by ill-usage—and every woman is ill-used who is not truly, purely, loyally loved! He saw that he might easily have warmed her spirit toward himself, therefore toward the world, and consequently toward the Giver. He might have made their life a constant summer-time—that very life that had been by his own short-sighted externalism, confirmed into freezing, stormy, chilling winter.
"Wheat and lentils I have seen in Egypt, taken from a mummy's hand, where they had lain three thousand and four hundred years. Some of that wheat I still possess; some of it I planted in a flower-pot, and it forthwith sprung up, green and beautiful, into life and excellence. The mummy's hand was crisp; the tombs of Beni-Hassan were not the places for wheat to grow, for they are very dry. Do you see the point, the place—the thing I am aiming at? It is to show that the ills of marriage life are to be corrected not by a recourse to law-courts and referees, but by each party resolutely trying to correct them in the heart, the head, the home. Another thing I aim at is to seal the lips—to strike to the earth the brawlers for Divorce—the breakers-up of families, who preach—or prate of—what they have neither brains to comprehend, nor manhood to appreciate—Marriage!