Daisy in the Field Part 29

"Very much indeed."

"Did you go to b.a.l.l.s there?"

"Oh, no, sir! only little hops, that the cadets have in the evenings."

"Was Preston there then?"

"He was entering upon his last year at the Academy."

"Had he improved?"

"Papa. - I thought he had _not_."

My father smiled. "Which of these young friends of ours do you like the best, Daisy?"

"Mr. Marshall and Mr. De Saussure, do you mean?"

"I mean them."

Something in papa's tone made my answer, I was conscious, a little constrained. I was very sorry, and could not help it.

"Papa - I think - Don't you think, Mr. Marshall has the most principle?"

"Do you always like people best that are the best, Daisy?"

said papa laughing. "Because, I confess I have a wicked perverseness to do the other way."

After this conversation I seemed to see several clouds rising on my horizon in different quarters. I thought it was wisest not to look at them; but there was one that cast a shadow always on the spot where I was. It was so long since I had heard from Mr. Thorold! I had told him he must not write to me; but at the same time he had said that he would, and that he would enclose a letter to my father. Neither letter had come. It was easy to account for; he might not have had a chance to write; or in the confusions at home, his despatch might have been detained somewhere; it might reach me after a long interval, or it might never reach me! There was nothing strange about it; there was something trying. The hunger of my heart for one word from him or of him, grew sometimes rapacious; it was a perpetual fast day with me, and nature cried out for relief. _That_ cloud cast a shadow always over me now; only except when now and then a ray from the eternal sunshine found a rift in the cloud, or shot below it, and for a moment my feet stood in light. I had letters from the Sandfords; I had even one from Miss Cardigan; it did me a great deal of good, but it broke my heart too.

Mamma and I kept off the subject of the great world for a while; I think my father purposely prolonged our stay at Geneva, to favour my pleasure; and I hoped something after all might prevent the discussion of that subject between mamma and me, at least for the present. So something did.

I came down one afternoon to the green bank behind the house, where a table stood, and where we took our meals when the weather was fine. Our three young men were around it and the air was fragrant with the fumes of their cigars. The cigars of two of them were tossed away on my appearance. Ransom held his in abeyance.

"I did not know you were here," I said, "or I should have scrupled about interrupting anything so pleasant."

"You do not think it pleasant, confess, Miss Randolph," said De Saussure, drawing near to look over the progress of my work.

"Do you dislike it, honestly, Miss Randolph?" said Hugh Marshall.

"I don't dislike sugar-plums," I said.

"Daisy likes nothing that ordinary people like," cried Ransom.

"I pity the man that will marry you, Daisy! He will live within a hedge-row of restrictions. You have lived among Puritans till you're blue."

I lifted my eyes to Ransom without speaking. What there was in my look, I do not know; but they all laughed.

"What connection is there between cigars and sugar-plums?"

Hugh Marshall asked next.

"None, I suppose," I said. "Only, - what would you think of a lady who sat down regularly to eat sugar-plums three or four times a day and the last thing before going to bed? and who evidently could not live without them."

"But why not take a sugar-plum, or a cigar, as well as other things - wine, or fruit, for instance?" said Marshall.

"It is an indulgence - but we all allow ourselves indulgences of one sort or another."

"Besides, with a lady it is different," said De Saussure. "We poor fellows have nothing better to do, half the time."

I had no wish to lecture Mr. De Saussure, but I could not help looking at him, which again seemed to rouse their amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You seem to say, that is an insignificant way of life," Hugh Marshall added.

"We'll try for something better to-morrow," said De Saussure.

"We have laid a plan to go to see the lake of Annecy, Miss Randolph, if we can secure your company and approbation. It will just take the day; and I propose that each one of us shall go prepared to instruct the others, at luncheon, as to his or her views of the worthiest thing a man can do with his life; - cigars being banished."

"Cigars are not banished yet," said Ransom, taking delicate whiffs of his own, which sent a fragrant wreath of blue smoke curling about his face.

"What do you say, Miss Randolph?" Hugh asked.

"Wouldn't you like to see the house of Eugene Sue?" said De Saussure.

"Who was Eugene Sue?" was my counter question; and they laughed again, our two friends with sparkling eyes.

