The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole
stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at
once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow.
During one, five, or ten blithe years, as the case may be, all the
springs of life send up sweet waters; joy is in the very air we breathe;
happiness seems our native element. During this period we know what is
the zest of living, as compared with the mere endurance of existence,
which is, perhaps, the most we have attained to before or since. With men
this culminating epoch comes often in manhood, or even at maturity,
especially with men of arduous and successful careers. But with women it
comes most frequently perhaps in girlhood and young womanhood.
Particularly is this wont to be the fact with women who do not marry, and
with whom, as the years glide on, life becomes lonelier and its interests
fewer.
By the time Miss Ida Ludington was twenty-five years old she recognised
that she had done with happiness, and that the pale pleasures of memory
were all which remained to her.
It was not so much the mere fact that her youth was past, saddening
though that might be, which had so embittered her life, but the
peculiarly cruel manner in which it had been taken from her.
The Ludingtons were one of the old families of Hilton, a little farming
village among the hills of Massachusetts. They were not rich, but were
well-to-do, lived in the largest house in the place, and were regarded
somewhat as local magnates. Miss Ludington's childhood had been an
exceptionally happy one, and as a girl she had been the belle of the
village. Her beauty, together, with her social position and amiability of
disposition, made her the idol of the young men, recognised leader of the
girls, and the animating and central figure in the social life of the
place.
She was about twenty years old, at the height of her beauty and in the
full tide of youthful enjoyment, when she fell ill of a dreadful disease,
and for a long time lay between life and death. Or, to state the case
more accurately, the girl did die--it was a sad and faded woman who rose
from that bed of sickness.
The ravages of disease had not left a vestige of her beauty--it was
hopelessly gone. The luxuriant, shining hair had fallen out and been
replaced by a scanty growth of washed-out hue; the lips, but yesterday so
full, and red, and tempting, were thin, and drawn, and colourless, and
the rose-leaf complexion had given place to an aspect so cruelly pitted,
seamed, and scarred that even friends did not recognize her.
The fading of youth is always a melancholy experience with women; but in
most cases the process is so gradual as to temper the poignancy of
regret, and perhaps often to prevent its being experienced at all except
as a vague sentiment.
But in Miss Ludington's case the transition had been piteously sharp and
abrupt.
With others, ere youth is fully past its charms are well-nigh forgotten
in the engrossments of later years; but with her there had been nothing
to temper the bitterness of her loss.
During the long period of invalidism which followed her sickness her only
solace was a miniature of herself, at the age of seventeen, painted on
ivory, the daguerrotype process not having come into use at this time,
which was toward the close of the third decade of the present century.
Over this picture she brooded hours together when no one was near,
studying the bonny, gladsome face through blinding tears, and sometimes
murmuring incoherent words of tenderness.
Her young friends occasionally came to sit with her, by way of enlivening
the weary hours of an invalid's day. At such times she would listen with
patient indifference while they sought to interest her with current local
gossip, and as soon as possible would turn the conversation back to the
old happy days before her sickness. On this topic she was never weary of
talking, but it was impossible to induce her to take any interest in the
present.
She had caused a locket to be made, to contain the ivory miniature of
herself as a girl, and always wore it on her bosom.
In no way could her visitors give her more pleasure than by asking to see
this picture, and expressing their admiration of it. Then her poor,
disfigured face would look actually happy, and she would exclaim, "Was
she not beautiful?" "I do not think it flattered her, do you?" and with
other similar expressions indicate her sympathy with the admiration
expressed. The absence of anything like self-consciousness in the delight
she took in these tributes to the charms of her girlish self was pathetic
in its completeness. It was indeed not as herself, but as another, that
she thought of this fair girl, who had vanished from the earth, leaving a
picture as her sole memento. How, indeed, could it be otherwise when she
looked from the picture to the looking-glass, and contrasted the images?
She mourned for her girlish self, which had been so cruelly effaced from
the world of life, as for a person, near and precious to her beyond the
power of words to express, who had died.
