Mis’ Loomis and Ellen Grant has just had our hands full seein’ people.
Ellen’s as deaf as a post, but she _would_ stay, and she set by the
winder and let us know when she seen anyone comin’ up the steps. Mis’
Dunham, she spelled us for a while. You never see anything like it in
all your born days, Mis’ Armstrong! The hull town’s been here, and
carriages driving up, folks some of ’em Mis’ Rhodes didn’t even know,
comin’ to inquire or leave cards. There’s been port wine sent for her,
and Tokay, and chicken broth, and jellies—I thought there’d been enough
sent last week for _him_, but they’re comin’ yet. What to do with ’em I
don’t know, for she won’t touch nothin’. And there’s flowers, flowers,
flowers!—from them great white lilies from Colonel Penn’s greenhouse to
a little wilty sprig o’ pink geranium that one of them colored children
at the corner brought tied with a white ribbon, for ‘little Marse
Silvy’; the child was cryin’ when she came. I filled her full of broth
and jelly before she went home. Some of the things has on ’em ‘For
Silvy’s mother’—that pleases her best of all. And the dear child lies
there so peaceful and sweet—She put the geranium by him herself. But
she’s waitin’ in there to see you, I know.”
Such a slender, drooping figure in its black garments that came to meet
Helen! Such patience, such gentleness in the pale face! The tears rose
once more to Helen’s eyes as she put her protecting arms around her
friend and held her close in a long embrace.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Anne Rhodes at last. “I want you to sit
here by me, we shall be alone for a little while. There is something I
want to say—while I can.” Her voice was very sweet and low, and her
tearless eyes were luminous. “Let me take your hand—this one; it held my
darling’s hand when he was dying. _I_ knew! Dear hand, _dear_ hand!” She
held it close to her cheek. After a moment she went on. “Such love, such
goodness! I never dreamed of anything like it, that people should be so
good. I want you to tell everyone—all who have done the least thing for
my little child’s sake, yes, or who have wanted to do anything, that
never while my life lasts—I hope it won’t be long—but never while it
lasts will I forget them, never will I cease to ask God to bless them,
‘to reward them sevenfold into their bosom.’ I have been praying to-day,
when I _could_ pray, that He would teach me how to help others, that the
world might be better because my little child had lived in it, and I had
had such joy. Helen, you will not forget?”
“No,” said Helen. She drew her friend’s head to her shoulder, and they
spoke no more. It grew darker and darker in the room where they sat, but
in the next chamber the moonlight poured through an opening in the
curtains and shone upon the lovely face of the child whose life had been
a delight, whose memory was a blessing, whose death touched the spring
of love in every heart, and, for one little heavenly space, made men
know that they were brothers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wings
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wings
_A Study_
I
IT was a lovely morning in the early summer that Milly Clark’s lover
brought her the engagement ring with which she was also to be wedded
some sweet day. It was a plain hoop of gold, with the word Mizpah graven
upon its inner side, not because there was any thought of parting
between them then, but simply in accordance with a somewhat sentimental
fashion of the day. Milly had been given her choice between the ring and
a little padlocked bracelet of which Norton was to keep the key, after
it had been safely fastened on her white wrist, and this, indeed,
appealed to all the instincts of barbaric womanhood, in its suggestion
of a lover’s mastery; but the ring was the holier symbol, and the pledge
of love eternal.
The bees were buzzing around the syringa bushes in the corner of the
old-fashioned garden, where the lovers stood looking out upon the road
through the white fence which was built upon a stone wall, and covered
with climbing roses. The road, shining in the sunlight, sloped down to a
bridge half hidden by chestnut trees, and beyond was a glimpse of hills
against the blue sky of June. The air, the countryside, the hum of
unseen insects, contained that suggestion of joy unspeakable that comes
only at this heavenly time of the year, but there were only the two by
the garden wall to feel it in its perfection this morning. As far as the
eye could see there was no other human being anywhere. At eleven o’clock
in a New England village, after the marketing is seen to and mail time
over, all self-respecting persons are at home behind the bowed green
blinds of the white houses by the roadside, or at work farther off in
the fields. For Milly and Norton to be out in the garden now was to be
quite alone, and when he put his arm around her and drew her down beside
him on the stone wall among the roses, she only smiled confidingly up
into his face, and flushed sweetly as he kissed her.
“I can’t seem to get used to it,” she said.
