_ "When summer gathers up her robes of glory,
And like a dream of beauty glides away."
"Across the hills and far away,
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day
The happy princess follow'd him."
It was several months after Helen's marriage. The scene was a little
lake, in one of the wildest parts of the Adirondacks, surrounded by
tall mountains which converted it into a basin in the land, and
walled in by a dense growth about the shores, which added still more
to its appearance of seclusion. In only one place was the scenery
more open, where there was a little vale between two of the hills,
and where a mountain torrent came rushing down the steep incline.
There the underbrush had been cleared away, and beneath the great
forest trees a house constructed, a little cabin built of logs, and
in harmony with the rest of the scene.
It was only large enough for two or three rooms downstairs, and as
many above, and all were furnished in the plainest way. About the
main room there were shelves of books, and a piano and a well-chosen
music-library. It was the little home which for a dozen years or
more David Howard had occupied alone, and where he and Helen had
spent the golden summer of their love.
It was late in the fall then, and the mountains were robed in
scarlet and orange. Helen was standing upon the little piazza, a
shawl flung about her shoulders, because it was yet early in the
morning. She was talking to her father, who had been paying them a
few days' visit, and was taking a last look about him at the fresh
morning scene before it was time for him to begin his long homeward
journey.
Helen was clad in a simple dress, and with the prettiest of white
sun bonnets tied upon her head; she was browned by the sun, and
looked a picture of health and happiness as she held her father's
arm in hers. "And then you are quite sure that you are happy?" he
was saying, as he looked at her radiant face.
She echoed the word--"Happy?" and then she stretched out her arms
and took a deep breath and echoed it again. "I am so happy," she
laughed, "I never know what to do! You did not stay long enough for
me to tell you, Daddy!" She paused for a moment, and then went on,
"I think there never was anybody in the world so full of joy. For
this is such a beautiful little home, you know, and we live such a
beautiful life; and oh, we love each other so that the days seem to
fly by like the wind! I never even have time to think how happy I
am."
"Your husband really loves you as much as he ought," said the
father, gazing at her tenderly.
"I think God never put on earth another such man as David," replied,
the girl, with sudden gravity. "He is so noble, and so unselfish in
every little thing; I see it in his eyes every instant that all his
life is lived for nothing but to win my love. And it just draws the
heart right out of me, Daddy, so that I could live on my knees
before him, just trying to tell him how much I love him. I cannot
ever love him enough; but it grows--it grows like great music, and
every day my heart is more full!"
Helen was standing with her head thrown back, gazing ahead of her;
then she turned and laughed, and put her arm about her father again,
saying: "Haven't you just seen what a beautiful life we live? And
oh, Daddy, most of the time I am afraid because I married David,
when I see how much he knows. Just think of it,--he has lived all
alone ever since he was young, and done nothing but read and study.
Now he brings all those treasures to me, to make me happy with, and
he frightens me." She stopped for a moment and then continued
earnestly: "I have to be able to go with him everywhere, you know, I
can't expect him to stay back all his life for me; and that makes me
work very hard. David says that there is one duty in the world
higher than love, and that is the duty of labor,--that no soul in
the world can be right for one instant if it is standing still and
is satisfied, even with the soul it loves. He told me that before he
married me, but at first when we came up here he was so impatient
that he quite frightened me; but now I have learned to understand it
all, and we are wonderfully one in everything. Daddy, dear, isn't it
a beautiful way to live, to be always striving, and having something
high and sacred in one's mind? And to make all of one's life from
one's own heart, and not to be dependent upon anything else? David
and I live away off here in the mountains, and we never have
anything of what other people call comforts and enjoyments--we have
nothing but a few books and a little music, and Nature, and our own
love; and we are so wonderfully happy with just those that nothing
else in the world could make any difference, certainly nothing that
money could buy us."
"I was worried when you wrote me that you did not even have a
servant," said Mr. Davis.
"It isn't any trouble," laughed Helen. (David's man lived in the
village half a mile away and came over every day to bring what was
necessary.) "This is such a tiny little cottage, and David and I are
very enthusiastic people, and we want to be able to make lots of
noise and do just as we please. We have so much music, you know,
Daddy, and of course David is quite a wild man when he gets excited
with music."
