Infelice Part 26

"O Land! O Land!

For all the broken-hearted, The mildest herald by our fate allotted-- Beckons, and with inverted torch doth stand, To lead us with a gentle hand Into the Land of the great departed,-- Into the Silent Land."

When the solemn silence that hung like a pall over the parsonage was broken by the hurried tread of many feet and the confused sound of strange voices, Regina seemed to be aroused from some horrible lethargy, and gazed despairingly at the doctor.

"It is too late. You can't do anything for him now," she said, clinging to his feet, as an attempt was made to lift them from her lap.

"He must have been dead several hours," answered Dr. Melville.

"None but G.o.d and the angels know when he died. I thought he had gone to sleep; and so indeed he had."

Hannah had spread the alarm, while searching for the doctor, and very soon Mr. Hargrove's personal friends and some of the members of the congregation thronged the library, into which the body of the minister had been removed.

An hour afterward Dr. Melville, having searched for the girl all over the house, found her crouched on the steps leading down to the flower garden. She sat with her arm around Hero's neck, and her head bowed against him. Seating himself beside her, the physician said:

"Poor child, this is an awful ordeal for you, and in Dr. Hargrove's death you have lost a friend whom the whole world cannot replace. He was the n.o.blest man, the purest Christian, I ever knew, and if the church has a hundred pastors in future, none will ever equal him. He married me, he baptized my children, and when I buried my wife, his voice brought me the most comfort, the----"

His tone faltered, and a brief silence ensued.

"Regina, I wish you would tell me as nearly as you can how he seemed to-day, and how it all happened. I could get nothing satisfactory put of old Hannah."

She described the occurrences of the morning, his debility and entire lack of appet.i.te, and the long walk in the afternoon, followed by the attack of vertigo and palpitation, to which he alluded after his return. When she concluded her recital of the last terrible scene in the melancholy drama, Dr. Melville sighed, and said:

"It has ended just as I feared, and predicted. His heart has been affected for some time, and not a month ago I urged him to give up his pulpit work for a while at least, and try rest and change of air.

But he answered that he considered his work imperative, and when he died it would be with the harness on. He would not permit me to allude to the subject in the presence of his family, because he told me he did not wish to alarm his sister, who is so devoted to him, or render the parting with his nephew more painful, by adding apprehensions concerning his health. I fear his grief at the loss of Dougla.s.s has hastened the end."

"When Mrs. Lindsay comes to-morrow it will kill her," groaned Regina, whose soul seemed to grow sick, as she thought of the devoted fond sister, and the anguish that awaited her already bruised and aching heart.

"No, sorrow does not kill people, else the race would become extinct."

"It has killed Mr. Hargrove."

"Not sorrow, but the disease, which sorrow may have aggravated."

"Mrs. Lindsay would not go to India with her son, because she said she could not leave her brother whose sight was failing, and who needed her most. Now she has lost both. Oh, I wish I could run away to-morrow, somewhere, anywhere, out of sight of her misery!"

"Some one must meet her at the train, and prepare her for the sad news. My dear child, you would be the best person for that melancholy task."

"I? Never! I would cut off my tongue before it should stab her heart with such awful news! Are people ever prepared for trouble like this?"

"Well, somebody must do it; but, like you, I am not brave enough to meet her with the tidings. When it is necessary, I can amputate limbs, and do a great many apparently cruel things, but when it conies to breaking such bad news as this I am a nervous coward. Mr.

Campbell is a kind, tenderhearted friend of the family, and I will request him to take a carriage and meet her to-morrow. Poor thing!

what a welcome home!"

Soon after he left her she heard the whistle of the night express, which arrived simultaneously with the departure of the outward train bound south, and she knew that it was eleven o'clock.

Hannah was in the kitchen talking with Esau the s.e.xton, and when several gentlemen who offered to remain until morning came out on the verandah, leaving the blinds of the library windows wide open, Regina rose and stole away to escape their observation.

Although walking swiftly she caught sight of the table in the middle of the room and of a ma.s.s of white drapery, on which the lamp-light fell with ghostly l.u.s.tre. Twelve hours before she had sat there, reading to the faithful kind friend whose affectionate gaze rested all the while upon her; now stiff and icy he was sleeping his last sleep in the same spot, and his soul? Safely resting, after the feverish toil and strife of Time, amid the palms of Eternal Peace.

Not the peace of Nirwana; neither the absolute absorption of one school of philosophy, nor the total extinction inculcated by a yet grosser system. Not the vague insensate peace of Pantheism, but the spiritual rest of a heaven of reunion and of recognition promised by Jesus Christ our Lord, who, conquering death in that lonely rock-hewn Judaean tomb, won immortal ident.i.ty for human souls. Not the succession of progressive changes that const.i.tute the hereafter of--

"This age that blots out life with question-marks, This nineteenth century with its knife and gla.s.s That make thought physical, and thrust far off The heaven, so neighbourly with man of old, To voids spa.r.s.e-sown with alienated stars."

Among the mult.i.tudinous philosophic, psychologic, biologic systems that have waxed and waned, dazzled and deluded, from the first utterances of Gotama, to the very latest of the advanced Evolutionists, is there any other than the Christian solution of the triple-headed riddle--Whence? Wherefore? Whither?--that will deliver us from the devouring Sphinx Despair, or yield us even shadowy consolation when the pinions of gentle yet inexorable death poise over our household darling, and we stand beside the cold silent clay, which natural affection and life-long companionship render so inexpressibly precious?

