had been tied across it, and this barrier had to cut through. Then on they came again: At the head of procession, astride an old horse that in his better days had belonged to a mounted rifleman, rode the parson. He was several yards ahead of the others and quite forgetful of them. The end of his flute stuck neglectedly out of his waistcoat pocket; his bridle reins lay slack on the neck of the drowsy beast; his hands were piled on the pommel of the saddle as over his familiar pulpit; his dreamy moss-agate eyes were on the tree-tops far ahead. In truth he was preparing a sermon on the affection of one man for another and ransacking Scripture for illustrations; and he meant to preach this the following Sunday when there would be some one sadly missed among his hearers. Nevertheless he enjoyed great peace of spirit this day: it was not John who rode behind him as the bridegroom: otherwise he would as soon have returned to the town at the head of the forces of Armageddon.
Behind the parson came William Penn in the glory of a new bridle and saddle and a blanket of crimson cloth; his coat smooth as satin, his mane a tumbling cataract of white silk; bunches of wild roses at his ears; his blue-black eyes never so soft, and seeming to lift his feet cautiously like an elephant bearing an Indian princess.
They were riding side by side, the young husband and wife. He keeping one hand on the pommel of her saddle, thus holding them together; while with the other he used his hat to fan his face, now hers, though his was the one that needed it, she being cool and quietly radiant with the thoughts of her triumph that day–the triumph of her wedding, of her own beauty. Furthermore show was looking ahead to the house-warming that night when she would be able to triumph again and also count her presents.
Then came Major and Mrs. Falconer. Her face was hidden by a veil and as they passed, it was held turned toward him: he was talking, uninterrupted.
Then followed Horatio Turpin and Kitty Poythress; and then Erskine and his betrothed, he with fresh feathers of the hawk and the scarlet tanager gleaming in his cap above his swart, stern aquiline face. Then Peter, beside the widow Babcock; he openly aflame and solicitous; she coy and discreetly inviting, as is the wisdom of some. Then others and others and others–a long gay pageant, filling the woods with merry voices and laughter.
They passed and the sounds died away–passed on to the town awaiting the, to the house-warming, and please God, to long life and some real affection and happiness.
Once he had expected to ride beside her at the head of this procession. There had gone by him the vision of his own life as it was to have been.
Long after the last sound had ceased in the distance he was sitting at the root of the red oak. The sun set, the moon rose, he was there still. A loud, impatient neigh from his horse aroused him. He sprang lightly up, meaning to ride all night and not to draw rein until he had crossed the Kentucky River and reached Traveller’s Rest, the home of Governor Shelby, where he had been invited to break his travel.
All that nigh he rode and at sunrise was far away. Pausing on a height and turning his horse’s head, he sat a long time motion-less as a statue. Then he struck his feet into its flank and all that day rode back again.
The sun was striking the tree-tops as he neared the clearing. He could see her across the garden. She sat quite still, her face turned toward the horizon. Against her breast, opened but forgotten, lay a book. He could recognize it. By that story she had judged him and wished to guide him. The smile smote his eyes like the hilt of a knight’s sword used as a Cross to drive away the Evil One. For he knew the evil purpose with which he had returned.
And so he sat watching her until she rose and walked slowly to the house.
XXII
IT was early autumn when the first letters from him were received over the mountains. All these had relation to Mount Vernon and his business there.
To the Transylvania Library Committee he wrote that the President had mad a liberal subscription for the buying of books and that the Vice-President and other public men would be likely to contribute.
