"But you couldn't see me leave, mother, anyway, unless I was there to
go."
It was characteristic of the girl adjusting her new travelling-hat
before the dim little looking-glass that, while her heart was beating
with excitement which was strangely like grief, she could give herself
at once to her stepmother's inquietude and turn it aside with a jest.
Mrs. Morgan, arrested in her anxious movement towards the door, stood
for a moment taking in the reasonableness of Stella's proposition, and
then sank back to the edge of her chair. "The train gets here at two
o'clock," she argued.
Lindsay Cowart came into the room, his head bent over the satchel he had
been mending. "You had better say good-by to Stella here at the house,
mother," he suggested; "there's no use for you to walk down to the depot
in the hot sun." And then he noticed that his stepmother had on her
bonnet with the veil to it--she had married since his father's death and
was again a widow,--and, in extreme disregard of the September heat, was
dressed in the black worsted of a diagonal weave which she wore only on
occasions which demanded some special tribute to their importance.
She began smoothing out on her knees the black gloves which, in her
nervous haste to be going, she had been holding squeezed in a tight ball
in her left hand. "I can get there, I reckon," she answered with mild
brevity, and as if the young man's words had barely grazed her
consciousness.
A moment later she went to the window and, with her back to Lindsay,
poured the contents of a small leather purse into one hand and began to
count them softly.
He looked up again. "I am going to pay for Stella's ticket, mother. You
must not do it," he said.
She replaced the money immediately, but without impatience, and as
acquiescing in his assumption of his sister's future. "You have done so
much already," he apologized; but he knew that she was hurt, and chafed
to feel that only the irrational thing on his part would have seemed to
her the kind one.
Stella turned from the verdict of the dim looking-glass upon her
appearance to that of her brother's face. As she stood there in that
moment of pause, she might have been the type of all innocent and
budding life. The delicacy of floral bloom was in the fine texture of
her skin, the purple of dewy violets in her soft eyes; and this new
access of sadness, which was as yet hardly conscious of itself, had
thrown over the natural gayety of her young girlhood something akin to
the pathetic tenderness which veils the earth in the dawn of a summer
morning.
He felt it to be so, but dimly; and, young himself and already strained
by the exactions of personal desires, he answered only the look of
inquiry in her face,--"Will the merchants here never learn any taste in
dry-goods?"
Instantly he was sick with regret. Of what consequence was the too
pronounced blue of her dress in comparison with the light of happiness
in her dear face? How impossible for him to be here for even these few
hours without running counter to some cherished illusion or dear habit
of speech or manner.
"I tell you it's time we were going," Mrs. Morgan appealed, her anxiety
returning.
"We have thirty-five minutes yet," Lindsay said, looking at his watch;
but he gathered up the bags and umbrellas and followed as she moved
ponderously to the door.
Stella waited until they were out in the hall, and then looked around
the room, a poignant tenderness in her eyes. There was nothing congruous
between its shabby walls and cheap worn furniture and her own beautiful
young life; but the heart establishes its own relations, and tears rose
suddenly to her eyes and fell in quick succession. Even so brief a
farewell was broken in upon by her stepmother's call, and pressing her
wet cheek for a moment against the discolored door-facing, she hurried
out to join her.
Lindsay did not at first connect the unusual crowd in and around the
little station with his sister's departure; but the young people at once
formed a circle around her, into which one and another older person
entered and retired again with about the same expressions of
affectionate regret and good wishes. He had known them all so long! But,
except for the growing up of the younger boys and girls during his five
years of absence, they were to him still what they had been since he was
a child, affecting him still with the old depressing sense of distance
and dislike. The grammarless speech of the men, the black-rimmed nails
of Stella's schoolmaster--a good classical scholar, but heedless as he
was good-hearted,--jarred upon him, indeed, with the discomfort of a new
experience. Upon his own slender, erect figure, clothed in poor but
well-fitting garments, gentleman was written as plainly as in words,
just as idealist was written on his forehead and the other features
which thought had chiselled perhaps too finely for his years.
The brightness had come back to Stella's face, and he could not but feel
grateful to the men who had left their shops and dingy little stores to
bid her good-by, and to the placid, kindly-faced women ranged along the
settees against the wall and conversing in low tones about how she would
be missed; but the noisy flock of young people, who with their chorus of
expostulations, assurances, and prophecies seemed to make her one of
themselves, filled him with strong displeasure. He knew how foolish it
would be for him to show it, but he could get no further in his effort
at concealment than a cold silence which was itself significant enough.
