Selphar had been quite silent during the drive. I leaned forward, looked closely into her face, and could dimly see through the darkness that her eyes were closed.
"Why!" she said at last, "see those gloves!"
"Where?"
"Down in the ditch; we passed them before I spoke. I see them on a blackberry-bush; they've got little brass buttons on the wrist."
Three rods past now, and we could not see our horse's head.
"Selphar," said my mother, quickly, "what is the matter with you?"
"If you please, ma'am, I don't know," replied the girl, hanging her head. "May I get out and bring 'em to you?"
Prince was reined up, and Sel got out. She went so far back, that, though we strained our eyes to do it, we could not see her. In about two minutes she came up, a pair of gentleman's gloves in her hand. They were rolled together, were of cloth so black that on a bright night it would never have been seen, and had small brass buttons at the wrist.
Mother took them without a word.
The story leaked out somehow, and spread all over town. It raised a great hue and cry. Four or five antediluvian ladies declared at once that we were nothing more nor less than a family of "them spirituous mediums," and seriously proposed to expel mother from the prayer-meeting. Masculine Creston did worse. It smiled a pitying smile, and pronounced the whole thing the fancy of "scared women-folks." I could endure with calmness any slander upon earth but that. I sent by the next mail for Winthrop, and stated the case to him in a condition of suppressed fury. He very politely bit back an incredulous smile, and said he should be very happy to see her perform. The answer was somewhat dubious. I accepted it in silent suspicion.
He came on Saturday noon. That afternoon we attended en masse one of those refined inquisitions commonly known as picnics, and Winthrop lost his pocket-knife. Selphar, of course, kept house at home.
When we returned, Winthrop made some careless reference to his loss in her presence, and thought no more of it. About half an hour after, we observed that she was washing the dishes with her eyes shut. The condition had not been upon her five minutes before she dropped the spoon suddenly into the water, and asked permission to go out to walk. She "saw Mr. Winthrop's knife somewhere under a stone, and wanted to get it." It was fully two miles to the picnic grounds, and nearly dark. Winthrop followed the girl, unknown to her, and kept her in sight. She went rapidly, and without the slightest hesitation or search, to an out-of-the-way gully down by the pond, where Winthrop afterwards remembered having gone to cut some willow-twigs for the girls, parted a thick cluster of bushes, lifted a large, loose stone under which the knife had rolled, and picked it up. She returned it to Winthrop, quietly, and hurried away about her work to avoid being thanked.
I observed that, after this incident, masculine Creston became more respectful.
Of several peculiarities in this development of the girl I made at the time careful memoranda, and the exactness of these can be relied upon.
1. She herself, so far from attempting to bring on these trance states, or taking any pride therein, was intensely troubled and mortified by them,would run out of the room, if she felt them coming on in the presence of visitors.
2. They were apt to be preceded by severe headaches, but came often without any warning.
3. She never, in any instance, recalled anything that happened during the trance, after it was passed.
4. She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by electricity from a battery, or acting in milder forms. She was also unable at any time to put her hands and arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them at once.
5. Space proved to be no impediment to her vision. She has been known to follow the acts, words, and expressions of countenance of members of the family hundreds of miles away, with accuracy; as was afterwards proved by comparing notes as to time.
6. The girl's eyes, after her trances became habitual, assumed, and always retained, the most singular expression I ever saw on any face. They were oblong and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of a snake. They were notsmile if you will, O practical and incredulous reader!but they were not human eyes. The eyes of Elsie Venner are the only eyes I can think of as at all like them. The most horrible circumstance about thema circumstance that always made me shudder, familiar as I was with itwas, that, though turned fully on you, they never looked at you. Something behind them or out of them did the seeing, not they.
7. She not only saw substance, but soul. She has repeatedly told me my thoughts when they were upon subjects to which she could not by any possibility have had the slightest clew.
8. We were never able to detect a shadow of deceit about her.
9. The clairvoyance never failed in any instance to be correct, so far as we were able to trace it.
As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful member of the family. The lost valuables restored and the warnings against mischances given by her quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of work. This incapacity, however, rather increased than diminished, and, together with her fickle health, which also grew more unsettled, caused us a great deal of care. The Creston physicianwho was a keen man in his way, for a country doctorpronounced the case altogether undreamt of before in Horatio's philosophy, and kept constant notes of it. Some of these have, I believe, found their way into the medical journals.