“Get used to what, dear?”
“Your—loving me.”
“I don’t want you to get used to it!” he cried fervently. “I’m sure I
never shall. Why, when we’re quite old people it will be just the same
as it is now. Love can never grow old—not ours, anyway. Can it, Milly!”
She gave him a smile for answer and he gazed down at her admiringly,
taking note anew of the deep blue of her eyes, the little veins on her
forehead, where the soft brown hair was drawn smoothly back from it, and
the pure curve of her throat and chin—a face of the highest New England
type, fine and beautiful. He himself was the product of a different
civilization, and cast in a rougher mold. It was the very difference
that had drawn them close together, his rude strength giving sweetest
promise of protection to her delicate fineness. She sat silently looking
at him, her soul steeped in a delicious dream.
“Yes, we will be like this always,” she said at last with almost
religious solemnity.
“Always,” he assented.
“Only growing better and better all the time, Norton. I feel as if I
could never be good enough to show how thankful I am that you love me.
Do you think I ever can?”
“Hush,” he said, frowning. “You must not talk in that way. I’m only a
stupid, commonplace fellow at best, not half good enough for _you_.
You’ll have to make _me_ better.”
“Oh, Norton!” she protested.
“Ah, never mind now, dear! You haven’t put on my ring yet,
Milly—remember it is not to come off until I have to put it on the next
time—do you know when that will be? When we are married, when you are
mine, really and forever. May that day soon come! Give me your hand now,
dear, and let me ‘ring your finger with the round hoop of gold,’ as you
were reading to me last night.”
“There is someone coming,” said Milly nervously. She stood up as the
shadow of a parasol touched the roses, and met the gaze of the Episcopal
clergyman’s wife, as she stopped to rest, panting a little, by the
garden wall. She was a thin woman in a black and white print gown, and
with a black lace bonnet trimmed with bunches of artificial violets
surmounting her sallow face.
“Oh, it’s you, is it, Milly?” she asked with a kindly inflection of her
rather sharp voice. “And Mr. Edwards, too, of course. Well, good morning
to you both. Isn’t it a perfect day! A little hot in the sun though. It
always tires me to walk up this hill; I have to stop a moment here to
get my breath. I suppose you’re not going to the funeral, either of you?
No, it’s not a bit necessary, but I fancied you might like to see the
service performed as it should be for once.”
“I did not know anyone had died,” said Milly.
“My dear, it’s only a little boy from the poorhouse. His relatives—such
as he had—are not able to bury him, and Mr. Preston did want to show the
parish what a properly conducted funeral was like. You know what a
frightfully bigoted place this is! We had to give up candles altogether,
Mr. Edwards. It fairly makes me shiver at times—the ignorance! I
wonder—I _do_ wonder, they don’t knock the cross off the spire some day,
because it’s a symbol. I wonder they even have a church, instead of a
circus tent!”
“Oh, Mrs. _Preston_!” remonstrated Milly. She glanced sideways nervously
at Norton, who was picking a rose to pieces with an imperturbable
expression.
“You will hear the choir boys at any rate as they march in procession
around the grave,” pursued Mrs. Preston, raising her parasol again. “I
don’t suppose there will be a soul there but ourselves. Well, I put on
my best bonnet, anyway, out of respect—I know you will both be glad when
I’m gone, although you’re too polite to say so.”
She relaxed into a quizzical smile as she regarded them. “Well,
good-by.”
“Thank Heaven! she’s gone at last,” said Norton with boyish petulance,
as they watched her disappear behind the evergreens that bordered the
churchyard. “What possessed her to give us so much of her society just
now—the very wrong moment, wasn’t it, dear? She has left me only a
quarter of an hour before the noon train to town, and I’ll not be back
until Monday, you know, this time. To think that I shall be working for
you now, Milly—for a sweet girl in a blue dress, with a dimple in one
cheek and long brown lashes that droop lower and lower as I—oh, you
darling!” They both laughed in joyously blissful content.
“Shall I put the ring on now?” he asked after a few moments. “Stand up
beside me, then. There, that is right. This is our betrothal, Milly. Say
the words, dear, since you would have them, while I slip on the ring.”
“Let us say them together. Oh, Norton, it is to be forever!”