A tall youth with bold and handsome features and a pretty girl in a
showy red muslin ignored him altogether, with a pride which really quite
overmatched his own; but the rest shrank back a little as he passed
looking after the checks and tickets, either cutting short their
sentences at his approach or missing the point of what they had to say.
The train seemed to him long in coming.
His stepmother moved to the end of the settee and made a place for him
at her side. "Lindsay," she said, under cover of the talk and laughter,
and speaking with some difficulty, "I hope you will be able to carry out
all your plans for yourself and Stella; but while you're making the
money, she will have to make the friends. Don't you ever interfere with
her doing it. From what little I have seen of the world, it's going to
take both to carry you through."
His face flushed a little, but he recognized her faithfulness and did it
honor. "That is true, mother, and I will remember what you say. But I
have some friends," he added, in enforced self-vindication, "in Vaucluse
if not here."
A whistle sounded up the road. She caught his hand with a swift
accession of tenderness towards his youth. "You've done the best you
could, Lindsay," she said. "I wish you well, my son, I wish you well."
There were tears in her eyes.
George Morrow and the girl in red followed Stella into the car, not at
all disconcerted at having to get off after the train was in motion.
"Don't forget me, Stella," the girl called back. "Don't you ever forget
Ida Brand!"
There was a waving of hands and handkerchiefs from the little station,
aglare in the early afternoon sun. A few moments later the train had
rounded a curve, shutting the meagre village from sight, and, to Lindsay
Cowart's thought, shutting it into a remote past as well.
He arose and began rearranging their luggage. "Do you want these?" he
inquired, holding up a bouquet of dahlias, scarlet sage, and purple
petunias, and thinking of only one answer as possible.
"I will take them," she said, as he stood waiting her formal consent to
drop them from the car window. Her voice was quite as usual, but
something in her face suggested to him that this going away from her
childhood's home might be a different thing to her from what he had
conceived it to be. He caught the touch of tender vindication in her
manner as she untied the cheap red ribbon which held the flowers
together and rearranged them into two bunches so that the jarring colors
might no longer offend, and felt that the really natural thing for her
to do was to weep, and that she only restrained her tears for his sake.
Sixteen was so young! His heart grew warm and brotherly towards her
youth and inexperience; but, after all, how infinitely better that she
should have cause for this passing sorrow.
He left her alone, but not for long. He was eager to talk with her of
the plans about which he had been writing her the two years since he
himself had been a student at Vaucluse, of the future which they should
achieve together. It seemed to him only necessary for him to show her
his point of view to have her adopt it as her own; and he believed,
building on her buoyancy and responsiveness of disposition, that nothing
he might propose would be beyond the scope of her courage.
"It may be a little lonely for you at first," he told her. "There are
only a handful of women students at the college, and all of them much
older than you; but it is your studies at last that are the really
important thing, and I will help you with them all I can. Mrs. Bancroft
will have no other lodgers and there will be nothing to interrupt our
work."
"And the money, Lindsay?" she asked, a little anxiously.
"What I have will carry us through this year. Next summer we can teach
and make almost enough for the year after. The trustees are planning to
establish a fellowship in Greek, and if they do and I can secure it--and
Professor Wayland thinks I can,--that will make us safe the next two
years until you are through."
"And then?"
He straightened up buoyantly. "Then your two years at Vassar and mine at
Harvard, with some teaching thrown in along the way, of course. And then
Europe--Greece--all the great things!"
She smiled with him in his enthusiasm. "You are used to such bold
thoughts. It is too high a flight for me all at once."
"It will not be, a year from now," he declared, confidently.
A silence fell between them, and the noise of the train made a pleasant
accompaniment to his thoughts as he sketched in detail the work of the
coming months. But always as a background to his hopes was that
honorable social position which he meant eventually to achieve, the
passion for which was a part of his Southern inheritance. Little as he
had yet participated in any interests outside his daily tasks, he had
perceived in the old college town its deeply grained traditions of birth
and custom, perceived and respected them, and discounted the more their
absence in the sorry village he had left. Sometime when he should assail
it, the exclusiveness of his new environment might beat him back
cruelly, but thus far it existed for him only as a barrier to what was
ultimately precious and desirable. One day the gates would open at his
touch, and he and the sister of his heart should enter their rightful
heritage.
