Volume 20 — The Blind Student.

When Ernest D'Arcy left the University of ——, all the glorious possibilities of life seemed to unfold themselves invitingly before him. He was young, he was clever, he was ambitious. Unlike too many American students, he had not wasted the golden hours of college life in idleness, dissipation, or even social enjoyment. He had been a hard, indeed, an enthusiastic, student; but on commencement day, when his brow was bound with victorious wreaths, he felt rewarded for having scorned the seductive pleasures of youth, and rejoiced that he had lived laborious days and nights.

But D'Arcy did not consider his education finished because he had passed through the university brilliantly. He well knew that the college was only the vestibule to the temple of learning. Through this vestibule he had passed; and now he wished to enter the noble temple itself. But on its very threshold he found himself suddenly stopped. A dangerous disease attacked his eyes. The most eminent oculists were consulted at once; absolute rest alone could save him from total blindness. He was forbidden to read or write a line. This was indeed a terrible blow to the ambitious young student. His golden hopes left him; his sweet dream of fame faded away; his bright career was blighted in the very bud. Unsustained by the holy influence of religion, a deep and dangerous despondency seized him; he abandoned himself to despair, and could not follow the advice of Burke, “Despair, but work even in despair,” for the affliction that caused his despair prevented him from working. So depressed was he at times that he contemplated suicide as a happy relief.

The D'Arcy family were of Norman origin. The grandfather of Ernest escaped from France in the early days of the Revolution, bringing with him to the United States the fortune that had descended to him through a long line of ancestors. Like so many French gentlemen of the last century, M. D'Arcy had imbibed the fashionable scepticism of the time of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. After coming to America, he married a Catholic lady, and his scepticism gradually settled into a form of mild indifferentism. Ernest's father was a devoted Catholic, but he died while his children were in their infancy. His wife was a Protestant, a woman of fashion, whose highest ambition was to be a leader of society. Her children, Ernest and his sister Mary, were brought up from their infancy on the Chesterfieldian model: to shine in society. To this end everything else was sacrificed. From the nursery they went to the dancing-school, and had masters to teach them all those superficial accomplishments which make up a modern fashionable education. Ernest's clever and original mind saved him from the evil effects of such an education. But, unfortunately, he did not escape a worse danger. With no one to direct his studies, at the susceptible age of seventeen he began to read the infidel French literature of the XVIIIth [pg 803] century, which formed a large part of his grandfather's library. Fascinated by the diabolical wit of Voltaire, Ernest's young and undisciplined mind mistook sophistry for argument, ridicule for reason, wit for wisdom. The fashionable religion of his mother had never possessed any charm or interest for him, and now, rejecting all belief, he became a free-thinker.

Ernest entered the University of —— in his eighteenth year, eager for distinction and determined to succeed. Succeed he did; and when he graduated, four years later, he was the first student of the university and unanimously chosen the commencement orator. No student ever left the University of ——, which has been the Alma Mater of so many distinguished men, with a brighter future before him than Ernest D'Arcy. But it was a future for this world, and for this world alone. Fame was the god of his idolatry. His residence at the University of ——, which boasts the absence of all religious teaching, had strengthened his scepticism. But the scepticism of Ernest D'Arcy was a scepticism of the head, not of the heart. His natural love for the true, the beautiful, and the good had kept him pure, even at the most dangerous period of youth, when the blood is warm, the passions strong, and the will weak. While the heart is good and pure, however the head may err, there is always hope. The unbelief of Ernest D'Arcy was not the cold, heartless, satisfied unbelief of the hardened scoffer rejoicing in his infidelity. It was the natural result upon an eager and active intellect of an education without religion, a home without God.

The same year that Ernest left the university his sister “finished” at the Academy of the Visitation of ——. Mary D'Arcy was not a brilliant girl, but very sweet, gentle, and interesting. Three years at the convent school had removed all traces of her unfortunate home education. Mary's most intimate friend at the convent was Edith Northcote, a young Catholic girl from the South. When they parted on distribution day, it was with the understanding that Edith should pass the next winter with Mary, and the two young ladies enter society together.

One morning, towards the end of October, Ernest was sitting in the library, surrounded by the most enchanting literature of the world, and not allowed to read a single line. D'Arcy was no sentimental dreamer or aimless student.

“To sleep away his hours

In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy.”

He wished to be a man among men. His ambition was first to teach himself, and then to teach the world. He wished to elevate the tone of society; to raise it from its fallen state. His was no splendid dream of revolutionizing the social world; he had no fond hope of creating an Utopia out of this busy, bustling America of the XIXth century. But he knew that life was too precious to be dedicated solely to the one selfish, absorbing pursuit of wealth; that the entire surrender of mind and heart and life itself to the accumulation of money was corrupting our people and exercising a baleful influence over the whole nation. Our merchants rival the merchant princes of Italy in wealth and enterprise; why should they not rival them also in their princely tastes? The palaces, the gardens, the galleries, the libraries, of Florence, Venice, and Genoa, “all tell the story of great thoughts and noble tastes which gold and trade may nurture when nobleness [pg 804] and greatness deal with them.” We should take time to cultivate the beautiful as well as the useful; the poetical as well as the practical. The artist should be patronized as well as the artisan. Time should be given to the refinement, the grace, the sweetness of life. We have followed too long and too earnestly the false philosophy taught in “Poor Richard's Almanac,” that money-getting is a sort of secular religion, and “there will be sleeping enough in the grave.” Our American life is one long “fitful fever.” We give no time to rest. Repose, a cultivated leisure, is not idleness. An elegant essay on this subject—leisure187—by a distinguished Baltimore lawyer, should be read and pondered by our eager and restless people, who are devoured by their business as Actæon was by his own dogs. “I mean,” says this writer, “the rest which is won and deserved by labor, and which sweetens and invigorates it and furnishes its reward. Whence comes this doctrine, that life, to be anything, must be for ever in motion? There is no process of physical development which does not need and depend upon repose. To all the green and beautiful things that deck the earth—the flowers that give it perfume, and the fruits and foliage that make it glad—there is needful the calm sunshine and the peaceful shade, the gentle rain and the yet gentler dew. Not a gem that flashes but has been crystallized in the immovable stillness of the great earth's breast. I believe that to be false philosophy which denies to individuals their seasons of leisure and meditation; teaching them that existence was meant to be nothing but a struggle.” Our very amusements are unwholesome and dangerous: the midnight “German,” the lascivious drama, the race-course, the steamboat excursion, the political meeting. The priceless time of youth should have some better employment than dancing and novel-reading. Our young men should be taught that life is too valuable, time too precious, to be frittered away in idle pleasures, in frivolous amusement, in heartless dissipation. Our young women should be taught that there is something nobler in life than the passing triumphs of the ball-room, gay flirtations, and dazzling toilets.

Thoughts like these occupied Ernest D'Arcy on that bright October morning—thoughts that stirred his heart and mind, and made him eager for the glorious work. With a soul longing to “be up and doing,” he was compelled to sit idle in the golden prime of his manhood. These were the moments of his greatest despondency, when all the brightness seemed gone from his life, and all the hope from his soul. Sitting there in the library that morning, D'Arcy recalled the beautiful lines of Miss Procter in “My Picture”:

“He had a student air,

With a look half sad, half stately,

Grave, sweet eyes and flowing hair.”

The library-door was opened, and there came in one who was always welcome—Mary D'Arcy.

“Ernest, I have a letter from Edith Northcote,” Mary said. “She will be here to-morrow.”

“I am glad to hear it. From all you have told me about Miss Northcote, I think I shall like her.”

“I am sure of it,” returned his sister. “If you don't, my opinion of your taste is gone for ever.”

“She is nothing of the bread-and-butter miss, I hope? I have all Byron's antipathy, you know, for that class.”

[pg 805]

“Byron himself could have found no fault with Edith on that ground,” said Mary.

“Well, I am relieved of no little apprehension,” said Ernest. “I have a perfect horror of the common run of girls, who haven't an idea above the last novel and the last fashion.”