His sonorous, pompous letter to a member of the Democratic Society was much longer and in part as follows:
“When I made know to the President who I was and where I came from, he regarded me with a look at once so stern and so benign, that I felt like one of my school-boys overtaken in some small rascality and was almost of a mind to march straight to a corner of the room and stand with my face to the wall. If he had seized me by the coat collar and trounced me well, I should somehow have felt that he had the right. From the conversations that followed I am led to believe that he knows the name of every prominent member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, and that he understands Kentucky affairs with regard to national and international complications as no other living man. While questioning me on the subject, he had the manner of one who, from conscientiousness, would further verify facts which he had already tested. But what impressed me even more than his knowledge was his justice; in illustration of which I shall never forget his saying, that the part which Kentucky had taken, or had wished to take, in the Spanish and French conspiracies had caused him greater solicitude than any other single event since the foundation of the National Government; but that nowhere else in America had the struggle for immediate self-government been so necessary and so difficult, and that nowhere else were the mistakes of patriotic and able men more natural or more to be judged with mildness.
“I think I can quote his very words when he spoke of the foolish jealousies and heartburnings, due to misrepresentations, that have influenced Kentucky against the East as a section and against the Government as favouring it: ‘The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and comfort; and what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own production to the weight, influence, and future maritime strength of the Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of interest, as One Nation.’
“Memorable to me likewise was the language in which he proceeded to show that this was true:
“‘The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on this head. They have seen in the negotiations by the Executive, and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction of that event throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi. . . . Will they not henceforth be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from their Brethren and connect them with Aliens?’
“I am frank to declare that, having enjoyed the high privilege of these interviews with the President and been brought to judge rightly what through ignorance I had judged amiss, I feel myself in honour bound to renounce my past political convictions and to resign my membership in the Lexington Democratic Society. Nor shall I join the Democratic Society of Philadelphia, as had been my ardent purpose; and it will not be possible for me on reaching that city to act as the emissary of the Kentucky Clubs. But I shall lay before the Society the despatches of which I am the bearer. And will you lay before yours the papers herewith enclosed, containing my formal resignation with the grounds thereof carefully stated?”
To Mrs. Falconer he wrote bouyantly:
“I have crossed the Kentucky Alps, seen the American Caesar, carried away some of his gold. I came, I saw, I overcame. How do you think I met the President? I was riding toward Mount Vernon one quiet sunny afternoon and unexpectedly came upon an old gentleman who was putting up some bars that opened into a wheat-filed by the roadside. He had on long boots, corduroy smalls, a speckled red jacket, blue coat with yellow buttons, and a broad-brimmed hat. He held a hickory switch in his hand. An umbrella and a long staff were attached to his saddle-bow. His limbs were so long, large, and sinewy; his countenance so lofty, masculine, and contemplative; and although he was of a presence so statue-like and venerable that my heart with a great throb cried out, It is Washington!”
“My dear friend,” he wrote at the close, “it is of no little worth to me that I should have come to Mount Vernon at this turning-point of my life. I find myself uplifted to a plane of thought and feeling higher than has ever been trod by me. When I began to draw near this place, I seemed to be mounting higher, like a man ascending a mountain; and ever since my arrival there has been this same sense of rising into a still loftier atmosphere, of surveying a vaster horizon, of beholding the juster relations of surrounding objects.
“All this feeling has its origin in my contemplation of the character of the President. You know that when a heavy sleet falls upon the Kentucky forest, the great trees crack and split, or groan and stagger, with branches snapped off or trailing. In adversity it is often so with men. But he is a vast mountain-peak, always calm, always lofty, always resting upon a base that nothing can shake; never higher, never lower, never changing; from every quarter of the earth storms have rushed in and beaten upon him; but they have passed; he is as he was. The heavens have emptied their sleets and snows on his head,–these have made him look only purer, only the more sublime.
“From the spectacle of this great man thus bearing the great burdens of his great life, a new standard of what is possible to human nature has been raised within me. I have seen with my own eyes a man whom the adverse forces of the world have not been able to wreck–a lover of perfection, who has so wrought it out in his character that to know him is to be awed into reverence of his virtues. I shall go away from him with nobler hopes of what a man may do and be.
“It is to you soley that I owe the honour of having enjoyed the personal consideration of the President. His reception of me had been in the highest degree ceremonious and distant; but upon my mentioning the names of father and brother, his manner grew warm: I had touched that trait of affectionate faithfulness with which he has always held on to every tie of kin and friendship. That your father should have fought against him and your brother under him made no difference in his memory. He had many questions to ask regarding you–your happiness, your family–to some of which I could return the answers that gave him pleasure or left him thoughtful. Upon my setting out from Mount Vernon, his last words made me the bearer of his message to you, the child of an old comrade and the sister or a gallant young soldier.”
Beyond this there was nothing personal in his letter and nothing as to his return.
When she next heard, he was in Philadelphia, giving his attention to the choosing and shipment of the books. One piece of news, imparted in perfect calmness by him, occasioned her acute disappointment. His expectation of coming into possession of some ten thousand dollars had not quite been realized. An appeal had been taken and the case was yet pending. He was pleased neither with the good faith nor with the good sense of the counsel engaged; and he would remain on the spot himself during the trial. He added that he was lodging with a pleasant family. Then followed the long winter during which all communication between the frontier and the seaboard was interrupted. When spring returned at last and the earliest travel was resumed, other letters came, announcing that the case had gone against him, and that he had nothing.
She sold at once all the new linen that had been woven, got together all the money she otherwise could and despatched it with Major Falconer’s consent, begging him to make use of it for the sake of their friendship–not to be foolish and proud: there were lawyers’ fees it could help to pay, or other plain practical needs it might cover. But when the post-rider returned, he brought it all back with a letter of gratitude: only, he couldn’t accept it. And the messenger had been warned not to let it be known that he was in prison for debt on account of these same suit expenses; for having from the first formed a low opinion of his counsel’s honour and ability and having later expressed this opinion at the door of the court-room with a good deal of fire and a good deal of contempt, and being furthermore unable and unwilling to pay the exorbitant fee, he had been promptly clapped into jail by the incensed attorney, as well for his poverty and for his temper and his pride.
In jail he spent that spring and summer and autumn. Then an important turn was given to his history. It seems that among the commissions with which he was charged on leaving Lexington was one from Edward West, the watchmaker and inventor, who some time before, and long before Fulton, had made trial of steam navigation with a small boat on the Town Fork of the Elkhorn, and who desired to have his invention brought before the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. He had therefore placed a full description of his steamboat in John’s hands with the request that he would enforce this with the testimony of an eye-witness as to its having moved through water. At this time, through Franklin’s influence, the Society was keenly interested in the work of inventors, having received also some years previous from Hyacinthe de Magellan two hundred guineas to be used for rewarding the authors of improvements and discoveries. Accordingly it took up the subject of West’s invention but desired to hear more regarding the success of the experiment; and so requested John to appear before it at one of its meetings. But upon looking for this obscure John and finding him in jail, the committee were under the necessity of appearing before him. Whereupon, grown interested in him and made acquainted with the ground of his unreasonable imprisonment, some of the members effected his release–by recourse to the attorney with certain well-direct threats that he could easily be put into jail for his own debts. Not only this; but soon afterwards the young Westerner was taken into the law-office of one of these gentlemen, binding himself for a term of years.
It was not until spring that he wrote he humorously of his days in jail; but when it came to telling her of the other matter, the words refused to form themselves before his will or his hand to shape them on the paper. He would do this in the next letter, he said to himself mournfully.
But early that winter Major Falconer had died, and his next letter was but a short hurried reply to one from her, bringing him this intelligence. And before he wrote again, certain grave events had happened that led him still further to defer acquainting her with his new situation, new duties, new plans.
That same spring, then, during which he was entering upon his career in Philadelphia, she too began really to live. And beginning to live, she began to build–inwardly and outwardly; for what is all life but ceaseless inner and outer building?
As the first act, she sold one of the major’s military grants, reserving the ample, noble, parklike one on which she had passed existence up to this; and near the cabin she laid the foundations of her house. Not the great ancestral manor-house on the James and yet a seaboard aristocratic Virginia country-place: two story brick with two-story front veranda of Corinthian columns; wide hall, wide stairway; oak wood interior, hand-carved, massive; sliding doors between the large library and large dining-room; great bedrooms, great fireplaces, great brass fenders and fire-dogs, brass locks and keys: full of elegance, spaciousness, comfort, rest.
