The Bridge of the Gods

She started as she heard his footstep, and turned her head quickly toward him, a faint flush tinging her cheek and a forced smile quivering around her lips. Her greeting was very gentle, and he saw that her heart was reproaching her for being so disloyal to him as to think of her lost lover; and yet he felt her fingers tremble and shrink away from his as he took her hand.

“God forgive me!” he thought, with infinite self-accusation. “How repugnant I must be to her, – an intruder, thrusting myself into the heart that is sacred to the dead.”

But he let her see nothing of this in his voice or manner as he inquired how she had been. She replied wearily that she was no better, that she longed to get well again and be at work.

“I missed your sermon to-day,” she said, with that strained, pathetic smile upon her lips again. “You must tell me about it now.”

He drew his chair to her side and began to give an outline of the sermon. She listened, but it was with forced attention, without sympathy, without in the least entering into the spirit of what he was saying. It pained him. He knew that her nature was so narrow, so conventional, that it was impossible for her to comprehend his grand scheme of Indian evangelization. But he checked his impatience, and gave her a full synopsis of the discourse.

“It is useless, useless. They cannot understand. A whole race is perishing around them, and they will not put forth a hand save to mistreat a Quaker or throw a stone at a Churchman. Our Puritanism is like iron to resist tyranny, – but alas! it is like iron, too, when one tries to bend it to some generous undertaking.”

He stopped, checking back other and more bitter words. All his soul rose up in revolt against the prejudice by which he was surrounded. Then Ruth spoke timidly.

“Seeing that it is so, would it not be best to let this missionary subject go, and preach on practical every-day matters? I am not wise in these things, I know; but would it not be better to preach on common subjects, showing us how we ought to live from day to day, than to discourse of those larger things that the people do not understand?”

His face darkened, though not angrily. This was the same prejudice he had just encountered in the meeting-house, though in a different form. He arose and paced back and forth with quick, impatient steps. Then he came and stood before her with folded arms and resolute face.

“Ruth, I have tried that so often, tried it with prayers and tears, but it is utterly impossible. I cannot bring myself to it. You know what the physicians say of my disease of the heart, – that my life may be very short; and I want it to be noble. I want to live for the greatest possibilities within my reach. I want to set some great work in motion that will light up thousands of darkened lives, – yea, and grow in might and power even after my lips are sealed in death.”

The little figure on the chair moved uneasily under his animated though kindly gaze.

“I do not quite comprehend you. I think the best work is to do what God gives us to do, and to do it well. To me he has given to labor in caring for the house,” – there was a patient weariness in her tone that did not escape Cecil, – “to you he has given the duties of a pastor, to strengthen the weak, cheer the sorrowing, comfort the old. Is it not better to do those things faithfully than to spend our time longing for some more ideal work not given us?”

“But suppose the ideal work is given? Suppose a man is called to proclaim new truths, and be the leader in a new reform? For him the quiet pastorate is impossible; nay, were it possible, it would be wrong, for would he not be keeping back the message God had given him? He would be one called to a work, yet entering not upon it; and upon him would come the curse that fell on the unfaithful prophets of old.”

All the gloom of the theology of his age was on him as he spoke. Refined and poetic as was his nature, it was thoroughly imbued with the Calvinism of early New England.

She lifted her hand wearily and passed it over her aching brow.

“I do not know,” she said; “I have never thought of such things, only it seems to me that God knew best when he gave us our lots in life. Surely wherever we find ourselves, there he intended us to be, and there we should patiently work, leaving our higher aspirations to his will. Is not the ideal life, after all, the one that is kindest and humblest?”

“But, Ruth,” replied the minister, sadly, “while the work you describe is certainly noble, I have yet felt for a long time that it is not what God calls me to. Day after day, night after night, I think of the wild races that roam the forests to the west, of which no man knows the end. Sometimes I think that I am called to stand before the rulers of the colony and plead that missionaries be sent to the Indians. Sometimes I feel that I am called to go and preach to them myself. Often in my dreams I plead with dark-browed sachems or with mighty gatherings of warriors to cast away their blood-stained weapons and accept Christ, till I awake all trembling with the effort. And always the deadly pain at my heart warns me that what is done must be done quickly.”

