“Across the hills and far away,     Beyond their utmost purple rim,
  And deep into the dying day
    The happy princess follow'd him.”
 
It was several months after Helen's marriage. The scene was a little lake, in one of the wildest parts of the Adirondacks, surrounded by tall mountains which converted it into a basin in the land, and walled in by a dense growth about the shores, which added still more to its appearance of seclusion. In only one place was the scenery more open, where there was a little vale between two of the hills, and where a mountain torrent came rushing down the steep incline. There the underbrush had been cleared away, and beneath the great forest trees a house constructed, a little cabin built of logs, and in harmony with the rest of the scene.
It was only large enough for two or three rooms downstairs, and as many above, and all were furnished in the plainest way. About the main room there were shelves of books, and a piano and a well-chosen music-library. It was the little home which for a dozen years or more David Howard had occupied alone, and where he and Helen had spent the golden summer of their love.
It was late in the fall then, and the mountains were robed in scarlet and orange. Helen was standing upon the little piazza, a shawl flung about her shoulders, because it was yet early in the morning. She was talking to her father, who had been paying them a few days' visit, and was taking a last look about him at the fresh morning scene before it was time for him to begin his long homeward journey.
Helen was clad in a simple dress, and with the prettiest of white sun bonnets tied upon her head; she was browned by the sun, and looked a picture of health and happiness as she held her father's arm in hers. “And then you are quite sure that you are happy?” he was saying, as he looked at her radiant face.
She echoed the word—“Happy?” and then she stretched out her arms and took a deep breath and echoed it again. “I am so happy,” she laughed, “I never know what to do! You did not stay long enough for me to tell you, Daddy!” She paused for a moment, and then went on, “I think there never was anybody in the world so full of joy. For this is such a beautiful little home, you know, and we live such a beautiful life; and oh, we love each other so that the days seem to fly by like the wind! I never even have time to think how happy I am.”
“Your husband really loves you as much as he ought,” said the father, gazing at her tenderly.
“I think God never put on earth another such man as David,” replied, the girl, with sudden gravity. “He is so noble, and so unselfish in every little thing; I see it in his eyes every instant that all his life is lived for nothing but to win my love. And it just draws the heart right out of me, Daddy, so that I could live on my knees before him, just trying to tell him how much I love him. I cannot ever love him enough; but it grows—it grows like great music, and every day my heart is more full!”
Helen was standing with her head thrown back, gazing ahead of her; then she turned and laughed, and put her arm about her father again, saying: “Haven't you just seen what a beautiful life we live? And oh, Daddy, most of the time I am afraid because I married David, when I see how much he knows. Just think of it,—he has lived all alone ever since he was young, and done nothing but read and study. Now he brings all those treasures to me, to make me happy with, and he frightens me.” She stopped for a moment and then continued earnestly: “I have to be able to go with him everywhere, you know, I can't expect him to stay back all his life for me; and that makes me work very hard. David says that there is one duty in the world higher than love, and that is the duty of labor,—that no soul in the world can be right for one instant if it is standing still and is satisfied, even with the soul it loves. He told me that before he married me, but at first when we came up here he was so impatient that he quite frightened me; but now I have learned to understand it all, and we are wonderfully one in everything. Daddy, dear, isn't it a beautiful way to live, to be always striving, and having something high and sacred in one's mind? And to make all of one's life from one's own heart, and not to be dependent upon anything else? David and I live away off here in the mountains, and we never have anything of what other people call comforts and enjoyments—we have nothing but a few books and a little music, and Nature, and our own love; and we are so wonderfully happy with just those that nothing else in the world could make any difference, certainly nothing that money could buy us.”
“I was worried when you wrote me that you did not even have a servant,” said Mr. Davis.
“It isn't any trouble,” laughed Helen. (David's man lived in the village half a mile away and came over every day to bring what was necessary.) “This is such a tiny little cottage, and David and I are very enthusiastic people, and we want to be able to make lots of noise and do just as we please. We have so much music, you know, Daddy, and of course David is quite a wild man when he gets excited with music.”
Helen stopped and looked at her father and laughed; then she rattled merrily on: “We are both of us just two children, for David is so much in love with me that it makes him as young as I am; and we are away off from everything, and so we can be as happy with each other as we choose. We have this little lake all to ourselves, you know; it's getting cold now, and pretty soon we'll have to fly away to the south, but all this summer long we used to get up in the morning in time to see the sun rise, and to have a wonderful swim. And then we have so many things to read and study; and David talks to me, and tells me all that he knows; and besides all that we have to tell each other how much we love each other, which takes a fearful amount of time. It seems that neither of us can ever quite realize the glory of it, and when we think of it, it is a wonder that nobody ever told. Is not that a beautiful way to live, Daddy dear, and to love?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Davis, “that is a very beautiful way indeed. And I think that my little girl has all that I could wish her to have.”
“Oh, there is no need to tell me that!” laughed Helen. “All I wish is that I might really be like David and be worth his love; I never think about anything else all day.” The girl stood for a moment gazing at her father, and then, looking more serious, she put her arm about him and whispered softly: “And oh, Daddy, it is too wonderful to talk about, but I ought to tell you; for some day by and by God is going to send us a new, oh, a new, new wonder!” And Helen blushed beautifully as her father gazed into her eyes.
He took her hand tenderly in his own, and the two stood for some time in silence. When it was broken it was by the rattling of the wagon which had come to take Mr. Davis away.
