How it came back, that rainy day at the seaside, the terror of the tempest, the fire she had kindled, the watch she had kept, the presentiment of sorrow, then the muffled figure coming down the road, the rain, the wind, and his smile, all meeting her at the door, and the perfume of the violets he had brought her!
Who knows not the power that perfumes have over the memory? The influence of sound is evanescent, that which the eyes have seen the imagination changes in time; but a perfume is the most subtile and indestructible of reminders. You have walked in the world's beaten ways many a year, till the country home of your childhood is a picture almost effaced from your mind. Its tones echo no more, its faces are faded, its scenes forgotten.
Some sultry summer day, wandering from the city, but only half weaned from the thoughts of it, your listlessly straying feet crush the warm, wild herbage, and a thick perfume of sweet-fern rises about you. What does it mean? Thrilling to your finger-tips, you bend and inhale that strange yet familiar scent. Its touch is as potent as the touch of the rod of Moses.
"A score of years roll back their tide
Of mingled joy and pain;
Dry-shod I cross the torrent's bed,
And am a child again."
Old scenes come up: gray rocks start out, lichen-jewelled; there are billows of butter-cups, mayweed, and clover, over which your young fancies sailed moth-winged, and brought rich freights from every port; the long lines of pole and stone fences are built up again in a twinkling; the boiling spring leaps bubbling into the heart of the sunshine; in the woods the cold, bright waters run hurrying over the pebbles; there is the homestead, the smoke from the chimney, the open windows, some one standing in the door, some one calling you with a voice as real as your breath; there are faces with eyes that see you, every feature plain, there are hands stretched out.
How it rises and tramples on your present, that past that hides but never dies! How your heart-strings strain with the vain longing to stay for ever in this bright, recovered country, and look no more on the desert and the land of bondage!
"Flow back, O years! into your channel,
Flow, and stop the way!
Let me forget how vain the fancies
Of that childish day."
If we did not know that every hope and sweetness in the past were but seeds for future blossom and fruit; if we did not know that childhood is but a bee's load of honey, but a babe's sip of milk, to those flowing streams in the promised land; if we did not believe that God's denial is brief, his bounty endless; that surely he sees and marks every pain; and that he holds the fulfilment of our utmost wish just at the verge of our utmost endurance—if we were not sure of this, could human nature bear the cross that sometimes is laid upon it? It could not!
Miss Hamilton did not appear at the dinner-table that day; but in the evening Mr. Southard was summoned to her in the library. She met him with an April face full of a grieved kind of joy, or a joyful grief, crossed the room toward him when he came in, and held out her hands to him.