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Page 67
To read what I have to say, you should have known my mother. To
understand it, you should understand her. But that is quite impossible
now, for there is a quiet spot over the hill, and past the church, and
beside the little brook where the crimsoned mosses grow thick and wet
and cool, from which I cannot call her. It is all I have left of her
now. But after all, it is not of her that you will chiefly care to hear.
My object is simply to acquaint you with a few facts, which, though
interwoven with the events of her life, are quite independent of it as
objects of interest. It is, I know, only my own heart that makes these
pages a memorial,--but, you see, I cannot help it.
Yet, I confess, no glamour of any earthly love has ever entirely dazzled
me,--not even hers. Of imperfections, of mistakes, of sins, I knew she
was guilty. I know it now; even with the sanctity of those crimsoned
mosses, and the hush of the rest beneath, so close to my heart, I cannot
forget them. Yet somehow--I do not know how--the imperfections, the
mistakes, the very sins, bring her nearer to me as the years slip by,
and make her dearer.
My mother was what we call an aristocrat. I do not like the term, as the
term is used. I am sure she does not now; but I have no other word. She
was a royal-looking woman, and she had the blood of princes in her
veins. Generations back,--how we children used to reckon the thing
over!--she was cradled in a throne. A miserable race, to be sure, they
were,--the Stuarts; and the most devout genealogist might deem it
dubious honor to own them for great-grand-fathers by innumerable degrees
removed. So she used to tell us, over and over, as a damper on our
childish vanity, looking such a very queen as she spoke, in every play
of feature, and every motion of her hand, that it was the old story of
preachers who did not practise. The very baby was proud of her. The
beauty of a face, and the elegant repose of a manner, are influences by
no means more unfelt at three years than at thirty.
As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping, and die out,--while
old men are gathered to their fathers scathless, and young men follow in
their footsteps safe and free,--and start into life, and claim its own
when children's children have forgotten it; as a single trait of a
single scholar in a race of clods will bury itself in day-laborers and
criminals, unto the third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a
creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors;--so, I
have sometimes fancied, the better and truer nature of voluptuaries and
tyrants was sifted down through the years, and purified in our little
New England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical blood
refined and ennobled, in my mother, into royalty.
A broad and liberal culture had moulded her; she knew its worth, in
every fibre of her heart; scholarly parents had blessed her with their
legacies of scholarly mind and name. With the soul of an artist, she
quivered under every grace and every defect; and the blessing of a
beauty as rare as rich had been given to her. With every instinct of her
nature recoiling from the very shadow of crimes the world winks at, the
family record had been stainless for a generation. God had indeed
blessed her; but the very blessing was a temptation.
I knew, before she left me, what she might have been, but for the
merciful and tender watch of Him who was despised and rejected of men. I
know, for she told me, one still night when we were alone together, how
she sometimes shuddered at herself, and what those daily and hourly
struggles between her nature and her Christianity _meant_.
I think we were as near to one another as mother and daughter can be,
but yet as different. Since I have been talking in such lordly style of
those miserable Jameses and Charleses, I will take the opportunity to
confess that I have inherited my father's thorough-going
democracy,--double measure, pressed down and running over. She not only
pardoned it, but I think she loved it in me, for his sake.
It was about a year and a half, I think, after he died, that she sent
for Aunt Alice to come to Creston. "Your aunt loves me," she said, when
she told us in her quiet way, "and I am so lonely now."
They had been the only children, and they loved each other,--how much, I
afterwards knew. And how much they love each other _now_, I like to
think,--quite freely and fully, and without shadow or doubt between
them, I dare to hope.
A picture of Aunt Alice always hung in mother's room. It was taken down
years ago. I never asked her where she put it. I remember it, though,
quite well; for mother's sake I am glad I do. For it was a pleasant face
to look upon, and a young, pure, happy face,--beautiful too, though with
none of the regal beauty crowned by my mother's massive hair, and
pencilled brows. It was a timid, girlish face, with reverent eyes, and
ripe, tremulous lips,--weak lips, as I remember them. From babyhood, I
felt a want in the face. I had, of course, no capacity to define it; it
was represented to me only by the fact that it differed from my
mother's.
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