"Look here, Daisy!" said Ransom, suddenly bringing down his chair on four feet and sitting upright, - "I wish you would put an end to this indulgence of sight-seeing and your society, and send these gentlemen home with me. I must go, and they ought to go too and do their duty. A word from you would send either of them straight to Beauregard's headquarters.

Talk of indulgences!"

"I do not wish to send either of them there," was my incautious answer.

"Do you think it is always wrong to fight?" De Saussure asked.

I said no, with an internal shiver running through me from head to foot. They went into a mutual gratulation on the causes for fighting that existed on the part of the Southern States, and the certainty that the warlike spirit of the North would "die off like a big fungus," as one of them phrased it.

I could not discuss the point with them, and I got away as soon as it could gracefully be done.

But something in this little talk, or in what went before it, had unsettled me; and I slept little that night. Anxieties which had lain pretty still, and pain which had been rather quiet, rose up together and shook me. My Bible reading had given me a word which for a time helped the confusion. "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please Him who hath chosen him to be a soldier."

Not to be entangled with the affairs of this life! - and my heart and soul were in a whirl of them; I might say, in a snarl. And true the words were. How could I please Him who had chosen me to be a soldier, with my heart set on my own pleasure, and busy with my own fears? I knew I could not. The quiet subjection of spirit with which I left Washington, I had in a measure lost at Lucerne. Somehow, opposition had roused me; and the great distance and the impossibility of hearing had made my imagination restless; and the near probability that mamma would not favour our wishes had caused me to take a sort of life and death grasp of them. The management of myself, that I had resigned, I found I had not resigned it; but my heart was stretching out yearning hands to Thorold and crying for a sight of him. Meanwhile, the particular work that I had to do in Switzerland had been little thought of. What was it?

I spent that night waking. My room looked not to the lake, but over an extent of greensward and orchards, lit up now by a bright moon. I knelt at my window, with a strong recollection of former times, and a vain look back at my little old self, the childish Daisy, whose window at Melbourne, over the honeysuckles, had been so well used and had entertained such a quiet little heart. Then there had been Miss Pinshon's Daisy; but all the Daisies that I could remember had been quiet compared to this one. Must joy take such close hold on sorrow?

Must hopes always be twin with such fears? - I asked amid bitter tears. But tears do one good; and after a little indulgence of them, I brought myself up to look at my duty.

What was it?

I might love, and fear, and hope; but I must not be "entangled." Not so concerned about myself, either for sorrow or joy, that I should fail in anything to discern the Lord's will, or be unready, or be slow, to do it. Not so but that my heart should be free, looking to G.o.d for its chief strength and joy always and everywhere, - yes, and holding my hopes at his hand, to be given up if he called them back. With Thorold parted from me, in the thick of the war struggle, almost certain to be rejected by both my father and my mother, could I have and keep such a disentangled heart? The command said yes, and I knew there were promises that said yes too; but for a time I was strangely unwilling. I had a sort of superst.i.tious feeling, that the giving up of my will about these things, and of my will's hold of them, would be a preliminary to their being taken away from me in good earnest.

And I trembled and wept and shrank, like the coward I was.

"And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully."

"G.o.d's way is the way," I said to myself, - "and there is no other. I know, in what I said to mamma that afternoon about dressing and going into the world, it was not all principle.

There was a mixture of selfish disinclination to go into society, because of Mr. Thorold and my feeling about him. My thoughts and will are all in a tangle; and they must be disentangled."

The struggle was long and sore that night. Worse than in Washington; because here I was alone among those who did not favour Mr. Thorold, and were opposed in everything to his and my views and wishes. Temptation said, that it was forsaking their cause, to give up my will about them. But there is no temptation that takes us and G.o.d has not provided a way of escape. The struggle was sharp; but when the dawn broke over the orchards and replaced the glory of the moonlight, my heart was quiet again. I was bent, before all things, upon doing the will of G.o.d; and had given up myself and all my hopes entirely to His disposal. They were not less dear hopes for that, though now the rest of my heart was on something better; on something which by no change or contingency can disappoint or fail. I was disentangled. I stood free. And I was happier than I had been in many a long day. "The peace of G.o.d." If people could only possibly know what that means!