Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860




This particular old black woman was a striking specimen of her
class. Old as she looked, her eye was bright and knowing. She wore a
red-and-yellow turban, which set off her complexion well, and hoops of
gold in her ears, and beads of gold about her neck, and an old funeral
ring upon her finger. She had that touching stillness about her which
belongs to animals that wait to be spoken to and then look up with a
kind of sad humility.

"Why, Sophy!" said the good minister, "is this you?"

She looked up with the still expression on her face. "It's old Sophy,"
she said.

"Why," said the Doctor, "I did not believe you could walk so far as this
to save the Union. Bring Sophy a glass of wine, Letty. Wine's good for
old folks like Sophy and me, after walking a good way, or preaching a
good while."

The young girl stepped into the back-parlor, where she found the
great pewter flagon in which the wine that was left after each
communion-service was brought to the minister's house. With much toil
she managed to tip it so as to get a couple of glasses filled. The
minister tasted his, and made old Sophy finish hers.

"I wan' to see you 'n' talk wi' you all alone," she said presently.

The minister got up and led the way towards his study. "To be sure," he
said; he had only waited for her to rest a moment before he asked her
into the library. The young girl took her gently by the arm, and helped
her feeble steps along the passage. When they reached the study, she
smoothed the cushion of a rocking-chair, and made the old woman sit
down in it. Then she tripped lightly away, and left her alone with the
minister.

Old Sophy was a member of the Reverend Doctor Honeywood's church.
She had been put through the necessary confessions in a tolerably
satisfactory manner. To be sure, as her grandfather had been a cannibal
chief, according to the common story, and, at any rate, a terrible wild
savage, and as her mother retained to the last some of the prejudices
of her early education, there was a heathen flavor in her Christianity,
which had often scandalized the elder of the minister's two deacons.
But the good minister had smoothed matters over: had explained that
allowances were to be made for those who had been long sitting without
the gate of Zion,--that, no doubt, a part of the curse which descended
to the children of Ham consisted in "having the understanding darkened,"
as well as the skin,--and so had brought his suspicious senior deacon to
tolerate old Sophy as one of the communion of fellow-sinners.

* * * * *

----Poor things! How little we know the simple notions with which these
rudiments of souls are nourished by the Divine Goodness! Did not Mrs.
Professor come home this very blessed morning with a story of one of her
old black women?

"And how do you feel to-day, Mrs. Robinson?"

"Oh, my dear, I have this singing in my head all the time." (What
doctors call _tinnitus aurium_.)

"She's got a cold in the head," said old Mrs. Rider.

"Oh, no, my dear! Whatever I'm thinking about, it's all this singing,
this music. When I'm thinking of the dear Redeemer, it all turns into
this singing and music. When the clark came to see me, I asked him if
he couldn't cure me, and he said, No,--it was the Holy Spirit in me,
singing to me; and all the time I hear this beautiful music, and it's
the Holy Spirit a-singing to me."----

* * * * *

The good man waited for Sophy to speak; but she did not open her lips as
yet.

"I hope you are not troubled in mind or body," he said to her at length,
finding she did not speak.

The poor old woman took out a white handkerchief, and lifted it to her
black face. She could not say a word for her tears and sobs.

The minister would have consoled her; he was used to tears, and could in
most cases withstand their contagion manfully; but something choked his
voice suddenly, and when he called upon it, he got no answer, but a
tremulous movement of the muscles, which was worse than silence.

At last she spoke.

"Oh, no, no, no! It's my poor girl, my darling, my beauty, my baby,
that's grown up to be a woman; she will come to a bad end; she will do
something that will make them kill her or shut her up all her life. Oh,
Doctor, Doctor, save her, pray for her! It a'n't her fault. It a'n't
her fault. If they knew all that I know, they wouldn't blame that poor
child. I must tell you, Doctor: if I should die, perhaps nobody else
would tell you. Massa Venner can't talk about it. Doctor Kittredge won't
talk about it. Nobody but old Sophy to tell you, Doctor; and old Sophy
can't die without telling you."

The kind minister soothed the poor old soul with those gentle, quieting
tones which had carried peace and comfort to so many chambers of
sickness and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened by the trials laid
upon them.

Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and proceeded to tell her
story. She told it in the low half-whisper which is the natural voice
of lips oppressed with grief and fears; with quick glances around the
apartment from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the dim portraits on
the walls and the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her words.

It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report
minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers
of stories made out of authors' brains. Yet its main character can be
imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to give
all its details.

She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,--she being
then a middle-aged woman. The heir and hope of a family which had been
narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been surrounded with
every care and trained by the best education he could have in New
England. He had left college, and was studying the profession which
gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he fell in love with a young girl
left in the world almost alone, as he was. The old woman told the story
of his young love and his joyous bridal with a tenderness which had
something more, even, than her family sympathies to account for it. Had
she not hanging over her bed a small paper-cutting of a profile--jet
black, but not blacker than the face it represented--of one who would
have been her own husband in the small years of this century, if the
vessel in which he went to sea, like Jamie in the ballad, had not sailed
away and never come back to land? Had she not her bits of furniture
stowed away which had been got ready for her own wedding,--_two_
rocking-chairs, one worn with long use, one kept for him so long that it
had grown a superstition with her never to sit in it,--and might he not
come back yet, after all? Had she not her chest of linen ready for her
humble house-keeping, with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of
neatly folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against
her black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in
"the presence"?

All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet
dwelling upon every incident with a loving pleasure. How happy this
young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they had
formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young and
fresh and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early summer when
they walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in
the garden,--she told of this as loath to leave it and come to the woe
that lay beneath.

She told the whole story;--shall I repeat it? Not now. If, in the
course of relating the incidents I have undertaken to report, _it tells
itself_, perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of producing a
painful impression on some of those susceptible readers whom it would be
ill-advised to disturb or excite, when they rather require to be amused
and soothed. In our pictures of life, we must show the flowering-out of
terrible growths which have their roots deep, deep underground. Just
how far we shall lay bare the unseemly roots themselves is a matter of
discretion and taste, in which none of us are infallible.

The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her
peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and
hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development.
She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when she first tried
to crawl across the carpet, and her father shrank from her with an
involuntary shudder as she worked her way towards him. With the memory
of Juliet's nurse she told the story of her teething, and how, the woman
to whose breast she had clung dying suddenly about that time, they
had to struggle hard with the child before she would learn the
accomplishment of feeding with a spoon. And so of her fierce plays and
fiercer disputes with that boy who had been her companion, and the whole
scene of the quarrel when she struck him with those sharp white teeth,
frightening her, old Sophy, almost to death; for, as she said, the boy
would have died, if it hadn't been for the old Doctor's galloping over
as fast as he could gallop and burning the places right out of his arm.
Then came the story of that other incident, sufficiently alluded to
already, which had produced such an ecstasy of fright and left such a
nightmare of apprehension in the household. And so the old woman came
down to this present time. That boy she never loved nor trusted was
grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man, and he was under their roof. He
wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and Elsie hated him, and sometimes she
would look at him over her shoulder just as she used to look at that
woman she hated; and she, old Sophy, couldn't sleep for thinking she
should hear a scream from the white chamber some night and find him in
spasms such as that woman came so near dying with. And then there was
something about Elsie she did not know what to make of: she would sit
and hang her head sometimes, and look as if she were dreaming; and she
brought home books they said a young gentleman up at the great school
lent her; and once she heard her whisper in her sleep, and she talked as
young girls do to themselves when they're thinking about somebody they
have a liking for and think nobody knows it.

She finished her long story at last. The minister had listened to it in
perfect silence. He sat still even when she had done speaking,--still,
and lost in thought. It was a very awkward matter for him to have a hand
in. Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Venners had a pew in the
Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house. It would seem that he, Mr.
Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most interested. Had
he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people? Was there enough
capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature to furnish sympathy
and unshrinking service for his friends in an emergency? or was he too
busy with his own attacks of spiritual neuralgia, and too much occupied
with taking account of stock of his own thin-blooded offences, to forget
himself and his personal interests on the small scale and the large,
and run a risk of his life, if need were, at any rate give himself up
without reserve to the dangerous task of guiding and counselling these
distressed and imperilled fellow-creatures?

The good minister thought the best thing to do would be to call and talk
over some of these matters with Brother Fairweather,--for so he would
call him at times, especially if his senior deacon were not within
earshot. Having settled this point, he comforted Sophy with a few words
of counsel and a promise of coming to see her very soon. He then called
his man to put the old white horse into the chaise and drive Sophy back
to the mansion-house.

When the Doctor sat down to his sermon again, it looked very differently
from the way it had looked at the moment he left it. When he came to
think of it, he did not feel quite so sure _practically_ about that
matter of the utter natural selfishness of everybody. There was Letty,
now, seemed to take a very unselfish interest in that old black woman,
and indeed in poor people generally; perhaps it would not be too much to
say that she was always thinking of other people. He thought he had
seen other young persons naturally unselfish, thoughtful for others; it
seemed to be a family trait in some he had known.

But most of all he was exercised about this poor girl whose story Sophy
had been telling. If what the old woman believed was true,--and it
had too much semblance of probability,--what became of his theory of
ingrained moral obliquity applied to such a case? If by the visitation
of God a person receives any injury which impairs the intellect or the
moral perceptions, is it not monstrous to judge such a person by our
common working standards of right and wrong? Certainly, everybody will
answer, in cases where there is a palpable organic change brought about,
as when a blow on the head produces insanity. Fools! How long will it be
before we shall learn that for every wound which betrays itself to the
sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations that cripple,
each of them, some one or more of our highest faculties? If what Sophy
told and believed was the real truth, what prayers could be agonizing
enough, what tenderness could be deep enough, for this poor, lost,
blighted, hapless, blameless child of misfortune, struck by such a doom
as perhaps no living creature in all the sisterhood of humanity shared
with her?

The minister thought these matters over until his mind was bewildered
with doubts and tossed to and fro on that stormy deep of thought heaving
forever beneath the conflict of windy dogmas. He laid by his old sermon.
He put back a pile of old commentators with their eyes and mouths and
hearts full of the dust of the schools. Then he opened the book of
Genesis at the eighteenth chapter and read that remarkable argument
of Abraham's with his Maker, in which he boldly appeals to first
principles. He took as his text, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth
do right?" and began to write his sermon, afterwards so famous,--"On the
Obligations of an Infinite Creator to a Finite Creature."

It astonished the good people, who had been accustomed so long to repeat
mechanically their Oriental hyperboles of self-abasement, to hear their
worthy minister maintaining that the dignified attitude of the old
Patriarch, insisting on what was reasonable and fair with reference to
his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful to his Maker, and
a great deal manlier and more to his credit, than if he had yielded the
whole matter, and pretended that men had not rights as well as duties.
The same logic which had carried him to certain conclusions with
reference to human nature, this same irresistible logic carried him
straight on from his text until he arrived at those other results, which
not only astonished his people, as was said, but surprised himself. He
went so far in defence of the rights of man, that he put his foot into
several heresies, for which men had been burned so often, it was time,
if ever it could be, to acknowledge the demonstration of the _argumentum
ad ignem_. He did not believe in the responsibility of idiots. He did
not believe a new-born infant was morally answerable for other people's
acts. He thought a man with a crooked spine would never be called to
account for not walking erect. He thought, if the crook was in his
brain, instead of his back, he could not fairly be blamed for any
consequence of this natural defect, whatever lawyers or divines might
call it. He argued, that, if a person inherited a perfect mind, body,
and disposition, and had perfect teaching from infancy, that person
could do nothing more than keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing
that the Creator allows a person to be born with an hereditary or
ingrafted organic tendency, and then puts this person into the hands of
teachers incompetent or positively bad, is not what is called _sin_ or
transgression of the law necessarily involved in the premises? Is not
a Creator bound to guard his children against the ruin which inherited
ignorance might entail on them? Would it be fair for a parent to put
into a child's hands the title-deeds to all its future possessions, and
a bunch of matches? And are not men children, nay, babes, in the eye of
Omniscience?--The minister grew bold in his questions. Had not he as
good right to ask questions as Abraham?

