Part 36

"Yes"," she had said, "I shall go softly all my years."

The plants she had brought that summer from Virginia had long since become old bushes. The Virginia Creeper had climbed to the tops of the trees. The garden, though in the same spot, was another place now, with vine-heavy arbours and sodden walks running between borders of flowers and vegetables--daffodils and thyme--in the quaint Virginia fashion. There was a lawn covered as the ancestral one had been with the feathery grass of England. There was a park where the deer remained at home in their wilderness.

Crowning this landscape of comfort and good taste, stood the house. Often of nights when its roof lay deep under snow and the eaves were bearded with hoary icicles, there were candles twinkling at every window and the sounds of music and dancing in the parlours. Once a year there was a great venison supper in the dining-room, draped with holly and mistletoe. On Christmas eve man a child's sock or stocking was hung--no one knew when or by whom--around the shadowy chimney-seat of her room; and every Christmas morning the little negros from the cabins knew to whom each of these belonged. In spring, parties of young girls and youths came out from town for fishing parties and picknicked in the lawn amid the dandelions and under the song of the blackbird; during the summer, for days at a time, other gay company filled the house; of autumns there were nutting parties in the russet woods. Other guests also, not young, not gay. Aaron Burr was entertained there; there met for counsel the foremost Western leaders in his magnificent conspiracy. More than one great man of his day, middle-aged, unmarried, began his visits, returned oftener for awhile--always alone--and one day drove away disappointed.

Through seasons and changes she had gone softly: never retreating from life but drawing about her as closely as she could its ties, its sympathies, it duties: in all things a character of the finest equipois, the truest moderation.

But these are women of the world--some of us men may have discerned one of them in the sweep of our experiences--to whom the joy and the sorrow come alike with quietness. For them there is neither the cry of sudden delight nor the cry of sudden anguish. Gazing deep into their eyes, we are reminded of the light of dim churches; hearing their voices, we dream of some minstrel whose murmurs reach us imperfectly through his fortress wall; beholding the sweetness of their faces, we are touched as by the appeal of the mute flowers; merely meeting them in the street, we recall the long-vanished image of the Divine Goodess. They are the women who have missed happiness and who know it, but having failed of affection, give themselves to duty. And so life never rises high and close about them as about one who stands waist-deep in a wheat-field, gathering at will either its poppies or its sheaves; it flows forever away as from one who pauses waist-deep in a stream and hearkens rather to the rush of all things toward the eternal deeps. It was into the company of theses quieter pilgrims that she had passed: she had missed happiness twice.

Her beauty had never failed. Nature had fought hard in her for all things; and to the last youth of her womanhood it burned like an autumn rose which some morning we may have found on the lawn under a dew that is turning to ice. But when youth was gone, in the following years her face began to reflect the freshness of Easter lilies. For prayer will in time make the human countenance its own divinest alter; years upon years of true thoughts, like ceaseless music shut up within, will vibrate along the nerves of expression until the lines of the living instrument are drawn into correspondence, and the harmony of visible form matches the unheard harmonies of the mind. It was about this time also that there fell upon her hair the earliest rays of the light which is the dawn of Eternal Morning.

She had never ceased to watch his career as part of her very life. Time was powerless to remove him farther from her than destiny had removed him long before: it was always yesterday; the whole past with him seemed caught upon the clearest mirror just at her back. Once or twice a year she received a letter, books, papers, something; she had been kept informed of the birth of his children. From other sources--his letters to the parson, traders between Philadelphia and the West--she knew other things: he had risen in the world, was a judge, often leading counsel in great cases, was almost a great man. She planted her pride, her gratitude, her happiness, on this new soil: they were the few seed that a woman in the final years will sow in a window-box and cover the window-pane and watch and water and wake and think of in the night--she who was used once to range the fields.

But never from the first to last had she received a letter from him that was transparent; the mystery stayed unlifted; she had to accept the constancy of his friendship without its confidence. Question or chiding of course there never was from her; inborn refinement alone would have kept her from curiosity or prying; but she could not put away the conviction that the concealment which he steadily adhered to was either delicately connected with his marriage or registered but too plainly some downward change in himself. Which was it, or was it both? Had he too missed happiness? Missed it as she had--by a union with a perfectly commonplace, plodding, unimaginative, unsympathetic, unrefined nature? And was it a mercy to be able to remember him, not to know him?

These thoughts filled her so often, so often! For into the busiest life--the life that toils to shut out thought--the inevitable leisure will come; and with the leisure will return the dreaded emptiness, the loneliness, the never stifled need of sympathy, affection, companionship--for that world of two outside of which every other human being is a stranger. And it was he who entered into all these hours of hers as by a right that she had neither the heart nor the strength to question.

