Part 4

She is always gay, because she has no depth of feeling to be stirred. The brook that runs shallow over hard pebbly bottom always rustles. She is light-hearted, because her heart floats in sparkles—like my sea-coal fire. She counts on marriage, not as the great absorbent of a heart’s love and life, but as a happy, feasible, and orderly conventionality, to be played with, and kept at distance, and finally to be accepted as a cover for the faint and tawdry sparkles of an old and cherished heartlessness.

She will not pine under any regrets, because she has no appreciation of any loss: she will not chafe at indifference, because it is her art; she will not be worried with jealousies, because she is ignorant of love. With no conception of the soul in its strength and fullness, she sees no lack of its demands. A thrill, she does not know; a passion, she can not imagine; joy is a name; grief is another; and life, with its crowding scenes of love and bitterness, is a play upon the stage.

I think it is Madame Dudevant who says, in something like the same connection: _Les hiboux ne connaissent pas le chemin par où les aigles vont au soleil_.

—Poor Ned! mused I, looking at the play of the fire—was a victim and a conqueror. He was a man of a full, strong nature—not a little impulsive—with action too full of earnestness for most of men to see its drift. He had known little of what is called the world; he was fresh in feeling and high of hope; he had been encircled always by friends who loved him, and who, maybe, flattered him. Scarce had he entered upon the tangled life of the city before he met with a sparkling face and an airy step that stirred something in poor Ned that he had never felt before. With him, to feel was to act. He was not one to be despised; for, notwithstanding he wore a country air, and the awkwardness of a man who has yet the _bienséance_ of social life before him, he had the soul, the courage, and the talent of a strong man. Little gifted in the knowledge of face-play, he easily mistook those coy manœuvers of a sparkling heart for something kindred to his own true emotions.

She was proud of the attentions of a man who carried a mind in his brain; and flattered poor Ned almost into servility. Ned had no friends to counsel him; or, if he had them, his impulses would have blinded him. Never was dodger more artful at the Olympic Games than the Peggy of Ned’s heart-affection. He was charmed, beguiled, entranced.

When Ned spoke of love, she staved it off with the prettiest of sly looks that only bewildered him the more. A charming creature to be sure; coy as a dove!

So he went on, poor fool, until one day—he told me of it with the blood mounting to his temples, and his eye shooting flame—he suffered his feelings to run out in passionate avowal—entreaty—everything. She gave a pleasant, noisy laugh, and manifested—such pretty surprise!

He was looking for the intense glow of passion; and lo, there was nothing but the shifting sparkle of a sea-coal flame.

I wrote him a letter of condolence—for I was his senior by a year; “My dear fellow,” said I, “diet yourself; you can find greens at the uptown market; eat a little fish with your dinner; abstain from heating drinks; don’t put too much butter to your cauliflower; read one of Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, and translate all the quotations at sight; run carefully over that exquisite picture of George Dandin in your Molière, and my word for it, in a week you will be a sound man.”

He was too angry to reply; but eighteen months thereafter I got a thick, three-sheeted letter, with a dove upon the seal, telling me that he was as happy as a king: he said he had married a good-hearted, domestic, loving wife, who was as lovely as a June day, and that their baby, not three months old, was as bright as a spot of June day sunshine on the grass.

—What a tender, delicate, loving wife—mused I—such flashing, flaming flirt must in the end make; the prostitute of fashion; the bauble of fifty hearts idle as hers; the shifting make-piece of a stage scene; the actress, now in peasant, and now in princely petticoats! How it would cheer an honest soul to call her—his! What a culmination of his heart-life; what a rich dreamland to be realized!

—Bah! and I thrust the poker into the clotted mass of fading coal—just such, and so worthless is the used heart of a city flirt; just so the incessant sparkle of her life, and frittering passions, fuses all that is sound and combustible into black, sooty, shapeless residuum.

When I marry a flirt, I will buy second-hand clothes of the Jews.

—Still—mused I—as the flame danced again—there is a distinction between coquetry and flirtation.

