Daisy in the Field

by Susan Warner

"Who was Eugene Sue?" was my counter question; and they laughed again, our two friends with sparkling eyes.

"Look here, Daisy!" said Ransom, suddenly bringing down his chair on four feet and sitting upright, - "I wish you would put an end to this indulgence of sight-seeing and your society, and send these gentlemen home with me. I must go, and they ought to go too and do their duty. A word from you would send either of them straight to Beauregard's headquarters. Talk of indulgences!"

"I do not wish to send either of them there," was my incautious answer.

"Do you think it is always wrong to fight?" De Saussure asked.

I said no, with an internal shiver running through me from head to foot. They went into a mutual gratulation on the causes for fighting that existed on the part of the Southern States, and the certainty that the warlike spirit of the North would "die off like a big fungus," as one of them phrased it. I could not discuss the point with them, and I got away as soon as it could gracefully be done.

But something in this little talk, or in what went before it, had unsettled me; and I slept little that night. Anxieties which had lain pretty still, and pain which had been rather quiet, rose up together and shook me. My Bible reading had given me a word which for a time helped the confusion. "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please Him who hath chosen him to be a soldier."

Not to be entangled with the affairs of this life! - and my heart and soul were in a whirl of them; I might say, in a snarl. And true the words were. How could I please Him who had chosen me to be a soldier, with my heart set on my own pleasure, and busy with my own fears? I knew I could not. The quiet subjection of spirit with which I left Washington, I had in a measure lost at Lucerne. Somehow, opposition had roused me; and the great distance and the impossibility of hearing had made my imagination restless; and the near probability that mamma would not favour our wishes had caused me to take a sort of life and death grasp of them. The management of myself, that I had resigned, I found I had not resigned it; but my heart was stretching out yearning hands to Thorold and crying for a sight of him. Meanwhile, the particular work that I had to do in Switzerland had been little thought of. What was it?

I spent that night waking. My room looked not to the lake, but over an extent of greensward and orchards, lit up now by a bright moon. I knelt at my window, with a strong recollection of former times, and a vain look back at my little old self, the childish Daisy, whose window at Melbourne, over the honeysuckles, had been so well used and had entertained such a quiet little heart. Then there had been Miss Pinshon's Daisy; but all the Daisies that I could remember had been quiet compared to this one. Must joy take such close hold on sorrow? Must hopes always be twin with such fears? - I asked amid bitter tears. But tears do one good; and after a little indulgence of them, I brought myself up to look at my duty. What was it?

I might love, and fear, and hope; but I must not be "entangled." Not so concerned about myself, either for sorrow or joy, that I should fail in anything to discern the Lord's will, or be unready, or be slow, to do it. Not so but that my heart should be free, looking to God for its chief strength and joy always and everywhere, - yes, and holding my hopes at his hand, to be given up if he called them back. With Thorold parted from me, in the thick of the war struggle, almost certain to be rejected by both my father and my mother, could I have and keep such a disentangled heart? The command said yes, and I knew there were promises that said yes too; but for a time I was strangely unwilling. I had a sort of superstitious feeling, that the giving up of my will about these things, and of my will's hold of them, would be a preliminary to their being taken away from me in good earnest. And I trembled and wept and shrank, like the coward I was.

"And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully."