Rebecca Harding Davis

“ I understand it, now, when it is too late."—He wiped the cold drops from his face.—"Now do you know whether it is remorse I feel, when I think how I put this purer self away,—how I went out triumphant in my inhuman, greedy brain,—how I resolved to know, to be, to trample under foot all weak love or homely pleasures? I have been punished. Let those years go. I think, sometimes, I came near to the nature of the damned who dare not love: I would not. It was then I hurt you, Margret,—to the death: your true life lay in me, as mine in you." ”

“ Holmes saw him at last lumbering across the prairie, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. Summer or winter, he contrived to be always hot. There was a cart drawn by an old donkey coming along beside him. Knowles was talking to the driver. The old man clapped his hands as stage-coachmen do, and drew in long draughts of air, as if there were keen life and promise in every breath. They came up at last, the cart empty, and drying for the day's work after its morning's scrubbing, Lois's pock-marked face all in a glow with trying to keep Barney awake. ”

“ I do not think he ever said to her that he knew all she had done for him, or thanked her; but no dog or woman that Stephen Holmes loved could look into his eyes, and doubt that love. Sad, masterful eyes, such as are seen but once or twice in a lifetime: no woman but would wish, like Lois, for such eyes to be near her when she came to die, for her to remember the world's love in. She came hobbling back every day to see him after she had gone, and would stay to make his soup, telling him, child-like, how many days it was until Christmas. ”

“ Holmes had taken off his hat, unconscious that he did it; he put it on slowly, and walked on. What was it that Knowles had said to him once about mean and selfish taints on his divine soul? "For Thou only art holy:" if there were truth in that!
"How quiet it is!" he said, as they stopped to leave him. It was,—a breathless quiet; the great streets of the town behind them were shrouded in snow; the hills, the moors, the prairie swept off into the skyless dark, a gray and motionless sea lit by a low watery moon. "The very earth listens," he said. ”

“ A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain. Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep under every green hill-side.
You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war. There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge's bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honour, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach. Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the coffin ”

“ My soul and body thirst and hunger for you, then, Margret."
She did not answer; her hands worked feebly together, the dull blood fainting in her veins.
Knowing only that the night yawned intolerable about her, that she was alone,—going mad with being alone. No thought of heaven or God in her soul: her craving eyes seeing him only. The strong, living man that she loved: her tired-out heart goading, aching to lie down on his brawny breast for one minute, and die there,—that was all.
She did not move: underneath the pain there was power, as Knowles thought. ”

“ Little Margret, sitting by the muddy road, digging her fingers dully into the clover-roots, while she looked at the spot where the wheels had passed, looked at life differently, it may be;—or old Joe Yare by the furnace-fire, his black face and gray hair bent over a torn old spelling-book Lois had given him. The night, perhaps, was going to be more to them than so many rainy hours for sleeping,—the time to be looked back on through coming lives as the hour when good and ill came to them, and they made their choice, and, as Holmes said, did abide by it. ”

“ It is God's light now alone.
Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its heavenly clearness. I think it was this light that made the burning of Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on the step of her frame-shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was this that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. ”

“ Poor Margret! he wondered if it hurt her?
He signed the deed, and left it in the slow, quiet way natural to him, and after a while stooped to pat the dog softly, who was trying to lick his hand,—with the hard fingers shaking a little, and a smothered fierceness in the half-closed eye, like a man who is tortured and alone.
There is a miserable drama acted in other homes than the Tuileries, when men have found a woman's heart in their way to success, and trampled it down under an iron heel. Men like Napoleon must live out the law of their natures, I suppose,—on a throne, or in a mill. ”

“ Lois was Lois in town or country. Some subtile power lay in the coarse, distorted body, in the pleading child's face, to rouse, wherever they went, the same curious, kindly smile. Not, I think, that dumb, pathetic eye, common to deformity, that cries, "Have mercy upon me, O my friend, for the hand of God hath touched me!"—a deeper, mightier charm, rather: a trust down in the fouled fragments of her brain, even in the bitterest hour of her bare life,—a faith faith in God, faith in her fellow-man, faith in herself. No human soul refused to answer its summons. ”

“ Down in the dark alleys, in the very vilest of the black and white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart, there was an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch whose portion of life was more meagre and low than theirs. Something in them struggled up to meet the trust in the pitiful eyes,—something which scorned to betray the trust,—some Christ-like power in their souls, smothered, dying, under the filth of their life and the terror of hell. A something in them never to be lost. If the Great Spirit of love and trust lives, not lost! ”

“ There were places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for the light,—for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.
There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the sunshine, and purer. It fell on the dense crowds,—upon the just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them clear. ”

“ What artist sense had she,—what could she know—the ignorant huckster—of the eternal laws of beauty or grandeur? Nothing. Yet something in the girl's face made her think that these hills, this air and sky, were in fact alive to her,—real; that her soul, being lower, it might be, than ours, lay closer to Nature, knew the language of the changing day, of these earnest-faced hills, of the very worms crawling through the brown mould. It was an idle fancy; Margret laughed at herself for it, and turned to watch the slow morning-struggle which Lois followed with such eager eyes. ”

“ Now, when Holmes had resolved coolly to weigh this woman, brain, heart, and flesh, to know how much of a hindrance she would be, he could only see her, with his artist's sense, as delicate a bloom of colouring as eye could crave, in one immovable posture,—as he had seen her once in some masquerade or tableau vivant. June, I think it was, she chose to represent that evening,—and with her usual success; for no woman ever knew more thoroughly her material of shape or colour, or how to work it up. ”

“ The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he caught his breath. It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there, whose breath blew on him,—the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered Nature. Well, this fierce, masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless. It was old Knowles's vital air. He wondered if the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom. ”

“ One did not wonder that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow. The frantic, nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the pulse of human life. Yet life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and life-long. The enduring air suited this woman, Margret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide should be his, in its entirety. ”

“ When she looked up, Holmes was standing by the window, with his face toward the gray fields. It was a long time before he turned and came to her.
"You have spoken honestly: it is an old fashion of yours. You believed what you said. Let me also tell you what you call God's truth, for a moment, Margret. It will not do you harm."—He spoke gravely, solemnly.—"When you loved me long ago, selfish, erring as I was, you fulfilled the law of your nature; when you put that love out of your heart, you make your duty a tawdry sham, and your life a lie. ”

“ She tried desperately, I say, to clutch the far, uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of it, to give it to her silent gnawing heart to feed on. She thrust out of sight all possible life that might have called her true self into being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward. Pitiful and vain so to cling! It is the way of women. As if any human soul could bury that which might have been, in that which is!
The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes, heeded the transient flush of enthusiasm but little. ”

“ Morning had come; great heavy bars of light fell from behind the hills athwart the banks of gray and black fog; there was shifting, uneasy, obstinate tumult among the shadows; they did not mean to yield to the coming dawn. The hills, the massed woods, the mist opposed their immovable front, scornfully. Margret did not notice the silent contest until she reached the lane. The girl Lois, sitting in her cart, was looking, attentive, at the slow surge of the shadows, and the slower lifting of the slanted rays.
"T' mornin' comes grand here, Miss Marg'et!" she said, lowering her voice. ”

“ The ills of life you mean to conquer will teach it to you, Holmes. You'll find the Something above yourself, if it's only to curse Him and die."
Holmes did not smile at the old man's heat,—walked gravely, steadily.
There was a short silence. Knowles put his hand gently on the other's arm.
"Stephen," he hesitated, "you're a stronger man than I. I know what you are; I've watched you from a boy. But you're wrong here. I'm an old man. There's not much I know in life,—enough to madden me. ”