A coquette sparkles, but it is more the sparkle of a harmless and pretty vanity than of calculation. It is the play of humors in the blood, and not the play of purpose at the heart. It will flicker around a true soul like the blaze around an _omelette au rhum_, leaving the kernel sounder and warmer.

Coquetry, with all its pranks and teasings, makes the spice to your dinner—the mulled wine to your supper. It will drive you to desperation, only to bring you back hotter to the fray. Who would boast a victory that cost no strategy, and no careful disposition of the forces? Who would bulletin such success as my Uncle Toby’s, in the back garden, with only the Corporal Trim for assailant? But let a man be very sure that the city is worth the siege!

Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose—easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters.

And so, with my eye clinging to the flickering blaze, I see in my reverie, a bright one dancing before me, with sparkling, coquettish smile, teasing me with the prettiest graces in the world—and I grow maddened between hope and fear, and still watch with my whole soul in my eyes; and see her features by and by relax to pity, as a gleam of sensibility comes stealing over her spirit—and then to a kindly, feeling regard: presently she approaches—a coy and doubtful approach—and throws back the ringlets that lie over her cheek, and lays her hand—a little bit of white hand—timidly upon my strong fingers—and turns her head daintily to one side—and looks up in my eyes as they rest on the playing blaze; and my fingers close fast and passionately over that little hand like a swift night-cloud shrouding the pale tips of Dian—and my eyes draw nearer and nearer to those blue, laughing, pitying, teasing eyes, and my arm clasps round that shadowy form—and my lips feel a warm breath—growing warmer and warmer—

Just here the maid comes in, throws upon the fire a panful of anthracite, and my sparkling sea-coal reverie is ended.

II ANTHRACITE

IT DOES not burn freely, so I put on the blower. Quaint and good-natured Xavier de Maistre[2] would have made, I dare say, a pretty epilogue about a sheet-iron blower; but I can not.

Footnote 2:

_Voyage autour de Ma Chambre._

I try to bring back the image that belonged to the lingering bituminous flame, but with my eyes on that dark blower—how can I?

It is the black curtain of destiny which drops down before our brightest dreams. How often the phantoms of joy regale us, and dance before us—golden-winged, angel-faced, heart-warming, and make an Elysium in which the dreaming soul bathes and feels translated to another existence; and then—sudden as night, or a cloud—a word, a step, a thought, a memory will chase them away like scared deer vanishing over a gray horizon of moor-land!

I know not justly, if it be a weakness or a sin to create these phantoms that we love, and to group them into a paradise—soul-created. But if it is a sin, it is a sweet and enchanting sin; and if it is a weakness, it is a strong and stirring weakness. If this heart is sick of the falsities that meet it at every hand, and is eager to spend that power which nature has ribbed it with, on some object worthy of its fullness and depth—shall it not feel a rich relief—nay more, an exercise in keeping with its end, if it flow out—strong as a tempest, wild as a rushing river, upon those ideal creations, which imagination invents, and which are tempered by our best sense of beauty, purity and grace?

—Useless, do you say? Ay, it is as useless as the pleasure of looking, hour upon hour, over bright landscapes; it is as useless as the rapt enjoyment of listening with heart full and eyes brimming, to such music as the Miserere, at Rome; it is as useless as the ecstasy of kindling your soul into fervor and love, and madness, over pages that reek with genius.

There are, indeed, base-molded souls who know nothing of this; they laugh; they sneer; they even affect to pity. Just so the Huns, under the avenging Attila, who had been used to foul cookery and steaks stewed under their saddles, laughed brutally at the spiced banquets of an Apicius!

—No, this phantom-making is no sin; or if it be, it is sinning with a soul so full, so earnest, that it can cry to Heaven cheerily, and sure of a gracious hearing—_peccavi_—_misericorde_!

But my fire is in a glow, a pleasant glow, throwing a tranquil, steady light to the farthest corner of my garret. How unlike it is to the flashing play of the sea-coal!—unlike as an unsteady, uncertain-working heart to the true and earnest constancy of one cheerful and right.