For behind everything else there was one thing more--deeper than anything else, dearer, more sacred; the feeling she would never surrender that for a while at least he had cared more for her than he had ever realized.

One mild afternoon of autumn she was walking with quiet dignity around her garden. She had just come from town where she had given to Jouett the last sitting of her portrait, and she was richly dressed in the satin gown and cap of lace which those who see the picture nowadays will remember. The finishing of it had saddened her a little; she meant to leave it to him; and she wondered whether, when he looked into the eyes of this portrait, he would at last understand": she had tried to tell him the truth; it was the truth that Jouett painted.

Thus she was thinking of the past as usual; and once she paused in the very spot where one sweet afternoon of May long ago he had leaned over the fence, holding in his hand his big black had decorated with a Jacobin cockade, and had asked her consent to marry Amy. Was not yonder the very maple, in the shade of which he and she sat some weeks later while she had talked with him about the ideals of life? She laughed, but she touched her handkerchief to her eyes as she turned to pass on. Then she stopped abruptly.

Coming down the garden walk toward her with a light rapid step, his head in the air, a smile on his fresh noble face, an earnest look in his gray eyes, was a tall young fellow of some eighteen years. A few feet off he lifted his hat with a free, gallant air, uncovering a head of dark-red hair, closely curling.

"I beg your pardon, madam," he said, in a voice that fell on her ears like music long remembered. "Is this Mrs. Falconer?"

"Yes," she replied, beginning to tremble, "I am Mrs. Falconer."

"Then I should like to introduce myself to you, dearest madam. I am John Gray, the son of your old friend, and my father sends me to you to stay with you if you will let me. And he desires me to deliver this letter."

"John Gray!" she cried, running forward and searching his face. "You John Gray! You! Take off your hat!" For a moment she looked at his forehead and his hair; her eyes became blinded with tears. She threw her arms around his neck with a sob and covered his face with kisses.

"Madam," said the young fellow, stooping to pick up his hat, and laughing outright at his own blushes and confusion, "I don't wonder that my father thinks so much of you!"

"I never did that to your father!" she retorted. Beneath the wrinkled ivory of her skin a tinge of faintest pink appeared and disappeared.

Half and hour later she was sitting at a western window. Young John Gray had gone to the library to write to his father and mother, announcing his arrival; and in her lap lay his father's letter which with tremulous fingers she was now wiping her spectacles to read. In all these years she had never allowed herself to think of her John Gray as having grown older; she saw him still young, as when he used to lean over the garden fence. But now the presence of this son had the effect of suddenly pushing the father far on into life; and her heart ached with this first realization that he too must have passed the climbing-point and have set his feet on the shaded downward slope that leads to the quiet valley.

His letter began lightly:

"I send John to you with the wish that you will be to the son the same inspiring soul you once were to the father. You will find him headstrong and with great notions of what he is to be in the world. But he is warm-hearted and clean-hearted. Let him do for you the things I used to do; let him hold the yarn on his arms for you to wind off, and read to you your favourite novels; he is a good reader for a young fellow. And will you get out your spinning-wheel some night when the logs are in roaring in the fireplace and let him hear its music? Will you some time with your hands make him a johnny-cake on a new ash shingle? I want him to know a woman who can do all things and still be a great lady. And lay upon him all the burdens that in any way you can, so that he shall not think too much of what he may some day do in life, but, of what he is actually doing. We get great reports of the Transylvania University, of the bar of Lexington, of the civilization that I foresaw would spring up in Kentucky; and I send John to you with the wish that he hear lectures and afterward go into the office of some one whom I shall name, and finally marry and settle there for life. You recall this as the wish of my own; through John shall be done what I could not do. You see how stubborn I am! I have given him the names of my school-children. He is to find out those of them who still live there, and to tell me of those who have passed away or been scattered.

"I do not know; but if at the end of life I should be left alone here, perhaps I shall make my way back to Kentucky to John, as the old tree falls beside the young one."

>From this point the tone of the letter changed.

"And now I am going to open to you what no other eye has ever seen, must ever see--one page in the book of my life."

When she reached these words with a contraction of the heart and a loud throbbing of the pulses in her ears, she got up and locked the letter in her bureau. Then, commanding herself, she went to the dining-room, and with her own hands prepared the supper table; got our her finest linen, glass, silver; had the sconces lighted, extra candelabra brought in; gave orders for especial dishes to be cooked; and when everything was served, seated her guest at the foot of the table and let him preside as though it were his old rightful place. Ah, how like his father he was! Several times when the father's name was mentioned, he quite choked up with tears.

At an early hour he sought rest from the fatigue of travel. She was left alone. The house was quiet. She summoned the negro girl who slept on the floor in her room and who was always with her of evenings:

"You can go to the cabin till bedtime. And when you come in, don't make any noise. And don't speak to me. I shall be asleep."