After a while there came, like a thief in the night, that which I suppose was poor Selphar's one unconscious, golden mission in this world. It came on a quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a week's continuance. Mother had gone out into the kitchen to give an order for breakfast. I heard a few eager words in Selphar's voice, and then the door shut quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.
Then my mother came to me without a particle of color in lips or cheek, and drew me away alone, and told the secret to me.
Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.
We sat down and looked at one another. There was a singular pinched look about my mother's mouth.
"Sarah."
"Yes."
"She says"and then she told me what she said. She had seen Alice Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away. Among the living, she desired to be counted of the dead. And that was all.
My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.
"Sarah." There was a chill in her voiceit had been such a gentle voice!that froze me. "Sarah, the girl is an impostor."
"Mother!"
She paced the room, once more, three times, back and forth. "At any rate, she is a poor, self-deluded creature. How can she see, seven hundred miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years? Think! an angel, Sarah! So much better than I, and II loved"
Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that. She broke off sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.
"We will say nothing about this, if you please. I do not believe a word of it."
We said nothing about it, but Selphar did. The delusion, if delusion it were, clung to her, haunted her, pursued her, week after week. To rid her of it, or to silence her, was impossible. She added no new facts to her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead was yet alive, with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply impossible to ridicule, frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her, Clara was so thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any mortalperhaps not for any immortalconsiderations. Winthrop and I talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet places. Mother's lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the first disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter. A perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl. She even talked of dismissing her; but repented it, and melted into momentary gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I was beginning to understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how utterly alone she must be in it. She would not believeshe knew not what. She could not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even her children could not intermeddle.
To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar's personal honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power. Indeed, it had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity. We had come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with converted Creston, to doubt the girl's capacity for seeing anything that she chose to, at any place.
Thus a year wore on. My mother grew sleepless and pallid. She laughed often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness unutterably painful to me.
Once only I ventured to break into the silence of the haunting thought that she knew, and we knew, was never escaped by either. "Mother, it would do no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and"
She interrupted me sternly: "Sarah, I had not thought you capable of such childish superstition. I wish that girl and her nonsense had never come into this house!"turning sharply away, and out of the room.
Just what that year was to my mother, I suppose only God and she have ever known, or will know.
But it ended. It ended at last, as I had prayed every night and morning of it that it should end. Mother came into my room one night, locked the door behind her, and, walking over to the window, stood with her face turned from me.
"Sarah."
"Yes."
"Sarah."
But that was all for a little while. Then,"Sick and in suffering, Sarah,the girlshe may be right, God Almighty knows! Sick and in suffering, you see. I am going. I think, I"
The voice broke and melted utterly. I stole away and left her alone.
Creston put on its spectacles and looked wise on learning, the next day, that Mrs. Dugald had taken the earliest morning train for the West, on sudden and important business. It was precisely what Creston expected, and just like the Dugalds for all the world,gone to hunt up material for that genealogical book, or map, or tree, or something, that they thought nobody knew they were going to publish. O yes, Creston understood it perfectly.
Space forbids me to relate in detail the clews which Selphar had given as to the whereabouts of the wanderer. Her trances, just at this time, were somewhat scarce and fragmentary, and the information she had professed to give had come in snatches and very imperfectly,the trance being apt to end suddenly at the moment when some important question was pending, and then, of course, all memory of what she had said, or was about to say, was gone. The names and appearance of persons and places necessary to the search had, however, been given with sufficient distinctness to serve as a guide in my mother's rather chimerical undertaking. I suppose ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have thought her a candidate for the State Lunatic Asylum. Exactly what she herself expected, hoped, or feared, I think it doubtful if she knew. I confess to a condition of simple bewilderment, when she was fairly gone, and Clara and I were left alone with Selphar's ghostly eyes forever on us. One night I had to lock the poor thing into her garret-room before I could sleep.
Just three weeks from the day mother started for the West, the coach rattled up to the door, and two women, arm in arm, came slowly up the walk. The one, erect, royal, with her great steadfast eyes alight; the other, bent and worn, gray-haired and sallow and dumb, crawling feebly through the golden afternoon sunshine, as the ghost of a glorious life might crawl back to its grave.
