Chapter Twenty-The End

Among those who stood around that dying bed, Horace and Maggie were wanting. For there was a little life waking just as the pilgrim life was ending, and that life belonged to them. Aunt Jane and the infant who brought joy to sorrow "met upon the threshold, going out and coming in." What strange sport of nature was this?

"Going out unto the triumph, coming in unto the fight;
Coming in unto the darkness, going out unto the light."

Nay, what a wondrous choice it was of the Will that rules every destiny and arranges the exact moment for all comings and goings!

"They met upon the threshold." Did they recognize each other? Did the parting pilgrim hastily snatch from her shoulders the mantle she needed no more, and enfold in it the child she would have felt to be almost her own?

Did the little one as he passed her hear the rustle of no angelic wings? Who knows what mysterious communion took place upon the threshold, and will learn the secrets of the soul that went and the soul that came?

Sorrow and joy contended together in the two hearts where Aunt Jane's memory was enshrined. Their wondrous delight in their child needed to be tempered and subdued, and God have the long-delayed gift at a moment when joy tempered grief. So he was cradled in the sanctity of days of mourning, yet welcomed with smiles that chased away tears.

The boys was a marvel of beauty and the health; he was just like Horace and just like Maggie, and they were absolutely unlike in race, unlike in character.

"Well," said Annie, after a critical study of the young hero, "I thought there never was a baby like mine, but this fellow throws her right in the shade. I am envious and jealous and glad and proud all at once. I wish I were a man, so that he could be named for me. Can't you manage it somehow, Maggie, you old darling, you?"

The "old darling" only smiled a rapturous smile. She was too happy to talk. The baby seemed to her nothing less than a miracle, a wonderful creation, no copy of anything on earth, and to be copied by none.

As to Horace, he contrived to let every one of his clients know within a week that he had entered into possession of a wonderful piece of property whose value could not be rated by millions of gold. How proud, how happy he was! And if sometimes amid his joy a secret voice whispered, "Oh that Aunt Jane had lived to see him!" another voice whispered, "She has."

"What a splendid little fellow, what a perfect copy of you!" Horace said to Maggie on the day his son and heir enchanted him by a smile of recognition. "This is the very smile you gave me that day on the train. Do you remember?"

"Do I remember? Oh, Horace! But this is your smile, not mine. I was saying so to Annie not an hour ago, and she agreed with me."

"I always hoped he would be like you," Horace went on. "I hope he won't have a particle of my old Adam."

"He'll have plenty of his own without borrowing yours. Do you know what my father says about giving him his name? But of course you don't, for his letter came after you went down town. I did not know father was so romantic. See, this is what he says:

"'Do not inflict the dismal name of Jeremiah upon your happy little boy. Give him a name by which his wife can call him."

"His wife!" cried Horace, greatly amused.

"I don't see anything to laugh at," said Maggie. "You were a baby once yourself, and yet you got married when your time came. Ain't you almost sorry?"

Everybody who has a heart knows what Horace said, as he clasped his wife and his boy to his breast, and thanked God for them both.

"I have been wishing that we could name him for Aunt Jane," said Maggie at last. "It was she who took such pains with me, taught me all I know, loved me so much better than I deserved, and at last gave me to you. I owe everything to her, everything."

"And I owe more than everything. You, our boy shall have her name, and if his little wife--do you suppose he has one on earth?--doesn't like it better than Jeremiah, why she shan't be his little wife."

So the baby was baptized Faulkner, but did not care in the least, and instead of screaming through the ceremony, laughed and crowed and made himself very much at home, winning smiles and winning friends by the score.

"You see how it is, Mag," said Annie, afterwards commenting on the scene; "you may be ever so good yourself, but your children will act just like other people's."

"Why shouldn't they?" asked Maggie.

Whereas Annie smiled mysteriously, and flew home to her own little Mag, a quaint, wee morsel of a maiden, who, tiny as she was, ruled grandma with a rod of iron and was spoiled by papa.

And Maggie's little lordly visitant had everything his own way, and carried all before him for a time. But, to his great surprise and displeasure, there came a day when he found that his young mother loved him so dearly that she was determined to have his perfect obedience, cost what it might. They had their little conflicts and shed their tears, but always came forth from every little battle better friends than ever; and Horace, busy all day in his office, and witnessing none of these encounters believed that his boy was an exception to all rules, and was born all docility, as he was all energy and life and fire.

Meanwhile Maggie was trying, while faithful to her child, to resume her old life and work for everybody, share everybody's joys and sorrows, and train her Mission girls for usefulness and happiness. It was hard work, but she managed it, just as people always manage to do what they choose. Only she could not go to seek work, but let it come to her, as it always will come to loving hearts and busy hands.

It had long been a favorite wish of Horace to make his house a home to young men who were living as he had lived, homeless and wifeless, and he could now indulge this wish, since he was not confined to a mere box. And he had only to open his hospitable doors: there were any number of friendless waifs who found no fireside so cheery, no home so attractive as his.

On one of these evenings, when Maggie had skipped upstairs to her baby, feeling not much older than he did, Frank Ray, one of these waifs, took occasion to open his mouth on this wise:--

"Seeing you and your wife so happy together in this pleasant home makes a fellow a little envious and a little restless. I suppose you know all about such feelings."

"Yes, and I went straightway and married a wife," was the reply.

"But what is a man to do whose tastes are domestic and simple, in love within, but who is too poor to marry? And you know this city is full of such men."

"He is to do what I did. Bring down his notion to the level of his purse, and get married."

"But has a poor man a right to ask a young lady, living at ease in her father's house, to come down to the level of homely poverty?"

"Other things being equal, he is wiser if he selects a young lady who has been accustomed to the cares and annoyances inseparable from straitened means. But if he happens to fall in love with one in a different sphere, of course, his position is somewhat embarrassing. Yet, if his love is returned, if he has really met his fate, I do not see why he should not ask her to share his poverty. For my part, I should want a woman to marry me for love, not for the ordinary luxuries a man without a heart could give her."

"But see how 'the girl of the period' dresses!"

"I wouldn't marry a girl of the period."

"A man must be pretty wise in his own conceit, who, being poor, fancies he can catch and tame one of these glittering creatures. But you must allow that there are all degrees and types of this girl. I have in my mind one who is modest, amiable, and refined; she dresses richly, but not extravagantly, not showily. I have loved her in secret five years. And I have not the smallest reason to think she prefers me to half-a-dozen other young men who hover round her. Yet, love does not care for reason, but feels its way."

"Yes; and there comes a time when it must speak out, or die."

"Well, I have got to just that point, and stand trembling on the brink of my fate. If I could offer her a comfortable home I would not wait another day. But to ask her to leave all those luxuries for my pleasure!"

"Ah! there's just where you make a grand mistake. What luxury can feed and satisfy an empty heart? For aught you know, hers is starving in the midst of plenty. And what luxury born of money can compare with that of loving and being beloved?"

Frank Ray's face was a study for its rapture. But he soon subsided.

"She refused a man who loved her passionately," he said.

Horace shrugged his shoulders.

"Now, you are misjudging her!" cried Frank. "You fancy she ran and told of it, and so it got round me. It is no such thing. He told me the whole story himself, and her part in it elevated her in my eyes, as it did in his. She asked him if she had ever given him encouragement by look, word, or tone; he owned that she had not. She said she had long seen, with pain, his attachment to her, and had conscientiously and persistently concealed her real liking for him, in order to spare him the mortification she was now giving him. She went on to say that it cost real self-denial to treat with coldness and indifference a man whom she would have delighted to treat as highly-prized, intimate friend. 'Why should it not?' she asked. 'Women are as susceptible to friendship as to love.' She appeared so doubly charming in this interview, showed so much real feeling for him, and such real nobility of character, that he made another frantic appeal to her heart."

