THE CALL OF A SOUL.
Now and again Cherokee kissed the roses with pangs of speechless pain.
The fragrance that floated from their lips brought only anguish. To
her, white roses must ever mean white memories of despair, and their
pale ghosts would haunt long after they were dead.
All day the family had been busy packing, for soon the Stanhopes would
close the house and take flight. Cherokee had been forced to tell them
she had changed her mind and would go to the country; she needed quiet,
rest. Pride made her withhold the humiliating fact that she had just
money enough to take her down to the South country.
There was a kind, generous friend, who, at her father’s death, offered
her a home under his roof for always, and now that promise came to
her, holding out its inducement, but she would not accept it; somehow
she felt glad that the time of leaving the Stanhopes was near. This
pleasant house, these cheerful, affectionate surroundings, had become
most intolerable since she must keep anything from them--even though
it be but an error of innocence.
“Let me forget the crushing humiliation of the past month,” she told
herself, “I must try to be strong, reasonable, if not happy.” She must
find some calling, something to sustain herself, to occupy her hands
and time. The soft, idle, pleasant existence offered by the friend
would enervate rather than fortify--would force her back on herself and
on useless regrets.
As she sat in her own room, holding the blank page of her coming life,
and studying what the truth should be, there arose before her inner
gaze two scenes of a girlish life; fresh, vivid were they, as of
yesterday, though both were now of a buried past.
First she recalled the hour when sorrow caught her by the hand, dragged
her from the couch of childhood to a darkened room where lay the
sphinx-like clay of her mother--the lids closed forever over what had
been loving gleams of sympathy--the hands crossed in still rigidity.
Her little child heart had no knowledge of the mysteries--love,
anguish, death--in whose shadow the zest of life withers. She knew
their names but they stood afar off, a veiled and waiting trio.
She crept, sobbing, from that terrible semblance of a mother to the
out-door sunshine, and the yard, where the crape-myrtle nodded
cheerfully to her just as it did before they frightened her so. The
dark house she was afraid of, so she had gone far out of doors.
The little lips that had lately quivered piteously, sang a tune in
unthinking gaiety, and life was again the same, for she could not then
understand.
The other scene was a radiant, sparkling, wildly joyous picture. The
world, enticing as a fairy garden, received her in her bright, petted
youth--her richly endowed orphanhood had been a perpetual feast. In
this period not one single voice of cold or ungracious tenor could she
recall.
But now she looked full over that garden, once all abloom. Here a
flower with blight in its heart, yonder one whose leaves were falling.
There whole bushes were only stems enthorned, and stood brown and
bitter, leaves and flowers withered or dead.
“So,” thought she, “it is with my life.” A rap on the door brought her
into the present. It was the delivery of the latest mail: some papers,
a magazine, and one letter. The letter was postmarked Winchester, Ky.
With a little sigh of triumphant expectation, she broke the seal. It,
to her thinking, might contain good news from friends at home.
It only took her a moment to scan it all.
“I am sick and needy. Won’t you help me for I am dying from
neglect.” This was signed:
“Black Mammy,
“Judy, (her X mark.)”
Cherokee read it again. Her eyes closed, and then opened, dilating in
swift terror. Her slave-mother suffering for the necessities of life.
She who had spent years in chivalrous devotion to the Bell family now
appealed to her, the last of that honored name.
A swift pain shot through her veins--a sudden increased anguish--a
sense of something irremediable, hopeless, inaccessible, held her in
its grip, and a voiceless, smothered cry rent her breast. Tears gushed
from her eyes, scalding waters which fell upon her hands and seemed to
wither them. Even the fern-leaf, the birth-mark, looked shrunken and
shrivelled, as she gazed at it; something told her to remember it held
the wraith of a life.
Cherokee was wild with grief. She went to the window and looked far out
into the night, letting her sight range all the Southern sky, and the
stars looked down with eyes that only stared and hurt her with their
lack of sympathy. A gentle wind crept by, and a faint sibilance, as of
taut strings throbbed through the coming night. It was Fred, with his
violin, waiting for her to come down to accompany him. But she did not
go--she had no thought of it being time to eat or time to play--she had
forgotten everything, except that a soul had cried to her and she must
answer it in so niggardly and miserly a fashion.
Now three, four, five hours had gone since the sunken sun laved the
western heaven with lowest tides of day. The tired world, that ever
craves for great dark night to come brooding in with draught of healing
and blessed rest that recreates, had been lulled to satisfaction. Still
mute sorrow held Cherokee, and it was nearly day when peace filled her
unremembering eyes and she had forgotten all.