The Choir Invisible

"That is all," she replied, controlling the quiver in her voice; but then

letting herself go a little, she added with slow distinctness:

"You might remember this: some women in marrying demand all and give all:

with good men they are the happy; with base men they are the brokenhearted.

Some demand everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with

strong men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with

congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are soon

in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the heartless,

and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of death."

"And which of these is Amy?" he said, after a minute of reflection. "And

which of the men am I?"

"Don't ask her to marry you until you find out both," she answered.

She watched him as he strode away from her across the clearing, with a look

in her eyes that she knew nothing of--watched him, motionless, until his

tall, black figure passed from sight behind the green sunlit wall of the

wilderness. What undisciplined, unawakened strength there was in him! how

far such a stride as that would carry him on in life! It was like the tread

of one of his own forefathers in Cromwell's unconquer-able, hymn-singing

armies. She loved to think of him as holding his descent from a line so

pious and so grim: it served to account to her for the quality of stern,

spiritual soldiership that still seemed to be the mastering trait of his

nature. How long would it remain so, was the question that she had often

asked of herself. A fighter in the world he would always be--she felt sure

of that; nor was it necessary to look into his past to obtain this

assurance; one had but to look into his eyes. Moreover, she had little doubt

that with a temper so steadily bent on conflict, he would never suffer

defeat where his own utmost strength was all that was needed to conquer. But

as he grew older, and the world in part conquered him as it conquers so many

of us, would he go into his later battles as he had entered his earlier

ones--to the measure of a sacred chant? Beneath the sweat and wounds of all

his victories would he carry the white lustre of conscience, burning

untarnished in him to the end?

It was this religious purity of his nature and his life, resting upon him as

a mantle visible to all eyes but invisible to him, that had, as she

believed, attracted her to him so powerfully. On that uncouth border of

Western civilization, to which they had both been cast, he was a little

lonely in his way, she in hers; and this fact had drawn them somewhat

together. He was a scholar, she a reader; that too had formed a bond. He had

been much at their home as lover of her niece, and this intimacy had given

her a good chance to take his wearing measure as a man. But over and above

all other things, it was the effect of the unfallen in him, of the highest

keeping itself above assault, of his first youth never yet brushed away as a

bloom, that constituted to her his distinction among the men that she had

known. It served to place him in contrast with the colonial Virginia society

of her remembrance--a society in which even the minds of the clergy were not

like a lawn scentless with the dew on it, but like a lawn parched by the

afternoon sun and full of hot odours. It kept him aloof from the loose ways

of the young backwoodsmen and aristocrats of the town, with whom otherwise

he closely mingled. It gave her the right, she thought, to indulge a

friendship for him such as she had never felt for any other man; and in this

friendship it made it easier for her to overlook a great deal that was rude

in him, headstrong, overbearing.