"Very silly--very wrong!" Horace put in.

"Do you think so?"

"Yes! What right had he to pursue and distress her in that way? Surely, such a young lady as you describe her to be knew her own mind."

"She did. But in his excitement and pain he thought of himself only, and let drop a word about his poverty, that she caught up with an indignation that dried her tears, declaring that men little knew the hearts of women, if they fancied they needed the bribe of wealth."

"Good!" ejaculated Horace. "I advise you to try your chance with her by all means."

"But she has never given me the right. Through all these years, when she must have seen my attachment, she has never spoken a word or looked a look that gave encouragement. She very rarely will go out with me, never wrote me a scrap of a note, though I have contrived excuses for writing dozens to her, never lent me a book or advised me would not there be a chance betrayal, a glance of joy in the eye when we met?"

"Oh, they're incomprehensible creatures, all of them. And you intimated that you had some hope."

"It is the hope of a fool, or the madman," returned Frank. "But I ought not to trespass thus on your time. Indeed, I do not know how I came to open my mind to you at all."

"The little Paradise of mine has been the means of opening not a few hearts to me and my wife," Horace replied, with some just pride. "Those who have got into the heart of this happy home have wanted to know its secret, seeing plainly that money had little to do with it; and as you have confided in me, I will be equally frank with you, and tell you this secret in a few words--we love God, and we love each other!"

"It shall to be my fault if there is not a home just like it!" was the reply.

And it turned out that there was a girl in the period, if not of it, who was capable of recognizing a loyal and loving heart when she met it, and of doing without some of the little outside advantages its possessor could not offer. She left a home where she gained in leaving it; she entered a home where she had to go without style and elegance, and put up with the faithful affection of a good man. The first time we meet her let us congratulate her.

And now we have come to the fifth anniversary of the marriages that have beguiled us of not a few hours, and we see Horace sits with his boy on his knee, and his wife by his side, the picture of a satisfied, happy man. Tom and Annie are on the other side of the fire, with little May, and there is a new light and a new grace on Annie's face, for she is not thinking of herself, but of the fairy figure in her arms, on which she looks with a fondness that her first-born child never called forth. For Annie is the sort to be ever growing; to be ever ripening, ever becoming more meet for this world, more akin to the harmonies of the next. But let her grow and ripen as she will; let her become wise, and good, and unselfish, and loving, only one pair of eyes will ever see in her the tender, womanly Christian grace that shines in the face and breathes in the atmosphere of "our Maggie!"

But here Adam Jr. declares, "I thought I had verily found a guide to matrimony in these pages, and should soon find myself in the Garden of Eden. But here I am out in the cold, with nothing left me but a commonplace photograph of two husbands, two wives, a boy, a girl, and a baby!"

But, Adam Jr., guide-books do not pretend to do your travelling for you. They leave you a free agent, and offer statistics rather than advice. If you wish to enter the Garden of Eden, why don't you do it? You cannot afford it? If that is literally true, you will have to wait in patience till you can. This will have the effect to make you far more worthy of your little Eve than you are now; you will be growing wiser, more moderate, every day, and richer in self-control; for an Almighty hand shapes your destiny, and see that your hour has not yet come. But you can afford it, yet cannot find a Saint Margaret, or a Bird of Paradise, and are not sure you fancy those particular types of character? Yes! but she who was born into this world to be your special choice and future joy lives somewhere in it, and will come to you, or you will go to her, at just the right moment. Meanwhile what do you want of her? To love you, to guide your house, to bear your children, to put up with all your faults and foibles, to merge her individuality in yours, and self-forgetting, be by you forgot? Then no Garden of Eden opens before you, and you shall live in a land full of thorns and thistles.

