Part 10

Carice laughingly shook her head. "I believe what I see," said she,--"or rather what I should see, if it were not so dim here. By and bye,--after I have ordered lights,--I may be able to reason from the seen to the unseen." And she glided from the room, which seemed to grow suddenly dark and chill behind her.

Very shortly she returned, preceded by a servant bearing lights, and accompanied by her mother. Looking toward Bergan with a smile, she gave a slight start; the coming words were arrested on her parted lips; the color mounted to her brow; across her face went a swift ripple of disappointment and pain. Quickly recovering herself, she presented him to her mother; but the bright cordiality, the warm heart-glow, of her earlier manner, had faded, and came no more. It was as if a gray screen had suddenly been drawn before a cheery household fire.

Happily for Bergan, his aunt claimed his attention, before he had time to feel the full dreariness of the change. She was a woman of rare tact, and much kindliness of heart, despite a somewhat stately manner, and a considerable degree of aristocratic chill for people not exactly in her "set." She gave Bergan a warm welcome,--almost a motherly one; there was something about him that brought a softening remembrance of the two sons that slept in the family burial ground, and quietly opened the way for him into her heart. Finding his entertainment left very much in her hands, she cared for it kindly; though not without a secret wonder at the inexplicable indifference of her husband and daughter. But she did her best to make amends for it by her own friendliness, and in part, succeeded.

Meanwhile, Bergan was beset by another tantalizing resemblance. Never, he thought, had he seen anything quite so lovely as his cousin Carice,--with her soft, brown hair, her clear rose-complexion, her large, limpid, blue eyes, the lily-like droop of her exquisitely formed head, the inexhaustible grace of her attitudes and movements,--but he had certainly seen somebody a little like her. So strong, yet so puzzling was this conviction, and so frequent the glances consequently sent in her direction, that he felt a word of explanation might not be amiss.

"Excuse me," said he, "if I seem to be looking at you almost constantly; but there is something about you curiously familiar, though it is impossible that we should have met before. I suppose I must have seen somebody that resembled you; but I cannot tell when or where."

Carice looked down, and colored slightly. Her father came to her relief.

"There is often no accounting for resemblances," said he. "When there is any tie of blood, however remote, we understand them, of course; but when the face of an utter stranger startles me in the street with the very smile of my sister Eleanor, or the grave look of my dead father, what am I to think?"

"One would like to know," remarked Bergan, "if there is a mental and moral likeness, to match the physical one. When I fix the resemblance that eludes me so persistently in you," he added, turning to Carice, "I hope it will help me to answer the question."

"I doubt if it does," replied Carice, quietly, yet not without a certain something in her tone that sounded almost like sarcasm. He looked at her in considerable surprise, but her eyes were turned away, and she said no more.

Feeling as if he were walking in a mist, which everywhere eluded his grasp, while it blinded his eyes, and chilled his heart, he rose to go.

"Let me see," said his aunt, kindly, as she gave him her hand, "to-morrow will be Sunday, will it not? Pray let us find you in our pew at church in the morning; and come home with us to an early dinner, before the evening service."

Bergan hesitated. He had no reasonable excuse; yet his uncle had not seconded the invitation. As if suddenly cognizant of the omission, Mr. Bergan now spoke.

"Come, by all means," said he, with more kindness than he had yet shown,--for he could not bring himself to give a half-hearted invitation to his sister's son,--"I have still a great deal to ask about your mother."

"And I," said his aunt, laughing, "have still a great deal to ask about yourself. Good night."

They stood on the piazza watching him, until he was out of sight. Then Carice turned to her father.

"Did he say anything about--yesterday?" she asked, gravely.

"Not a word. I should have liked him better if he had offered some explanation."

"Perhaps he did not recognize us," suggested Carice.

"How could he help it?"

"I don't know,--only--you were angry and I was frightened; probably our faces did not wear their natural expression. Besides, he was doubtless a little bewildered by his fall, and--"

"What or whom are you talking about?" here broke in the amazed Mrs. Bergan.

"About my nephew, the mad cavalier who so nearly came into collision with Carice yesterday," replied her husband.

Mrs. Bergan threw up her hands. "And you let me invite him to dinner!" she exclaimed, in a tone of deep injury.

"How could I help it, my dear? Besides, he is my sister's son."

Meanwhile, Bergan found his way back to the village through the darkness, wondering what had become of the lightness of heart and cheerfulness of hope with which he had set out--he looked at his watch--only two hours before!

II.

STRENGTHENED OUT OF ZION.

