The Flight of the Shadow

At length I bethought me that, so long as I did not know what to do, I was not required to do anything; I must wait till I did know what to do. But with the thought came suffering enough to be the wages of any sin that, so far as I knew, I had ever committed. For the conviction awoke that already the love that had hitherto been the chief joy of my being, had begun to pale and fade. Was it possible I was ceasing to love my uncle? What could any love be worth if mine should fail my uncle! Love itself must be a mockery, and life but a ceaseless sliding down to the death of indifference! Even if I never ceased to love him, it was just as bad to love him less! Had he not been everything to me?—and this man, what had he ever done for me? Doubtless we are to love even our enemies; but are we to love them as tenderly as we love our friends? Or are we to love the friend of yesterday, of whom we know nothing though we may believe everything, as we love those who have taken all the trouble to make true men and women of us? “What can be the matter with my soul?” I said. “Can that soul be right made, in which one love begins to wither the moment another begins to grow? If I be so made, I cannot help being worthless!”

It was then first, I think, that I received a notion—anything like a true notion, that is, of my need of a God—whence afterward I came to see the one need of the whole race. Of course, not being able to make ourselves, it needed a God to make us; but that making were a small thing indeed, if he left us so unfinished that we could come to nothing right;—if he left us so that we could think or do or be nothing right;—if our souls were created so puny, for instance, that there was not room in them to love as they could not help loving, without ceasing to love where they were bound by every obligation to love right heartily, and more and more deeply! But had I not been growing all the time I had been in the world? There must then be the possibility of growing still! If there was not room in me, there must be room in God for me to become larger! The room in God must be made room in me! God had not done making me, in fact, and I sorely needed him to go on making me; I sorely needed to be made out! What if this new joy and this new terror had come, had been sent, in order to make me grow? At least the doors were open; I could go out and forsake myself! If a living power had caused me—and certainly I did not cause myself—then that living power knew all about me, knew every smallness that distressed me! Where should I find him? He could not be so far that the misery of one of his own children could not reach him! I turned my face into the grass, and prayed as I had never prayed before. I had always gone to church, and made the responses attentively, while I knew that was not praying, and tried to pray better than that; but now I was really asking from God something I sorely wanted. “Father in heaven,” I said, “I am so miserable! Please, help me!”

I rose, went into the house, and up to the study, took a sock I was knitting for my uncle, and sat down to wait what would come. I could think no more; I could only wait.

CHAPTER XIII. OLD LOVE AND NEW

While I waited, as nearly a log, under the weariness of spiritual unrest, as a girl could well be, the door opened. Very seldom did that door open to any one but my uncle or myself: he would let no one but me touch his books, or even dust the room. I jumped from the chest where I sat.

It was only Martha Moon.

“How you startled me, Martha!” I cried.

“No wonder, child!” she answered. “I come with bad news! Your uncle has had a fall. He is laid up at Wittenage with a broken right arm.”

I burst into tears.

“Oh, Martha!” I cried; “I must go to him!”

“He has sent for me,” she answered quietly.

“Dick is putting the horse to the phaeton.”

“He doesn’t want me, then!” I said; but it seemed a voice not my own that shrieked the words.

The punishment of my sin was upon me. Never would he have sent for Martha and not me, I thought, had he not seen that I had gone wrong again, and was no more to be trusted.

“My dear,” said Martha, “which of us two ought to be the better nurse? You never saw your uncle ill; I’ve nursed him at death’s door!”

“Then you don’t think he is angry with me, Martha?” I said, humbled before myself.

“Was he ever angry with you, Orbie? What is there to be angry about? I never saw him even displeased with you!”

I had not realized that my uncle was suffering—only that he was disabled; now the fact flashed upon me, and with it the perception that I had been thinking only of myself: I was fast ceasing to care for him! And then, horrible to tell! a flash of joy went through me, that he would not be home that day, and therefore I could not tell him anything!

The moment Martha left me I threw myself on the floor of the desert room. I was in utter misery.

“Gladly would I bear every pang of his pain,” I said to myself; “yet I have not asked one question about his accident! He must be in danger, or he would not have sent for Martha instead of me!”

How had the thing happened, I wondered. Had Death fallen with him—perhaps on him? He was such a horseman, I could not think he had been thrown. Besides, Death was a good horse who loved his master—dearly, I was sure, and would never have thrown him or let him fall! A great gush of the old love poured from the fountain in my heart: sympathy with the horse had unsealed it. I sprang from the floor, and ran down to entreat Martha to take me with her: if my uncle did not want me, I could return with Dick! But she was gone. Even the sound of her wheels was gone. I had lain on the floor longer than I knew.

I went back to the study a little relieved. I understood now that I was not glad he was disabled; that I was anything but glad he was suffering; that I had only been glad for an instant that the crisis of my perplexity was postponed. In the meantime I should see John Day, who would help me to understand what I ought to do!

