'Stéphanie Gavotte'?"
Her faded smile held a faint surprise.
"How did you know?"
"I am a clairvoyant, and did you sing, 'Then You'll Remember Me?'"
"No, I never sang; but Mary--your mother--did."
They reached the back porch and passed through the wide hall into
the shaded spaciousness of the drawing-room. In that quiet interior
light that rested softly upon the decorous portraits of his forebears,
the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-à-brac of three generations,
he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized
again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice
and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish
grip, he heard his aunt's voice, light, wandering, non-arresting, as if
continuing some conversational thread, "And Miss Allison Clyde, Mark--my
old friend." He had been vaguely aware of some one else in the room, but
when he met the smile of the older woman who held out her hand to him,
he wondered that he had not realized it more promptly; for Miss Allison
Clyde, although far removed from the youth of years, had about her
something immediately and quietly charming--something, it occurred to
him, that suggested autumnal perfumes and the warmth of late sunlight.
It was a face with a certain fine austerity belonging to a generation
at once more natural and more reserved than ours.
"So this is Mary's boy," she said. "You have her eyes." He looked at her
and unconsciously glanced at Stella. The older woman belonged to the
quiet old room. Stella, despite the same inheritance, did not.
Tea was brought in by a maid grown gray in his aunt's service, and Miss
Lucretia presided. Mark's eyes again wandered from Miss Allison Clyde to
Stella with involuntary comparison.
No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young
woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully.
Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her
chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness.
"Stella has promised to sing 'Crabbéd Age' for me again," she announced
when tea was finished.
"Shall I sing it now?" Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to
the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer
was not an egoist, he shuddered.
"I am making frightful hash of it, I know," Stella confessed, unabashed,
as her fingers stumbled. "I think Miss Allison had better play it." Mark
glanced quickly at the older woman.
"Then it was _you_ I heard a moment ago."
"I tried it," she admitted, with a smile. "The title had a melancholy
attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I
should have had stage-fright dreadfully."
"Play something else," Mark suggested. "It would give me so much
pleasure. Something _not_ Mark Faraday."
Miss Allison rose decisively.
"No, I will play 'Crabbed Age,'" she decided, "and youth shall sing
it." And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it
with a musician's sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through
passably in her firm young voice.
In answer to Mark's sincere, "Play more," as she started to rise from
the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages
of "Meistersinger" in a way that showed a musician's knowledge of the
score.
"How wonderful that you can play like that still!" exclaimed Stella.
The gaucherie of that "still" struck upon Mark's artistic sensibilities,
trained in Italian habits of speech. "What a resource it must be!"
"For crabbed age," Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint
amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this
explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison
continued, "The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation
for lost youth, I fear." She said it without sentimentality, but, as
she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the "Golden Apples"
that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of
the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark's comprehension and
smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano
stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his
"Sun-dial," noting the titles--Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon,
Evening, Night. "'Youth and Crabbed Age' is Evening, I see," she
commented. "Then what is this?" She held up a separate sheet loosely
set in the book, reading the title, "Too Late for Love and Loving."
"That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor
of Shakespeare," Mark explained. "I am not a poet. They are just words
for music."
She read them over:
"Sweet love, too late!
Life is Time's prisoner,
Love's hour has fled,
The flowers are dead,
Love has passed by.
Sweet love, too late!
Death stands at the gate."
She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then
again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from
the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what
they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes
were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth--autumn pools
shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded
by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster,
yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of
the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the
incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with
relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must
have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss
Allison's single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would
seem, had not deprived her.
It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that
revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had
turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness,
and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes.
Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been
surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an
autumnal beauty of its own.
