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ANOTHER CHANGE.
For some time Tom made progress toward health, and was able to
read a good part of the day. Most evenings he asked Joseph to
play to him for a while; he was fond of music, and fonder still
of criticism--upon anything. When he had done with Joseph, or
when he did not want him, Mary was always ready to give the
latter a lesson; and, had he been a less gifted man than he was,
he could not have failed to make progress with such a teacher.
The large-hearted, delicate-souled woman felt nothing strange in
the presence of the workingman, but, on the contrary, was
comfortably aware of a being like her own, less privileged but
more gifted, whose nearness was strength. And no teacher, not to
say no woman, could have failed to be pleased at the thorough
painstaking with which he followed the slightest of her hints,
and the delight his flushed face would reveal when she praised
the success he had achieved.
It was not long before he began to write some of the things that
came into his mind. For the period of quiescence as to
production, which followed the initiation of more orderly study,
was, after all, but of short duration, and the return tide of
musical utterance was stronger than ever. Mary's delight was
great when first he brought her one of his compositions very
fairly written out--after which others followed with a rapidity
that astonished her. They enabled her also to understand the man
better and better; for to have a thing to brood over which we are
capable of understanding must be more to us than even the
master's playing of it. She could not be sure this or that was
correct, according to the sweet inexorability of musical
ordainment, but the more she pondered them, the more she felt
that the man was original, that the material was there, and the
law at hand, that he brought his music from the only bottomless
well of utterance, the truth, namely, by which alone the soul
most glorious in gladness, or any other the stupidest of souls,
can live.
To the first he brought her she contrived to put a poor little
faulty accompaniment; and when she played his air to him so
accompanied, his delight was touching, and not a little amusing.
Plainly he thought the accompaniment a triumph of human faculty,
and beyond anything he could ever develop. Never pupil was more
humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or
of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the
swiftest and highest growth. It matters little where a man may be
at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. The next
point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him. The
key to the whole thing is obedience, and nothing else.
What the gift of such an instructor was to Joseph, my reader may
be requested to imagine. He was like a man seated on the grass
outside the heavenly gate, from which, slow-opening every evening
as the sun went down, came an angel to teach, and teach, until he
too should be fit to enter in: an hour would arrive when she
would no longer have to come out to him where he sat. Under such
an influence all that was gentlest and sweetest in his nature
might well develop with rapidity, and every accidental roughness
--and in him there was no other--by swift degrees vanish from both
speech and manners. The angels do not want tailors to make their
clothes: their habits come out of themselves. But we are often
too hard upon our fellows; for many of those in the higher ranks
of life--no, no, I mean of society--whose insolence wakens ours,
as growl wakes growl in the forest, are not yet so far removed
from the savage--I mean in their personal history--as some in the
lowest ranks. When a nobleman mistakes the love of right in
another for a hatred of refinement, he can not be far from
mistaking insolence for good manners. Of such a nobility, good
Lord, deliver us from all envy!
As to falling in love with a lady like Mary, such a thing was as
far from Jasper's consciousness as if she had been a duchess. She
belonged to another world from his, a world which his world
worshiped, waiting. He might miss her even to death; her absence
might, for him, darken the universe as if the sun had withdrawn
his brightness; but who thinks of falling in love with the sun,
or dreams of climbing nearer to his radiance?
The day will one day come--or what of the long-promised kingdom
of heaven?--when a woman, instead of spending anxious thought on
the adornment of her own outward person, will seek with might the
adornment of the inward soul of another, and will make that her
crown of rejoicing. Nay, are there none such even now? The day
will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the
overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the
personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like
St. Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention. O my brother,
what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother
beautiful!
Be not indignant, my reader: not for a moment did I imagine thee
capable of such a mean calling! It is left to a certain school of
weak enthusiasts, who believe that such growth, such
embellishment, such creation, is all God cares about; these
enthusiasts can not indeed see, so blind have they become with
their fixed idea, how God could care for anything else. They
actually believe that the very Son of the life-making God lived
and died for that, and for nothing else. That such men and women
are fools, is and has been so widely believed, that, to men of
the stamp of my indignant reader, it has become a fact! But the
end alone will reveal the beginning. Such a fool was Prometheus,
with the vulture at his heart--but greater than Jupiter with his
gods around him.
There soon came a change, however, and the lessons ceased
altogether.
Tom had come down to his old quarters, and, in the arrogance of
convalescence, had presumed on his imagined strength, and so
caught cold. An alarming relapse was the consequence, and there
was no more playing; for now his condition began to draw to a
change, of which, for some time, none of them had even thought,
the patient had seemed so certainly recovering. The cold settled
on his lungs, and he sank rapidly.