St. Paul's Church, Berganton, was a small, plain structure of brick and stone, rather prettily situated on the bank of the aforesaid creek, which flowed through the midst of the town. Its sole claim to exterior beauty must have rested on the thick vines which covered its walls, framed its windows, and climbed to the roof of its low, square tower; doing their best to atone for its many architectural deficiencies, its failure to present to the eye a certain material "beauty of holiness," in harmony with the spiritual loveliness of the unseen temple, of which it was the faint type.

Toward this church, on the morning after his visit to Oakstead, Bergan directed his steps. Meeting his uncle in the vestibule, he was soon seated in the square family pew, and had a few moments to look about him, before service.

In its small way, the church was almost as much a memorial of the House of Bergan as the old Hall itself. Sir Harry had been a fair sample of the average English Churchman of his day, with whom a certain amount of religious observance was deemed necessary and becoming, both by way of seemly garmenting for one's self, and good example for one's neighbors. If it did not reach very deep into the heart, it at least imparted a certain completeness and dignity to the outward life.

Moreover, family tradition was strongly in religion's favor. There had always been relations of a highly friendly and decorous sort between the house and the church; and to have turned his back disrespectfully upon the one, would have been to show himself a degenerate scion of the other. As a natural consequence, Sir Harry did not feel that he had done his whole duty to himself, or his posterity, until he had provided a fitting stage for the necessary family ceremonials of christening, marriage, and burial; as well as an appropriate spot for his own enjoyment of a respectable Sunday doze, under the soothing influence of an orthodox sermon, after having duly taken his share in the responses of the morning service. If this school of Churchmen had its faults, it also had its virtues. If its standard of religion was a low one, with a strong leaning toward human pride and selfish indulgence; it was better than the open irreverence and infidelity, the unblushing disregard of religious restraints and sanctions, of later generations.

Under Sir Harry's auspices, therefore, the foundations of St. Paul's were laid, and its walls arose, as a kind of necessary adjunct to Bergan Hall. And his successors, with rare exceptions, had felt it a duty to add to its interior attractions, as well as to make it a continuous family record, by memorial windows of stained glass, mural tablets of bronze or marble, and thank-offerings of font, communion plate, and other appliances and adornments. Some of these, no doubt, were merely self-laudatory, the fitful outgrowth of family pride; others might have sprung from a sense of what was beautiful and fitting,--which was a very good thing, as far as it went, though it went not much below the surface; but a few there were, doubtless, which had been consecrated to their use by heartfelt tears of sorrow, of penitence, or of gratitude. Be this as it may, they all helped (at least, in human eyes) to give the interior of St. Paul's a certain completeness, and even a degree of beauty and harmony.

Still, both in its size and its decorations, the church was far inferior to the Hall. There was a vast disproportion, both in amount and quality, between the space and the furniture set apart for the service and pleasure of a single household, and that consecrated to the worship of God, and the spiritual nurture of His people. But, in the matter of preservation, as well as in answering a definite end, the advantage was greatly on the side of the church and its appointments. Wherever the Bergan hands had grown slack, or had been withdrawn, in that work, others had taken it up, for the love of Christ, and carried it forward to completion, or kept it from lapsing back into chaos.

And so, Bergan--remembering how surely the merely secular memorials of Sir Harry and his successors had been overtaken by the slow feet of decay, while these others had been saved by their connection with an institution having a deeper and broader principle of life--was led into a natural enough, though for him a most unusual, train of thought. He asked himself if Sir Harry would not have done better, even for his own selfish end, to have given the larger share (or, at least, an equal one) of his time, care, and money, to the edifice which had the surest hold upon permanency, and was most likely to be sacredly kept for its original purpose. In our country, more than almost anywhere else, people build houses for other people to dwell in, and Time delights to blot family names from his roll, at least on the page where they were first written. All family mansions, however fair and proud, are surely destined to fall into stranger hands, or to be given over to the Vandal occupation of decay. All families, of however lofty position, are certain to sojourn, at times, in the valley of humiliation, if they do not lose themselves in the deeper valley of extinction. Would it not have been better, then, to have foregone somewhat of the frail and faithless magnificence of Bergan Hall, and linked the dear family name and memory more closely with the indestructible institution which belongs to the ages?

And, as he thus questioned, the narrow walls, the low roof, and the insignificant adornments of the little church seemed slowly to widen and lift themselves to the grand proportions of a vast, pillared temple; and the small chancel window--doing so little, nor doing that little well, to keep alive the fair memory of "Elizabeth, wife of Sir Harry"--became a great glory of pictured saints and angels, through whose diaphanous bodies the rainbow-light fell softly among a crowd of kneeling worshippers;--unto whom the sculptured mural tablets, the jewel-tinted glass, the stately walls, the soaring arch, told over and over again the lovely story, and held up to view the noble example, of a race whose labor and delight it had been to build strong and beautiful the walls of Zion; and which, in so doing, had raised up to itself the most enduring, as well as the most precious of earthly monuments. How much better this than the crumbling splendors of Bergan Hall, and the fading glory of an almost extinct name!