“Forever. Give me your dear hand. Now with me. ‘The Lord’—‘The
Lord,’”—her clear voice mingled with his deep one. “The Lord
watch—between thee—and me—when we are parted—(but we never shall be!)
when we are parted—the one from the other.” The ring shone on her
finger, their lips met in a long kiss. He caught her to him and laid her
head upon his breast and her arms around his neck, and they stood thus,
silently, while the seconds passed. What power was in those words of
might to bring a sudden hush upon both hearts, and to change the
sunshine into the awesome, beautiful light of another world? Something
deeper, nobler, purer than they stirred those two souls, and made them
sacredly, divinely one. Each felt intensely what neither could have
expressed. Never, while life lasted, could the witness of that moment be
forgotten.
Long after her lover had left her Milly sat in the garden, her face half
hidden in the roses, with the bees still booming around the syringas,
and the sky growing bluer and bluer in the heat of noon. She heard the
choir boys singing now in the little churchyard near by as they marched
around the open grave,
“_Brief life is here our portion,
Brief sorrow, shortlived care,
The life that knows no ending,
The tearless life, is there.
Oh happy retribution,
Short toil, eternal rest!
For mortals and for sinners,
A mansion with the blest._”
The words brought her no realization of the shortness of human life, of
inevitable sorrow, of impending care, and no remembrance of the dead
pauper child, or of the open grave—they only served to add to the
fullness of her bliss the thought that after all this measureless
happiness of earth, there was still the joy of heaven beyond.
II
IT was only a few weeks after their betrothal that Norton sailed for
Australia on that long journey from which he did not return for three
years. The trip was to make his fortune, and fortune meant a home and
Milly for his own; so neither rebelled, and, indeed, it was only
intended at first that he should stay away a year. In the first ardor of
romance parting seemed but a little thing—two hearts like theirs could
beat as one with a continent between them. And love shows sweetly in
different lights; the purple shadows of impending separation gave it a
deeper, richer glow.
She took a little journey in from the country to see him off, and they
talked of this beforehand as of something quite festive, although there
proved to be a bewildering hurry and bustle about it that mixed
everything up in a whirl. Mrs. Preston went with her, and there was a
disjointed attempt at conversation on the deck of the steamer with some
of Norton’s friends who had also come to see him off, and the
examination with them, amid laughter and jokes, of Norton’s tiny
stateroom, and the few moments there when, lingering behind, the two
kissed each other good-by, and, the veil of pretense ruthlessly torn
aside, Milly felt a sudden terrible spasm of heartbreak.
“I cannot let you go—I cannot!” she sobbed, and her lover had to loosen
her arms from around his neck and dry her eyes with his handkerchief,
whispering soothing words, and then she must be led out into the glaring
sunlight and turn her face away from the group of friends, while her
hand still lay in Norton’s. And then the bell rang—the signal for
parting—and then—do we not know it all? The last look from the pier at
the beloved face, and then the slow watching, watching until the vessel
is out of sight and the vision is filled with green overlapping waves,
and afterwards the walk back again along the wharf, among bales and vans
of plunging horses, out into the world of dusty streets and houses, and
the midsummer sights and smells, and the busy, empty life that is left.
Milly was grateful to Mrs. Preston for not talking. She blindly let
herself be piloted anywhere to find that she was at last ensconced in a
hurrying train proceeding homeward through a green landscape, with
freshly cooler air blowing in through the open window to soothe her
aching head. When they reached the village in the dusk it was Mrs.
Preston who walked home with her up the long hill (and, oh, the going
home when the one we love most has just left it) and answered all the
questions that were showered upon both, and afterward went upstairs to
Milly’s room and saw that the girl put on a loose gown to rest in, and
made her drink the cup of tea she had brought up. She gave Milly a
little kiss, “like a peck,” thought Milly, suddenly alive to the
remembrance of those other kisses, and after the elder woman had left,
she slipped from the bed where she had even submitted to have her feet
covered, and went over to the window and knelt down by it with her head
on the sill almost in the branches of the maple tree through which she
could see the moon rising in golden quiet. _He_ was looking at the same
moon now, and the Lord was watching between them. She pressed the ring
to her lips, she pressed it to her bosom—the ring that made her his—joy
flooded back upon her with the thought. She had forgotten that she could
speak to him still, that she could write.
Oh, quick, quick, lose not a moment; it was treachery to have a thought
in her soul and he not know it! Down on her knees in the moonlight she
wrote, and wrote, and wrote, all that she never could have said—her very
heart.