The next day Edith arrived, and her appearance certainly realized all of Ernest's expectations. She was nineteen—an age when the sweet graces of girlhood still linger and lend an additional charm to the blooming woman. Her features were not regularly beautiful, but her face possessed a charm and an interest which no faultlessly beautiful face ever had. If a true woman's soul, full of the sweetest sympathy, ever brightened and beautified a human face, it was that of Edith Northcote. Then, her voice was so sweet and cordial and warm—and what is more attractive than a low, sweet voice in woman? Edith was scarcely the medium height, but exquisitely formed, and perfectly natural and graceful in all her movements, in charming contrast with the trained glances and artificial manners of our fashionable society belles. Like Alexandrine, in A Sister's Story, there was an air of refinement about this lovely girl as rare as it was delightful; she had all the freshness and fragrance of the rose without the rose's thorns. Mrs. D'Arcy, who was a female Turveydrop in the matter of deportment, said she had never seen in any society manners so elegant and at the same time so sweet and natural as the manners of Edith Northcote. Such praise from such a woman was in itself fame.

Edith soon became the life and joy of the house; she was an elegant lady in the parlor, an intelligent companion in the library, and the charming, sweet girl everywhere. The influence of her bright presence pervaded the whole household. Even stately Mrs. D'Arcy yielded to the general enthusiasm, and declared that Mary was fortunate in having such a friend. But of all the family, Ernest felt the influence of Edith's society the most. The library, where he had passed so many hours in gloom and despondency, was now brightened by her daily and hourly presence. She read beautifully, and with a voice and manner that threw a charm around everything. Her true, womanly heart sympathized deeply with Ernest in his great affliction, and she at once determined to do all in her power to relieve it. So it soon became the custom for Ernest and Edith to retire to the library every morning after breakfast, where she read the morning paper to him while he smoked his cigar. Then two or three hours were devoted to serious study. The books, so long neglected, were again resumed. The literary work, which Ernest loved so well, was again taken up. Edith was his librarian, his reader, his amanuensis. He had the true student's dislike of any person touching his books and papers; but Edith's touch seemed to have magic in it, for she could do what few ladies can ever do—put papers in order without putting them out of place.

But not only as his literary assistant was Edith serviceable to Ernest; she was his sweet and gentle companion, his kind and sympathetic friend, ever ready in all things to make him forget his blindness and his consequent dependence. Inspiring and stimulating him to renewed exertion, she also directed his ambition to the noblest ends. She opened a new life to the brilliant young student—a life full of love and sweetness and humanity. Her bright and joyous influence banished from his soul the dark despair that had been [pg 806] enthroned there so long, and again there was raised in his heart

“A hope

That he was born for something braver than

To hang his head and wear a nameless name.”

Edith found time for everything; duty, as well as pleasure, had each its allotted place in her daily life. Before the rest of the family were awake she was up and off to early Mass. In the winter twilight, when other young ladies were returning from the fashionable promenade, Edith could often be seen with a little basket on her arm, carrying delicacies to the sick, or more substantial food to relieve the necessities of Christ's suffering children. Ernest sometimes accompanied her on these errands of mercy, and it was a new revelation to him to see Edith, so gay, sparkling, and fascinating in society, visiting the humble homes of the poor, cheering and comforting the sick and destitute. Her very presence seemed like a sunbeam in their dreary dwellings. Edith did not think she was performing any heroic virtue by these things. She knew she was only following the injunction of Him who loved the poor so well that he became like one of them. She knew the Catholic poor were the blessed inheritance of the Catholic Church. Many Catholic young ladies, delicately nurtured and fastidiously refined, are daily doing what Edith did.