That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong
friend, Miss Augusta Penfield:
I met Lucretia's nephew, Mary's boy, to-day. He is you know, a
composer already on the road to fame. You remember that he was born
abroad. There is for all his undiluted American ancestry a foreign
touch about him, a something warm and ardent caught under the Italian
skies that even our children seem to take on when born there. He is
indeed a beautiful boy, a dreamer, yet manly. A boy I call him, yet
he is twenty-nine. My dear father had four sons and a daughter at
his age. Still he is a boy. It is strange in this generation, Augusta,
that though in many ways they seem so advanced, so beyond us, in others
they are further away from life's responsibilities than we were at their
age. There is a suggestion of his Uncle William about Mark, but he is
somehow stronger, more imperative. I was drawn to him at once because
of his music. And he has the charming manner, the almost excessive
chivalry, toward our sex that we see so little of any more, or at least
seldom encounter at our age. Lucretia had asked Stella in for tea. She
is a dear child and quite alarmingly composed, but not altogether
musical, despite her excellent musical opportunities. She played one
of the boy's songs, a delicious thing, rather dreadfully. I felt sorry
for him. Lucretia insisted upon my playing his "Youth and Crabbed Age,"
which every one has been singing, although he seems delightfully unaware
of that fact. He was so courteous about insisting that I should play
more, I ran through a bit of "Meistersinger,"--he seemed so truly a
young _Walther_,--and then discovered another little song that he has
not published, "Too Late for Love and Loving," full of a kind of pathos
that it seems impossible youth could understand. But I suppose that is
where genius comes in.
The rest of the letter was made of messages and the mild, small daily
occurrences that are of moment to such as Miss Augusta Penfield.
That night, searching in an old secretary in his room for some missing
notes, Mark came upon a little daguerreotype in a drawer. It was of a
young girl, taken apparently in the late sixties or early seventies.
Something in the face, clear-eyed, warm-lipped, trusting, caught and
held his attention. He turned it over to see if the girl's name was on
the back, but the only inscription was a date in his Uncle William's
writing, June, 1863. Poor Uncle William, who had been so full of
promise, they said, but who had died from a bullet wound, a sacrifice to
his country two years after the war!
Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man's face,
dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in
uniform always on his mother's dressing-table, rose before his mind's
eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him
to the war. The date must have been just about the time that he had
enlisted and marched away. He had gone without telling her perhaps;
she could have been little more than a child. Perhaps he had never told.
Or they might have had their brief tragic happiness upon the edge of
death, they two "embracing under death's spread hand."
He stared at the picture. It would have been easy to love a girl with
those eyes, that mouth. A fancy came upon him to put Uncle William's
picture beside the girl's, and impulsively he went back to the darkened
drawing-room, groped for the framed picture that stood upon the mantel,
found it, and carried it up to his room. Then side by side he studied
the two faces.
His imagination began to reconstruct their story. He wished that he
might learn more. He went back to the old desk. It might have been
his uncle's. He opened a drawer; it was empty. A second and a third;
the last contained some valueless miscellany, an old glass knob a faded
bit of worsted fringe, some papers. Poking under them, he actually found
a package of letters. He picked it up, and with a little thrill of
realization recognized his uncle's writing. The paper was old and
yellowed with time. It had no address, but was sealed with red wax.
Scarcely expecting fulfillment of his romantic hope, he broke the seal
and opened the package. There was no address on the first envelope. Some
business memorandum, no doubt; yet nothing surely that at this late day
he might not in honor examine. He drew out the closely written sheet and
turned it over. After all the years his eyes were surely the first to
read it. There was no name in the inscription. Uncle William's fine
writing was very legible.
II
July 15, 1863.
My little love with the smooth hair and the great eyes, you do not
know that I have the little daguerreotype next my heart. I stole it
from Lucretia, and packed it among my things. How often I shall take it
out in the long days ahead before the war is over and I can come back to
tell you that I love you. You will wait for me, sweetheart. No other man
shall be the one to make those clear eyes fall, to change them from a
child's to a woman's eyes. I can see you as you stood there beside the
sun-dial. "Fight a brave fight, William," you said, "and come back
soon." You were brave and glorious. Your eyes were not even wet, yet you
care enough for me to shed a tear. I know that, little Allison. We have
been such good comrades, you and I. I looked back and saw you waving.