The afternoon waned. He pointed outside the car window. "See how
different all this is from the part of the State which we have left," he
said. "The landscape is still rural, but what mellowness it has; because
it has been enriched by a larger, more generous human life. One can
imagine what this whole section must have been in those old days, before
the coming of war and desolation. And Vaucluse was the flower, the
centre of it all!" His eye kindled. "Some day external prosperity will
return, and then Vaucluse and her ideals will be needed more than ever;
it is she who must hold in check the commercial spirit, and dominate, as
she has always done, the material with the intellectual." There was a
noble emotion in his face, reflecting itself in the younger countenance
beside his own. Poor, young, unknown, their hearts thrilled with pride
in their State, with the possibility that they also should give to her
of their best when the opportunity should be theirs.
"It is a wonderful old town," Lindsay went on again. "Even Wayland says
so,--our Greek professor, you know." His voice thrilled with the
devotion of the hero-worshipper as he spoke the name. "He is a Harvard
man, and has seen the best of everything, and even he has felt the charm
of the place; he told me so. You will feel it, too. It is just as if the
little town and the college together had preserved in amber all that was
finest in our Southern life. And now to think you and I are to share in
all its riches!"
His early consecration to such a purpose, the toil and sacrifice by
which it had been achieved, came movingly before her; yet, mingled with
her pride in him, something within her pleaded for the things which he
rated so low. "It used to be hard for you at home, Lindsay," she said,
softly.
"Yes, it was hard." His face flushed. "I never really lived till I left
there. I was like an animal caught in a net, like a man struggling for
air. You can't know what it is to me now to be with people who are
thinking of something else than of how to make a few dollars in a
miserable country store."
"But they were good people in Bowersville, Lindsay," she urged, with
gentle loyalty.
"I am sure they were, if you say so," he agreed. "But at any rate we are
done with it all now." He laid his hand over hers. "At last I am going
to take you into our own dear world."
It was, after all, a very small world as to its actual dimensions, but
to the brother it had the largeness of opportunity, and to Stella it
seemed infinitely complex. She found security at first only in following
minutely the programme which Lindsay had laid out for her. It was his
own as well, and simple enough. Study was the supreme thing; exercise
came in as a necessity, pleasure only as the rarest incident. She took
all things cheerfully, after her nature, but after two or three months
the color began to go from her cheeks, the elasticity from her step; nor
was her class standing, though creditable, quite what her brother had
expected it to be.
Wayland detained him one day in his class-room. "Do you think your
sister is quite happy here, Cowart?" he asked.
The boy thrilled, as he always did at any special evidence of interest
from such a source, but he had never put this particular question to
himself and had no reply at hand.
"I have never thought this absolute surrender to books the wisest thing
for you," Wayland went on; "but for your sister it is impossible. She
was formed for companionship, for happiness, not for the isolation of
the scholar. Why did you not put her into one of the girls' schools of
the State, where she would have had associations more suited to her
years?" he asked, bluntly.
Lindsay could scarcely believe that he was listening to the young
professor whose scholarly attainments seemed to him the sum of what was
most desirable in life. "Our girls' colleges are very superficial," he
answered; "and even if they were not, she could get no Greek in any of
them."
"My dear boy," Wayland said, "the amount of Greek which your sister
knows or doesn't know will always be a very unimportant matter; she has
things that are so infinitely more valuable to give to the world. And
deserves so much better things for herself," he added, drawing together
his texts for the next recitation.
Lindsay returned to Mrs. Bancroft's quiet, old-fashioned house in a sort
of daze. "Stella," he said, "do you think you enter enough into the
social side of our college life?"
"No," she answered. "But I think neither of us does."
"Well, leave me out of the count. If I get through my Junior year as I
ought, I am obliged to grind; and when there is any time left, I feel
that I must have it for reading in the library. But it needn't be so
with you. Didn't an invitation come to you for the reception Friday
evening?"
Her face grew wistful. "I don't care to go to things, Lindsay, unless
you will go with me," she said.
