The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 63, January, 1863

In Thy borrowed goodness good,
Some sweet morning yet in God's
Dim, aeonian periods,
Joyful I shall wake to see
Those I love who rest in Thee,
And to them in Thee allied
Shall my soul be satisfied.

Scarcely Hope hath shaped for me
What the future life may be.
Other lips may well be bold;
Like the publican of old,
I can only urge the plea,
"Lord, be merciful to me!"
Nothing of desert I claim,
Unto me belongeth shame.
Not for me the crowns of gold,
Palms, and harpings manifold;
Not for erring eye and feet
Jasper wall and golden street.
What Thou wilt, O Father, give!
All is gain that I receive.
If my voice I may not raise
In the elders' song of praise,
If I may not, sin-defiled,
Claim my birthright as a child,
Suffer it that I to Thee
As an hired servant be;
Let the lowliest task be mine,
Grateful, so the work be Thine;
Let me find the humblest place
In the shadow of Thy grace:
Blest to me were any spot
Where temptation whispers not.
If there be some weaker one,
Give me strength to help him on;
If a blinder soul there be,
Grant that I his guide may be.
Make my mortal dreams come true
With the work I fain would do;
Clothe with life the weak intent,
Let me be the thing I meant;
Let me find in Thy employ
Peace that dearer is than joy;
Out of self to love be led
And to heaven acclimated,
Until all things sweet and good
Seem my natural habitude.

* * * * *

So we read the prayer of him
Who, with John of Labadie,
Trod, of old, the oozy rim
Of the Zuyder Zee.

Thus did Andrew Rykman pray.
Are we wiser, better grown,
That we may not, in our day,
Make his prayer our own?

THE STRATHSAYS

Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window, looking down the harbor. A brave great window it was, and I mind me how many a dark summer's night, we two leaned over its edge and watched the soft flow of the River of the Cross, where its shadowy tide came up and lapped the stone foundations of that old house by the water-side,—I and Angus. Under us the rowers slipped the wherries and the yawls; in the channel the rafts floated down a slow freight from the sweet and savage pine-forests, and the fire they carried on their breasts, and the flames of their pitch-knots, threw out strange shadows of the steering raftsmen, and a wild bandrol of smoke flaring and streaming on the night behind them;—and yet away far up on the yonder side, beneath the hanging alders and the cedar-trees, the gundalows dropped down, great laden barges; and perhaps a lantern, hung high in the stern of some huge East-Indiaman at the wharves of the other town quite across the stream, showed us all its tracery and spires, dim webs of shadow stretched and woven against the solemn ground of the starlit sky, and taught us the limit of the shores. Ah, all things were sweet to us then! we were little but children,—Angus and I. And it's not children we are now, small's the pity! The joys of childhood are good, I trow; but who would exchange for them the proud, glad pulse of full womanhood?—not I. I mind me, too, that in those days the great world of which I used to hear them speak always seemed to me lying across the river, and over the fields and the hills, and away down and out by the skirts of the mystical sea; and on the morning when I set sail for Edinboro', I felt to be forever drawing nigher its skurry and bustle, its sins and pleasures and commotions.

We had no father,—Margray, or Effie, or Mary Strathsay, or I. He had brought his wife out from their home in Scotland to St. Anne's in the Provinces, and had died or ever I was born,—and I was the last of the weans. A high, keen spirit was his wife; she did not bend or break; a stroke that would have beggared another took no crumb from her cloth; she let the right in warehouses and wharves lie by, and lie by, and each year it paid her sterling income. None ever saw tear in those proud eyes of hers, when they brought in her husband dead, or when they carried him out; but every day at noon she went up into her own room, and whether she slept or whether she waked the two hours in that darkened place, there was not so much as a fly that sang in the pane to tell.

She was a fair, stately woman, taller than any of her girls, and with half the mind to hate them all because they were none of them a son. More or less the three were like her, lofty brows and shining hair and skin like morning light, the lave of them,—but as for me, I was my father's child. There's a portrait of him now, hangs on the chimney-pier: a slight man, and not tall,—the dark hair waves away on either side the low, clear brow,—the eyes deep-set, and large and dark and starry,—a carmine just flushing beneath the olive of the cheek,—the fine firm mouth just breaking into smiles; and I remember that that morning when I set sail for Edinboro', as I turned away from gazing on that face, and saw myself glinting like a painted ghost in the long dim mirror beside me, I said it indeed, and proudly, that I was my father's own child.

So she kissed us, Effie and me. Perhaps mine lingered the longer, for the color in my cheek was deeper tinct than Scotch, it was the wild bit of Southern blood that had run in her love's veins; when she looked at me, I gave her back hot phases of her passionate youth again,—so perhaps mine was the kiss that left the deeper dint.

Margray, and Mary Strathsay, had been back three years from school, and the one was just married,—and if she left her heart out of the bargain, what was that to me?—and the other was to reign at home awhile ere the fated Prince should come, and Effie and myself were to go over seas and take their old desks in the famous school at Edinboro'. The mother knew that she must marry her girls well, and we two younglings were sadly in Queen Mary Strathsay's way. Yes, Mrs. Strathsay lived for nought but the making of great matches for her girls; the grandees of the Provinces to-day sat down at her board and to-morrow were to pay her tribute, scot and lot; four great weddings she meant should one by one light up her hearth and leave it lonely with the ashes there. But of them all she counted on the last, the best, the noblest for Alice,—that was I.