But you trust life so fearlessly, child. You are only fifteen. At that
age one cannot imagine death. I am twenty-three and am a man. I knew I
must not speak. I knew it, though my heart was knocking against my sides
for love of you. So I shall not send these letters. I shall send you a
line now and then, but not of love. You will hear the news of me from
mother and the girls. I shall write these letters just the same, and
keep them, and if the day comes when those great eyes, those dear and
wonderful eyes, give the promise my heart is waiting for, then I shall
hand them to you to read, and you shall know how long and faithfully I
have loved you. I shall not write you of the war and the long marches;
those things will be in my home letters. To you I shall write only of
ourselves, not as if I were in the midst of battle and sudden death,
but as if I were at home in Beechwood, where my heart is, at my window
overlooking a corner of your garden. I am there now, sitting at my
window as I write. I have just caught a glimpse of you in your Sunday
gown, the white-and-green striped silk, with the tiny lavender flowers
scattered on the white ground. You were picking a spray of lemon verbena
to take to church. I see you in the little green bonnet in the high pew
beside your mother. You have the soul of a lover, my Allison. I know it
when I see you smell the fragrant flowers. Little Allison, how you will
love when your day comes! Your mouth, so young, so warm, so generous,
was made to give all; your pure eyes for complete trust. You belong to
me, my Allison, although you do not know it yet. Even as I write this,
fear shakes my heart. Have not all lovers thought the same? So strong
is the sense of possession in love, so impossible it seems to the human
heart that we should give all and receive nothing. What if some one
should rudely awaken your clear soul from its young sleep, lay hot
human hands upon you, my rose, my little cool, white flower! I can not
bear these thoughts. You are mine, and I shall let you sleep until the
moment comes for love to knock at the door of your heart. There shall
be no rude awakening. I shall speak first so gently, yes, you shall be
roused slowly from that sleep of childhood. Then you will put your hands
in mine and say, "William, I love you," just as you said to me to-day,
"Fight a good fight." And I will take those dear hands and draw you
slowly toward me and kiss you on your fine, straight brows, your serene
forehead, that is like that of the angels in the Italian pictures father
brought home from Italy. Then I will let you go. I shall not be too
impetuous, lest I frighten you. And then some day you will say again,
"Come home soon William," and it will mean that I am to go home to you.
Yours till death,
WILLIAM.
August, '63.
My love with the dove's eyes:
Why were you so shy when I met you to-day on the gravel path? I asked
you where you were going. You would not stop; you almost ran past, like
a little gray moth. I love you in that gray little gown; your little
bare shoulders are pink beside it, like a spring flower beside a stone.
Why were you so shy? You are too young to have a lover. There is no one
except the tow-headed Bowman boy across the street. It could not have
been he. Then you went to the piano, and I heard you singing softly, "My
Love is like a Red, Red Rose." What can you know of love, my little one?
I am jealous of life itself that must bring that change to you. I would
delay that day. Not yet would I have the bud open for the hot sun to
draw out its fragrance. I would keep you yet a while in the white,
austere innocence of your youth. My little love, my child, the hour is
not yet.
WILLIAM.
September, '64.
Where I sit at my window, sweetheart, I can see the corner of the
grape-arbor in your garden. Do you remember the day we sat there, and I
read you my story, and you listened, with your great dreaming eyes on
the slippery leaf shadows, and your mouth stained with the purple
grapes? And when I had finished, you asked me, "Why did Reginald think
he had to die, William?" And I told you, "Because he loved Eleanor so
much and she loved another man." "Then why didn't he love some one else,
too? How silly they all were!" you said. You were too young to
understand. I look in the eyes of the little girl in the picture, and
she does not understand. The little girl is a year younger than you, and
the green-and-white frock in the picture was torn and darned last
summer. I remember how you looked, bent over your needle, your red lips
a little heavy with unspoken protest as you sewed the long rent. What a
child you always were to tear your frocks and get berry stains on your
white aprons and scratch your fingers and arms with briers! And how I
have loved each scratch and stain. My sweet, wild little Allison! Now
perhaps you begin to understand, to wonder and dream a little. You may
even have your dreams of lovers. You wonder yet with no intimation
behind your clear eyes of what this thing is that incites men to courage
or drives them to madness and death. Have you wondered yet if some day
it will come to you? Or does it live still in that fair, fragrant world
of your imagination as a tale that is told?