Helen stopped and looked at her father and laughed; then she rattled
merrily on: "We are both of us just two children, for David is so
much in love with me that it makes him as young as I am; and we are
away off from everything, and so we can be as happy with each other
as we choose. We have this little lake all to ourselves, you know;
it's getting cold now, and pretty soon we'll have to fly away to the
south, but all this summer long we used to get up in the morning in
time to see the sun rise, and to have a wonderful swim. And then we
have so many things to read and study; and David talks to me, and
tells me all that he knows; and besides all that we have to tell
each other how much we love each other, which takes a fearful amount
of time. It seems that neither of us can ever quite realize the
glory of it, and when we think of it, it is a wonder that nobody
ever told. Is not that a beautiful way to live, Daddy dear, and to
love?"
"Yes," said Mr. Davis, "that is a very beautiful way indeed. And I
think that my little girl has all that I could wish her to have."
"Oh, there is no need to tell me that!" laughed Helen. "All I wish
is that I might really be like David and be worth his love; I never
think about anything else all day." The girl stood for a moment
gazing at her father, and then, looking more serious, she put her
arm about him and whispered softly: "And oh, Daddy, it is too
wonderful to talk about, but I ought to tell you; for some day by
and by God is going to send us a new, oh, a new, new wonder!" And
Helen blushed beautifully as her father gazed into her eyes.
He took her hand tenderly in his own, and the two stood for some
time in silence. When it was broken it was by the rattling of the
wagon which had come to take Mr. Davis away.
David came out then to bid his guest good-by, and the three stood
for a few minutes conversing. It was not very difficult for, Helen
to take leave of her father, for she would see him, so she said, in
a week or two more. She stood waving her hands to him, until the
bumping wagon was lost to sight in the woods, and then she turned
and took David's hand in hers and gazed across the water at the
gorgeous-colored mountains. The lake was sparkling in the sunlight,
and the sky was bright and clear, but Helen's thoughts took a
different turn from that.
All summer long she had been rejoicing in the glory of the landscape
about her, in the glowing fern and the wild-flowers underfoot, and
in the boundless canopy of green above, with its unresting
song-birds; now there were only the shrill cries of a pair of
blue-jays to be heard, and every puff of wind that came brought down
a shower of rustling leaves to the already thickly-covered ground.
"Is it not sad, David," the girl said, "to think how the beauty
should all be going?"
David did not answer her for a moment. "When I think of it," he said
at last, "it brings me not so much sadness as a strange feeling of
mystery. Only stop, and think of what that vanished springtime
meant--think that it was a presence of living, feeling, growing
creatures,--infinite, unthinkable masses of them, robing all the
world; and that now the life and the glory of it all is suddenly
gone back into nothingness, that it was all but a fleeting vision, a
phantom presence on the earth. I never realize that without coming
to think of all the other things of life, and that they too are no
more real than the springtime flowers; and so it makes me feel as if
I were walking upon air, and living in a dream."
Helen was leaning against a post of the piazza, her eyes fixed upon
David intently. "Does that not give a new meaning to the vanished
spring-time?" he asked her; and she replied in a wondering whisper,
"Yes," and then gazed at him for a long time.
"David," she said at last, "it is fearful to think of a thing like
that. What does it all mean? What causes it?"
"Men have been asking that helpless question since the dawn of
time," he answered, "we only know what we see, this whirling and
weaving of shadows, with its sacred facts of beauty and love."
Helen looked at him thoughtfully a moment, and then, recollecting
something she had heard from her father, she said, "But, David, if
God be a mystery like that, how can there be any religion?"
"What we may fancy God to be makes no difference," he answered.
"That which we know is always the same, we have always the love and
always the beauty. All men's religion is but the assertion that the
source of these sacred things must be infinitely sacred, and that
whatever may happen to us, that source can suffer no harm; that we
live by a power stronger than ourselves, and that has no need of
us."
Helen was looking at her husband anxiously; then suddenly she asked
him, "But tell me then, David; you do not believe in heaven? You do
not believe that our souls are immortal?" As he answered her in the
negative she gave a slight start, and knitted her brows; and after
another pause she demanded, "You do not believe in revealed religion
then?"
David could not help smiling, recognizing the voice of his clerical
father-in-law; when he answered, however, he was serious again.
"Some day, perhaps, dear Helen," he said, "I will tell you all about
what I think as to such things. But very few of the world's real
thinkers believe in revealed religions any more--they have come to
see them simply as guesses of humanity at God's great sacred
mystery, and to believe that God's way of revealing Himself to men
is through the forms of life itself. As to the question of
immortality that you speak of, I have always felt that death is a
sign of the fact that God is infinite and perfect, and that we are
but shadows in his sight; that we live by a power that is not our
own, and seek for beauty that is not our own, and that each instant
of our lives is a free gift which we can only repay by thankfulness
and worship."