She woke to joy the next morning, still in this consciousness of
new-found power, and with a high ideal of the life before her. She was
to grow and grow that she might be worthy of him—that she might help
_him_ grow to be worthy of the highest. Every minute of the day she
could live for him, just as in every minute of the day he was living for
her. She went about her daily tasks with renewed energy, because he was
thinking of her while she performed them. Even during little Letty
Stevens’s tedious music lesson she smiled, thinking how she would write
him that the child’s halting five-finger exercise counted itself out to
her in the words, “How I love you, how I love you, how I love you, how I
love you, _dear_!”
She had a little note from him by the pilot boat, written a few hours
after they had parted; how little it seemed after all she had thought
and felt in this twenty-four hours! But it made the color rise in her
soft cheeks, and she cried over it and wore it next her bosom by day and
laid it under her pillow by night. For many long weeks it was the only
message from him that she had to feed on. The mail does not come quickly
from Australia. She had sent off pages and pages to him in the two or
three months before his first letter came, and it was much longer before
she had an answer to hers. How she studied those letters—simple, almost
boyish effusions—full of wondering pride in those that she wrote to him.
“Why, you are a real poetess, Milly; I don’t see how you manage to think
of such things. I wish I _had_ been thinking of you at the time you
speak of, but I’m afraid that must have been when I was staying at
Jackson’s, and he and Blessington and I played cards every evening;
awfully poor luck I had, too. I suppose I must have been thinking of
you, after all, and that’s what made me play so badly, don’t you believe
it? No, I don’t do much reading out here; you’ll have to do the reading
for both of us, and you can tell it all to me when I get home. _When I
get home._ Oh, Milly! I can’t write about it as you do, but I’m working
for my sweet, sweet girl with all the strength I’ve got.”
The girl bloomed as she never had before with this quickening of her
soul. The days were so full of duties; her music scholars, the household
matters, in which she helped her widowed aunt, the two young cousins to
be looked after, her reading, and, when she could attend them, the
weekday afternoon prayers at the little church where she sometimes, with
the sexton, represented all Mr. Preston’s congregation. Milly’s people
were of the Congregational faith, but Norton and she had gone to St.
John’s together. People found fault with Mr. Preston—a rather dull man
with impassive wooden features—because he had no variety of expression;
he read service and sermon in a low monotonous voice which, however,
grew to have a soothing charm for Milly. Why need anyone express
anything? It was all in herself—other people’s expression only jarred.
Those few moments in the half light of the empty church gave a sense of
peace that was an actual physical rest, undisturbed by the personality
of others. She was even guilty of slipping from the church afterwards to
avoid Mr. Preston’s perfunctory handshake.
Then, after each quickly-passing day, came the long evening when in her
little white room she wrote to him—wrote to Norton, her own, own lover.
Ah, what fire there can be in the veins of a little Puritan girl!
So the swift winter passed and the spring came around again, and he had
not returned.
Then came hours when the sense of separation began to press more heavily
upon her, when the soft breeze wearied her and the common roadside
flowers brought tears to her eyes—especially when the Australian mail
was long delayed. It was in a mood of this kind that she went one day to
see Mrs. Preston, whose sharp features relaxed at the sight of her. Mrs.
Preston was sitting in the front parlor by the window, with her sleeves
rolled up a little, and a gingham apron tied around her waist, beating
up eggs in a large bowl.
“Come in,” she called cheerfully to Milly. “I just saw Mrs. Furniss go
past; she looked as if she thought I was committing one of the seven
deadly sins when she discovered that I was beating my eggs in here. The
aborigines consider a parlor a sacred thing, you know. It’s the
pleasantest place in the whole house this morning, and this lilac bush
is budding. It’s spring again, for certain.”
“Yes,” said Milly listlessly.
“I’m making custard for dessert to-morrow; the bishop’s coming. He
always says, ‘Mrs. Preston, it’s such a relief to reach your house and
get sponge cake and syllabub, instead of relays of pie!’ You know the
poor, dear man has the dyspepsia terribly, and you New England people
have no mercy on him. I’m glad he’s coming to-morrow, it gives me
something more to do; one must _work_ in the spring, or die. If this
weather keeps on I’ll get at the garret. What is the matter with you
this morning, Milly?”
“I’m tired,” said Milly with a quiver of her lip.
“Work.”
