Margret Howth, a Story of To-day Part 21

Margret lifted her head, and held it on her breast. She could hear cries and sobs; the faces, white now, and wet, pressed nearer, yet fading slowly: it was the Old Year going out, the worn-out year of her life. Holmes opened the window: the cold night-wind rushed in, bearing with it s.n.a.t.c.hes of broken harmony: some idle musician down in the city, playing fragments of some old, sweet air, heavy with love and regret. It may have been chance: yet, let us think it was not chance; let us believe that He, who had made the world warm and happy for her, chose that this best voice of all should bid her good-bye at the last.

So the Old Year went out in that music. The dull eyes, loving to the end, wandered vaguely as the sounds died away, as if losing something,--losing all, suddenly. She sighed as the clock struck, and then a strange calm, unknown before, stole over her face; her eyes flashed open with a living joy. Margret stooped to close them, kissing the cold lids; and Tiger, who had climbed upon the bed, whined and crept down.

"It is the New Year," said Holmes, bending his head.

The cripple was dead; but LOIS, free, loving, and beloved, trembled from her prison to her Master's side in the To-Morrow.

I can show you her grave out there in the hills,--a short, stunted grave, like a child's. No one goes there, although there are many firesides where they speak of "Lois" softly, as of something holy and dear: but they think of her always as not there; as gone home; even old Yare looks up, when he talks of "my girl." Yet, knowing that nothing in G.o.d's just universe is lost, or fails to meet the late fulfilment of its hope, I like to think of her poor body lying there: I like to believe that the great mother was glad to receive the form that want and crime of men had thwarted,--took her uncouth child home again, that had been so cruelly wronged,--folded it in her warm bosom with tender, palpitating love.

It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out limbs, the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into fresh atoms, woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when G.o.d smiled permission through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild ecstasy of the true beauty that she loved so well. In no questioning, sad pallor of sombre leaves or gray lichens: throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in lilies, white, exultant in a chordant life!

Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense, at her freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to hunger or to hope, and learn to be. And so thinking, the certainty of her aim and work and love yonder comes with a new, vital reality, beside which the story of the yet living men and women of whom I have told you grows vague and incomplete, like unguessed riddles. I have no key to solve them with,--no right to solve them.

My story is but a mere groping hint? It lacks determined truth, a certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of G.o.d's justice running through it, awarding apparent good and ill? I know: it is a story of To-Day.

The Old Year is on us yet. Poor old Knowles will tell you it is a dark day; bewildered at the inexplicable failure of the cause for which his old blood ran like water that dull morning at Ball's Bluff. He doubts everything in the bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even, if the very flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic selfishness: if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain truth to give it strength. A dark day, he tells you: that the air is filled with the cry of the slave, and of nations going down into darkness, their message untold, their work undone: that now, as eighteen centuries ago, the Helper stands unwelcome in the world; that your own heart, as well as the great humanity, asks an unrendered justice. Does he utter all the problems of To-Day? Vand.y.k.e, standing higher, perhaps, or, at any rate, born with hopefuller brain, would show you how, by the very instant peril of the hour, is lifted clearer into view the eternal prophecy of coming content: could tell you that the unquiet earth, and the unanswering heaven are instinct with it: that the ungranted prayer of your own life should teach it to you: that in that Book wherein G.o.d has not scorned to write the history of America, he finds the quiet surety that the rescue of the world is near at hand.

Holmes, like most men who make destiny, does not pause in his cool, slow work for their prophecy or lamentation. "Such men will mould the age," old Knowles says, drearily, for he does not like Holmes: follows him unwillingly, even knowing him nearer the truth than he. "Born for masters.h.i.+p, as I told you long ago: they strike the blow, while----.

I'm tired of theorists, exponents of the abstract right: your Hamlets, and your Sewards, that let occasion slip until circ.u.mstance or--mobs drift them as they will."

But Knowles's growls are unheeded, as usual.

What is this To-Day to Margret? She has no prophetic insight, cares for none, I am afraid: the common things of every-day wear their old faces to her, dear and real. Her haste is too eager to allay the pain about her, her husband's touch too strong and tender, the Master beside her too actual a presence, for her to waste her life in visions.

Something of Lois's live, universal sympathy has come into her narrow, intenser nature; through its one love, it may be. What is To-Morrow until it comes? This moment the evening air thrills with a purple of which no painter as yet has caught the tint, no poet the meaning; no silent face pa.s.ses her on the street on which a human voice might not have charm to call out love and power: the Helper yet waits near her.

Here is work, life: the Old Year you despise holds beauty, pain, content yet unmastered: let us leave Margret to master them.

It does not satisfy you? Child-souls, you tell me, like that of Lois, may find it enough to hold no past and no future, to accept the work of each moment, and think it no wrong to drink every drop of its beauty and joy: we, who are wiser, laugh at them. It may be: yet I say unto you, their angels only do always behold the face of our Father in the New Year.