From the time that she had first risen from the sick-bed, where she had
suffered so sad a transformation, nothing could induce her to put on the
brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed,
which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully
folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For
herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black.
For three or four years she remained more or less an invalid. At the end
of that time she regained a fair measure of health, although she seemed
not likely ever to be strong.
In the meanwhile her school-mates and friends had pretty much all
married, or been given in marriage. She was a stranger to the new set of
young people which had come on the stage since her day, while her former
companions lived in a world of new interests, with which she had nothing
in common. Society, in reorganizing itself, had left her on the outside.
The present had moved on, leaving her behind with the past. She asked
nothing better. If she was nothing to the present, the present was still
less to her. As to society, her sensitiveness to the unpleasant
impression made by her personal appearance rendered social gatherings
distasteful to her, and she wore a heavy veil when she went to church.
She was an only child. Her mother had long been dead, and when about this
time her father died she was left without near kin. With no ties of
contemporary interest to hold her to the present she fell more and more
under the influence of the habit of retrospection.
The only brightness of colour which life could ever have for her lay
behind in the girlhood which had ended but yesterday, and was yet so
completely ended. She found her only happiness in the recollections of
that period which she retained. These were the only goods she prized, and
it was the grief of her life that, while she had strong boxes for her
money, and locks and keys for her silver and her linen, there was no
device whereby she could protect her store of memories from the slow
wasting of forgetfulness.
She lived with a servant quite alone in the old Ludington homestead,
which it was her absorbing care to keep in precisely the same condition,
even to the arrangement of the furniture, in which it had always been.
If she could have insured the same permanence in the village of Hilton,
outside the homestead enclosure, she would have been spared the cause of
her keenest unhappiness. For the hand of change was making havoc with the
village: the railroad had come, shops had been built, and stores and new
houses were going up on every side, and the beautiful hamlet, with its
score or two of old-fashioned dwellings, which had been the scene of her
girlhood, was in a fair way to be transformed into a vile manufacturing
village.
Miss Ludington, to whom every stick and stone of the place was dear,
could not walk abroad without missing some ancient landmark removed since
she had passed that way before, perhaps a tree felled, some meadow, that
had been a playground of her childhood, dug up for building-lots, or a
row of brick tenements going up on the site of a sacred grove.
Her neighbours generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as
they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of
houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the
paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton
was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to
which Miss Ludington sorrowfully assented.
It would be hard to describe her impotent wrath, her sense of outrage and
irreparable loss, as one by one these changes effaced some souvenir of
her early life. The past was once dead already; they were killing it a
second time. Her feelings at length became so intolerable that she kept
her house, pretty much ceasing to walk abroad.
At this period, when she was between thirty and thirty-five years old, a
distant relative left her a large fortune. She had been well-to-do
before, but now she was very rich. As her expenses had never exceeded a
few hundred dollars a year, which had procured her everything she needed,
it would be hard to imagine a person with less apparent use for a great
deal of money. And yet no young rake, in the heyday of youth and the riot
of hot blood, could have been more overjoyed at the falling to him of a
fortune than was this sad-faced old maid. She became smiling and
animated. She no longer kept at home, but walked abroad. Her step was
quick and strong; she looked on at the tree-choppers, the builders, and
the painters, at their nefarious work, no more in helpless grief and
indignation, but with an unmistakable expression of triumph.
Presently surveyors appeared in the village, taking exact and careful
measurements of the single broad and grassy street which formed the older
part of it. Miss Ludington was closeted with a builder, and engrossed
with estimates. The next year she left Hilton to the mercy of the
vandals, and never returned.
But it was to another Hilton that she went.
The fortune she had inherited had enabled her to carry out a design which
had been a day-dream with her ever since the transformation of the
village had begun. Among the pieces of property left her was a large farm
on Long Island several miles out of the city of Brooklyn. Here she had
rebuilt the Hilton of her girlhood, in facsimile, with every change
restored, every landmark replaced. In the midst of this silent village
she had built for her residence an exact duplicate of the Ludington
homestead, situated in respect to the rest of the village precisely as
the original was situated in the real Hilton.