"The Lord is in His holy temple," was here breathed through Bergan's visioned fane, in appropriately awed and solemn tones. Nevertheless, they broke the slender thread of its being. As Bergan rose to his feet, with the rest of the congregation, its majestic vista, its pictured windows, and all its rich array, vanished like the filmy imagery of a dream, at the moment of awakening. But it was not without a keen sense of the contrast that he brought his mind back to the real St. Paul's, and the service going on under its lowlier roof.

Nothing remained but the harmonious voice, which had at once perfected and broken the spell. Glancing toward the chancel, Bergan saw a clergyman, with a face that would have been simply benignant, but for the vivid illumination of a pair of deep-set, dark-blue eyes,--a light never seen save where a great heart sends its warm glow through all the chambers of a grand intellect.

There is something marvellous in the inexhaustible adaptation of the Church service to the wants of the soul. At the same time that it is a miracle of fitness for the ends of public worship, it has its adequate word for every secret, individual need. Though Bergan had heard it hundreds of times before, and always with a hearty admiration of its beauty and comprehensiveness, never had its rhythmic sentences fallen upon his heart with such gracious and grateful effect. Doubtless, this was owing, in great measure, to the subdued frame of mind induced by the events of the last week; but it was also due, in some degree, to the perfection with which the service was rendered. It was neither hurried nor drawled, neither grumbled nor whined, neither a rasping see-saw nor a dull monotone. It was not overlaid with the arts of elocution; nor was it robbed of all life and warmth by the formal emphasis and intonation of the merely correct reader. But, in Mr. Islay's mouth, it became the living voice of living hearts. The dear old words, without losing one whit of the accumulated power, and the sacred associations, of long years of reverent use, came as freshly and as fervently from the speaker's lips, as if they were the heart-warm coinage of the moment.

As an inevitable consequence, Bergan's responses were uttered with answering fervor. And how perfectly they met his wants! How wonderfully they expressed his sense of weakness and failure, his depression and humiliation, his new-born self-distrust, his earnest desire and determination to be stronger against future temptations. In some sentences, there was a depth of meaning and of fitness, that seemed to have been waiting all these years for this moment of complete interpretation. Continually was he startled by subtile references to his peculiar circumstances, by the calm precision with which his sores were probed, and the tender skill which applied to them healing balm.

Especially was he struck by the Collect for the day,--so clearly did it express thoughts and feelings too vague in his own mind to have shaped themselves into words:--

"O Lord, we beseech Thee, absolve Thy people from their offences; that through Thy bountiful goodness, they may all be delivered from the bands of those sins which by their frailty they have committed."

Never before could he have so clearly understood what was meant by the "bands" of sins, committed, not of deliberate intent, but through frailty. How painfully he felt the pressure of those bands! how certainly they would cramp his efforts and hinder his progress! And how singularly distinct they had become to his sight, both in their nature and their effects, by means of that old, oft-repeated, yet ever new, Collect!

With a half-unconscious attempt at divination, Bergan turned over the leaves of his Prayer Book, during the short pause before the psalm, wondering what other mystic meanings were waiting under familiar words, for his future needs. It was not without a little chill at his heart that his eye caught the opening sentences of the burial anthem.

There could be no question about that. Whatever else might or might not be waiting for him, that was certain, some day, to be said over his dead body, and vainly to try to find entrance into his deaf ears. But when? At the end of a long life; in the midst of his days; or ere his work was scarce begun?

His work. What was it? To walk in a vain shadow? To disquiet himself in vain? To heap up riches for an unknown gatherer? To write his name high on the temple of Fame? To become a philanthropist, or a reformer? No; but to "apply his heart unto wisdom."

It was both a deep and a hard saying. Bergan felt that he could not fathom it, even while he saw how ruthlessly it struck at the roots of human pride, and lopped the boughs of personal ambition.

Meanwhile, the psalm had been sung, and with a rustling of leaves and garments, the congregation had settled themselves into their seats. Through the succeeding hush, Mr. Islay quietly sent the words of his text: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor _wisdom_, in the grave whither thou goest."

It was the word in season!

Bergan left the church that day, not only with a deeper sense of his own mortality, and consequent weakness, than ever before; but also with a modified view of life's work and duty. In one sense, it was a narrower view,--with that narrowness which feels the need of some true, fixed centre, from which to work outward, with any degree of safety and system, and, consequently, of success. He began to see that he who would influence others for good, and through them the world, must first be certain of the point where his influence begins, and that toward which it tends.