Nevertheless, he had his way, and when once she made it possible,
opportunities for social pleasures poured in upon her. As Wayland had
said, she was formed for friendship, for joy; and that which was her own
came to her unsought. She was by nature too simple and sweet to be
spoiled by the attention she received; the danger perhaps was the less
because she missed in it all the comradeship of her brother, without
which in her eyes the best things lost something of their charm. It was
not merely personal ambition which kept him at his books; the passion of
the scholar was upon him and made him count all moments lost that were
spent away from them. Sometimes Stella sought him as he pored over them
alone, and putting her arm shyly about him, would beg that he would go
with her for a walk, or a ride on the river; but almost always his
answer was the same: "I am so busy, Stella dear; if you knew how much I
have to do you would not even ask me."
There was one interruption, indeed, which the young student never
refused. Sometimes their Greek professor dropped in at Mrs. Bancroft's
to bring or to ask for a book; sometimes, with the lovely coming of the
spring, he would join them as they were leaving the college grounds, and
lead them away into some of the woodland walks, rich in wild flowers,
that environed the little town. Such hours seemed to both brother and
sister to have a flavor, a brightness, quite beyond what ordinary life
could give. Wayland, too, must have found in them his own share of
pleasure, for he made them more frequent as the months went by.
* * * * *
It was in the early spring of her second year at Vaucluse that the
accident occurred. The poor lad who had taken her out in the boat was
almost beside himself with grief and remorse.
"We had enjoyed the afternoon so much," he said, trying to tell how it
had happened. "I thought I had never seen her so happy, so gay,--but you
know she was that always. It was nearly sunset, and I remember how she
spoke of the light as we saw it through the open spaces of the woods and
as it slanted across the water. Farther down the river the yellow
jasmine was beginning to open. A beech-tree that leaned out over the
water was hung with it. She wanted some, and I guided the boat under the
branches. I meant to get it for her myself, but she was reaching up
after it almost before I knew it. The bough that had the finest blossoms
on it was just beyond her reach, and while I steadied the boat, she
pulled it towards her by one of the vines hanging from it. She must have
put too much weight on it--
"It all happened so quickly. I called to her to be careful, but while I
was saying the words the vine snapped and she fell back with such force
that the boat tipped, and in a second we were both in the water. I knew
I could not swim, but I hoped that the water so near the bank would be
shallow; and it was, but there was a deep hole under the roots of the
tree."
He could get no further. Poor lad! the wonder was that he had not been
drowned himself. A negro ploughing in the field near by saw the accident
and ran to his help, catching him as he was sinking for the third time.
Stella never rose after she went down; her clothing had been entangled
in the roots of the beech.
Sorrow for the young life cut off so untimely was deep and universal,
and sought to manifest itself in tender ministrations to the brother so
cruelly bereaved. But Lindsay shrank from all offices of sympathy, and
except for seeking now and then Wayland's silent companionship, bore his
grief alone.
The college was too poor to establish the fellowship in Greek, but the
adjunct professor in mathematics resigned, and young Cowart was elected
to his place, with the proviso that he give two months further study to
the subject in the summer school of some university. Wayland decided
which by taking him back with him to Cambridge, where he showed the boy
an admirable friendship.
Lindsay applied himself to his special studies with the utmost
diligence. It was impossible, moreover, that his new surroundings should
not appeal to his tastes in many directions; but in spite of his
response to these larger opportunities, his friend discerned that the
wound which the young man kept so carefully hidden had not, after all
these weeks, begun even slightly to heal.
Late on an August night, impelled as he often was to share the solitude
which Lindsay affected, he sought him at his lodgings, and not finding
him, followed what he knew was a favorite walk with the boy, and came
upon him half hidden under the shadows of an elm in the woods that
skirted Mount Auburn. "I thought you might be here," he said, taking the
place that Lindsay made for him on the seat. Many words were never
necessary between them.
The moon was full and the sky cloudless, and for some time they sat in
silence, yielding to the tranquil loveliness of the scene and to that
inner experience of the soul brooding over each, and more inscrutable
than the fathomless vault above them.
"I suppose we shall never get used to a midnight that is still and at
the same time lustrous, as this is to-night," Wayland said. "The sense
of its uniqueness is as fresh whenever it is spread before us as if we
had never seen it before."
It was but a part of what he meant. He was thinking how sorrow, the wide
sense of personal loss, was in some way like the pervasiveness, the
voiceless speech, of this shadowed radiance around them.
