By the window of Beacon Street, that looked over toward the west and the
south, there sat a lonely woman. “After all,” she said to herself, as the
bitterness of her thoughts puckered her heart more and more, “this world
is but one of the seventy-four comedies with which the Eternal amuses
himself.”
The deep tragedy of her life had embittered her soul and of late she had
grown more and more to tell herself alone her thoughts. Now that her
husband was dead, each wound would re-open. Yet memory came with little
pictures of the Ashley, of the golden rice fields, of one who had loved
her there. And these pictures made the dull gray of the Boston evening
slowly light up with glory. A mocking bird swings in the orchard bough at
Camellia-on-the-Ashley, the mellow notes of the cotton pickers are wafted
softly, lowly—
“Swing low, sweet chariot—comin’ for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.”
Thus her thoughts were gentle, sweet, like the cooing of a mother’s
first-born, winsome as his first smile, which makes her forget her hour
of travail.
A dog bays in the distance, a deer bounds again into the forest—a young
man comes from the chase—a smile, a kiss—an—
She waked suddenly from her dream. Some one was coming up the street,
staring earnestly at the numbers. He was an elderly man, who moved as
softly toward the grave as the gentle notes of the flute sinking along
the last octave. Yet there was life in his step, and she could see that
he handled himself well on the slippery pavement, where the half-melted
snow had frozen again. There was a look about his face that touched a
chord down in her heart, and the expression he wore as if he, an old man,
were almost a youth again, set her once more to dreaming.
The bell rang. “A gentleman to see you, ma’am,” said Hilda, entering. “He
will not give his name. He says he is from Charleston.”
A man in whose eyes an infinite fire seemed burning, entered close on
Hilda’s heels.
“Mrs. Brooks,” he said, and his voice made her think of the notes of
a passion swept violin, “I trust you will pardon my intrusion in this
manner, and I scarcely know how to explain it so that it will seem less
rude.” He was staring intently at the woman before him. His deep eyes
took in the details of her mourning garments, her face with its fine
lines of settled sadness and the abundant threads of white sprinkled
through the thick brown braids, gathered under her widow’s cap.
Her mother’s heart prompted the swift question:
“You come from Charleston? Helen—is she—?”
“Your daughter is quite well, madam, and safe in the little hamlet of
Dunvegan, in North Carolina, whither I—whither she and her aunts were
conveyed after the burning of—.” He paused, knowing the thoughts that the
name of Columbia would awaken.
Sighing deeply, Mrs. Brooks motioned her visitor to a chair and looked at
him inquiringly. “I am pleased to see you, sir,” she said courteously; “I
knew and loved Charleston well in my girlhood.”
“You were, before your marriage, Miss Lezare? Forgive me if I seem rudely
inquisitive.”
“Yes, sir, Lezare was my maiden name.”
“Ah, yes—Lezare of Camellia? While you were living there was there a
man—Masters, Charles Masters?”
“Stop, sir!” she interrupted. “What right have you to bring back that
name into my life—what—?”
“Has it then left your life?” he asked, with a touch of fear in his
voice. “Forgive me if I have given you pain, madam. My honor is my pledge
that I mean no wrong. It is necessary—do you understand?—absolutely
necessary for me to proceed.”
She was silent and seemed as one lost in a deep forest who seems to see a
face in the darkness about.
“This man Masters was among those who went to Texas in her struggle for
independence, was he not, madam? And after the battle of San Jacinto was
reported among the killed? He loved a young lady of Charleston, one whom
you may know—a young lady whose proud family were opposed to her union
with one who had come to Charleston a penniless youth and had been the
architect of his own fortunes—they preferred a wealthy young Bostonian,
who brought letters to every family of influence in the state. You knew
this, madam?”
His eyes asked pardon for this direct question and his voice was low with
tenderness.
“Yes, yes, I knew this,” she responded, lacing and interlacing her slow,
slender fingers. “What—what more?”
“You doubtless know, too, madam, that the report of his death was false
and that he returned after peace was declared, to find his sweetheart had
wedded his rival and gone to Boston to live. What you do not know”—here
his voice took on a deep, full ring of joy—“is that he never, for one
moment, never did and never has, doubted his sweetheart’s truth. To many
men it is given to pass with unseeing eyes the holy worth of a woman’s
love, but to Charles Masters it was given to know, when he had plighted
his troth in the garden at Camellia, the sacredness of the gift that was
his. Never once since then has his reverence for it or his belief in it
failed.”
Colonel Masters was doing more than telling a harrowing story—he was
reading his own fate in her eyes.
“Sir,” Mrs. Brooks started from her chair, “I will give you all I have
in this world, I will give you all God gives me in Heaven to say those
words again!”
Word by word her voice had risen, growing stronger under the intense
passion of her soul till it touched the highest note of her life, till
it quivered like the tremulous tones of the flute thrilled at the holy
reaches of the Infinite Beyond.
“He still believes!”
“Then where is he? Has he—”
She shrank back from him, for there was a smile on his features, and
though faces grow old, smiles never do.
Reading her thoughts, he lifted her hand to his lips, and it was to her
as when the mute touches the chords of the violin. The music was deep and
plaintive, and the strain was one that makes all things possible.
“He is here!”
A cold, sleety rain was falling on the street outside, and the ice was
forming on the elms of Beacon street. The shadows which sprang from the
window that looked toward the west and the south lengthened themselves
along the floor. Men hastened homeward in the gathering night, and a damp
darkness settled down over the bleak landscape.
But they sat by the window that looked toward the west, and though they
faced the sunset, they saw it not, for the morning had come.