After all, thought I, give me such a heart; not bent on vanities, not blazing too sharp with sensibilities, not throwing out coquettish jets of flame, not wavering, and meaningless with pretended warmth, but open, glowing and strong. Its dark shades and angles it may have; for what is a soul worth that does not take a slaty tinge from those griefs that chill the blood. Yet still the fire is gleaming; you see it in the crevices; and anon it will give radiance to the whole mass.

—It hurts the eyes, this fire; and I draw up a screen painted over with rough but graceful figures.

The true heart wears always the veil of modesty (not of prudery, which is a dingy, iron, repulsive screen). It will not allow itself to be looked on too near—it might scorch; but through the veil you feel the warmth; and through the pretty figures that modesty will robe itself in, you can see all the while the golden outlines, and by that token, you _know_ that it is glowing and burning with a pure and steady flame.

With such a heart the mind fuses naturally—a holy and heated fusion; they work together like twins-born. With such a heart, as Raphael says to Adam:

Love hath his seat In reason, and is judicious.

But let me distinguish this heart from your clay-cold, lukewarm, half-hearted soul; considerate, because ignorant; judicious, because possessed of no latent fires that need a curb; prudish, because with no warm blood to tempt. This sort of soul may pass scatheless through the fiery furnace of life; strong, only in its weakness; pure, because of its failings; and good, only by negation. It may triumph over love, and sin, and death; but it will be a triumph of the beast, which has neither passions to subdue, or energy to attack, or hope to quench.

Let us come back to the steady and earnest heart, glowing like my anthracite coal.

I fancy I see such a one now; the eye is deep and reaches back to the spirit; it is not the trading eye, weighing your purse; it is not the worldly eye, weighing position; it is not the beastly eye, weighing your appearance; it is the heart’s eye weighing your soul!

It is full of deep, tender, and earnest feeling. It is an eye, which looked on once, you long to look on again; it is an eye which will haunt your dreams—an eye which will give a color, in spite of you, to all your reveries. It is an eye which lies before you in your future, like a star in the mariner’s heaven; by it, unconsciously, and from force of deep soul habit, you take all your observations. It is meek and quiet; but it is full as a spring that gushes in flood; an Aphrodite and a Mercury—a Vaucluse and a Clitumnus.

The face is an angel face; no matter for curious lines of beauty; no matter for popular talk of prettiness; no matter for its angles, or its proportions; no matter for its color or its form—the soul is there, illuminating every feature, burnishing every point, hallowing every surface. It tells of honesty, sincerity and worth; it tells of truth and virtue—and you clasp the image to your heart as the received ideal of your fondest dreams.

The figure may be this or that, it may be tall or short, it matters nothing—the heart is there. The talk may be soft or low, serious or piquant—a free and honest soul is warming and softening it all. As you speak, it speaks back again; as you think, it thinks again (not in conjunction, but in the same sign of the Zodiac); as you love, it loves in return.

—It is the heart for a sister, and happy is the man who can claim such! The warmth that lies in it is not only generous, but religious, genial, devotional, tender, self-sacrificing, and looking heavenward.

A man without some sort of religion is, at best, a poor reprobate, the football of destiny, with no tie linking him to infinity, and the wondrous eternity that is begun with him; but a woman without it is even worse—a flame without heat, a rainbow without color, a flower without perfume!

A man may, in some sort, tie his frail hopes and honors with weak, shifting ground-tackle to business, or to the world; but a woman without that anchor which they call faith is adrift and a-wreck! A man may clumsily contrive a kind of moral responsibility out of his relations to mankind, but a woman in her comparatively isolated sphere, where affection and not purpose is the controlling motive, can find no basis for any system of right action, but that of spiritual faith.

A man may craze his thought and his brain, to trustfulness in such poor harborage as fame and reputation may stretch before him; but a woman—where can she put her hope in storms, if not in Heaven?