Ernest was benefited by attending Edith on those missions of love. His warm heart was touched and all the latent sweetness of his nature brought out by the distress which he witnessed, and of which he had never dreamed amidst the luxuries of his own elegant home. There was one case that particularly interested him; unfortunately, there are many such in this age of boasted religious liberty. It was that of a Mrs. White. She was a woman of education and refinement, and had been accustomed to all the comforts of life in her father's house. Early in life she married a poor but worthy young man. He was a clerk, and labored for his wife and children with an industry that knew no flagging. By constantly bending over his desk he literally worked himself into consumption. After lingering a few months, during which all his little savings were spent, he died, leaving his family in utter destitution. During his sickness he had been visited by several Catholic ladies, who attended to his wants with so sweet a charity that his heart was touched, and he longed to know more of a religion which taught such blessed humanity. As the Author of all truth has declared that he who seeks shall find, so Mr. White found the truth which he sought, and died a most beautiful and edifying death. His wife soon afterwards became a Catholic, converted by the example of the good ladies who had so kindly ministered to her dying husband. In the extremity of her distress Mrs. White appealed to her father, who had refused to have any intercourse with her since her marriage. What do you think was the answer of this father to a daughter whose only offence was that she had left father and mother to cleave to her husband? We blush for the humanity that could send to a grief-stricken and desolate daughter so brutal a message as this:

“Now your chosen husband is dead, I will receive you back, provided you give up, at once and for ever, the Catholic religion, which you have recently professed. Otherwise, you may die as you have lived—a pauper and an outcast.”

And so she lived and died a pauper and an outcast; but, so living and so dying, her lot was more enviable than that of her cruel and unnatural father. Her last moments were comforted [pg 807] by the promise of Ernest D'Arcy to provide for her two children. The elder, a bright little fellow of thirteen, he placed in a lawyer's office; the other, a boy nine years old, was admitted into a Catholic orphan asylum.

Thus visiting the sick and relieving the poor, and frequently meeting Catholic priests and Catholic Sisters in pious attendance on death-beds, the conversation of Ernest and Edith naturally took a religious turn. One evening, after returning from one of their charitable visits, they were sitting in the library before the great wood-fire (for Ernest would not allow that abomination, miscalled a modern improvement, a furnace-flue, in his sanctum), as they generally did before tea. Ernest was unusually thoughtful that evening, so much so that Edith observed it and asked him the cause.

“I am thinking about you and myself—about all your goodness to me,” he said; “about what I was before I knew you, and what I may be by your noble example. Edith, the daily beauty of your life makes mine ugly. My father was a Catholic, and I am—nothing. The cold and fashionable religion of my mother neither satisfied my mind nor interested my heart. I became a free-thinker, an infidel, but never a scoffer at religion. I did not believe, because I did not know what to believe.”

“We must read together Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity—that magnificent tribute to the truth and beauty of the Christian religion,” Edith replied. “You know the story of his conversion: in his extreme youth he yielded to the gay scepticism which at the time controlled French society, and he, a son of the Crusaders, became a disciple of Voltaire, and wrote in the interest of infidelity. The death of Chateaubriand's mother, whose last moments had been saddened by his scepticism, and whose last words were a prayer for his conversion, recalled him to a sense of that religion in which he had been educated. ‘I became a Christian,’ Chateaubriand wrote. ‘My conviction came from the heart. I wept and I believed.’ He resolved to devote to religion the eloquent pen which had been used against her. The result was his immortal work the Genius of Christianity. The beautiful style, the vast information, the glowing descriptions of art, scenery, poetry, and music cannot fail to delight and interest you.”

The next day Edith commenced Chateaubriand's great masterpiece. As, day after day, the reading continued, Ernest grew deeply interested. He saw clearly demonstrated the noble and inspiring fact that “the Christian religion, of all the religions that ever existed, is the most favorable to liberty and to the arts and sciences; that the modern world is indebted to it for every improvement: from agriculture to the abstract sciences; from the hospitals for the reception of the unfortunate to the temples reared by the Michael Angelos and embellished by the Raphaels.”

Other books were read, all breathing the same divine spirit, the same exalted Christian charity, the same sweet human sympathy. The warm, tender heart of Ernest D'Arcy was fascinated by the beautiful and noble sentiments expressed in the volumes which were now a part of his daily reading. He compared them with the false philosophy of a Voltaire and the senseless sentimentality of a Rousseau, which taught how to destroy, but not how to save; whose end was the destruction, not the amelioration, of society. These [pg 808] books certainly opened a newer and a sweeter world to the student. But it must not be supposed that the young D'Arcy saw immediately the truth of Catholicity in all its divine beauty. Few, like S. Paul, are miraculously changed from the enemy to the friend of God's church. Few, like Chateaubriand, can say: “I wept and I believed.”