The astonishment of the surveyors and builders at the character of the
work required of them was probably great, and their bills certainly were,
though Miss Ludington would not have grudged the money had they been ten
times greater. However, seeing that the part of the village duplicated
consisted of but one broad maple-planted street, with not over thirty
houses, mostly a story and a half, and that none of the buildings, except
the school-house, the little meeting-house, and the homestead, were
finished inside, the outlay was not greater than an elaborate plan of
landscape gardening would have involved.
The furniture and fittings of the Massachusetts homestead, to the least
detail, had been used to fit up its Long Island duplicate, and when all
was complete and Miss Ludington had settled down to housekeeping, she
felt more at home than in ten years past.
True, the village which she had restored was empty; but it was not more
empty than the other Hilton had been to her these many years, since her
old schoolmates had been metamorphosed into staid fathers and mothers.
These respectable persons were not the schoolmates and friends of her
girlhood, and with no hard feelings toward them, she had still rather
resented seeing them about, as tending to blur her recollections of their
former selves, in whom alone she was interested.
That her new Long Island neighbours considered her mildly insane was to
her the least of all concerns. The only neighbours she cared about were
the shadowy forms which peopled the village she had rescued from
oblivion, whose faces she fancied smiling gratefully at her from the
windows of the homes she had restored to them.
For she had a notion that the spirits of her old neighbours, long dead,
had found out this resurrected Hilton, and were grateful for the
opportunity to revisit the unaltered scenes of their passion. If she had
grieved over the removal of the old landmarks and the change in the
appearance of the village, how much more hopelessly must they have
grieved if indeed the dead revisit earth! The living, if their homes are
broken up, can make them new ones, which, after a fashion, will serve the
purpose; but the dead cannot. They are thenceforth homeless and desolate.
No sense of having benefited living persons would have afforded Miss
Ludington the pleasure she took in feeling that, by rebuilding ancient
Hilton, she had restored homes to these homeless ones.
But of all this fabric of the past which she had resurrected, the central
figure was the school-girl Ida Ludington. The restored village was the
mausoleum of her youth.
Over the great old-fashioned fireplace, in the sitting-room of the
homestead which she had rebuilt in the midst of the village, she had hung
a portrait in oil, by the first portrait-painter then in the country. It
was an enlarged copy of the little likeness on ivory which had formerly
been so great a solace to her.
The portrait was executed with extremely life-like effect, and was fondly
believed by Miss Ludington to be a more accurate likeness in some
particulars than the ivory picture itself.
It represented a very beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen, although
already possessing the ripened charms of a woman. She was dressed in
white, with a low bodice, her luxuriant golden hair, of a rare sheen and
fineness, falling upon beautifully moulded shoulders. The complexion was
of a purity that needed the faint tinge of pink in the cheeks to relieve
it of a suspicion of pallor. The eyes were of the deepest, tenderest
violet, full of the light of youth, and the lips were smiling.
It was, indeed, no wonder that Miss Ludington had mourned the vanishing
from earth of this delectable maiden with exceeding bitterness, or that
her heart yet yearned after her with an aching tenderness across the gulf
of years.
How bright, how vivid, how glowing had been the life of that beautiful
girl! How real as compared with her own faint and faded personality,
which, indeed, had shone these many years only by the light reflected
from that young face! And yet that life, in its strength and brightness,
had vanished like an exhalation, and its elements might no more be
recombined than the hues of yesterday's dawn.
Miss Ludington had hung the portraits of her father and mother with
immortelles, but the frame of the girl's picture she had wound with
deepest crape.
Her father and mother she did not mourn as one without hope, believing
that she should see them some day in another world; but from the death of
change which the girl had died no Messiah had ever promised any
resurrection.