This was the dangerous vein of speculation in which the Reverend Doctor
Honeywood found himself involved, as a consequence of the suggestions
forced upon him by old Sophy's communication. The truth was, the good
man had got so humanized by mixing up with other people in various
benevolent schemes, that, the very moment he could escape from his old
scholastic abstractions, he took the side of humanity instinctively,
just as the Father of the Faithful did,--all honor be to the noble old
Patriarch for insisting on the worth of an honest man, and making the
best terms he could for a very ill-conditioned metropolis, which might
possibly, however, have contained ten righteous people, for whose sake
it should be spared!

The consequence of all this was, that he was in a singular and seemingly
self-contradictory state of mind when he took his hat and cane and went
forth to call on his heretical brother. The old minister took it for
granted that the Reverend Mr. Fairweather knew the private history of
his parishioner's family. He did not reflect that there are griefs
men _never_ put into words,--that there are fears which must not be
spoken,--intimate matters of consciousness which must be carried, as
bullets that have been driven deep into the living tissues are sometimes
carried, for a whole life-time,--_encysted_ griefs, if we may borrow the
chirurgeon's term, never to be reached, never to be seen, never to be
thrown out, but to go into the dust with the frame that bore them about
with it, during long years of anguish, known only to the sufferer and
his Maker. Dudley Venner had talked with his minister about this child
of his. But he had talked cautiously, feeling his way for sympathy,
looking out for those indications of tact and judgment which would
warrant him in some partial communication, at least, of the origin of
his doubts and fears, and never finding them.

There was something about the Reverend Mr. Fairweather which repressed
all attempts at confidential intercourse. What this something was,
Dudley Venner could hardly say; but he felt it distinctly, and it sealed
his lips. He never got beyond certain generalities connected with
education and religious instruction. The minister could not help
discovering, however, that there were difficulties connected with this
girl's management, and he heard enough outside of the family to convince
him that she had manifested tendencies, from an early age, at variance
with the theoretical opinions he was in the habit of preaching, and in
a dim way of holding for truth, as to the natural dispositions of the
human being.

About this terrible fact of congenital obliquity his new beliefs began
to cluster as a centre, and to take form as a crystal around its
nucleus. Still, he might perhaps have struggled against them, had it not
been for the little Roman Catholic chapel he passed every Sunday, on his
way to the meeting-house. Such a crowd of worshippers, swarming into the
pews like bees, filling all the aisles, running over at the door like
berries heaped too full in the measure,--some kneeling on the steps,
some standing on the side-walk, hats off, heads down, lips moving, some
looking on devoutly from the other side of the street! Oh, could he
have followed his own Bridget, maid of all work, into the heart of that
steaming throng, and bowed his head while the priests intoned their
Latin prayers! could he have snuffed up the cloud of frankincense, and
felt that he was in the great ark which holds the better half of the
Christian world, while all around it are wretched creatures, some
struggling against the waves in leaky boats, and some on ill-connected
rafts, and some with their heads just above water, thinking to ride out
the flood which is to sweep the earth clean of sinners, upon their own
private, individual life-preservers!

Such was the present state of mind of the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather,
when his clerical brother called upon him to talk over the questions to
which old Sophy had called his attention.


CHAPTER XVIII.

THE REVEREND DOCTOR CALLS ON BROTHER FAIRWEATHER.


For the last few months, while all these various matters were going on
in Rockland, the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had been busy with the
records of ancient councils and the writings of the early fathers. The
more he read, the more discontented he became with the platform upon
which he and his people were standing. They and he were clearly in
a minority, and his deep inward longing to be with the majority was
growing into an engrossing passion. He yearned especially towards the
good old unquestioning, authoritative Mother Church, with her articles
of faith which took away the necessity for private judgment, with her
traditional forms and ceremonies, and her whole apparatus of stimulants
and anodynes.