With the opening of spring Edith returned home, and Earnest was again left alone with his books. But how changed seemed everything! The brightness was gone from the library. The pleasure was gone from his studies. He sadly missed her who had been his constant companion for so many months. Fortunately, about this time his eyes improved sufficiently to allow him to read for a short time every day. He continued the reading to which Edith had introduced him. This was some consolation to him, now that he was separated from her. But, alas! it was a consolation not long allowed to him. If that stern old moralist, Dr. Johnson, acknowledged that he found it easier to practise abstinence than temperance in wine, it will not be surprising that so ardent a student as Ernest D'Arcy found it absolutely impossible to practise temperance in reading when he read at all. And now he had a greater incentive to work than ever before. He felt that he must make himself worthy of the sweet girl whom he loved. The delicately refined nature of this perfect gentleman would not allow him to make a formal declaration of love to Edith while she was a guest in his mother's house, but that unerring, never-failing instinct which belongs to woman enabled her to see plainly that he was deeply, fondly interested in her. Nor was Edith insensible to the many attractive qualities of Ernest D'Arcy; his cultured mind, his noble heart, his high ambition, his exalted sentiments of honor and morality, claimed her enthusiastic admiration, while the romantic character of their constant intercourse pleased her girlish fancy.

D'Arcy's Catholic reading had enchanted his impressible mind. As an historical institution, the church delighted and astonished him. He saw it rise triumphantly on the ruins of the empire of the Cæsars; he saw it conquer and civilize the barbarians of Germany and the North; he saw it tame the fierce passions of the Franks and Goths; he saw it in the middle ages standing between the people and princely despots; he saw it always on the side of right and always against wrong, always raising its powerful voice in favor of the oppressed; he saw it in the XVIth century successfully sustain itself against the most formidable religious revolution the world had ever known; he saw it in the XIXth century serene in the midst of tumbling thrones and political convulsions, teaching one faith and one doctrine, while heresy was broken into a thousand indistinguishable fragmentary sects.

With his mind fresh from these new and interesting studies, Ernest D'Arcy began to write the story of his mental life, which he called From Darkness to Light. Like Milton, he became so engrossed in his work that his eyes grew rapidly worse; and, like him also, he was unwilling to discontinue his studies, until at length study was impossible. Edith Northcote heard of this new trial through Ernest's sister Mary; for Ernest himself was too manly, too considerate, to annoy Edith with his troubles. She determined at once to make a Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes to obtain the cure of Ernest's eyes. She procured [pg 809] some of the celebrated miraculous water, and sent it to Ernest, telling him that on a certain day she would commence the Novena, requesting him to apply the water to his eyes each day, and say the prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes contained in the little book recently published. The account of the apparition greatly interested Ernest, and, though not yet a Catholic, he did not hesitate to comply with both of Edith's requests.

Thousands of unrecorded miracles have been wrought by the water of Lourdes, and the restoration of Ernest's eyes was one of them.188 As the darkness left his eyes, the divine light of faith entered his soul; and he who had been both mentally and physically blind, now saw with the eyes of the body and saw also with the eyes of the soul. He saw the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of the Catholic religion; seeing, he believed; believing, he professed; professing, he practised. Ernest D'Arcy became a Catholic—a devout, a zealous, a fervid Catholic.

Ernest did not inform Edith by letter of the happy effects of the water of Lourdes. He visited her in her Southern home. Simply saying a friend wished to see her, he awaited her entrance with no little impatience. At length she appeared. Ernest advanced to meet her. The few words he spoke explained everything: “Edith, I am a Catholic.”

The next few weeks were the sweetest Ernest had ever known—sweeter than he had ever dreamed of. He had found what he had so long sought in vain—the true religion; and in finding the religion which was to make him happy in heaven, he also found the being who was to make him happy on earth.