"My good angel and I just go about our business, and nobody molests us," she said with a spice of mischief; for the mention of anything peculiarly Catholic usually had the effect of producing a blank silence, and a general elongation of visage.
"But such a magnificent spectacle as I saw this morning! I came home round the Common. The sleet-storm of last evening had left all the trees crusted with ice to the very tips of their twigs, and set an ice-mitre on every individual arrow-head of the iron fence. There were the ghosts of all the bishops from Peter down. There wasn't any sky, but only a vast crystalline distance. I took my stand on the Beacon and Charles street corner. Every other person who was so happy as to be out looked also. Then the sun came up. Park street steeple caught fire at the ball, and flamed all the way down. There was a glimmer on the topmost twigs, then the trees all over the Common were in an instant transfigured into flashing diamonds. The malls were enough to put your eyes out—nothing but glitter from end to end. It was a grand display for the frost-people. The trees will talk about it all next summer."
The winter slipped away; and Mr. Southard had not fulfilled his promise to Miss Hamilton. Neither had he relinquished his studies. Shut up with his books hour after hour and day after day, in silence and solitude, he scarcely knew how the world fared without. For him the war had suddenly dwindled. Through long and weary vigils that wore his face thin and his eyes hollow, he studied, and thought, and prayed, not the humble petition of one who places himself before God, and passively awaits an inspiration, but the impassioned and fiery petition of one who will not doubt the justice of his cause, and will not be denied. Then, leaning from the window to cool his heated eyes and head in the fresh early dawning, a peace that was half exhaustion would settle upon him. Sleep came pitifully in those hours, and pressed on the throbbing brain too much expanded by thought, and for a little while soothed the tormented heart.
His journal bore traces of the conflict.
"I will resist the seduction! This is my time of trial; but I will conquer! In the name of God, I will yet confound the doctors of the Roman Church. O God! who didst nerve the arm of David against Goliath, strengthen thou me!"
At every step he was baffled. Catching at what appeared a mere theological weed, thinking to fling it out of his way, he found it rooted like an oak. Approaching dogmas with the expectation of cutting them down like men of straw, he was confronted by mailed giants.
He found himself among crowds and clouds of Catholic saints—shadows, he called them—that would fly from his path when he should hold up the torch of truth. But, looking in that light, he saw steadfast eyes, and shining foreheads, and palm-branches that brushed his shrinking, empty hands. And out from among them, with a look of gentle humility that smote him like a blow, and with a tremulous radiance gathering about her pure forehead, came one whom he had frowned upon, and striven to discrown. What was she saying? "All nations shall call me blessed!" Not great, not glorious, not even lovely, but blessed!
"Well—she—was blessed," admitted the minister.
The next moment he started out of his chair, muttered some kind of exorcism, caught his hat, and went out for a walk. Though it was mid-April, a north wind was blowing thank heaven for that! Nothing murky about the north wind. It would soon blow away all these pestilential vapors that came up from the sun-steeped lowlands of his soul; pagan places where, though his iconoclastic will had again and again gone about breaking images, no sooner did it rest than there they were again, Bacchus, and Hebe, and Diana, and the rest. Or from yet more dangerous because more deceptive regions, wide, bright solitudes of the soul, arid and dazzling, where the unobstructed sky seemed to lean upon the earth—the region of mirages, of New Jerusalems, that shone and crumbled—of sacred-seeming streams that fled from thirsty lips—of cool shadows that never were reached.