He drew a little nearer the relaxed and slender figure beside his own.
"It is of _her_ you are thinking, Lindsay," he said, gently, and
mentioning for the first time the young man's loss. "All that you see
seems saturated with her memory. I think it will always be so--scenes of
exceptional beauty, moments of high emotion, will always bring her
back."
The boy's response came with difficulty: "Perhaps so. I do not know. I
think the thought of her is always with me."
"If so, it should be for strength, for comfort," his friend pleaded.
"She herself brought only gladness wherever she came."
There was something unusual in his voice, something that for a moment
raised a vague questioning in Lindsay's mind; but absorbed as he was in
his own sadness, it eluded his feeble inquiry. To what Wayland had said
he could make no reply.
"Perhaps it is the apparent waste of a life so beautiful that seems to
you so intolerable--" He felt the strong man's impulse to arrest an
irrational grief, and groped for the assurance he desired. "Yet,
Lindsay, we know things are not wasted; not in the natural world, not in
the world of the spirit." But on the last words his voice lapsed
miserably, and he half rose to go.
Lindsay caught his arm and drew him back. "Don't go yet," he said,
brokenly. "I know you think it would help me if I would talk
about--Stella; if I should tell it all out to you. I thank you for being
willing to listen. Perhaps it will help me."
He paused, seeking for some words in which to express the sense of
poverty which scourged him. Of all who had loved his sister, he himself
was left poorest! Others had taken freely of her friendship, had
delighted themselves in her face, her words, her smile, had all these
things for memories. He had been separated from her, in part by the hard
conditions of their youth, and at the last, when they had been together,
by his own will. Oh, what had been her inner life during these last two
years, when it had gone on beside his own, while he was too busy to
attend?
But the self-reproach was too bitter for utterance to even the kindest
of friends. "I thought I could tell you," he said at last, "but I can't.
Oh, Professor Wayland," he cried, "there is an element in my grief that
is peculiar to itself, that no one else in sorrow ever had!"
"I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay." Again the
younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it
unchallenged.
The professor rose to his feet. "Good night," he said; "unless you will
go back with me. Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep." He
had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare
ourselves and one another.
"'Where the love light never, never dies,'"
The boy's voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of
the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds.
Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite
effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country. He
could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections
as slight--Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute
notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus
still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their
footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window. Such
the easy proficiency of affection.
Attention to the lad's singing suddenly was lifted above the
subconscious. The simple melody had entangled itself in some forgotten
association of the professor's boyhood, seeking to marshal which before
him, he received the full force of the single line sung in direct
ear-shot. Like the tune, the words also became a challenge; pricked
through the unregarded heaviness in which he was plying his familiar
task, and demanded that he should name its cause.
For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long! No, not
dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic. Burnt down, smoldered;
suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace. There was a touch of
contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind
and turned back to his work. And yet, he stopped a moment longer to
think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best
achievement!
The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over
which he had spent his evenings for more than a week. Most of them had
been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation
here and there which had made his progress slow. He examined a
half-dozen more, and then in sheer mental revolt against the subject,
slipped them under the rubber bands with others of their kind and
dropped the neat packages out of his sight into one of the drawers of
the desk. Wayland's book on Greece, the fruit of eighteen months'
sojourn there, had come through the mail on the same day when the
calculus papers had been handed in, and he had read it through at once,
not to be teased intolerably by its invitation. He had mastered the
text, avid through the long winter night, but he picked it up again now,
and for a little while studied the sumptuous illustrations. How long
Wayland had been away from Vaucluse, how much of enrichment had come to
him in the years since he had left! He himself might have gone also, to
larger opportunities--he had chosen to remain, held by a sentiment! The
professor closed the book with a little sigh, and taking it to a small
shelf on the opposite side of the room, stood it with a half-dozen
others worthy of such association.
Returning, he got together before him the few Greek authors habitually
in hand's reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his
desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from
favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology.
Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors--a mere handful they were,--he
was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book
which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly. How far he was in actual
miles from the men who were getting their thoughts into print, how much
farther in environment! Things which to them were the commonplaces of a
scholar's life were to him impossible luxuries; few even of their books
found their way to his shelves. At least the original sources of
inspiration were his, and sometimes he felt that his verses were not
without spirit, flavor.