And that sweet trustfulness—that abiding love—that enduring hope, mellowing every page and scene of life, lighting them with pleasantest radiance, when the world-storms break like an army with smoking cannon—what can bestow it all, but a holy soul-tie to what is above the storms, and to what is stronger than an army with cannon? Who that has enjoyed the counsel and the love of a Christian mother, but will echo the thought with energy, and hallow it with a tear?—_et moi, je pleurs!_

My fire is now a mass of red-hot coal. The whole atmosphere of my room is warm. The heat that with its glow can light up, and warm a garret with loose casements and shattered roof, is capable of the best love—domestic love. I draw farther off, and the images upon the screen change. The warmth, the hour, the quiet, create a home feeling; and that feeling, quick as lightning, has stolen from the world of fancy (a Promethean theft), a home object, about which my musings go on to drape themselves in luxurious reverie.

—There she sits, by the corner of the fire, in a neat home dress, of sober, yet most adorning color. A little bit of lace ruffle is gathered about the neck, by a blue ribbon; and the ends of the ribbon are crossed under the dimpling chin, and are fastened neatly by a simple, unpretending brooch—your gift. The arm, a pretty taper arm, lies over the carved elbow of the oaken chair; the hand, white and delicate, sustains a little home volume that hangs from her fingers. The forefinger is between the leaves, and the others lie in relief upon the dark embossed cover. She repeats in a silver voice a line that has attracted her fancy; and you listen—or, at any rate, you seem to listen—with your eyes now on the lips, now on the forehead, and now on the finger, where glitters like a star, the marriage ring—little gold band, at which she does not chafe, that tells you—she is yours!

—Weak testimonial, if that were all that told it! The eye, the voice, the look, the heart, tells you stronger and better, that she is yours. And a feeling within, where it lies you know not, and whence it comes you know not, but sweeping over heart and brain, like a fire-flood, tells you, too, that you are hers! Irremediably bound as Massinger’s Hortensio:

I am subject to another’s will and can Nor speak, nor do, without permission from her!

The fire is warm as ever; what length of heat in this hard burning anthracite! It has scarce sunk yet to the second bar of the grate, though the clock upon the churchtower has tolled eleven.

—Aye—mused I, gayly—such a heart does not grow faint, it does not spend itself in idle puffs of blaze, it does not become chilly with the passing years; but it gains and grows in strength and heat until the fire of life is covered over with the ashes of death. Strong or hot as it may be at the first, it loses nothing. It may not, indeed, as time advances, throw out, like the coal fire, when new-lit, jets of blue sparkling flame; it may not continue to bubble and gush like a fountain at its source, but it will become a strong river of flowing charities.

Clitumnus breaks from under the Tuscan mountains, almost a flood; on a glorious spring day I leaned down and tasted the water, as it boiled from its sources; the little temple of white marble—the mountain sides gray with olive orchards—the white streak of road—the tall poplars of the river margin were glistening in the bright Italian sunlight around me. Later, I saw it when it had become a river—still clear and strong, flowing serenely between its prairie banks, on which the white cattle of the valley browsed; and still farther down I welcomed it, where it joins the Arno—flowing slowly under wooded shores, skirting the fair Florence and the bounteous fields of the bright Cascino; gathering strength and volume, till between Pisa and Leghorn—in sight of the wondrous Leaning Tower and the ship-masts of the Tuscan port—it gave its waters to its life’s grave—the sea.

The recollection blended sweetly now with my musings, over my garret grate, and offered a flowing image to bear along upon its bosom the affections that were grouping in my reverie.

It is a strange force of the mind and of the fancy that can set the objects which are closest to the heart far down the lapse of time. Even now, as the fire fades slightly, and sinks slowly toward the bar, which is the dial of my hours, I seem to see that image of love which has played about the fire-glow of my grate—years hence. It still covers the same warm, trustful, religious heart. Trials have tried it; afflictions have weighed upon it; danger has scared it; and death is coming near to subdue it; but still it is the same.

