There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going on.There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes.I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet.You may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like ours.Do as you like.But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned loose among live men.
-Terrible fact?
Very terrible.Nothing more so.Do you forget the angels who lost heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours.Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her.Let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me.
It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years.These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.I have many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.Of course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their First Great Cause.This secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.Ido not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.Persons, however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they could not tell in our human words.
Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery.There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love.I remember two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above ours.No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no women to be worshipped.
But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.But this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression.Can she tell me anything?
Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which I have been groping after through so many friendships that Ihave tired of, and through--Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of and to use for a special illustration.Riding along over a rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.There is a great hollow under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
So it is in life.We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.Suddenly we hear the deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