Mother threw open the door, and stood there like a queen. "Children, your aunt has come home. She is too tired to talk just now. By and by she will be glad to see you."
We took her gently up stairs, into the room where the lilies were mouldering to dust, and laid her down upon the bed. She closed her eyes wearily, turned her face over to the wall, and said no word.
What was the story of those tired eyes I never asked, and I never knew. Once, as I passed the room, a quick picture showed through the open door. The two women lying with their arms about each other's neck, as they used to do when they were children together; and above them, still and watchful, the wounded Face that had waited there so many years for this.
One was speaking with weak sobs, and very low. It was Aunt Alice. I caught but two words,"My husband."
But what that husband was remains unknown till the day when the grave shall give up its dead, and the secrets of hearts oppressed and sinned against and sorrowful shall be revealed.
She lingered weakly there, within the restful room, for seven days, and then one morning we found her with her eyes upon the thorn-crowned face, her own quite still and smiling.
A little funeral train wound away one night behind the church, and left her down among those red-cup mosses that opened in so few months again to cradle the sister who had loved her. Two words only, by mother's orders, marked the simple headstone,
"Alice Browning."
I have given you facts. Explain them as you will. I do not attempt it, for the simple reason that I cannot.
A word must be said as to the fate of poor Sel, which was mournful enough. Her trances grew gradually more frequent and erratic, till she became so thoroughly diseased in mind and body as to be entirely unfitted for household work, and, in short, nothing but an encumbrance. We kept her, however, for the sake of charity, and should have done so, till her poor, tormented life wore itself out; but after the advent of a new servant, and my mother's death, she conceived the idea that she was a burden, cried over it a few weeks, and at last one bitter winter's night she disappeared. We did not give up all search for her for years, but nothing was ever heard from her. He, I hope, who permitted life to be such a terrible mystery to her, has cared for her somehow, and kindly, and well.
THE MINER
Down 'mid the tangled roots of things
That coil about the central fire,
I seek for that which giveth wings,
To stoop, not soar, to my desire.
Sometimes I hear, as 't were a sigh,
The sea's deep yearning far above.
"Thou hast the secret not," I cry,
"In deeper deeps is hid my Love."
They think I burrow from the sun,
In darkness, all alone and weak;
Such loss were gain if He were won.
For 't is the sun's own Sun I seek.
The earth, they murmur, is the tomb
That vainly sought his life to prison;
Why grovel longer in its gloom?
He is not here; He hath arisen.
More life for me where He hath lain
Hidden, while ye believed him dead,
Than in cathedrals cold and vain,
Built on loose sands of "It is said."
My search is for the living gold,
Him I desire who dwells recluse,
And not his image, worn and old,
Day-servant of our sordid use.
If Him I find not, yet I find
The ancient joy of cell and church,
The glimpse, the surety undefined,
The unquenched ardor of the search.
Happier to chase a flying goal,
Than to sit counting laurelled gains,
To guess the Soul within the soul,
Than to be lord of what remains.
PHYSICAL HISTORY OF THE VALLEY OF THE AMAZONS
II
Major Coutinho and myself passed three days in the investigation of the Serra of Erreré. We found it to consist wholly of the sandstone deposits described in my previous article, and to have exactly the same geological constitution. In short, the Serra of Monte Alegre, and of course all those connected with it on the northern side of the river, lie in the prolongation of the lower beds forming the banks of the river, their greater height being due simply to the fact that they have not been worn to the same low level. The opposite range of Santarem, which has the same general outline and character, shares, no doubt, the same geological structure. In one word, all these hills were formerly part of a continuous formation, and owe their present outline and their isolated position to a colossal denudation. The surface of the once unbroken strata, which in their original condition must have formed an immense plain covered by water, has been cut into ravines or carried away over large tracts, to a greater or less depth, leaving only such portions standing as from their hardness could resist the floods which swept over it. The longitudinal trend of these hills is to be ascribed to the direction of the current which caused the denudation, while their level summits are due to the regularity of the stratification. They are not all table-topped, however; among them are many of smaller size, in which the sides have been gradually worn down, producing a gently rounded surface. Of course, under the heavy tropical rains this denudation is still going on, though in a greatly modified form.