He paused for a moment, and the girl, who had still been gazing at
him thoughtfully, went on, "Father used to talk about those things
to me, David, and he showed me how the life of men is all spent in
suffering and struggling, and that therefore faith teaches us---"
"Yes, dearest," the other put in, "I know all that you are going to
say; I have read these arguments very often, you know. But suppose
that I were to tell you that I think suffering and struggling is the
very essence of the soul, and that what faith teaches us is that the
suffering and struggling are sacred, and not in the least that they
are some day to be made as nothing? Dearest, if it is true that the
soul makes this life what it is, a life of restless seeking for an
infinite, would it not make the same life anywhere else? Do you
remember reading with me Emerson's poem about Uriel, the seraph who
sang before God's throne,--how even that could not please him, and
how he left it to plunge into the struggle of things imperfect; and
how ever after the rest of the seraphim were afraid of Uriel? Do you
think, dearest, that this life of love and labor that you and I live
our own selves needs anything else to justify it? The life that I
lived all alone was much harder and more full of pain than this, but
I never thought that it needed any rewarding."
David stopped and stood gazing ahead of him thoughtfully; when he
continued his voice was lower and more solemn. "These things are
almost too sacred to talk of, Helen," he said; "but there is one
doubt that I have known about this, one thing that has made me
wonder if there ought not to be another world after all. I never
sympathized with any man's longing for heaven, but I can understand
how a man might be haunted by some fearful baseness of his own
self,--something which long years of effort had taught him he could
not ever expiate by the strength of his own heart,--and how he could
pray that there might be some place where rightness might be won at
last, cost what it would."
The man's tone had been so strange as he spoke that it caused Helen
to start; suddenly she came closer to him and put her hands upon his
shoulders and gazed into his eyes. "David," she whispered, "listen
to me a moment."
"Yes, dear," he said, "what is it?"
"Was it because of yourself that you said those words?"
He was silent for a moment, gazing into her anxious eyes; then he
bowed his head and said in a faint voice, "Yes, dear, it was because
of myself."
And the girl, becoming suddenly very serious, went on, "Do you
remember, David, a long time ago--the time that I was leaving Aunt
Polly's--that you told me how you knew what it was to have
something very terrible on one's conscience? I have not ever said
anything about that, but I have never forgotten it. Was it that that
you thought of then?"
"Yes, dear, it was that," answered the other, trembling slightly.
Helen stooped down upon her knees and put her arms about him, gazing
up pleadingly into his face. "Dearest David," she whispered, "is it
right to refuse to tell me about that sorrow?"
There was a long silence, after which the man replied slowly, "I
have not ever refused to tell you, sweetheart; it would be very
fearful to tell, but I have not any secrets from you; and if you
wished it, you should know. But, dear, it was long, long ago, and
nothing can ever change it now. It would only make us sad to know
it, so why should we talk of it?"
He stopped, and Helen gazed long and earnestly into his face.
"David," she said, "it is not possible for me to imagine you ever
doing anything wrong, you are so good."
"Perhaps," said David, "it is because you are so good yourself." But
Helen interrupted him at that with a quick rejoinder: "Do you forget
that I too have a sorrow upon my conscience?" Afterwards, as she saw
that the eager remark caused the other to smile in spite of himself,
she checked him gravely with the words, "Have you really forgotten
so soon? Do you suppose I do not ever think now of how I treated
poor Arthur, and how I drove away from me the best friend of my
girlhood? He wrote me that he would think of me no more, but, David,
sometimes I wonder if it were not just an angry boast, and if he
might not yet be lonely and wretched, somewhere in this great cold
world where I cannot ever find him or help him."
The girl paused; David was regarding her earnestly, and for a long
time neither of them spoke. Then suddenly the man bent down, and
pressed a kiss upon her forehead. "Let us only love each other,
dear," he whispered, "and try to keep as right as we can while the
time is given us."
There was a long silence after that while the two sat gazing out
across the blue lake; when Helen spoke again it was to say, "Some
day you must tell me all about it, David, because I can help you;
but let us not talk about these dreadful things now." She stopped
again, and afterwards went on thoughtfully, "I was thinking still of
what you said about immortality, and how very strange it is to think
of ceasing to be. Might it not be, David, that heaven is a place not
of reward, but of the same ceaseless effort as you spoke of?"