The burning ardor that had given such intensity to his sermon came into his voice as he spoke. The invalid moved nervously on her chair, and he saw that his enthusiasm merely jarred on her without awakening any response.

“Forgive me,” he said hurriedly, “I forgot that you were not well enough to talk of those things. Sometime when you are better we will speak of them again.”

And then he talked of other and to her more interesting topics, while a keen pang rankled in his breast to find her irresponsive to that which was so dear to him.

But he was very kind to her; and when after a while the old Indian woman, Cecil’s nurse in childhood and their only servant now, came to tell him that dinner was ready, he would not go until he had first brought his wife her dinner and waited on her with his own hands.

After his own repast was finished he must hasten away to preach his afternoon sermon. But he came to her first and bent over her; for though love never had been, perhaps never could be, between them, there was a deep domestic feeling in his nature.

“How good and patient you are in your sickness,” he said, gazing down into the quiet, wistful face that was so honest and true, yet so thoroughly prosaic and commonplace. “What a sermon you have been preaching me, sitting here so uncomplainingly.”

“Do you think so?” she said, looking up gratefully. “I am glad. I so want to do my duty by you.”

He had meant to kiss her as he bent over her, though such caresses were rare between them, but there was something in her tones that chilled him, and he merely raised a tress of her hair to his lips instead. At the door he bade her a pleasant farewell, but his countenance grew sorrowful as he went down the path.

“Duty,” he murmured, “always duty, never love. Well, the fault is my own that we were ever married. God help me to be true and kind to her always. She shall never know that I miss anything in her.”

And he preached to his congregation that afternoon a sermon on burden-bearing, showing how each should bear his own burden patiently, – not darkening the lives of others by complaint, but always saying loving words, no matter how much of heartache lay beneath them. He told how near God is to us all, ready to heal and to strengthen; and closed by showing how sweet and beautiful even a common life may grow through brave and self-sacrificing endurance of trouble.

It was a helpful sermon, a sermon that brought the listeners nearer God. More than one heart was touched by those earnest words that seemed to breathe divine sympathy and compassion.

He went home feeling more at peace than he had done for many days. His wife’s room was still, as he entered it. She was in her easy-chair at the window, lying back among the pillows asleep. Her face was flushed and feverish, her long lashes wet with tears. The wraps had fallen away from her, and he stooped over to replace them. As he did so her lips moved in her half-delirious slumber, and she murmured some name sounding like his own. A wild throb of joy thrilled through him, and he bent closer to listen. Again she spoke the name, spoke it sorrowfully, longingly. It was the name of her lover drowned at sea.

The long, nervous fingers that held the half-drawn wraps shook convulsively as with acutest pain, then drew the coverings gently around her.

“God help her, God help her!” he murmured, as he turned softly away, his eyes filling with tears, – tears for her sorrow rather than his own.

CHAPTER III

A DARKENED FIRESIDE

… Her way is parted from my way;Out of sight, beyond light, at what goal may we meet?Dante Rossetti.

Ruth was much worse in the evening, but at last, after Cecil had watched at her side till a late hour, she sank into a troubled sleep. Then the old Indian servant insisted on taking his place at the sufferer’s bedside, for she saw that he was much worn by the labors of the day and by anxiety for his wife. At first he refused; but she was a skilled nurse, and he knew that the invalid would fare better in her hands than his own, so at last he consented on condition that she would call him if his wife grew worse. The woman promised, and he withdrew into the library, where a temporary bed had been made for him. At the door he turned and looked back.

His wife lay with closed eyes and flushed face amid the white pillows. The robe over her breast stirred with her difficult breathing, and her head turned now and then from side to side while she uttered broken, feverish words. By her sat the swarthy nurse, watching her every movement and ready with observant eye and gentle touch to minister to all her needs.

