In this new land of promise—­the golden California—­lying like a bride by the side of her bridegroom—­the great Pacific Ocean—­and shut away by deserts and mountains, from all old conventional cliques and prejudices of our Eastern cities, my soul took wing.  What poetry was in me found its outlet; what religious capacity God had endued me with, went forth from the clash of cymbals and the sound of the sackbut, that ever had reminded me, in all seasons of sorrow, or even of joyous excitement, that I was one of an ancient people, astray in foreign pastures—­went forth (even as the compromise was made at first by Christ and his apostles with the magnificent but soulless worship of the Jews) to merge these sounds of ancient rite and form in the deep roll of the organ, that fills the churches where the Host is present.

I needed this abiding miracle to stay my faith—­to give it a new rapture, never experienced before—­to sustain me in my sorrow.  In the presence of the holy Eucharist—­in the sweet belief that saints communed with me, and that the Mother of God, who, like me, had wept and suffered, interceded for me at the throne of Christ, I regained the vitality that seemed gone forever.

There is no cup like this for the lips of the parched and weary wayfarer—­none!

CHAPTER XV.

Let me go back a little in this retrospect, into which I am compelling into a small space much that would take time in the telling, as a necessary retrenchment for too much affluence of description in the beginning.

The mind of the narrator, like the stone descending the shaft, gathers accelerated velocity with its momentum toward the last, and so expends itself in a more brief and sententious manner than in the commencement.  It should be also, but rarely is, more powerful, and more condensed as it nears its finale.

Why these things do not go more uniformly together, as according to popular opinion they invariably must, is better understood by the artist than his readers.

Details are requisite to fill up a mental picture, and impress it on the memory, and, though brevity is certainly the soul of wit, it cannot be said to be infallible in enforcing description to do its duty—­that of painting a panoramic picture on the brain.

Life is full of pre-Raphaelitism, and so is fiction, if indeed it resembles life—­such as we know it, or such as it might be.  The art of verisimilitude is found alone in detail.

Let me go back, then, for a brief summary of some of the principal events and personages of Monfort Hall and Beauseincourt, the earlier portions of this retrospect.  I will begin with the La Vignes.

George Gaston, in one of the brief pauses of his stormy political career, wooed and married Margaret La Vigne, the year before her mother espoused in second nuptials her early lover (the brother of that saintly minister who came to her rescue in the first days of her widowhood), and in this marriage she has been happy and prosperous.