ne to the more public
entrance.
All his years with his first wife had been spent in that house. She was
delicate when he married her, and soon grew sickly and suffering. One
after another her children died as babies. At last came one who lived,
and then the mother began to die. She was one of those lowly women who
apply the severity born of their creed to themselves, and spend only the
love born of the indwelling Spirit upon their neighbors. She was rather
melancholy, but hoped as much as she could, and when she could not hope
did not stand still, but walked on in the dark. I think when the sun
rises upon them, some people will be astonished to find how far they
have got in the dark.
Her husband, without verifying for himself one of the things it was his
business to teach others, was yet held in some sort of communion with
sacred things by his love for his suffering wife, and his admiration of
her goodness and gentleness. He had looked up to her, though several
years younger than himself, with something of the same reverence with
which he had regarded his mother, a women with an element of greatness
in her. It was not possible he should ever have adopted her views, or in
any active manner allied himself with the school whose doctrines she
accepted as the logical embodiment of the gospel, but there was in him
all the time a vague something that was not far from the kingdom of
heaven. Some of his wife's friends looked upon him as a wolf in the
sheepfold; he was no wolf, he was only a hireling. Any neighborhood
might have been the better for having such a man as he for the parson of
the parish--only, for one commissioned to be in the world as he was in
the world!--why he knew more about the will of God as to a horse's legs,
than as to the heart of a man. As he drew near the house, the older and
tenderer time came to meet him, and the spirit of his suffering,
ministering wife seemed to overshadow him. Two tears grew half-way into
his eyes:--they were a little bloodshot, but kind, true eyes. He was not
sorry he had married again, for he and his wife were at peace with each
other, but he had found that the same part of his mind would not serve
to think of the two: they belonged to different zones of his unexplored
world. For one thing, his present wife looked up to him with perfect
admiration, and he, knowing his own poverty, rather looked down upon her
in consequence, though in a loving, gentle, and gentlemanlike way.
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