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MARY'S DREAM.
That night, and every night until the dust was laid to the dust,
Mary slept well; and through the days she had great composure;
but, when the funeral was over, came a collapse and a change. The
moment it became necessary to look on the world as unchanged, and
resume former relations with it, then, first, a fuller sense of
her lonely desolation declared itself. When she said good night
to Beenie, and went to her chamber, over that where the loved
parent and friend would fall asleep no more, she felt as if she
went walking along to her tomb.
That night was the first herald of the coming winter, and blew a
cold blast from his horn. All day the wind had been out. Wildly
in the churchyard it had pulled at the long grass, as if it would
tear it from its roots in the graves; it had struck vague sounds,
as from a hollow world, out of the great bell overhead in the
huge tower; and it had beat loud and fierce against the corner-
buttresses which went stretching up out of the earth, like arms
to hold steady and fast the lighthouse of the dead above the sea
which held them drowned below; despairingly had the gray clouds
drifted over the sky; and, like white clouds pinioned below, and
shadows that could not escape, the surplice of the ministering
priest and the garments of the mourners had flapped and fluttered
as in captive terror; the only still things were the coffin and
the church--and the soul which had risen above the region of
storms in the might of Him who abolished death. At the time Mary
had noted nothing of these things; now she saw them all, as for
the first time, in minute detail, while slowly she went up the
stair and through the narrowed ways, and heard the same wind that
raved alike about the new grave and the old house, into which
latter, for all the bales banked against the walls, it found many
a chink of entrance. The smell of the linen, of the blue cloth,
and of the brown paper--things no longer to be handled by those
tender, faithful hands--was dismal and strange, and haunted her
like things that intruded, things which she had done with, and
which yet would not go away. Everything had gone dead, as it
seemed, had exhaled the soul of it, and retained but the odor of
its mortality. If for a moment a thing looked the same as before,
she wondered vaguely, unconsciously, how it could be. The
passages through the merchandise, left only wide enough for one,
seemed like those she had read of in Egyptian tombs and pyramids:
a sarcophagus ought to be waiting in her chamber. When she opened
the door of it, the bright fire, which Beenie undesired had
kindled there, startled her: the room looked unnatural,
uncanny, because it was cheerful. She stood for a moment
on the hearth, and in sad, dreamy mood listened to the howling
swoops of the wind, making the house quiver and shake. Now and
then would come a greater gust, and rattle the window as if in
fierce anger at its exclusion, then go shrieking and wailing
through the dark heaven. Mechanically she took her New Testament,
and, seating herself in a low chair by the fire, tried to read;
but she could not fix her thoughts, or get the meaning of a
sentence: when she had read it, there it lay, looking at her just
the same, like an unanswered riddle.
The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human
soul; and out of that now began to rise fumes of doubt and
question into Mary's heart and brain. Death was a fact. The loss,
the evanishment, the ceasing, were incontrovertible--the only
incontrovertible things: she was sure of them: could she be sure
of anything else? How could she? She had not seen Christ rise;
she had never looked upon one of the dead; never heard a voice
from the other bank; had received no certain testimony. These
were not her thoughts; she was too weary to think; they were but
the thoughts that steamed up in her, and went floating about
before her; she looked on them calmly, coldly, as they came, and
passed, or remained--saw them with indifference--there they were,
and she could not help it--weariedly, believing none of them,
unable to cope with and dispel them, hardly affected by their
presence, save with a sense of dreariness and loneliness and
wretched company. At last she fell asleep, and in a moment was
dreaming diligently. This was her dream, as nearly as she could
recall it, when she came to herself after waking from it with a
cry.
She was one of a large company at a house where she had never
been before--a beautiful house with a large garden behind. It was
a summer night, and the guests were wandering in and out at will,
and through house and garden, amid lovely things of all colors
and odors. The moon was shining, and the roses were in pale
bloom. But she knew nobody, and wandered alone in the garden,
oppressed with something she did not understand. Every now and
then she came on a little group, or met a party of the guests, as
she walked, but none spoke to her, or seemed to see her, and she
spoke to none.
She found herself at length in an avenue of dark trees, the end
of which was far off. Thither she went walking, the only living
thing, crossing strange shadows from the moon. At the end of it
she was in a place of tombs. Terror and a dismay indescribable
seized her; she turned and fled back to the company of her kind.
But for a long time she sought the house in vain; she could not
reach it; the avenue seemed interminable to her feet returning.