Not that Bergan understood, or would ever be likely to understand, the full measure and real character of the change that had been wrought in him under that lowly church-roof. Up to this point, his life had been from without, inward; henceforth, it was to be from within outward. The inner life of the soul was really begun in him,--feebly, half-unconsciously, it is true,--yet possessing a hidden power of assimilation and growth, that would soon bend all things to itself. Storm and sunshine, darkness and light, success and failure, would alike minister to its wants, and help it to grow fair and strong. Things most inimical to it, at first sight, would but give it tougher fibre and lovelier grain; in the drought, it would but send its roots down deeper in pursuit of hidden wells; under the pruning-knife, it would but burst forth into fairer blossoms and richer fruit.

Yet it was no sudden change, for all his life had been a preparation for it. Oftenest the kingdom of God cometh without observation. The stones of the spiritual temple may be fashioned amid clamor and discord, but they are laid in their places with a silence that is full of meaning.

III.

SEEING, BUT UNDERSTANDING NOT.

The service being ended, Bergan naturally turned to his kinsfolk for an ampler and friendlier greeting than had been possible at their hurried meeting in the crowded vestibule. Especially--with a grateful remembrance of her yesterday's cordiality--did he look to his aunt for a word of familiar kindness, that should make him feel less alone, less of a stranger, amid the friendly chorus of salutations and leave-takings coming to his ears from the departing congregation. But, to his surprise and pain, the same indefinable chill which had made him so vaguely uncomfortable with her husband and daughter, had now taken possession of her also, and woven a thin film of ice over the manner that yesterday was so kind.

The change was so unaccountable that he could not believe in it. He told himself that the real thing at fault was his own sickly imagination, that he was morbidly sensitive, as well as foolishly exacting. He convinced his understanding, but could not silence his heart. That Cassandra of the depths continually smote his unwilling ear with her lugubrious voice, calling upon him to observe how strangely Mrs. Bergan had been transformed overnight, from the interested, cordial, even affectionate aunt, into the polite and practised woman of the world, doing merely what courtesy required for the entertainment of the guest that circumstances had flung upon her hands.

In this state of affairs, Bergan would gladly have exchanged the dinner at Oakstead for a quiet afternoon in his room and a sober talk with his thoughts. But the invitation being already accepted, he must needs abide by the event. Accordingly, he took the vacant seat in his uncle's carriage, and was soon set down at the cottage steps.

Before dinner, the two gentlemen were left to a quiet chat by themselves on the cool, shady piazza. Bergan embraced this opportunity to explain, more fully than he had yet done, his motives and aims. He told his uncle,--a little proudly, it might be, for he wished it to be understood that he had come hither with a self-respecting purpose of independence, and not with any idea of leaning upon his friends,--he told his uncle that his choice of Berganton as the starting-point of his professional career, was due to the influence of his mother. Her childhood's home, and its vicinity, had always kept a tenacious hold on her affections, despite the fact that more than two-thirds of her womanhood had been spent elsewhere, and all the deeper joys and sorrows of her life had blossomed and fruited in different soil. When, therefore, it became necessary for one of her sons to go out into the world, in search of a better field of labor than was afforded in his native village, her thoughts naturally turned to the spot so haloed in her memory, and where her ancestry had sent such deep, old roots into the soil, as to create a kind of kinship for evermore between their descendants and the locality. It would be a pleasant thing for Bergan, she thought, to make a home and a name for himself in a place where he possessed so strong a claim to residence; it would be equally pleasant for the old town to recognize the familiar mould of features and character in its streets; and it would be pleasantest of all for herself to know that her son was with her kinsfolk, amid well-known scenes, rather than among strangers, on ground where her thoughts could find no foothold. Some day, she hoped to visit him there, and feed her mother's pride upon his success, at the same time that she renewed her girlhood amid old associations.

Bergan then touched lightly upon his disappointment in the dull old town--finding it so much duller and older, even to decrepitude, than he had expected, and consequently, so little eligible to his purpose. And here, if he had been met by a more interested glance, and a fuller sympathy, he would have gone on to speak of the disgraceful scene into which he had been betrayed by his uncle--the Major--and the obligation under which he felt himself placed thereby to remain in Berganton, at least long enough to efface any unfavorable impression which it might have caused. But, though his uncle Godfrey heard him patiently and courteously enough, there was so little of the hearty interest of kinship in his manner, that Bergan could not bring himself to open the subject. Not only was it unpleasant in itself, but it touched at many points on deep things of his nature, which instinctively refused to pour themselves into any but a friendly, sympathetic ear.