Atlantic Monthly by - (the reading strategies book .txt) 📖

all away; the lilac muslin and the barége. Mamma, that veil, the mourning veil, is in the drawer. Oh, mamma, that veil was for you; don’t refuse it; our Father sends it, and he knows best. Perhaps you will see heaven through that veil.”

It is appalling to think how near to the happiest and most prosperous scene of life stands the saddest despair. All homes are haunted with awful possibilities, for whose realization no array of threatening agents is required,—no lightning, or tempest, or battle; a peaceful household lamp, a gust of perfumed evening air, a false step in a moment of gayety, a draught taken by mistake, a match overlooked or mislaid, a moment’s oversight in handling a deadly weapon,—and the whole scene of life is irretrievably changed!

It was but a day after the scene in the arbor, and all was mourning in the so lately happy, hospitable house; everybody looked through tears. There were subdued breathings, a low murmur, as of many listeners, a voice of prayer, and the wail of a funeral hymn,—and then the heavy tread of bearers, as, beneath the black pall, she was carried over the threshold of her home, never to return.

And Olivia and Albert came forth behind their dead. The folds of the dark veil seemed a refuge for the mother’s sorrow. But how did the flowers of home, the familiar elms, the distant smiling prospect look through its gloomy folds,—emblem of the shadow which had fallen between her heart and life? When she looked at the dark moving hearse, she wondered that the sun still shone, that birds could sing, and that even her own flowers could be so bright.

Ah, mother! the world had been just as full of sorrow the day before; the air as full of “farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead”; but thou knewest it not! Now the outer world comes to thee through the mourning veil!

But after the funeral comes life again,—hard, cold, inexorable life, knocking with business-like sound at the mourner’s door, obtruding its commonplace pertinacity on the dull ear of sorrow. The world cannot wait for us; the world knows no leisure for tears; it moves onward, and drags along with its motion the weary and heavy-laden who would fain rest.

Olivia would have buried herself in her sorrows. There are those who refuse to be comforted. The condolence of friends seems only a mockery; and truly, nothing so shows the emptiness and poverty of human nature as its efforts at condolence.

Father Payson, however, was a visitor who would not be denied; there was something of gentle authority in his white hairs that might not be resisted. Old, and long schooled in sorrow, his heart many times broken in past years, he knew all the ways of mourning. His was no official commonplace about “afflictive dispensations.” He came first with that tender and reverent silence with which the man acquainted with grief approaches the divine mysteries of sorrow; and from time to time he cast on the troubled waters words, dropped like seeds, not for present fruitfulness, but to germinate after the floods had subsided.

He watched beside a soul in affliction as a mother waits on the crisis of a fever whose turning is to be for life or for death; for he well knew that great sorrows never leave us as they find us; that the broken spirit, ill set, grows callous and distorted ever after.

He had wise patience with every stage of sorrow; he knew that at first the soul is blind, and deaf, and dumb. He was not alarmed when returning vitality showed itself only in moral spasms and convulsions; for in all great griefs come hours of conflict, when the soul is tempted, and complaining, murmuring, dark, skeptical thoughts are whirled like withered leaves through all its desolate chambers.

“What have I learned by looking through this veil?” said Olivia to him, bitterly, one day when they were coming out of a house where they had been visiting a mourning family. “I was trusting in God as an indulgent Father; life seemed beautiful to me in the light of his goodness; now I see only his inflexible severity. I never knew before how much mourning and sorrow there had been even in this little village. There is scarcely a house where something dreadful has not at some time happened. How many families here have been called to mourning since we have! I have not taken up a paper in which I have not seen a record of two or three accidental deaths; some of them even more bitter and cruel than what has befallen us. I read this morning of a poor washerwoman, whose house was burned, and all her children consumed, while she was away working for her bread. I read the other day of a blind man whose only son was drowned in his very presence, while he could do nothing to help him. I was visiting yesterday that poor dress-maker whom you know. She has by toil and pains been educating a fine and dutiful son. He is smitten down with hopeless disease, while her idiot child, who can do nobody any good, is spared. Ah, this mourning veil has indeed opened my eyes; but it has taught me to add all the sorrows of the world to my own; and can I believe in God’s love?”

“Daughter,” said the old man, “I am not ignorant of these things. I have buried seven children; I have buried my wife; and God has laid on me in my time reproach, and controversy, and contempt. Each cross seemed, at the time, heavier than the others. Each in its day seemed to be what I least could bear; and I would have cried, ‘Anything but this!‘ And yet, now when I look back, I cannot see one of these sorrows that has not been made a joy to me. With every one some perversity or sin has been subdued, some chain unbound, some good purpose perfected. God has taken my loved ones, but he has given me love. He has given me the power of submission and of consolation; and I have blessed him many times in my ministry for all I have suffered, for by it I have stayed up many that were ready to perish.”