In every letter she sent him that spring and summer and early autumn, always she had something to tell him about this house, about the room in it built for him, about the negros she had bought, the land she was clearing, the changes and improvements everywhere: as to many things she wanted his advice. That year also she sent back to Virginia for flower-seed and shrub and plants–the same old familiar ones that had grown on her father’s lawn, in the garden, about the walls, along the water–some of which had been bought over from England: the flags, the lilies, honeysuckles, calacanthus, snowdrops, roses–all of them. Speaking of this, she wrote him that of course that most of these would have to be set out that autumn, and little could be done for grounds till the following season; but the house!–it was to be finished before winter set in. In the last of these letters, she ended by saying: “I think I know now the very day you will be coming back. I can hear your horse’s feet rustling in the leaves of–I said–October; but I will say November this time.”
His replies were unsatisfying. There had been the short, hurried, earnest letter, speaking of Major Falconer’s death: that was all right. But since then a vague blinding mist had seemed to lie between her eyes and every page. Something was kept hidden–some new trouble. “I shall understand everything when he comes!” she would say to herself each time. “I can wait.” Her buoyancy was irrepressible.
Late that autumn the house was finished–one of those early country-places yet to be seen here and there on the landscape of Kentucky, marking the building era of the aristocratic Virginians and renewing in the wilderness the architecture of the James.
She had taken such delight in furnishing her room: in the great bedstead with its mighty posts, its high tester, its dainty, hiding curtains; such delight in choosing, in bleaching, in weaving the linen for it! And the pillowcases–how expectant they were on the two pillows now set side by side at the head of the bed, with the delicate embroidery in the centre of each! At first she had thought of working her initials within an oval-shaped vine; but one day, her needle suddenly arrested in the air, she had simply worked a rose.
Late one afternoon, when the blue of Indian summer lay on the walls of the forest like a still sweet veil, she came home from a walk in the woods. Her feet had been rustling among the brown leaves and each time she had laughed. At her round white throat she had pinned a scarlet leaf, from an old habit of her girlhood. But was not Kentucky turning into Virginia? Was not womanhood becoming girlhood again? She was still so young–only thirty-eight. She had the right to be bringing in from the woods a bunch of the purple violets of November.
She sat down in her shadowy room before the deep fireplace; where there was such comfort now, such loneliness. In early years at such hours she had like to play. She resolved to get her a spinet. Yes; and she would have myrtle-berry candles instead of tallow, and a slender-legged mahogany table beside which to read again in the Spectator and “Tom Jones.” As nearly as she could she would bring back everything that she had been used to in her childhood–was not all life still before her? If he were coming, it must be soon, and she would know what had been keeping him–what it was that had happened. She had walked to meet him so many times already. And the heartless little gusts of wind, starting up among the leaves in the woods, how often they had fooled her ear and left her white and trembling!
The negro boy who had been sent to town on other business and to fetch the mail, soon afterwards knocked and entered. There was a letter from him–a short one and a paper. She read the letter and could not believe her own eyes, could not believe her own mind. Then she opened the paper and read the announcement of it printed there”: he was married.
That night in her bedroom–with the great clock measuring out life in the corner–the red logs turning slowly to ashes–the crickets under the bricks of the hearth singing of summer gone–that night, sitting by the candle-stand, where his letter lay opened, in a nightgown white as white samite, she loosened the folds of her heavy lustrous hair–wave upon wave–until the edges that rippled over her forehead rippled down over her knees. With the loosening of her hair somehow had come the loosening of her tears. And with the loosening of her tears came the loosening of her hold upon what she, until this night, had never acknowledged to herself–her love for him, the belief that he had loved her.
The next morning the parson, standing a white, cold shepherd before his chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text: “I shall go softly all my years.” While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out.