A yearning tenderness and pity came into his gaze. “Poor child, poor child!” he thought. “If I could only make her well and happy! If I could only bring her dead lover back to life, how gladly would I put her in his arms and go away forever!” And it seemed to him in some dim way that he had wronged the poor sufferer; that he was to blame for her sorrow.

He went on into the library. A lamp was burning on the table; a Hebrew Bible and a copy of Homer lay beside it. Along the walls were arranged those heavy and ponderous tomes in which the theology of the age was wont to clothe itself.

He seated himself at the table and took up his Homer; for he was too agitated to sleep. But it was in vain that he tried to interest himself in it. The rhythm had lost its music, the thought its power; it was in vain that he tried to forget himself in the reply of Achilles, or the struggle over the body of Patroclus.

Hawthorne tells us that a person of artistic temperament may at a time of mental depression wander through the Roman galleries and see nothing in the finest masterpieces of Raphael or Angelo. The grace is gone from the picture, the inspiration from the marble; the one is a meaningless collection of colors, the other a dull effigy carved in stone.

Something of this mood was on Cecil to-night. Irresponsive to the grand beauty of the poem he felt only its undertone of heartache and woe.

“It is like human life,” he thought, as he listlessly turned the pages; “it is bright on the surface, but dark and terrible with pain below. What a black mystery is life! what bitter irony of justice! Hector is dragged at Achilles’ chariot-wheel, and Paris goes free. Helen returns to her home in triumph, while Andromache is left desolate. Did Homer write in satire, and is the Iliad but a splendid mockery of justice, human and divine? Or is life so sad that every tale woven of it must needs become a tragedy?”

He pondered the gloomy puzzle of human existence long that night. At length his brain grew over-weary, and he slept sitting in his chair, his head resting on the pages of the open book.

How long he slept he knew not, but he awoke with a start to find a hand laid on his shoulder and the tall figure of the Indian woman standing beside him. He sprang up in sudden fear.

“Is she worse?” he cried. But the woman, with that light noiseless step, that mute stolidity so characteristic of her race, had already glided to the door; and there was no need for her to answer, for already his own apprehensions had replied.

He was in the room almost as soon as she. His wife was much worse; and hastening through the night to a neighboring farmhouse, he roused its inmates, despatched a messenger for the physician, and returned, accompanied by several members of the neighbor’s family.

The slow moments dragged away like years as they watched around her. It seemed as if the doctor would never come. To the end of his life Cecil never forgot the long-drawn agony of that night.

At length their strained hearing caught the quick tread of horses’ hoofs on the turf without.

“The doctor, the doctor!” came simultaneously from the lips of Cecil and the watchers. The doctor, – there was hope in the very name.

How eagerly they watched his face as he bent over the patient! It was a calm, self-contained face, but they saw a shadow flit over it, a sudden almost imperceptible change of expression that said “Death” as plainly as if he had spoken it. They could do nothing, he said, – nothing but wait for the end to come.

How the moments lingered! Sometimes Cecil bent over the sufferer with every muscle quivering to her paroxysms; sometimes he could endure it no longer and went out into the cool night air or into the library, where with the mere mechanical instinct of a student he picked up a book, reading a few lines in it, then throwing it aside. Yet wherever he was he felt her sufferings as acutely as when standing by her side. His whole frame was in keenest sympathy with hers, his whole being full of pain. So sharp were his sensations that they imparted an abnormal vigor to his mind. Every line his eyes met in reading stood out on the page with wonderful distinctness. The words seemed pictorial, and his mind grasped abstruse propositions or involved expressions with marvellous facility.

He noted it, and remembered afterward that he thought at the time how curious it was that his tortured sympathies should give him such startling acuteness of perception.

The slow night waned, the slow dawn crept over the eastern hills. Cecil stood with haggard eyes at the foot of the bed, watching the sleeper’s face. As the daylight brightened, blending with the light of the still burning lamps, he saw a change come over her countenance; the set face relaxed, the look lost its wildness. A great hope shone in his hollow eyes.

