After a day of so much excitement the two girls would scarcely be held from sleep by the violence of the storm. Only at one or two tremendous peals of thunder did they start from their slumber and listen to the sweeping wind, which rattled every window, roared in the chimneys, and shook the whole house. Then suddenly the tumult would cease. Not a drop of rain would fall. Not a leaf seemed to move, nor a puff of wind to blow. Just as suddenly would the rain again pour in torrents, only abruptly to cease, as if a valve had been shut, and the supply instantly cut off.
Nor did the light that fell upon their faces, as Aunt Rachel came for her last care before retiring, disturb and eyelid. The darkness and the light are alike to those whom God translates into the mysterious world of sleep. Strange world! in which we dwell in unconsciousness a quarter part of all our lives! Is four score years then so long, that from it must be subtracted a full fourth part?
To one of Rachel’s peculiar habits of mind the spectacle of sleep is always solemn and mysterious. Where do their spirits wander? Voyaging along the dark continent, through what influences do they glide? What guardian spirits convoy them? Or what spiteful sprites would annoy them? If they were dead, would they not lie just as now they do? Rachel shuddered as she tucked them up and put back a raven lock of hair that had escaped from Alice’s cap.
Think it not strange that a farmer’s wife should deeply ponder questions which have tasked the deepest thinkers. Careful thinking may demand careful culture. But it is nature that gives the power to think, and it is conferred on many who never train their faculties with the help of schools. Now and then, and in New England often, are to be found plain and uncultured persons, whose unconscious thoughts deal habitually with the profoundest questions which man can ponder. The very intensity of religious conviction—at once the cause of so much that is good, and the occasion of so much ill repute—tends, at length, to breed among the common people an aptitude for deep moral problems.
But Rachel never sought such subjects. They came to her, and came largely, through her feelings and her imagination. She was scarcely conscious of her own agency in producing the thoughts—half-sad impressions of the infinite—which seemed to overshadow her. She was scared at the impressions which seemed to fall aupon her,—just as birds, singing in a thicket, if the shadow of a hawk sailing in the air pass by, hush their notes and nestle close. Many have marvelled at the mystery of human life, its irregularities, its inequalities, its incompleteness, its contradictory elements, its inequitableness. These were not Rachel’s peculiar thoughts. Life seemed every day like a voyage along the edge of a great spirit world, out of which, it seemed to her, presently would come some infinite truth, some revelation. These were not thoughts, but vague feelings.
Nor are such tendencies uncommon among common people. There are many fine natures hidden under coarse forms. Powerful impressions are produced on many who cannot resolve them into ideas, and still less fashion them to words. Along the furrow, by the work-bench, in the chamber, or in the kitchen, have been thousands silently plying the unknown with as solemn an earnestness as that of those who write books to prove how little man can know of the Unknowable.
Of all that have cast line or net into that sea, whose line has straightened? and whose net has been broken with its draught of fishes?
But this evening, as if stirred up by the excitement of the night and the storm, Rachel seemed to gaze upon Alice as one who sends a child afar off. What is before her? Is her life already rolled up within her, as leaves and blossoms are in buds? Do men come into life mere messengers to fulfil decrees? Is this child like a dyer’s thread, whose colors, differently measured and laid in, shall in weaving form a prearranged figure? And what is the pattern? Who knows? and what will be the weaving? Who can tell? Can any one hinder it? or help it? Must it be?—is it decreed?—will my darling’s life unfold as inevitably as a rose pit into a rose bush? an apple seed into an apple tree? Must I let her go, as one would cut loose a skiff, and let it drift out into the wide ocean? It may founder or strand upon a desolate island, or monsters may seize it, or rough men, seeing it helpless on the sea, snatch up its little voyager into some ship of foreign tongue, on rude and dangerous voyages! Already Rachel felt that Alice was gone out of her arms, and that dull aching which came from the soul’s deep sense of pilgrimage—from the habit of solitary thought, from its pining after truths beyond the boundary lines—was a premonition of sorrow.