“Yes,” she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were whirled fiercely about her feet, “I shall go softly all my years.”
XXIII
AFTER this the years were swept along. Fast came the changes in Kentucky. The prophecy which John Gray had made to his school-children passed to its realization and reality went far beyond it. In waves of migration, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of settlers of the Anglo-Saxon race hurried into the wilderness and there jostled and shouldered each other in the race passion of soil-owning and home-building; or always farther westward they rushed, pushing the Indian back. Lexington became the chief manufacturing town of the new civilization, thronged by merchants and fur-clad traders; gathered into it were men and women making a society that would have been brilliant in the capitals of the East; at its bar were heard illustrious voices, the echoes of which are not yet dead, are past all dying; the genius of young Jouett found for itself the secret of painting canvases so luminous and true that never since in the history of the State have they been equalled; the Transylvania University arose with lecturers famous enough to be known in Europe: students of law and medicine travelled to it from all parts of the land.
John Gray’s school-children grew to be men and women. For the men there were no longer battles to fight in Kentucky, but there were the wars of the Nation; and far away on the widening boundaries of the Republic they conquered or failed and fell; as volunteers with Perry in the victory on Lake Erie; in the awful massacre at the River Raisin; under Harrison at the Thames; in the mud and darkness of the Mississippi at New Orleans, repelling Pakenham’s charge with Wellington’s veteran, victory-flushed campaigners.
The school-master’s friend, the parson, he too had known his more peaceful warfare, having married and become a manifold father. Of a truth it was feared at one period that the parson was running altogether to prayers and daughters. For it was remarked that with each birth, his petitions seemed longer and his voice to rise from behind the chancel with a fresh wail as of one who felt a growing grievance both against himself and the almighty. Howbeit, innocently enough after the appearance of the fifth female infant, one morning he preached the words: “No man knoweth what manner of creature he is”; and was unaware that a sudden smile rippled over the faces of his hearers. But it was not until later on when mother and six were packed into one short pew at morning service, that they became known in a body as the parson’s Collect for all Sundays.
Sometimes the little ones were divided and part of them sat in another pew where there was a single occupant–a woman–childless.
“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.”
Then seating herself beside the little candle stand which mercifully for her had had shed its light on so many books in the great lonely bedchamber, she re-read those last words:
“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:
“Can you remember the summer I left Kentucky? On reaching Philadelphia I called on a certain family consisting, as I afterwards ascertained, of father, mother, and daughter; and being in search of lodgings, I was asked to become a member of their household. This offer was embraced the more eagerly because I was sick for a home that summer and in need of some kind soul to lean on in my weakness. I had indeed been led for these reasons to seek their acquaintance–the father and mother having known my own parents even before I met them. You will thus understand how natural a haven with my loneliness and amid such memories this house became to me, and upon what grounds I stood in my association with its members from the beginning.
“When the lawsuit went against me and I was wrongfully thrown into jail for debt, their faithful interest only deepened. Very poor themselves, they would yet have make any sacrifice in my behalf. During the months of my imprisonment they were often with me, bringing every comfort and brightening the dulness of many an hour.
“Upon my release I returned gladly to their joyous household, welcomed I could not say with what joyous affection. Soon afterwards I found a position in the office of a law firm and got my start in life.
“And now I cross the path of some things that cannot be written. But you who know what my life and character had been will nobly understand: remember your last words to me.
“One day I offered my hand to the daughter. I told her the whole truth: that there was some one else–not free; that no one could take the place of this other was filling at the moment, and would always fill. Nevertheless, if she would accept me on these conditions, everything that it was in my power to promise she could have.
“She said that in time she would win the rest.
“A few weeks later that letter came from you, bringing the intelligence that changed everything. (Do you remember my reply? I seem only this moment to have dropped the pen.) As soon as I could control myself, I told her that now you were free, that it was but justice and kindness alike to her and to me that I should give here the chance to reconsider the engagement. A week passed, I went again. I warned her how different the situation had become. I could promise less than before–I could not say how little. A month later I went again.