He took up a little volume of Theocritus, which opened easily at the
Seventh Idyl, and began to read aloud. Half-way through the poem the
door opened and his wife entered. He did not immediately adjust himself
to the interruption, and she remained standing a few moments in the
centre of the room.
"Thank you; I believe I will be seated," she said, the sarcasm in her
words carefully excluded from her voice.
He wondered that she should find interest in so sorry a game. "I thought
you felt enough at home in here to sit down without being asked," he
said, rising, and trying to speak lightly.
She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it
without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever
planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by
her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable
too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression,
defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly
satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little
from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's
face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth
would have made her beautiful.
"It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart
said.
"The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked.
"I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the
Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately
neither family holds us college people to very strict social account."
"They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich."
"Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is
only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak
genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make
conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like
frost.
He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would
have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his
grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in
sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very
unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and
he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.
"I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers."
"I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too."
"Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of
summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow."
"It isn't the day; it's the poetry. That's the good of there being
poetry."
She skipped his parenthesis. "And you keep this room as cold as a
vault." Not faultfinding, but a somewhat irritating concern for his
comfort was in the complaint.
She went to the hearth and in her efficient way shook down the ashes
from the grate and heaped it with coal. A cabinet photograph of a girl
in her early teens, which had the appearance of having just been put
there, was supported against a slender glass vase. Mrs. Cowart took it
up and examined it critically. "I don't think this picture does
Arnoldina justice," she said. "One of the eyes seems to droop a little,
and the mouth looks sad. Arnoldina never did look sad."
They were on common ground now, and he could speak without constraint.
"I hadn't observed that it looked sad. She seems somehow to have got a
good deal older since September."
"She is maturing, of course." All a mother's pride and approbation, were
in the reserve of the speech. To have put more definitely her estimate
of the sweet young face would have been a clumsy thing in comparison.
Lindsay's countenance lighted up. He arose, and standing by his wife,
looked over her shoulder as she held the photograph to the light. "Do
you know, Gertrude," he said, "there is something in her face that
reminds me of Stella?"
"I don't know that I see it," she answered, indifferently, replacing the
photograph and returning to her chair. The purpose which had brought her
to the room rose to her face. "I stopped at the warehouse this
afternoon," she said, "and had a talk with father. Jamieson really goes
to Mobile--the first of next month. The place is open to you if you want
it."
"But, Gertrude, how should I possibly want it?" he expostulated.
"You would be a member of the firm. You might as well be making money as
the rest of them."
He offered no comment.
"It is not now like it was when you were made professor. The town has
become a commercial centre and its educational interests have declined.
The professors will always have their social position, of course, but
they cannot hope for anything more."
"It is not merely Vaucluse, but the South, that is passing into this
phase. But economic independence has become a necessity. When once it is
achieved, our people will turn to higher things."
"Not soon enough to benefit you and me."
"Probably not."
"Then why waste your talents on the college, when the best years of your
life are still before you?"
"I am not teaching for money, Gertrude." He hated putting into the bald
phrase his consecration to his ideals for the young men of his State; he
hated putting it into words at all; but something in his voice told her
that the argument was finished.
There was a sound of carriage wheels on the drive. He arose and began to
assist her with her wraps. "It is too bad for you to be dependent on
even such nice escorts as the Dillinghams are," he solaced, recovering
himself. "We college folk are a sorry lot."
But when she was gone, the mood for composition which an hour before had
seemed so near had escaped him, and he put away his books and
manuscript, standing for a while, a little chilled in mind and body,
before the grate and looking at the photograph on the mantel. While he
did so the haunting likeness he had seen grew more distinct and by
degrees another face overspread that of his young daughter, the face of
the sister he had loved and lost.
With a sudden impulse he crossed the room to an old-fashioned mahogany
secretary, opened its slanting lid, and unlocking with some difficulty a
small inner drawer, returned with it to his desk. Several packages of
letters tied with faded ribbon filled the small receptacle, but they
struck upon him with the strangeness of something utterly forgotten. The
pieces of ribbon had once held for him each its own association of time
or place; now he could only remember, looking down upon them with tender
gaze, that they had been Stella's, worn in her hair, or at her throat or
waist. Simple and inexpensive he saw they were. Arnoldina would not have
looked at them.