Joseph, whose violin was useless now, was not the less in
attendance. Every evening, when his work was over, he came
knocking gently at the door of the parlor, and never left until
Tom was settled for the night. The most silently helpful,
undemonstrative being he was, that doctor could desire to wait
upon patient. When it was his turn to watch, he never closed an
eye, but at daybreak--for it was now spring--would rouse Mary,
and go off straight to his work, nor taste food until the hour
for the mid-day meal arrived.
Tom speedily became aware that his days were numbered--phrase of
unbelief, for are they not numbered from the beginning? Are our
hairs numbered, and our days forgotten--till death gives a hint
to the doctor? He was sorry for his past life, and thoroughly
ashamed of much of it, saying in all honesty he would rather die
than fall for one solitary week into the old ways--not that he
wished to die, for, with the confidence of youth, he did not
believe he could fall into the old ways again. For my part, I
think he was taken away to have a little more of that care and
nursing which neither his mother nor his wife had been woman
enough to give the great baby. After all, he had not been one of
the worst of babies.
Is it strange that one so used to bad company and bad ways should
have so altered, in so short a time, and without any great
struggle? The assurance of death at the door, and a wholesome
shame of things that are past, may, I think, lead up to such a
swift change, even in a much worse man than Tom. For there is the
Life itself, all-surrounding, and ever pressing in upon the human
soul, wherever that soul will afford a chink of entrance; and Tom
had not yet sealed up all his doors.
When he lay there dead--for what excuse could we have for foolish
lamentation, if we did not speak of the loved as lying
dead?--Letty had him already enshrined in her heart as the
best of husbands--as her own Tom, who had never said a hard word
to her--as the cleverest as well as kindest of men who had
written poetry that would never die while the English language
was spoken. Nor did "The Firefly" spare its dole of homage to the
memory of one of its gayest writers. Indeed, all about its office
had loved him, each after his faculty. Even the boy cried when he
heard he was gone, for to him too he had always given a kind
word, coming and going. A certain little runnel of verse flowed
no more through the pages of "The Firefly," and in a month there
was not the shadow of Tom upon his age. But the print of him was
deep in the heart of Letty, and not shallow in the affection of
Mary; nor were such as these, insignificant records for any one
to leave behind him, as records go. Happy was he to have left
behind him any love, especially such a love as Letty bore him!
For what is the loudest praise of posterity to the quietest love
of one's own generation? For his mother, her memory was mostly in
her temper. She had never understood her wayward child, just
because she had given him her waywardness, and not parted with it
herself, so that between them the two made havoc of love. But she
who gives her child all he desires, in the hope of thus binding
his love to herself, no less than she who thwarts him in
everything, may rest assured of the neglect she has richly
earned. When she heard of his death, she howled and cursed her
fate, and the woman, meaning poor Letty, who had parted her and
her Tom, swearing she would never set eyes upon her, never let
her touch a farthing of Tom's money. She would not hear of paying
his debts until Mary told her she then would, upon which the fear
of public disapprobation wrought for right if not righteousness.
But what was Mary to do now with Letty? She was little more than
a baby yet, not silly from youth, but young from silliness.
Children must learn to walk, but not by being turned out alone in
Cheapside.
She was relieved from some perplexity for the present, however,
by the arrival of a letter from Mrs. Wardour to Letty, written in
a tone of stiffly condescendent compassion--not so unpleasant to
Letty as to her friend, because from childhood she had been used
to the nature that produced it, and had her mind full of a vast,
undefined notion of the superiority of the writer. It may be a
question whether those who fill our inexperienced minds with
false notions of their greatness, do us thereby more harm or
good; certainly when one comes to understand with what an
arrogance and self-assertion they have done so, putting into us
as reverence that which in them is conceit, one is ready to be
scornful more than enough; but, rather than have a child question
such claims, I would have him respect the meanest soul that ever
demanded respect; the first shall be last in good time, and the
power of revering come forth uninjured; whereas a child judging
his elders has already withered the blossom of his being.
But Mrs. Wardour's letter was kind-perhaps a little repentant; it
is hard to say, for ten persons will repent of a sin for one who
will confess it--I do not mean to the priest--that may be an easy
matter, but to the only one who has a claim to the confession,
namely, the person wronged. Yet such confession is in truth far
more needful to the wronger than to the wronged; it is a small
thing to be wronged, but a horrible thing to wrong.
The letter contained a poverty-stricken expression of sympathy,
and an invitation to spend the summer months with them at her old
home. It might, the letter said, prove but a dull place to her
after the gayety to which she had of late been accustomed, but it
might not the less suit her present sad situation, and possibly
uncertain prospects.
Letty's heart felt one little throb of gladness at the thought of
being again at Thornwick, and in peace. With all the probable
unpleasant accompaniments of the visit, nowhere else, she
thought, could she feel the same sense of shelter as where her
childhood had passed. Mary also was pleased; for, although Letty
might not be comfortable, the visit would end, and by that time
she might know what could be devised best for her comfort and
well-being.
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