At last she was again upon the lawn, but neither man nor woman
was there; and in the house only a light here and there was
burning. Every guest was gone. She entered, and the servants,
soft-footed and silent, were busy carrying away the vessels of
hospitality, and restoring order, as if already they prepared for
another company on the morrow. No one heeded her. She was out of
place, and much unwelcome. She hastened to the door of entrance,
for every moment there was a misery. She reached the hall. A
strange, shadowy porter opened to her, and she stepped out into a
wide street.
That, too, was silent. No carriage rolled along the center, no
footfarer walked on the side. Not a light shone from window or
door, save what they gave back of the yellow light of the moon.
She was lost--lost utterly, with an eternal loss. She knew
nothing of the place, had nowhere to go, nowhere she wanted to
go, had not a thought to tell her what question to ask, if she
met a living soul. But living soul there could be none to meet.
She had nor home, nor direction, nor desire; she knew of nothing
that she had lost, nor of anything she wished to gain; she had
nothing left but the sense that she was empty, that she needed
some goal, and had none. She sat down upon a stone between the
wide street and the wide pavement, and saw the moon shining gray
upon the stone houses. It was all deadness.
Presently, from somewhere in the moonlight, appeared, walking up
to her, where she sat in eternal listlessness, the one only
brother she had ever had. She had lost him years and years
before, and now she saw him; he was there, and she knew him. But
not a throb went through her heart. He came to her side, and she
gave him no greeting. "Why should I heed him?" she said to
herself. "He is dead. I am only in a dream. This is not he; it is
but his pitiful phantom that comes wandering hither--a ghost
without a heart, made out of the moonlight. It is nothing. I am
nothing. I am lost. Everything is an empty dream of loss. I know
it, and there is no waking. If there were, surely the sight of
him would give me some shimmer of delight. The old time was but a
thicker dream, and this is truer because more shadowy." And, the
form still standing by her, she felt it was ages away; she was
divided from it by a gulf of very nothingness. Her only life was,
that she was lost. Her whole consciousness was merest, all but
abstract, loss.
Then came the form of her mother, and bent over that of her
brother from behind. "Another ghost of a ghost! another shadow of
a phantom!" she said to herself. "She is nothing to me. If I
speak to her, she is not there. Shall I pour out my soul into the
ear of a mist, a fume from my own brain? Oh, cold creatures, ye
are not what ye seem, and I will none of you!"
With that, came her father, and stood beside the others, gazing
upon her with still, cold eyes, expressing only a pale quiet. She
bowed her face on her hands, and would not regard him. Even if he
were alive, her heart was past being moved. It was settled into
stone. The universe was sunk in one of the dreams that haunt the
sleep of death; and, if these were ghosts at all, they were
ghosts walking in their sleep.
But the dead, one of them seized one of her hands, and another
the other. They raised her to her feet, and led her along, and
her brother walked before. Thus was she borne away captive of her
dead, neither willing nor unwilling, of life and death equally
careless. Through the moonlight they led her from the city, and
over fields, and through valleys, and across rivers and seas--a
long journey; nor did she grow weary, for there was not life
enough in her to be made weary. The dead never spoke to her, and
she never spoke to them. Sometimes it seemed as if they spoke to
each other, but, if it were so, it concerned some shadowy matter,
no more to her than the talk of grasshoppers in the field, or of
beetles that weave their much-involved dances on the face of the
pool. Their voices were even too thin and remote to rouse her to
listen.
They came at length to a great mountain, and, as they were going
up the mountain, light began to grow, as if the sun were
beginning to rise. But she cared as little for the sun that was
to light the day as for the moon that had lighted the night, and
closed her eyes, that she might cover her soul with her eyelids.
Of a sudden a great splendor burst upon her, and through her
eyelids she was struck blind--blind with light and not with
darkness, for all was radiance about her. She was like a fish in
a sea of light. But she neither loved the light nor mourned the
shadow.
Then were her ears invaded with a confused murmur, as of the
mingling of all sweet sounds of the earth--of wind and water, of
bird and voice, of string and metal--all afar and indistinct.
Next arose about her a whispering, as of winged insects, talking
with human voices; but she listened to nothing, and heard nothing
of what was said: it was all a tiresome dream, out of which
whether she waked or died it mattered not.
Suddenly she was taken between two hands, and lifted, and seated
upon knees like a child, and she felt that some one was looking
at her. Then came a voice, one that she never heard before, yet
with which she was as familiar as with the sound of the blowing
wind. And the voice said, "Poor child! something has closed the
valve between her heart and mine." With that came a pang of
intense pain. But it was her own cry of speechless delight that
woke her from her dream.
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