“Ah,” said Olivia, “you indeed have reason to be comforted, because you can see in yourself the fruit of your sorrows; but I am not improving; I am only crushed and darkened,—not amended.”

“Have patience with thyself, child; weeping must endure for a night; all comes not at once. ‘No trial for the present seemeth joyous’; but ‘afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruit’;—have faith in this afterwards. Some one says that it is not in the tempest one walks the beach to look for the treasures of wrecked ships; but when the storm is past we find pearls and precious stones washed ashore. Are there not even now some of these in your path? Is not the love between you and your husband deeper and more intimate since this affliction? Do you not love your other children more tenderly? Did you not tell me that you had thought on the sorrows of every house in this village? Courage, my child! that is a good sign. Once, as you read the papers, you thought nothing of those who lost friends; now you notice and feel. Take the sorrows of others to your heart; they shall widen and deepen it. Ours is a religion of sorrow. The Captain of our salvation was made perfect through suffering; our Father is the God of all consolation; our Teacher is named the Comforter; and all other mysteries are swallowed up in the mystery of the Divine sorrow. ‘In all our afflictions He is afflicted.’ God refuseth not to suffer;—shall we?”

There is no grave so desolate that flowers will not at last spring on it. Time passed with Albert and Olivia with healing in its wings. The secret place of tears became first a temple of prayer, and afterwards of praise; and the heavy cloud was remembered by the flowers that sprung up after the rain. The vacant chair in the household circle had grown to be a tender influence, not a harrowing one; and the virtues of the lost one seemed to sow themselves like the scattered seeds of a fallen flower, and to spring up in the hearts of the surviving ones. More tender and more blessed is often the brooding influence of the sacred dead than the words of the living.

Olivia became known in the abodes of sorrow, and a deep power seemed given her to console the suffering and distressed. A deeper power of love sprung up within her; and love, though born of sorrow, ever brings peace with it. Many were the hearts that reposed on her; many the wandering that she reclaimed, the wavering that she upheld, the desolate that she comforted. As a soul in heaven may look back on earth, and smile at its past sorrows, so, even here, it may rise to a sphere where it may look down on the storm that once threatened to overwhelm it.

It was on the afternoon of just such another summer day as we have described at the opening of our story, that Olivia was in her apartment, directing the folding and laying away of mourning garments. She took up the dark veil and looked on it kindly, as on a faithful friend. How much had she seen and learned behind the refuge of its sheltering folds! She turned her thoughts within herself. She was calm once more, and happy,—happy with a wider and steadier basis than ever before. A new world seemed opened within her; and with a heart raised in thankfulness she placed the veil among her most sacred treasures.

Yes, there by the smiling image of the lost one,—by the curls of her glossy hair,—by the faded flowers taken from her bier, was laid in solemn thankfulness the Mourning Veil.

 

PENDLAM: A MODERN REFORMER.

 

My theatre-going friend pulled up suddenly in his ambling discourse concerning the merits of the last actress, dropped his voice to a whisper, touched my arm, and pointed with his cane.

“Look! the Reverend John Henry Pendlam!”

“Coming out of a bar-room! Ho, ho! Sir Reverend!”

I spoke gayly, but with an indefinably serious sentiment at heart I was interested in this John Henry Pendlam; not particularly on account of the reputation for eloquence and zeal which he had so early and rapidly achieved, but his approaching marriage with my friend’s second cousin, Susan D–-, (whom I had myself even barely escaped marrying,) quickened a personal curiosity regarding my successor.

“He is on no base errand,” replied Horatio. “He goes about carrying the Gospel into these dens. The papers you see in his hand are tracts. Shall I introduce you?”

Before I could fairly answer, No, (for I felt a repugnance to making the acquaintance of any man who was to marry Susan,) Pendlam, standing a moment in the gas-light before the door of the saloon, observed my friend, and advanced quickly.

“Too late to escape!” cried the young clergyman, seizing Horatio by the collar. “I have you, truant!” And he drew a tract upon him, like a revolver.

“I surrender!” said Horatio. “If it’s you, don’t shoot; I’ll come down, as the treed coon said to the hunter.”

“Don’t think to disarm me by a pleasantry,” replied Pendlam, brandishing his spiritual weapon. “This is my sermon on the theatre, which you engaged to hear me preach; I have had it printed for you.”

“Really,” said Horatio, with a humorous smile, “I had forgotten my promise. Besides, I was engaged,—let me see, it was two Sundays ago, wasn’t it?—yes, I was engaged to dine with Miss