About this time he procured a breviary and kept it in his desk under
the loose papers. He sent to a Catholic bookstore and obtained a small
crucifix suspended from a string of beads. He ordered his new coat to be
cut very narrow in the collar and to be made single-breasted. He began
an informal series of religious conversations with Miss O'Brien, the
young person of Irish extraction already referred to as Bridget, maid
of all work. These not proving very satisfactory, he managed to fall in
with Father McShane, the Catholic priest of the Rockland church. Father
McShane encouraged his nibble very scientifically. It would be such
a fine thing to bring over one of those Protestant heretics, and a
"liberal" one too!--not that there was any real difference between
them, but it sounded better to say that one of these rationalizing
free-and-equal religionists had been made a convert than any of those
half-way Protestants who were the slaves of catechisms instead of
councils and of commentators instead of popes. The subtle priest played
his disciple with his finest tackle. It was hardly necessary: when
anything or anybody wishes to be caught, a bare hook and a coarse line
are all that is needed.

If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty,
if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And
the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a
heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice
which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life
we shirk it by forming _habits_, which take the place of
self-determination. In politics party-organization saves us the pains of
much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote. In religious matters
there are great multitudes watching us perpetually, each propagandist
ready with his bundle of finalities, which having accepted we may be
at peace. The more absolute the submission demanded, the stronger the
temptation becomes to those who have been long tossed among doubts and
conflicts.

So it is that in all the quiet bays which indent the shores of the great
ocean of thought, at every sinking wharf, we see moored the hulks
and the razees of enslaved or half-enslaved intelligences. They rock
peacefully as children in their cradles on the subdued swell that comes
feebly in over the bar at the harbor's mouth, slowly crusting with
barnacles, pulling at their iron cables as if they really wanted to be
free, but better contented to remain bound as they are. For these no
more the round unwalled horizon of the open sea, the joyous breeze
aloft, the furrow, the foam, the sparkle that track the rushing keel!
They have escaped the dangers of the wave, and lie still henceforth,
evermore. Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss, and palsy the chief
beatitude!

America owes its political freedom to religious Protestantism. But
political freedom is reacting on religious prescription with still
mightier force. We wonder, therefore, when we find a soul which was
born to a full sense of individual liberty, an unchallenged right
of self-determination on every new alleged truth offered to its
intelligence, voluntarily surrendering any portion of its liberty to
a spiritual dictatorship which always proves to rest, in the last
analysis, on _a majority vote_, nothing more nor less, commonly an old
one, passed in those barbarous times when men cursed and murdered each
other for differences of opinion, and of course were not in a condition
to settle the beliefs of a comparatively civilized community.

In our disgust, we are liable to be intolerant. We forget that weakness
is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our
most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity. Who of us
does not look with great tenderness on the young chieftain in the "Fair
Maid of Perth," when he confesses his want of courage? All of us love
companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us
are more or less imaginative in our theology. Some of us may find the
aid of material symbols a comfort, if not a necessity. The boldest
thinker may have his moments of languor and discouragement, when he
feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths with the old beldame
crossing herself at the cathedral-door,--nay, that, if he could drop
all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with the brown-eyed
solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all their simple
consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass, and life
turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,--no
individual mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the great
calm cattle-sense of all time and all places that know the milky smell
of herds,--if he could be like these, he would be content to be driven
home by the cow-boy, and share the grassy banquet of the king of ancient
Babylon. Let us be very generous, then, in our judgment of those
who leave the front ranks of thought for the company of the meek
non-combatants who follow with the baggage and provisions. Age, illness,
too much wear and tear, a half-formed paralysis, may bring any of us to
this pass. But while we can think and maintain the rights of our own
individuality against every human combination, let as not forget to
caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice which is
criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to indulge. God
help him over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad
supplication, _Requiescat in pace_!

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