"Ah, yes," said the other, "that is the thought of 'the wages of
going on.' And of course, dear, we would all like those wages; there
is no thought that tempts me so much as the possibility of being
able to continue the great race forever; but I don't see how we have
the least right to demand it, or that the facts give us the least
reason to suppose that we will get it. It seems to me simply a
fantastic and arbitrary fancy; the re-creating of a worn-out life in
that way. I do not think, dearest, that I am in the least justified
in claiming an eternity of vision because God gives me an hour; and
when I ask Him the question in my own heart I learn simply that I am
a wretched, sodden creature that I do not crowd that hour with all
infinity and go quite mad at the sight of the beauty that He flings
wide before me."
Helen did not reply for a while, and then she asked: "And you think,
David, that our life justifies itself no matter how much suffering
may be in it?"
"I think, dearest," was his reply, "that the soul's life is
struggle, and that the soul's life is sacred; and that to be right,
to struggle to be right, is not only life's purpose, but also life's
reward; and that each instant of such righteousness is its own
warrant, tho the man be swept out of existence in the next." Then
David stopped, and when he went on it was in a lower voice. "Dear
Helen," he said, "after I have told you what I feel I deserve in
life, you can understand my not wishing to talk lightly about such
things as suffering. Just now, as I sit here at my ease, and in fact
all through my poor life, I have felt about such sacred words as
duty and righteousness that it would be just as well if they did not
ever pass my lips. But there have come to me one or two times, dear,
when I dared a little of the labor of things, and drank a drop or
two of the wine of the spirit; and those times have lived to haunt
me and make me at least not a happy man in my unearned ease. There
come to me still just once in a while hours when I get sight of the
gleam, hours that make me loathe all that in my hours of comfort I
loved; and there comes over me then a kind of Titanic rage, that I
should go down a beaten soul because I have not the iron strength of
will to lash my own self to life, and tear out of my own heart a
little of what power is in it. At such times, Helen, I find just
this one wish in my mind,--that God would send to me, cost what it
might, some of the fearful experience that rouses a man's soul
within him, and makes him live his life in spite of all his dullness
and his fear."
David had not finished, but he halted, because he saw a strange look
upon the girl's face. She did not answer him at once, but sat gazing
at him; and then she said in a very grave voice, "David, I do not
like to hear such words as that from you."
"What words, dearest?"
"Do you mean actually that it sometimes seems to you wrong to live
happily with me as you have?"
David laid his hand quietly upon hers, watching for a minute her
anxious countenance. Then he said in a low voice: "You ought not to
ask me about such things, dear, or blame me for them. Sometimes I
have to face the very cruel thought that I ought not ever to have
linked my fate to one so sweet and gentle as you, because what I
ought to be doing in the world to win a right conscience is
something so hard and so stern that it would mean that I could never
be really happy all my life."
David was about to go on, but he stopped again because of Helen's
look of displeasure. "David," she whispered, "that is the most
unloving thing that I have ever heard from you!"
"And you must blame me, dear, because of it?" he asked.
"I suppose," Helen answered, "that you would misunderstand me as
long as I chose to let you. Do you not suppose that I too have a
conscience,--do you suppose that I want any happiness it is wrong
for us to take, or that I would not dare to go anywhere that your
duty took you? And do you suppose that anything could be so painful
to me as to know that you do not trust me, that you are afraid to
live your life, and do what is your duty, before me?"
David bent down suddenly and pressed a kiss upon the girl's
forehead. "Precious little heart," he whispered, "those words are
very beautiful."
"I did not say them because they were beautiful," answered Helen
gravely; "I said them because I meant them, and because I wanted you
to take them in earnest. I want to know what it is that you and I
ought to be doing, instead of enjoying our lives; and after you have
told me what it is I can tell you one thing--that I shall not be
happy again in my life until it is done."
David watched her thoughtfully a while before he answered, because
he saw that she was very much in earnest. Then he said sadly,
"Dearest Helen, perhaps the reason that I have never been able all
through my life to satisfy my soul is the pitiful fact that I have
not the strength to dare any of the work of other men; I have had
always to chafe under the fact that I must choose between nourishing
my poor body, or ceasing to live. I have learned that all my
power--and more too, as it sometimes seemed,--was needed to bear
bravely the dreadful trials that God has sent to me."
Helen paled slightly; she felt his hand trembling upon hers, and she
remembered his illness at her aunt's, about which she had never had
the courage to speak to him. "And so, dear heart," he went on
slowly, "let us only be sure that we are keeping our lives pure and
strong, that we are living in the presence of high thoughts and
keeping the mastery of ourselves, and saying and really meaning that
we live for something unselfish; so that if duty and danger come, we
shall not prove cowards, and if suffering comes we should not give
way and lose our faith. Does that please you, dear Helen?"