“Ah, well–that is all!
“The summer after my marriage I travelled to Virginia regarding a landsuit. One day I rode far out of my course into the path of the country where you lived. I remained some days strolling over the silent woods and fields, noting the bushes on the lawn, such as you had carried over into Kentucky, hunting out the quiet nooks where you were used to read in your girlhood. Those long, sweet, sacred summer days alone with you there before you were married! O Jessica! Jessica! Jessica! Jessica! And to this day the sight of peach blossoms in the spring–the rustle of autumn leaves under my feet! Can you recall the lines of Malory? ‘Men and women could love together seven years, and then was love truth and faithfulness.’ How many more than seven have I loved you!–you who never gave me anything but friendship, but who would in time, I hope, have given me everything if I had come back. Ah, I did come back! Many a time even now as soon as I have hurried through the joyous gateways of sleep, I come back over the mountains to you as naturally as though there had been no years to separate and to age. Let me tell you all this! My very life would be incomplete without it! I owed something to you long before I owed anything to another: a duty can never set aside a duty. And as to what I have owed you since, it becomes more and more the noblest earthly that I shall ever leave unpaid. I did not know you perfectly when we parted: I was too young, too ignorant of the world, too ignorant of many women. A man must have touched their coarseness in order to appreciate their refinement; have been wounded by untruthfulness to understand their delicate honour; he must have been driven to turn his eyes mercifully away from their stain before he can ever look with all the reverence and gratitude of his heart and soul upon their brows of chastity.
“But of my life otherwise. I take it fir granted that you would know where I stand, what I have become, whether I have kept faith with the ideals of my youth.
“I have succeeded, perhaps reached now what men call the highest point of their worldly prosperity, made good my resolve that no human power should defeat me. All that Macbeth had not I have: a quiet throne of my own, children, wife, troops of friends, duties, honours, ease. There have been times when with natural misgiving lest I had wandered too far these many summers on a sea of glory, I have prepared for myself the lament of Wolsey on his fall: yet ill fortune had not overwhelmed me or mine.
“All this prosperity, as the mere fruit of my toil, has been less easy than for many. I may not boast the Apostle that I have fought a good fight, but I can say that I fought a hard one. The fight will always be hard for any man who undertakes to conquer life with the few simple weapons I have used and who will accept victory only upon such terms as I have demanded. For be my success small or great, it has been won without inner compromise or other form of self-abasement. No man can look me in the eyes and say I ever wronged him for my own profit; none may charge that I have smiled on him in order to use him, or call him my friend that I might make him do for me the work of a servant.
“Do not imagine I fail to realize that I have added my full share to the general evil of the world: in part unconsciously, in part against my conscious will. It is the knowledge of this influence of imperfection forever flowing from myself to all others that has taught me charity with all the wrongs that flow from others toward me. As I have clung to myself despite the evil, so I have clung to the world despite all the evil that is in the world. To lose faith in men, not humanity; to see justice go down and not believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right; and so to turn with ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all–the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. Many a time this candle has gone out; but as quickly as I could snatch any torch–with your sacred name on my lips–it has been relighted.
“My candles are all beginning to burn low now. For as we advance far on into life, one by one our duties end, one by one the lights go out. Not much ahead of me now must lurk the great mortal changes, coming always nearer, always faster. As they approach, I look less to my candles, more toward my candles, more toward my lighthouses–those distant unfailing beacons that cast their rays over the stormy sea of this life from the calm ocean of the Infinate. I know this: that if I should live to be an old man, my duties ended and my candles gone, it is these that will shine in upon me in that vacant darkness. And I have this belief: that if we did but recognize them aright, these ideals at the close of life would become one with the ideals of youth. We lost them as we left mortal youth behind; we regain them as we enter upon youth immortal.
“If I have kept unbroken faith with any of mine, thank you. And thank God!”