Overcoming something of reluctance, he took one of the packages from its
place. It contained the letters he had found in her writing-table after
her death, most of them written after she had come to Vaucluse by her
stepmother and the friends she had left in the village. He knew there
was nothing in any of them she would have withheld from him; in reading
them he was merely taking back something from the vanished years which,
if not looked at now, would perish utterly from earth. How affecting
they were--these utterances of true and humble hearts, written to one
equally true and good! His youth and hers in the remote country village
rose before him; not now, as once, pinched and narrow, but as salutary,
even gracious. He could but feel how changed his standards had become
since then, how different his measure of the great and the small of
life.
Suddenly, as he was thus borne back into the past, the old sorrow sprang
upon him, and he bowed before it. The old bitter cry which he had been
able to utter to no human consoler swept once more to his lips: "Oh,
Stella, Stella, you died before I really knew you; your brother, who
should have known and loved you best! And now it is too late, too
late."
He sent out as of old his voiceless call to one afar off, in some land
where her whiteness, her budding soul, had found their rightful place;
but even as he did so, his thought of her seemed to be growing clearer.
From that far, reverenced, but unimagined sphere she was coming back to
the range of his apprehension, to comradeship in the life which they
once had shared together.
He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head
and taking another package of the letters from their place. Her letters!
He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance,
his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last
two years of her life. What an innocent life it was that was spread
before him; and how young,--oh, how young! And it was a happy life. He
was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to
find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to
come so readily to her lips. He could detect, too, how the note of
gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger
existence of Vaucluse. At last he could be comforted that, however it
had ended, it was he who had made it hers.
He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of
emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into
his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the
grate. That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its
completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials
which she herself had left. What he had believed to be loss, bitter,
unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become
wealth.
His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane. He scanned the
present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good
they were. What it was given him to do for his students, at least what
he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long
friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little
community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they
might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so
much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear,
dear child.
And Gertrude? Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had
long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler
proportions. The worthier aspects of his home life, the finer traits of
his wife's character, stood before him as proofs of what might yet be.
His memory had kept no record of the fact that when in the first year of
his youthful sorrow, sick for comfort and believing her all tenderness,
he had married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many
times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals
and purposes. His judgment held only this, that she had never understood
him. For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself.
Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his
life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set
himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and
sympathy. Was not a perfect married love worth the minor sacrifices as
well as the supreme surrender from which he believed that neither of
them would have shrunk?
He returned to his desk and began to rearrange the contents of the
little drawer. Among them was a small sandalwood box which had been
their mother's, and which Stella had prized with special fondness. He
had never opened it since her death, but as he lifted it now the frail
clasp gave way, the lid fell back, and the contents slipped upon the
desk. They were few: a ring, a thin gold locket containing the
miniatures of their father and mother, a small tintype of himself taken
when he first left home, and two or three notes addressed in a
handwriting which he recognized as Wayland's. He replaced them with
reverent touch, turning away even in thought from what he had never
meant to see.
By and by he heard in the distance the roll of carriages returning from
the Fieldings' reception. He replenished the fire generously, found a
long cloak in the closet at the end of the hall, and waited the sound of
wheels before his own door. "The rain has grown heavier," he said,
drawing the cloak around his wife as she descended from the carriage.
Something in his manner seemed to envelop her. He brought her into the
study and seated her before the fire. She had expected to find the house
silent; the glow and warmth of the room were grateful after the chill
and darkness outside, her husband's presence after that vague sense of
futility which the evening's gayety had left upon her.
"I suppose I ought to tell you about the party," she said, a little
wearily; "but if you don't mind, I will wait till breakfast. Everybody
was there, of course, and it was all very fine, as we all knew it would
be. I hope you've enjoyed your Latin poets more."
"They are Greek, dear," he said. "I have been making translations from
some of them now and then. Some day we will take a day off and then I'll
read them to you. But neither the party nor the poets to-night. See, it
is almost two o'clock."
"I knew it must be late. But you look as fresh as a child that has just
waked from sleep."
"Perhaps I have just waked."
They rose to go up-stairs. "I will go in front and make a light in our
room while you turn off the gas in the hall."
He paused for a moment after she had gone out and turned to a page in
the Greek Anthology for a single stanza. Shelley's translation was
written in pencil beside it:
Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled;
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving
New splendor to the dead.