Very strange were my feelings that afternoon in the lonely house. I had always felt it lonely when Martha, never when my uncle was out. Yet when my uncle was in, I was mostly with him, and seldom more than a few minutes at a time with Martha. Our feelings are odd creatures! Now that both were away, there was neither time nor space in my heart for feeling the house desolate; while the world outside was rich as a treasure-house of mighty kings. The moment I was a little more comfortable with myself, my thoughts went in a flock to the face that looked over the garden-wall, to the man that watched me while I slept, the man that wrote that lovely letter. Inside was old Penny with her broom: she took advantage of every absence to sweep or scour or dust; outside was John Day, and the roses of the wilderness! He was waiting the hour to come to me, wondering how I would receive him!

Slowly went the afternoon. I had fallen in love at first sight, it is true; not therefore was I eager to meet my lover. I was only more than willing to see him. It was as sweet, or nearly as sweet, to dream of his coming, as to have him before me—so long as I knew he was indeed coming. I was just a little anxious lest I should not find him altogether so beautiful as I was imagining him. That he was good, I never doubted: could I otherwise have fallen in love with him? And his letter was so straightforward—so manly!

The afternoon was cloudy, and the twilight came the sooner. From the realms of the dark, where all the birds of night build their nests, lining them with their own sooty down, the sweet odorous filmy dusk of the summer, haunted with wings of noiseless bats, began at length to come flickering earthward, in a snow infinitesimal of fluffiest gray and black: I crept out into the garden. It was dark as wintry night among the yews, but I could have gone any time through every alley of them blind-folded. An owl cried and I started, for my soul was sunk in its own love-dawn. There came a sudden sense of light as I opened the door into the wilderness, but light how thin and pale, and how full of expectation! The earth and the vast air, up to the great vault, seemed to throb and heave with life—or was it that my spirit lay an open thoroughfare to the life of the All? With the scent of the roses and the humbler sweet-odoured inhabitants of the wilderness; with the sound of the brook that ran through it, flowing from the heath and down the hill; with the silent starbeams, and the insects that make all the little noises they can; with the thoughts that went out of me, and returned possessed of the earth;—with all these, and the sense of thought eternal, the universe was full as it could hold. I stood in the doorway of the wall, and looked out on the wild: suddenly, by some strange reaction, it seemed out of creation’s doors, out in the illimitable, given up to the bare, to the space that had no walls! A shiver ran through me; I turned back among the yews. It was early; I would wait yet a while! If he were already there, he too would enjoy the calm of a lovely little wait.

A small wind came searching about, and found, and caressed me. I turned to it; it played with my hair, and cooled my face. After a while, I left the alley, passed out, closed the door behind me, and went straying through the broken ground of the wilderness, among the low bushes, meandering, as if with some frolicsome brook for a companion—a brook of capricious windings—but still coming nearer to the fence that parted the wilderness from the heath, my eyes bent down, partly to avoid the hillocks and bushes, and partly from shyness of the moment when first I should see him who was in my heart and somewhere near. Softly the moon rose, round and full. There was still so much light in the sky that she made no sudden change, and for a moment I did not feel her presence or look up. In front of me, the high ground of the moor sank into a hollow, deeply indenting the horizon-line: the moon was rising just in the gap, and when I did look up, the lower edge of her disc was just clear of the earth, and the head of a man looking over the fence was in the middle of the great moon. It was like the head of a saint in a missal, girt with a halo of solid gold. I could not see the face, for the halo hid it, as such attributions are apt to do, but it must be he; and strengthened by the heavenly vision, I went toward him. Walking less carefully than before, however, I caught my foot, stumbled, and fell. There came a rush through the bushes; he was by my side, lifted me like a child, and held me in his arms; neither was I more frightened than a child caught up in the arms of any well-known friend: I had been bred in faith and not mistrust! But indeed my head had struck the ground with such force, that, had I been inclined, I could scarcely have resisted—though why should I have resisted, being where I would be! Does not philosophy tell us that growth and development, cause and effect, are all, and that the days and years are of no account? And does not more than philosophy tell us that truth is everything?

“My darling! Are you hurt?” murmured the voice whose echoes seemed to have haunted me for centuries.

“A little,” I answered. “I shall be all right in a minute.” I did not add, “Put me down, please;” for I did not want to be put down directly. I could not have stood if he had put me down. I grew faint.

Life came back, and I felt myself growing heavy in his arms.

“I think I can stand now,” I said. “Please put me down.”

He obeyed immediately.

“I’ve nearly broken your arms,” I said, ashamed of having become a burden to him the moment we met.

“I could run with you to the top of the hill!” he answered.

“I don’t think you could,” I returned. Perhaps I leaned a little toward him; I do not know. He put his arm round me.

“You are not able to stand,” he said. “Shall we sit a moment?”

CHAPTER XIV. MOTHER AND UNCLE

I was glad enough to sink on a clump of white clover. He stretched himself on the heather, a little way from me. Silence followed. He was giving me time to recover myself. As soon, therefore, as I was able, it was my part to speak.

“Where is your horse?” I asked. The first word is generally one hardly worth saying.

“I left him at a little farmhouse, about a mile from here. I was afraid to bring him farther, lest my mother should learn where I had been. She takes pains to know.”

“Then will she not find out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will she not ask you where you were?”

“Perhaps. There’s no knowing.”

“You will tell her, of course, if she does?”

“I think not.”

“Oughtn’t you?”

“No.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mean you will tell her a story?”