“I _have_ worked! I’m busy all the time, but it doesn’t do any good.
It’s hard to have Norton away for so long. I can’t help feeling—” she
stopped a moment and looked very hard out of the window. “I’m afraid I’m
beginning to get—melancholy about it.” She was trying to smile, but a
bright tear fell in her lap.
“I don’t think you’re very unhappy,” said Mrs. Preston. She put the bowl
of eggs down on the table and folded her thin arms. “It’s the luxury of
grief that you’re enjoying—part of the romance. Be melancholy—as you
call it—while you can.”
“You are always so cheerful,” said Milly rather resentfully.
“I, my dear! I don’t dare to be anything else. I _have_ to be cheerful,
or—” She turned a darkening face to the budding lilacs. “I don’t dare to
_think_ long enough to be depressed, to even—remember. There’s an awful
abyss down which I slip when _I_ get melancholy; it’s the bottomless
pit. I know it’s there all the time, but I have to pretend to myself
that I’m not near it, or I get dragged under. I avoid it like the
plague!” A momentary spasm contracted her face; she added in a lower
tone, “Did you know that I had four children once? They died within a
year.”
“Oh, you poor thing!” cried Milly. She reached forward and tried to take
one of the fast-locked hands of the woman before her. “Oh, how terrible,
how terrible! How did you _live_?”
“I didn’t; all the best part of me went too, this thing you see here—”
she stopped, and the same shiver as before went over her.
“But you have your husband,” said Milly, seeking about for comfort. A
vision of Mr. Preston, stiff, dull, formal, with his wooden features,
fronted her confusingly.
“Yes, that’s the worst of it—if I only had not William!”
“Oh, Mrs. _Preston_!” cried Milly.
“I suppose it _is_ surprising. After having bored each other for so many
years, we really ought to be very much attached, don’t you think?
Perhaps even you can see how much comfort I get from William. If I were
an article of the Rubric, instead of a woman—but of course, that is
different.”
“But you must have loved him when you were married,” cried Milly,
shocked.
“Did I, dear? I loved something that went by his name, it wasn’t
William. There, don’t let us talk of it; I find no fault. He should have
been a celibate priest; I agree with him there. He has never really
cared for me, or for—the children.” The spasm passed over her face
again. “Oh, if I did not have him, if I were not tied to this narrow
round which chokes every higher instinct of me, if I could go off
somewhere by myself, to California or Egypt, or Cathay—travel, travel,
travel, keep going on and on, seeing something new every hour, breathing
freer every day, getting out into the great life of the world!” She
clenched her hands. “I have given my life, my aspirations, the whole
strength of my being, to William, and now I have nothing left—but
William.”
“You have four children in heaven,” said Milly softly.
The elder woman broke down into a fit of weeping that seemed to rend
her. Milly sat by, appalled at this glimpse of the inner life of two
respectable married people. Later, as she was going home, she met Mr.
Preston, his tall, thin figure in its clerical garb silhouetted against
the bright green of the spring foliage. His pale eyes gazed solemnly at
her as he drew near across the fields; she felt that he might be
murmuring Credos, or even Aves, quite oblivious of her presence. But he
reached the bars in time to let them down for her, and offer her the
handshake from which she had been wont to flee, and then stood a moment
as if he would have spoken, while she gazed at him furtively. Could any
woman put her arms around that stiff neck or kiss those thin, set lips?
Oh, poor Mrs. Preston! But he was really speaking.
“I saw you in the distance and I stopped to pick these for you,” he said
in his slow, even tone. It was a little bunch of violets that he held
out to her.
“Oh, Mr. Preston, thank you!” said Milly in wonder.
“It is a pleasure to me that you attend our services. If—” he paused,
“if my daughter had lived she would have been your age—like you, in her
springtime.”
He gazed past her solemnly and then taking off his hat to her, went on
his way, leaving Milly overpowered with bewilderment.
What did it all mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? How did people
drift apart after they were married? A new idea of the complexity of
life came to her, the strange way in which human beings acted on each
other, drawn, as by magnets, with the differing forces. Marriage to her
had always presented a picture of growth in happiness, growth in
goodness, a path upward together for lover and beloved. She tried now
and for the first time vainly to recall if any in her limited circle of
acquaintance seemed to fulfill these conditions. Sordidness, narrowness,
selfishness, a jealous love of one’s children, these stood revealed
instead to the casual eye.