"Why, you is getting stupid-like, child! Honey darling, don't you know that Master Percival, your father, was my master ever so many years?"—and she began notating them upon her fingers.
I interrupted the mathematical calculation by telling Chloe that three people were waiting for their tea.
"Two of 'em is my dear childers," said Chloe,—who never would accept Aaron, even with all his goodness, into her heart; and she moved about with accelerated velocity in her daily orbit.
What could Mr. Axtell have meant by saying that he had killed Mary, who, Chloe had assured me, died peaceably in her father's house? After disturbing the equilibrium of thought-realm, and nearly giving my mind a new axis of revolution, I decided to think no more of it. I could not, would not, believe that Abraham Axtell had gone up any Moriah of sacrifice, and been permitted to let fall the knife upon his victim. His life must have been a dream, an illusion; he only wanted awakening to existence. And the memory of my Sabbath-morning's vision dwelt with me, and the voice that speaketh, filling the soul "as a sea-shell is with murmuring," said, "Your finger will awaken him." And I looked down at my two passive hands, and asked, "Which one of them?" And the murmuring voice startled me with the answer, "Two are required,—one of reconciliation, the other of forgiveness." Whereupon I lifted up the ten that Nature gave, and said, "Take them all, if need be."——
"Tea is ready," said Aaron, peeping in, his face alive with satisfied muscles, playing too merry a tune of joy, I thought, for a grave minister.
"Sophie's a magician," I thought for the thousandth time, as, for the millionth, Aaron looked at her sitting so demurely regal at his spread table.
"What would these two good people say," I asked myself, in thinking, "if they knew all that I have learned in my visit, not yet a week long?"—and I ran up and down in the scale of semibreves and minims that I had heard, with the one long, sweet trill transfusing life on earth into heavenly existence, and I felt very wingy, very much as if I could take up the tower, standing high and square out there, and carry it, "like Loretto's chapel, through the air to the green land," where my spirit would go singing evermore. I could not tell what my joy was like: not unto anything that I had seen upon the earth; under the earth I had not yet been; only once above it, and they were calmly celestial there. I was turbulently joyous, and so I winged a little while around Sophie and Aaron, hummed a good-night in Chloe's ears, and found that the canny soul was luxuriating in the idea that the icy lady was to be thawed into the acceptance of sundry confections which she was basketing to carry with her when I went out.
"Call me early," I said; "you know I leave at seven o'clock."
"I shall be up ever so early, Miss Anna; never fear for Chloe's sleeping late to-morrow in the morning; you get ever so much,—'nuff for Chloe and you too; good-night, honey!"—and Chloe went on her mission, whilst Aloes and Honey went up-stairs, past Aaron's study, and into a room where the mysterious art of packing must be practised for a little.
I thought of the "breadths of silver and skirts of gold" that I had seen the Day pack away; and, inspired with the thought, fell to folding less amberous raiment, until, my duty done, I pressed the cover down, and locked my treasures in, for the journey of the morrow. Then I took out my sacred gift to guard, and, laying it before me, looked at it. It was of dimensions scarcely larger than the moon,—that is, extremely variant and uncertain: to one, a planet, larger than Jupiter, moons and all; to another, scarcely more than a bridal ring. So my packet was of uncertain size: undoubtedly the tower was packed away in it, Herbert too,—and I couldn't help agreeing with my thought, and confessing that this was a better form for conveyance than that I so lately had planned; so I put it safely away, with myself, until the day should come. The day-star had arisen in my heart. Would it ever go down? Not whilst He who holdeth the earth in the hollow of His hand hath me there too. Reaching out, once more, for the strong protective fibres that had so blessed me, I wandered forth with it into the land whose mural heights are onychites and mocha-stones of mossy mystery.