When we lower the coffin of our beloved is there soothing comfort in the satisfactory reflection that perhaps at some distant epoch, by the harmonious operation of "Natural Selection" and by virtue of the "Conservation of Force," the "Survival of the fittest" will certainly ensure the "Differentiation" the "Evolution" of our buried treasure into some new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever unknown and utterly unrecognizable? Tormented by aspirations which neither time nor s.p.a.ce, force nor matter, will realize or satisfy, consumed by spiritual hunger fiercer than Ugolino's, we are invited to seize upon the Barmecide's banquet of "The Law which formulates organic development as a transformation of the h.o.m.ogeneous into the heterogeneous;" and that "this universal transformation is a change from indefinite h.o.m.ogeneity to definite heterogeneity; and that only when the increasing multiformity is joined with increasing definiteness, does it const.i.tute Evolution, as distinguished from other changes that are like it, in respect of increasing heterogeneity."

Does this wise and simple pabulum cure spiritual starvation?

"G.o.d said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And the Lord G.o.d formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Nay--thunders Science--put away such childish superst.i.tion, smite such traditionary idols; man was first made after the similitude of a marine ascidian, and once swam as a tadpole in primeval seas.

In all the wide universe of modern speculation there remains no unexplored nook or cranny, where an immortal human soul can find refuge or haven. Having hunted it down, trampled and buried it as one of the little "inspired legendary" foxes that nibble and bruise the promising sprouts of the Science Vineyard, what are we requested to accept in lieu of the doctrine of spiritual immortality? "Natural Evolution."

One who has long been regarded as an esoteric in the Eleusis of Science, and who ranks as a crowned head among its hierophants, frankly tells us: "What are the core and essence of this hypothesis Natural Evolution? Strip it naked, and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ign.o.ble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the n.o.bler forma of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself--emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena--were once latent in a fiery cloud. Many who hold it would probably a.s.sent to the position that at the present moment all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, all our art--Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael--are potential in the fires of the sun."... A different pedigree from that offered us by Moses and the Prophets, Christ and the Apostles; but does it light up the Hereafter?

We are instructed that our instincts and consciousness dwell in the "sensory ganglia," that "an idea is a contradiction, a motion, a configuration of the intermediate organ of sense," that "memory is the organic registration of their effects of impressions," and that the "cerebrum" is the seat of ideas, the home of thought and reason.

But when "grey-matter" that composes this thinking mechanism becomes diseased, and the cold touch of death stills the action of fibre and vesicle, what light can our teachers pour upon the future of that coagulated substance where once reigned hope, ambition, love, or hate? Those grey granules that were memory, become oblivion.

Certainly physiology has grown to giant stature since the days of St.

Paul, but does it bring to weeping mourners any more comfort than the doctrine he taught the Corinthians?

Does the steel Law Mill of Progressive Development grind us either tonic or balm for the fatal hours of sorest human trial? We have learned that "the heart of man is constructed upon the recognized rules of hydraulics, and with its great tubes is furnished with common mechanical contrivances, valves."

But when the valvular action is at rest under the stern finger of death, can all the marvellous appliances of this intensely and wonderfully mechanical age force one ruddy drop through those great tubes, or coax one solitary throb, where G.o.d has said "Be still"?

To the stricken mother, bowed over the waxen image of her darling, is there any system, theory, or creed that promises aught of the Great Beyond comparable to the Christian's sublime hope that the pet lamb is safely and tenderly folded by the Shepherd Jesus?

To the aching heart and lonely soul of sorrowing Regina these vexing riddles that sit open-mouthed at our religious and scientific cross-roads, brought no additional gloom; for with the pure holy faith of unquestioning childhood she seemed to see beside the rigid form of her pastor and friend the angel who on sea-girt Patmos bade St. John write, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them."

Anxious to avoid those who sat within keeping sad watch, the unhappy girl went around to the front entrance, and sank down on the lowest step, burying her face in her hands.

The library was merely a continuation of the hall that ran east and west through the centre of the house, and though comparatively remote from the front door was immediately opposite, and from the sight of that room Regina shrank instinctively.

Too much shocked and stunned to weep, she became so absorbed by thoughts of to-morrow's mournful mission, that she failed to notice the roll of wheels along the street, or the quick rattle of the gate-latch. The sound of rapid footsteps and the rustle of drapery on the pebbled walk, finally arrested her attention, and rising she would have moved aside, but a hand seized her arm.

"What is the matter? How is my brother?"

"Oh, Mrs. Lindsay!"

"Something must have happened. I had such a presentiment of trouble at home that I could not wait till to-morrow. I came on the night express. Why is the house all lighted up? Is Peyton ill?"

Trembling from head to foot, she waited an instant, but Regina only crouched and groaned, and Mrs. Lindsay sprang up the steps. As she reached the door, the light in the library revealed the shrouded table,--the rigid figure resting thereon,--and a piercing wail broke the silence of death.

"Merciful G.o.d!--not my Peyton?"

Thrusting her fingers into her ears, Regina fled down the walk out of the yard, anywhere to escape the sound and sight of that broken-hearted woman, whose cry was indeed _de profundis_.

"Console if you will, I can bear it; 'Tis a well-meant alms of breath; But not all the preaching since Adam Has made Death other than Death."