“She is getting better, she is coming out of her sufferings,” he whispered to the doctor.

“She will be out of her sufferings very soon,” he replied sadly; and then Cecil knew that the end was at hand. Was it because the peace, the profound serenity which sometimes is the prelude of death, filling her being, penetrated his, that he grew so strangely calm? An inexpressible solemnity came to him as he looked at her, and all his agitation left him.

Her face grew very sweet and calm, and full of peace. Her eyes met Cecil’s, and there was in them something that seemed to thank him for all his goodness and patience, – something that was both benediction and farewell. Her lips moved, but she was past the power of speech, and only her eyes thanked him in a tender, grateful glance.

The sun’s edge flashed above the horizon, and its first rays fell through the uncurtained window full upon her face. She turned toward them, smiling faintly, and her face grew tenderly, radiantly beautiful, as if on that beam of sunshine the spirit of her dead lover had come to greet her from the sea. Then the sparkle died out of her eyes and the smile faded from her lips. It was only a white, dead face that lay there bathed in golden light.

A moment after, Cecil left the house with swift footsteps and plunged into the adjacent wood. There under a spreading oak he flung himself prone upon the earth, and buried his face in his hands. A seething turmoil of thoughts swept his mind. The past rose before him like a panorama. All his married life rushed back upon him, and every memory was regret and accusation.

“I might have been kinder to her, I might have been better,” he murmured, while the hot tears gushed from his eyes. “I might have been so much better to her,” he repeated over and over, – he, whose whole thought had been to shut up his sorrow in his own heart and show her only tenderness and consideration.

By and by he grew calmer and sat up, leaning against the tree and looking out into vacancy with dim eyes that saw nothing. His heart was desolate, emptied of everything. What was he to do? What was he to set before himself? He had not loved her, but still she had been a part of his life; with what was he to fill it now?

As he sat there depressed and troubled, a strange thing happened.

He was looking, as has been said, blindly into vacancy. It may have been an optical illusion, it may have been a mere vagary born of an over-wrought brain; but a picture formed before him. In the distance, toward the west, he saw something that looked like a great arch of stone, a natural bridge, rugged with crags and dark with pine. Beneath it swept a wide blue river, and on it wild horsemen were crossing and recrossing, with plumed hair and rude lances. Their faces were Indian, yet of a type different from any he had ever seen. The bridge was in the heart of a mighty mountain-range. On either side rose sharp and lofty peaks, their sides worn by the action of water in some remote age.

These details he noted as in a dream; then the strangeness of it all burst upon him. Even as it did so, the vision dissolved; the bridge wavered and passed away, the mountain-peaks sank in shadow. He leaped to his feet and gazed eagerly. A fine mist seemed passing before his sight; then he saw only the reach of hill and woodland, with the morning light resting upon it.

While the vision faded, he felt springing up within him an irrepressible desire to follow it. A mysterious fascination seized him, a wild desire to seek the phantom bridge. His whole being was swayed as by a supernatural power toward the west whence the vision had passed. He started forward eagerly, then checked himself in bewilderment. What could it mean?

In the nineteenth century, one similarly affected would think it meant a fevered, a disordered brain; but in the seventeenth, when statesmen like Cromwell believed in dreams and omens, and roués like Monmouth carried charms in their pockets, these things were differently regarded.

The Puritan ministry, whose minds were imbued with the gloomy supernaturalism of the Old Testament on which they fed, were especially men to whom anything resembling an apparition had a prophetic significance. And Cecil Grey, though liberal beyond most New England clergymen, was liable by the keenness of his susceptibilities and the extreme sensitiveness of his organization to be influenced by such delusions, – if delusions they be. So he stood awed and trembling, questioning within himself, like some seer to whom a dark and uncertain revelation has been made.

Suddenly the answer came.