Old Johnny Graeme was the partner in what had been my father's house, and for fifteen years it had gone prospering as never house did yet, and making Mrs. Strathsay bitterer; and Johnny Graeme, a little wizened warlock, had never once stopped work long enough to play at play and reckon his untold gold.

Just for that summer, too, some ships of the royal fleet anchored there off Campobello, and the Honorable Charles Seavern, third son of an Earl, and professional at his cups, swung them at his will, and made holiday meanwhile among the gay and willing folk of all the little towns around.

There was another yet, a youth growing up to fine estates away off beyond Halifax. His father sat in the Queen's own Parliament for the Colonies, had bent to the knightly accolade, and a change of ministry or of residence might any day create Sir Brenton peer; his mother had been Mrs. Strathsay's dearest friend:—this child who off and on for half his life had made her house his home and Alice his companion, while in the hearts of both children Mrs. Strathsay had cautiously planted and nursed the seed,—a winning boy, a noble lad, a lordly man.

If Margray had not married old Johnny Graeme, it would have broken Mrs. Strathsay's will; the will was strong; she did, she married him. If Mary, with her white moonsheen of beauty, did not bewitch the senses of Captain Seavern, it would break Mrs. Strathsay's pride; and few things were stronger than Mrs. Strathsay's pride,—unless 't were Mary's own. If Effie–but that's nothing to the purpose. If Alice did not become the bride of Angus Ingestre, it would break Mrs. Strathsay's heart. God forgive me! but I bethought me once that her heart was the weakest member in all her body.

So she kissed us, as I say, and we slid down the ten miles of river, and went sailing past the busy islands and over the broad deeps and out of the day and into the night, and then two little orphans cried themselves to sleep with their arms about each other's necks. After all, it was not much like my picture of the great world, this lonely sea, this plunging up from billow on to billow, this burrowing down in the heart of green-gloomed hollows, this rocking and creaking and straining, this buoyant bounding over the crests,—yet the freedom, the monotony, the wild career of the winds fired me; it set my blood a-tingle; I liked it. And then I thought of Angus, rocked to sleep each night, as he was now, in his ocean-cradle. But once at school, and the world was round me; it hummed up from the streets, it boomed down from the spires. I became a part of it, and so forgot it. To Effie there were ever stealing rumors of yet a world beyond, of courts and coronets, of satin shimmer and glitter of gems, but they glanced off from me,—and other than thus I have never yet found that great world that used to lie over the river.

We had been at school a happy while, and but for constant letters, and for the brief visit of Mrs. Strathsay, who had journeyed over the Atlantic for one last look at sweet home-things, and to see how all went with us, and then had flitted back again,—but for that, home would have seemed the veriest dream that ever buzzed in an idle brain: would so have seemed to other maidens, not to us, for the fibres of the Strathsay heart were threads that never wore thin or parted. Two twelvemonths more, and we should cross the sea ourselves at last; and wearying now of school a bit, all our visions centred in St. Anne's, and the merry doings, the goings and comings, that we heard of there; and it seemed to me as if home were to be the beginning of life, as erst it had seemed that in school we should find the world.

It was the vacation of the long summer term; there was packing and padlocking to go each on her way, and the long dormitories rang with shrill clamor. They all had a nest to seek. Effie was already gone away with her chief crony, whose lady-mother, a distant kinswoman of our own, fancied the girl's fair countenance. I was to join them in a week or two,—not yet, because I had wished to send home the screens painted on white velvet, and they wanted yet a sennight's work, and I knew Mrs. Strathsay would be proud of them before the crackle of the autumn fires. The maids ran hither and yon, and the bells pealed, and the knocker clashed, and the coaches rolled away over the stone pave of the court-yard, and there was embracing and jesting and crying, when suddenly all the pleasant hubbub stood still, for Miss Dunreddin was in the hall, and her page behind her, and she beckoned me from my post aloft on a foot-board, summoning the deserters before me and awarding them future expiations, amidst all manner of jeering and jinking and laughter.

A gentleman from the Provinces to see me in the little parlor: he had brought us letters from home, and after Miss Dunreddin had broken the seals she judged we might have them, and I was at liberty for an hour, and meantime Angus Ingestre awaited me. Angus! I sprang down the stairs, my cheeks aglow, my heart on my lips, and only paused, finger on lock, wondering and hesitating and fearing, till the door was flung open, and I drawn in with two hands shut fast on my own, and two eyes—great blue Ingestre eyes—looking down on me from the face so far above: for he towered like a Philistine.

"And is it Angus?" I cried. For how was I to know the boy I had left in a midshipman's jacket, in this mainmast of a man, undress-uniform and all?

"I've no need to ask, Is it Alice?" he answered. "The same little peach of a chin!"

"Nay, but, Angus,—'t will never do,—and I all but grown up!"

"Not my little maid any longer, then?"

But so trembling and glad was I to see him, that I dared no more words, for I saw the tears glistening in my eyelashes and blinding me with their dazzling flashes.

So he took me to a seat, and sat beside me, and waited a minute; and after that waiting it was harder to speak than it had been before, and every thought went clean out of my head, and every word, and I stared at my hands till I seemed to see clear through them the pattern of my dress, and at the last I looked up, and there he had been bending forward and scanning me all the while; and then Angus laughed, and caught up my hand and pretended to search it narrowly.