Seek rather one whom you will love, honor, and cherish, in spite of her human weaknesses; whom you will ever allow to be herself, and to whom you shall render an absolutely unselfish devotion. Marrying on such terms, you will find her, whatever her natural character, vying with you to see which shall do most loving, honoring, and cherishing; which shall be most ready, not merely to live, but to let live; which shall be most purely unselfish and devoted. She cannot walk side by side with a man of true nobility of character without becoming herself elevated and ennobled.

But she has not come to you, and you would feign know where to seek her? Well, we do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles, and we do find rose-buds where we see full-blown roses. It is a rash experiment to make an Eve of a maiden who was born of a frivolous, selfish mother; and a pretty safe one to pluck a bud from a bush that you know to be a genuine rose-tree. To be sure, this matured, matronly woman, who is your ideal of what is truest and best in her sex, has not become such by accident, and if you find her daughter crude and far below her in moral worth, remind yourself of the years of discipline that have rounded out, mellowed, and perfected this character. She has had her crying babies, and her provoking servants, and all the little trials inseparable from domestic life; she has grown unselfish and loving by slow and painful degrees; if you would fain marry her, in spite of her age, and because of her virtues, she would not have you, for her heart still belongs to him whose name she bears. No, you are crude and immature yourself, and so is your Eve; you must grow good, as you do old, together!

"But," you whisper, "I have found a wife, and married. I love her, she loves me, but we do not live in Paradise. She has little ways that at times make me desperate; but she declares that I have mine, which are as greatly repugnant to her."

Of course! She fancied, when you told her she was an idol, that you spoke the truth. But you meant just the reverse, while, perhaps, unconscious of the fact. You intended to sit on a pedestal and let her worship you; and she is inclined to do it, and would if she could. But then there are "your ways!" Well, what are they? Let us ask Eve herself, since you won't confess.

"In the first place, he smokes; and he knows I hate smoke. How can men want to make themselves so disagreeable! Then he always, if a point is under discussion, makes me yield. And he often speaks to me in such a fault-finding, displeased way, that I cry my eyes out as soon as he leaves the house."

What! you leave the house with harsh words on your lips that will rankle in the heart that, whatever its weaknesses, loves you, and would gladly love more if you would make yourself worthy of it? Take the next uptown stage, go home, and tell her you are ashamed of yourself, kiss away her tears, an tell her that you never will part from her in anger again. And you are willful, and never give way to her? You smoke, though it makes her sick? Ah, no wonder you do not live in Paradise! You will have to get down on your knees and pray that the root and ground of all your domestic failures may be done away with, that love to God may take the place of the love of self, an that you may learn the wholesome lesson of forbearance and gentleness, which He alone can teach.

But you say that Eve chafes your temper by always being behind hand; that she is not a nice housekeeper, that she spoils your children, that she spends too much money.

Now, then, Eve, it is your turn. It is your Christian duty to learn punctuality and precision. If it annoys Adam Jr. to find dust on his table or his books, it is your duty to see that no dust settles there. If you have his food prepared and served in a slovenly way, it is high time to turn over a new leaf. If you are spoiling his children by foolish indulgence, cease from that perilous course at once. And remember that reckless expenditure is little less than willful theft.

You cannot revolutionize your character and habits? True. But He who made you a wife and mother well understands all your difficulties, and is ready to remodel you the instant you are ready to permit Him to do it. But you reply that neither your husband nor yourself sustain any vital relation to Him; dare not take Him into your counsels; are not in the habit of looking to Him for sympathy or for help. Ah, now we come to the root of the matter! Your lives are hid, not with Christ in God, but in self, and it is hardly possible to conceive of any but a Christian marriage as being a very happy one. You may and do have your hours of delight to each other, but you have yet to learn the calm peace of those whose human frailties are daily giving way before the indwelling of a new life, that crowds out, roots out, slays the old selfish life.

There is many a little heaven here below; there is many a patient husband, many a true wife, ripening in these outskirts of Paradise for the Eden that is yet to come. Where is the man, where is the woman, who cannot help to form and happily dwell in such a home?

THE END

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