The fingers are thinner; the face has lines of care and sorrow crossing each other in a web-work that makes the golden tissue of humanity. But the heart is fond and steady; it is the same dear heart, the same self-sacrificing heart, warming, like a fire, all around it. Affliction has tempered joy; and joy adorned affliction. Life and all its troubles have become distilled into an holy incense, rising ever from your fireside—an offering to your household gods.

Your dreams of reputation, your swift determination, your impulsive pride, your deep uttered vows to win a name, have all sobered into affection—have all blended into that glow of feeling which finds its center, and hope, and joy in HOME. From my soul I pity him whose soul does not leap at the mere utterance of that name.

A home!—it is the bright, blessed, adorable phantom which sits highest on the sunny horizon that girdeth life! When shall it be reached? When shall it cease to be a glittering day-dream, and become fully and fairly yours?

It is not the house, though that may have its charms; nor the fields carefully tilled, and streaked with your own footpaths—nor the trees, though their shadow be to you like that of a great rock in a weary land—nor yet is it the fireside, with its sweet blaze-play—nor the pictures which tell of loved ones, nor the cherished books—but more far than all these—it is the PRESENCE. The Lares of your worship are there; the altar of your confidence there; the end of your worldly faith is there; and adorning it all, and sending your blood in passionate flow, is the ecstasy of the conviction, that _there_ at least you are beloved; that there you are understood; that there your errors will meet ever with gentlest forgiveness; that there your troubles will be smiled away; that there you may unburden your soul, fearless of harsh, unsympathizing ears; and that there you may be entirely and joyfully—yourself!

There may be those of coarse mold—and I have seen such even in the disguise of women—who will reckon these feelings puling sentiment. God pity them!—as they have need of pity.

—That image by the fireside, calm, loving, joyful, is there still; it goes not, however my spirit tosses, because my wish, and every will, keep it there, unerring.

The fire shows through the screen, yellow and warm as a harvest sun. It is in its best age, and that age is ripeness.

A ripe heart!—now I know what Wordsworth meant when he said:

The good die first, And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust Burn to the socket!

The town clock is striking midnight. The cold of the night-wind is urging its way in at the door and window-crevice; the fire has sunk almost to the third bar of the grate. Still my dream tires not, but wraps fondly round that image—now in the far-off, chilling mists of age, growing sainted. Love has blended into reverence; passion has subsided into joyous content.

—And what if age comes, said I, in a new flush of excitation—what else proves the wine? What else gives inner strength, and knowledge, and a steady pilot-hand, to steer your boat out boldly upon that shoreless sea, where the river of life is running? Let the white ashes gather; let the silver hair lie where lay the auburn; let the eye gleam farther back, and dimmer; it is but retreating toward the pure sky-depths, an usher to the land where you will follow after.

It is quite cold, and I take away the screen altogether; there is a little glow yet, but presently the coal slips down below the third bar, with a rumbling sound—like that of coarse gravel falling into a new-dug grave.

—She is gone!

Well, the heart has burned fairly, evenly, generously, while there was mortality to kindle it; eternity will surely kindle it better.

—Tears indeed; but they are tears of thanksgiving, of resignation, and of hope!

And the eyes, full of those tears which ministering angels bestow, climb with quick vision upon the angelic ladder, and open upon the futurity where she has entered, and upon the country which she enjoys.

It is midnight, and the sounds of life are dead.

You are in the death chamber of life; but you are also in the death chamber of care. The world seems sliding backward; and hope and you are sliding forward. The clouds, the agonies, the vain expectancies, the braggart noise, and fears, now vanish behind the curtain of the past, and of the night. They roll from your soul like a load.

In the dimness of what seems the ending present, you reach out your prayerful hands toward that boundless future, where God’s eye lifts over the horizon, like sunrise on the ocean. Do you recognize it as an earnest of something better? Aye, if the heart has been pure and steady—burning like my fire—it has learned it without seeming to learn. Faith has grown upon it, as the blossom grows upon the bud, or the flower upon the slow-lifting stalk.