CHAPTER LXI.
The poor child did not laugh.
“You do not know him, you do not know him,” again and again she replied, wearily.
She might have added,—but she did not,—“You do not know me.” And after all, what mother, of them all, knows her daughter, enveloped as she is in a double veil? For between the old heart and the young lies the mist of the years; and what eye can pierce aright the diffracting medium of maternal love?
Even Doctor Alice, when called in consultation, next day, could not probe to the bottom of the mystery.
And are there not ever some little nooks and corners of our hearts unsuspected by our dearest friends, even?—aspirations that they would have laughed at, perhaps,—fears which we should have blushed to confess,—hopes, alas, withered and fallen now,—that we have never revealed to mortal ears?
Now, within our Mary’s breast there was, I shall not say a nook or a recess, but a dark and dismal chamber, the key of which had never left her keeping.
Let us call it the Cavern of Religious Terror, and cut the allegory short.
Suppose we try to put ourselves in her place, and see how things looked, not to an average girl of that period (still less to any one of this), but to one such as Mary was.
At the time in question, the dogma of what is known among theologians, I believe, as that of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, was held from one end of Virginia to the other.