They made no pretence of talking beyond the few necessary questions of even the smallest assemblage at tea; but when Mr. Ashmead, their guest and the minister of the neighboring parish, said that he thought he must leave on the morrow early, both his host and his young, grave hostess begged he would stay for a few more days, till next Sunday even, if he could.
And so the new life began—the life we meant to start with at the beginning of our story, but which has seemed so to need its introduction, to be so much more interesting through it, that we could not help putting in this long, explanatory prelude.
The long days of winter passed, and a year was gone since the day that saw Elizabeth Seymour's burial. Grace was growing tall and womanly, and had taken her mother's place with as great seriousness as success. She it was who taught her little brother all he was capable of learning at his age; she who helped the worn-out teacher in the school; she who copied out her father's sermons, and looked out his texts and quotations.
The father and daughter, now knit together by a doubly tender tie, and fully realizing all its happy solemnity, turned to the welcome occupations of study to fill the many vacant hours their duties allowed them. Mr. Seymour's library was extensive, and every month brought from Boston some valuable and interesting additions. Of course, theology figured mainly among the subjects treated of in these old and new books; but not alone the theology of his own sect, for he had the early fathers' magnificent works, those Thebaids of literature where the vastness of the seemingly endless desert is only a veil for the innumerable caves of deepest science, and hidden recesses filled with most beautiful dogmas. The councils, too, were not unrepresented on his shelves, though the earlier ones were to him the best known and the least obnoxious. Among them was a dusty little book, in ancient type, evidently a very hermit of a book, whose solitude had not been disturbed since, by some accident, it had once made its way there among the miscellaneous collection of a small library purchased nearly twenty years ago. We may have occasion to refer to it again.
Mr. Seymour, confident of the truth of his own doctrines, never hesitated to simulate doubts and ask questions, or propound religious problems for the further mental training of his daughter's inquiring disposition; but this habit of constant investigation at last produced in her a tumult of the brain which she found she no longer had the power to quell. Questions forced themselves upon her, doubts wrestled for mastery in her mind, all things began to take strange, hitherto undreamt-of shapes, and truths, elusory yet alluring, seemed to rise out of axioms which she thought she had long ago laid aside as proved and dangerous errors. She strove to hold on to her once blind and unreasoning acceptance of her father's teaching. She would have welcomed any superstition, could it only have promised her peace; but the restless spirit, once roused in her, hurried her remorselessly, till at last, in sheer despair, she turned to sweeping and systematic denial of everything she had been taught to look upon as truth.
At first she did not speak to her father about these strange experiences; she clung to the idea that it was physical excitement, a fever of the brain, which would subside and let her see her landmarks plainly once more. But the tempest grew wilder and more hopeless; questions rose up, and would not be crushed out of existence—faced her and mocked her, and would not be answered by the catechism formulas she strove to oppose to them; her life seemed resolving itself into an eternal, tormenting, unspoken, but ever suggested "why?" that rose and took the shape of a demon she could not lay nor yet would listen to. Importunate voices were all around her, chasms opened on every side; and while she taught her little brother, and wrote out her father's sermons, it seemed as if a stern and pitiless query sounded within her very heart, demanding why she abetted the enslaving of other minds to codes of which she herself felt the utter insufficiency. The keenest misery to her was that this mocking voice, whose every vibration pulled down a stone of her former religious temple, and sent it echoing in hollow tones of fiendish triumph down the recesses and depths of her torn heart—this voice never suggested one idea upon which she might have seized and made the corner-stone of a new organization of truth. The strange demon that beset her seemed, to her agonized mind, the spirit of heartless destruction only, not even of the most perishable and paltry substitution. Hollow, empty, heartless, seemed life to her; faith gone, or proved an illusion good only for those whose weak brain could not bear the spiritual loneliness of unbelief; the world a charnel-house, in which death-doomed fools quarrelled about precedence in another world, whose very existence was a myth of their own miserable creation; life a journey aimless and useless, and the faiths men carried through it only so many wind-threatened torches they bore for their own deception—was this all, was this the beginning and the end? Blindly her heart cried out, "Somewhere there must be a God, somewhere there must be happiness!" and the fiend within her brain made answer: "There is no God save the one the coward imagines; there is no happiness save that which the fool finds in ignorance."
One day, after many months of this life-wearing struggle, Grace spoke of her state to her father; and strange indeed was the shock to the earnest, clear-thinking minister. Grave and tender, he tried to handle the wounded child, but Grace was not to be soothed into faith; it was conviction she required. Firmly yet patiently she heard him, and answered:
"All that I have said to myself, but it is of no avail."
He tried to speak to her of her mother—of her belief, her unwavering hope in God, her sure knowledge of Jesus, her feeling of rock-bound security at the moment of her death; but to all this Grace answered: "I know it all, but I cannot feel it; tell me something else, something more."