The girl pressed his hand silently in hers. After a while he went on
still more solemnly: "Some time," he said, "I meant to talk to you
about just that, dearest, to tell you how stern and how watchful we
ought to be. It is very sad to me to see what happens when the great
and fearful realities of life disclose themselves to good and kind
people who have been living without any thought of such things. I
feel that it is very wrong to live so, that if we wished to be right
we would hold the high truths before us, no matter how much labor it
cost."
"What truths do you mean?" asked Helen earnestly; and he answered
her: "For one, the very fearful fact of which I have just been
talking--that you and I are two bubbles that meet for an instant
upon the whirling stream of time. Suppose, sweetheart, that I were
to tell you that I do not think you and I would be living our lives
truly, until we were quite sure that we could bear to be parted
forever without losing our faith in God's righteousness?"
Helen turned quite white, and clutched the other's hands in hers;
she had not once thought of actually applying what he had said to
her. "David! David!" she cried, "No!"
The man smiled gently as he brushed back the hair from her forehead
and gazed into her eyes. "And when you asked for sternness, dear,"
he said, "was it that you did not know what the word meant? Life is
real, dear Helen, and the effort it demands is real effort."
The girl did not half hear these last words; she was still staring
at her husband. "Listen to me, David," she said at last, still
holding his hand tightly in hers, her voice almost a whisper; "I
could bear anything for you, David, I know that I could bear
_anything_; I could really die for you, I say that with all my
soul,--that was what I was thinking of when you spoke of death. But
David, if you were to be taken from me,--if you were to be taken
from me--" and she stopped, unable to find a word more.
"Perhaps it will be just as well not to tell me, dear heart," he
said to her, gently.
"David," she went on more strenuously yet, "listen to me--you must
not ever ask me to think of that! Do you hear me? For, oh, it cannot
be true, it cannot be true, David, that you could be taken from me
forever! What would I have left to live for?"
"Would you not have the great wonderful God?" asked the other
gently--"the God who made me and all that was lovable in me, and
made you, and would demand that you worship him?" But Helen only
shook her head once more and answered, "It could not be true,
David,--no, no!" Then she added in a faint voice, "What would be the
use of my having lived?"
The man bent forward and kissed her again, and kissed away a little
of the frightened, anxious look upon her face. "My dear," he said
with a gentle smile, "perhaps I was wrong to trouble you with such
fearful things after all. Let me tell you instead a thought that
once came to my mind, and that has stayed there as the one I should
like to call the most beautiful of all my life; it may help to
answer that question of yours about the use of having lived. Men
love life so much, Helen dear, that they cannot ever have enough of
it, and to keep it and build it up they make what we call the arts;
this thought of mine is about one of them, about music, the art that
you and I love most. For all the others have been derived from
things external, but music was made out of nothing, and exists but
for its one great purpose, and therefore is the most spiritual of
all of them. I like to say that it is time made beautiful, and so a
shadow picture of the soul; it is this, because it can picture
different degrees of speed and of power, because it can breathe and
throb, can sweep and soar, can yearn and pray,--because, in short,
everything that happens in the heart can happen in music, so that we
may lose ourselves in it and actually live its life, or so that a
great genius can not merely tell us about himself, but can make all
the best hours of his soul actually a part of our own. This thought
that I said was beautiful came to me from noticing how perfectly the
art was one with that which it represented; so that we may say not
only that music is life, but that life is music. Music exists
because it is beautiful, dear Helen, and because it brings an
instant of the joy of beauty to our hearts, and for no other reason
whatever; it may be music of happiness or of sorrow, of achievement
or only of hope, but so long as it is beautiful it is right, and it
makes no difference, either, that it cost much labor of men, or that
when it is gone it is gone forever. And dearest, suppose that the
music not only was beautiful, but knew that it was beautiful; that
it was not only the motion of the air, but also the joy of our
hearts; might it not then be its own excuse, just one strain of it
that rose in the darkness, and quivered and died away again
forever?"
When David had spoken thus he stopped and sat still for a while,
gazing at his wife; then seeing the anxious look still in possession
of her face, he rose suddenly by way of ending their talk.
"Dearest," he said, smiling, "it is wrong of me, perhaps, to worry
you about such very fearful things as those; let us go in, and find
something to do that is useful, and not trouble ourselves with them
any more." _