“The Lord hath revealed his will unto me and shown me the path wherein I am to walk,” he murmured in a hushed and stricken tone. “Ruth was taken from me that I might be free to go where he should send me. The vision of the Indians and the bridge which faded into the west, and the strange desire that was given me to follow it, show that the Lord has another work for me to do. And when I find the land of the bridge and of the wild people I saw upon it, then will I find the mission that God has given me to do. ‘Lord God of Israel, I thank Thee. Thou hast shown me the way, and I will walk in it, though all its stones be fire and its end be death.’”

He stood a moment with bowed head, communing with his God. Then he returned to his lonely home.

The friends whose kindly sympathies had brought them to the house of mourning wondered at the erect carriage, the rapt, exalted manner of the man. His face was pale, almost as pale as that within the darkened room; but his eyes shone, and his lips were closely, resolutely set.

A little while, and that determined face was all sorrowful and pitying again, as he bent over the still, cold body of his dead.

CHAPTER IV

THE COUNCIL OF ORDINATION

Friends were assembled together; the Elder and Magistrate alsoGraced the scene with their presence, and stood like the Law and the Gospel…After the Puritan way and the laudable custom of Holland.The Courtship of Miles Standish.

A few days after the funeral, letters missive from the little society went out to all the neighboring churches, calling a council to ordain the Reverend Cecil Grey a missionary to the Indians.

It was a novel thing, in spite of the noble example that Roger Williams had set not many years before; and the summons met with a general response.

All the churches, far and near, sent delegates. If one could only have taken a peep, the day before the council, into the households of that part of New England, what a glimpse he would have gotten of Puritan domestic life! What a brushing up there was of black coats, what a careful starching and ironing of bands; and above all, in Cecil’s own neighborhood, what a mighty cookery for the ordination dinner the next day! For verily the capacity of the clerical stomach is marvellous, and is in fact the one thing in theology that does not change. New departures alter doctrines, creeds are modified, but the appetite of the clergy is not subject to such mutations.

The morrow came, and with it the expected guests. The meeting house was crowded. There were many ministers and lay delegates in the council. In the chair sat a venerable preacher, not unknown in the records of those days, – a portly man, with a shrewd and kindly face. Sterner faces were there also. The council wore a grave aspect, more like a court of judges before whom a criminal is cited to appear than an assembly of clergymen about to ordain a missionary.

After some preliminaries, Cecil was called on to give a statement of his reasons for wishing to go as an evangelist to the Indians. He rose before them. There was a singular contrast between his slight form and expressive features and the stout frames and grim countenances of the others. But the graceful presence of the man had in it a quiet dignity that commanded the respect of all.

In obedience to the command, he told how he had thought of the unknown tribes beyond the Alleghanies, living in the gloom of paganism and perishing in darkness, till an intangible sympathy inclined him toward them, – till, as it seemed to him, their great desire for light had entered into and possessed him, drawing him toward them by a mysterious and irresistible attraction. He felt called of God to go and minister to their spiritual needs, and that it was his duty to leave everything and obey the call.

“Is this all?” he was asked.

He hesitated a moment, and then described his vision in the wood the morning of his wife’s death. It made a deep impression on his hearers. There was scarcely a man in the assembly who was not tinged with the superstition of the age; and all listened, not lightly or sceptically, but in awe, as if it brought them to the threshold of the supernatural.

When the narration was ended, the chairman requested him to retire, pending the decision of the council; but first he was asked, —

“Are you willing to abide by the decision of this council, whatever it may be?”

He raised his head confidently, and his reply came frank and fearless.

“I shall respect the opinions of my brethren, no matter how they may decide; but I shall abide by the will of God and my own convictions of duty.”

The grave Puritan bent his head, half in acknowledgment of the reply, half in involuntary admiration of its brave manhood; then Cecil left the room, the silent, watchful crowd that filled the aisles parting respectfully to let him pass.

“Now, brethren,” said the chairman, “the matter is before you. Let us hear from each his judgment upon it.”

Solemn and weighty were the opinions delivered. One brother thought that Mr. Grey had plenty of work to do at home without going off on a wild-goose chase after the heathen folk of the wilderness. His church needed him; to leave it thus would be a shameful neglect of duty.