Rachel left the children and went down stairs. The storm was sobbing itself to rest. The thunder grew more distant, and the rain settled down to a steady work of fine and constant drops. into the great kitchen she went, and closing the doors, ere long she was bowed in prayer. No words escaped her. Yet tears were there many, and many sighs. But, as the storm had spent itself out of doors, so it would seem as if this pleading face to face with God had scattered her clouds, and if she did not arise radiant, she at least wore a face solemn with the peace of resignation. If one shall ask, was there need of such trouble? Not to him that asketh. But to him that is born to sing, singing is a necessity: and to him that is born to sigh, sighing is a necessity. Some smile easily, and some are just as easily sad. Some think. Some feel. Each has his mood.
A conscience that is idealized, that clothes the minutest shades of life with transcendent importance, and sees refinements in duty far beyond common eyes, cannot help stamping the character with a peculiar experience.
The broad common sense of her husband was only just enough touched with the imagination to give richness, and plain and practical refinement. But he was not wont to spend thought either upon his own states of mind, or upon the subtile questions which dazzle, or darken, natures of a mystical tendency. He knew all the doctrines of religion as she did. He read the same books, listened to the same sermons; but the result in each was utterly unlike. There was not simply definiteness, but uniformity of conception in his mind. Once having explored a doubt and mastered it, it never rose again. Once having traced the proofs of any proposition to an intellectual conviction, that truth stood forever clear and firm.
Rachel lacked that philosophical grip which holds a truth to its place, and compels it to a decent and conventional behavior. Truths came and went above her head, as summer clouds do—casting down their shifting shadows in endless variety and never twice alike. A fear which was mastered yesterday was as fresh to-day as the new wind of march, which blows no less to-day because it was spent and hushed yesterday evening.
If in her childhood truth had risen upon her mind in its wider aspects, and the infiniteness of divine tenderness had fired the imagination and toned the conscience, it is not easy to see what measure of difference there would have been between the result and that which actually had taken place, by an early and continued presentation to her mind of sterner views of divine justice and of the requisitions of divine purity.
Winged with imagination and colored with fear and exquisite sensibility of conscience, her thoughts ranged those vast fields of truth so familiar to New-England pulpits; not as if affrighted with some near and impending terror, but as sad with long-familiar truth, whose glory and beauty cast down shadows and twilight upon our mortal state, and stained all human life.
That this was a feeling rather than a conviction made it the more unmanageable. That it dissolved and fled away often, when sharply pierced with a clear truth, was of little use so long as “the clouds returned again after the rain.”
It should not be thought that these inward experiences produced a moping, tear-shedding woman, who carried her shadow over all the household. Rachel had a peculiar charm of personal presence. Her sympathy was so quick, her goodness so deep, her intuitions so fine, that she took hold upon all who came near her, and evinced a singular power of producing happiness in them. Nothing of her own moods appeared to ordinary observers except a fine sadness, which passed among her friends not apt to distinguish closely between shades of feeling, simply as tenderness. It is not uncommon for such natures to guard their inward life with a jealous shame, as if it would, if known, lower them in men’s approbation. And sometimes, too, the rebound from these airy and endless musings into practical kindness brings grateful relief. At any rate, Rachel was known neither by her children nor her friends as one of an unhappy experience, but as one of the few that were far more than they seemed; whose reserve was that of inward occupation and depth, rather than of timidity or of pride.
The morning came to the happy children. Alice was to return with rose, and spend the day in town, and Rose was to show and share a wealth of things indoors and out, which seemed to Alice—whose more simple and retired life seldom met with superfluities—a fairy world.
Is there in life a fairer sight than two maidens, just emerging from childhood, twined together in love, gentle, strong, sincere, and full of fancies? who see real things as if they were visions, and imaginary things as if they were real? whose days and nights flow musical as a meadow brook, between green banks, and over a bottom rough, just enough to give flash and ripple to the surface? All the simplicity of childhood is yet theirs, while dawning duties and social proprieties begin to jut out like the buds in early spring! How beautiful the contrast between Alice, sensitive, reserved, and full of innate dignity—whose cheek changed color to her feelings, shifting almost as the colors flash from a humming-bird’s back as he quivers among flowers,—and Rose, fair skinned, of a brown hair that might be called suppressed auburn,—free, frank, strong and loving,—who seemed conscious of the life and meaning of every living thing except herself. Alice accepted mirth but never created it. Rose sparkled with it. Her thoughts moved in a brilliant atmosphere. In certain of her moods events, people, and even soulless objects, sparkled with gayety and humor. The two girls might be called, in the language of art, Light and Shadow.