David came out then to bid his guest good-by, and the three stood for a few minutes conversing. It was not very difficult for, Helen to take leave of her father, for she would see him, so she said, in a week or two more. She stood waving her hands to him, until the bumping wagon was lost to sight in the woods, and then she turned and took David's hand in hers and gazed across the water at the gorgeous-colored mountains. The lake was sparkling in the sunlight, and the sky was bright and clear, but Helen's thoughts took a different turn from that.
All summer long she had been rejoicing in the glory of the landscape about her, in the glowing fern and the wild-flowers underfoot, and in the boundless canopy of green above, with its unresting song-birds; now there were only the shrill cries of a pair of blue-jays to be heard, and every puff of wind that came brought down a shower of rustling leaves to the already thickly-covered ground.
“Is it not sad, David,” the girl said, “to think how the beauty should all be going?”
David did not answer her for a moment. “When I think of it,” he said at last, “it brings me not so much sadness as a strange feeling of mystery. Only stop, and think of what that vanished springtime meant—think that it was a presence of living, feeling, growing creatures,—infinite, unthinkable masses of them, robing all the world; and that now the life and the glory of it all is suddenly gone back into nothingness, that it was all but a fleeting vision, a phantom presence on the earth. I never realize that without coming to think of all the other things of life, and that they too are no more real than the springtime flowers; and so it makes me feel as if I were walking upon air, and living in a dream.”
Helen was leaning against a post of the piazza, her eyes fixed upon David intently. “Does that not give a new meaning to the vanished spring-time?” he asked her; and she replied in a wondering whisper, “Yes,” and then gazed at him for a long time.
“David,” she said at last, “it is fearful to think of a thing like that. What does it all mean? What causes it?”
“Men have been asking that helpless question since the dawn of time,” he answered, “we only know what we see, this whirling and weaving of shadows, with its sacred facts of beauty and love.”
Helen looked at him thoughtfully a moment, and then, recollecting something she had heard from her father, she said, “But, David, if God be a mystery like that, how can there be any religion?”
“What we may fancy God to be makes no difference,” he answered. “That which we know is always the same, we have always the love and always the beauty. All men's religion is but the assertion that the source of these sacred things must be infinitely sacred, and that whatever may happen to us, that source can suffer no harm; that we live by a power stronger than ourselves, and that has no need of us.”
Helen was looking at her husband anxiously; then suddenly she asked him, “But tell me then, David; you do not believe in heaven? You do not believe that our souls are immortal?” As he answered her in the negative she gave a slight start, and knitted her brows; and after another pause she demanded, “You do not believe in revealed religion then?”
David could not help smiling, recognizing the voice of his clerical father-in-law; when he answered, however, he was serious again. “Some day, perhaps, dear Helen,” he said, “I will tell you all about what I think as to such things. But very few of the world's real thinkers believe in revealed religions any more—they have come to see them simply as guesses of humanity at God's great sacred mystery, and to believe that God's way of revealing Himself to men is through the forms of life itself. As to the question of immortality that you speak of, I have always felt that death is a sign of the fact that God is infinite and perfect, and that we are but shadows in his sight; that we live by a power that is not our own, and seek for beauty that is not our own, and that each instant of our lives is a free gift which we can only repay by thankfulness and worship.”
He paused for a moment, and the girl, who had still been gazing at him thoughtfully, went on, “Father used to talk about those things to me, David, and he showed me how the life of men is all spent in suffering and struggling, and that therefore faith teaches us—-”
“Yes, dearest,” the other put in, “I know all that you are going to say; I have read these arguments very often, you know. But suppose that I were to tell you that I think suffering and struggling is the very essence of the soul, and that what faith teaches us is that the suffering and struggling are sacred, and not in the least that they are some day to be made as nothing? Dearest, if it is true that the soul makes this life what it is, a life of restless seeking for an infinite, would it not make the same life anywhere else? Do you remember reading with me Emerson's poem about Uriel, the seraph who sang before God's throne,—how even that could not please him, and how he left it to plunge into the struggle of things imperfect; and how ever after the rest of the seraphim were afraid of Uriel? Do you think, dearest, that this life of love and labor that you and I live our own selves needs anything else to justify it? The life that I lived all alone was much harder and more full of pain than this, but I never thought that it needed any rewarding.”
David stopped and stood gazing ahead of him thoughtfully; when he continued his voice was lower and more solemn. “These things are almost too sacred to talk of, Helen,” he said; “but there is one doubt that I have known about this, one thing that has made me wonder if there ought not to be another world after all. I never sympathized with any man's longing for heaven, but I can understand how a man might be haunted by some fearful baseness of his own self,—something which long years of effort had taught him he could not ever expiate by the strength of his own heart,—and how he could pray that there might be some place where rightness might be won at last, cost what it would.”
The man's tone had been so strange as he spoke that it caused Helen to start; suddenly she came closer to him and put her hands upon his shoulders and gazed into his eyes. “David,” she whispered, “listen to me a moment.”
“Yes, dear,” he said, “what is it?”
“Was it because of yourself that you said those words?”
He was silent for a moment, gazing into her anxious eyes; then he bowed his head and said in a faint voice, “Yes, dear, it was because of myself.”
And the girl, becoming suddenly very serious, went on, “Do you remember, David, a long time ago—the time that I was leaving Aunt Polly's—that............