* * * * *
To-day you came home from your sewing circle, where you sewed garments
for the soldiers, and when you came away you let me carry your package.
The sleeve of your little gray gown had been darned, and you had
outgrown the dress. "It isn't pretty any more, but I mustn't have a
new one," you said. "It is wicked for us to have new things when the
soldiers are ragged and cold." And that look that is like tears came
into your eyes. Oh, how I longed to kiss the hand you held out for your
bundle at the gate! Not yet, Allison. You are just sixteen. You are a
child yet. I must wait.
WILLIAM.
December, '64.
My Allison, I signed myself last your William, and I called you mine.
It is no bold assumption. Neither life nor death can make me other than
yours, whether you will or not, neither can it make you any less mine.
Isn't it our George William Curtis who said that the land belonged to
his rich neighbor, but the view was his? No matter if I never touch your
dear hands save as a friend, my Allison, you will still be mine, because
I have divined the fine mysteries of your spirit. I am your worshiper
and knight, whatever fate befalls us. "We needs must love the highest
when we see it," says the new poet across the water. No truer words
were ever spoken. So in that fine inner sense I am yours and you are
mine whether you ever come to love me or not. To-day I found you chasing
a butterfly in the garden. What a child you are still! You brushed me as
you ran past, then, as you turned, ran almost into my arms. Ah, my
Allison, you did not know how it set my heart beating when that loose
strand of your hair blew across my face! Your cheeks were flushed, and
you drew back laughing.
"What do you want with the butterfly, Allison?" I asked. "You surely
would not hurt it. If you throw your bonnet over it, you will break its
wings."
You looked at me with your great eyes.
"I would not do that, William. I only wanted to see the gold spots on
its wings."
"You can do that best without touching it, my dear," I said. "A touch
will destroy its gold dust." You looked at me with your pure eyes and
said,--like a little child, yet you are almost a woman,--"Oh, William,
I would not break its wings." And then sharply a thought struck me like
a pang. Can I perhaps see you better with my soul's eyes, Allison, if
you are never mine? Would I break _your_ wings in touching you? Are
you something too fine and fair for human experience? It came like a
presentiment then that you would never be mine in the dear common human
way. Can it be so, dear love? No, no; I would have you when the hour
comes. Despite the angel in your eyes, you were made to make fair a
home, to know in all its phases a man's love, to hold your children in
your arms,--children with eyes such as you have now,--and teach them
such things as pure beings like you can teach to children.
"Isn't it nice that they are butterflies last, William?" you said.
"Suppose they had to grow brown and ugly and to move slowly, instead
of flying, when they are old like people."
"It is like life and death," I told you, although God knows I am no
preacher. Perhaps it is because my body is at the war while my soul
is in Beechwood that I must sometimes think these thoughts of death.
Your eyes looked straight into mine then, with something like a
reflection of heaven's light. Then again all at once they were a child's
again, and you said: "Grandma's portrait in the hall is beautiful. She
was sixteen then. But she isn't pretty any more."
"No, she isn't pretty any more, Allison, yet once like you she chased
butterflies in the garden. And that portrait was painted the year before
she was married."
Why was it then that you turned away your eyes and the soft curve of
your cheek grew pink? Perhaps it is always so with the young girl at
the thought of love and marriage; but you are still a child.
"The butterfly has flown away, Allison, and you never even looked at
its golden wings," I reminded you, and you laughed and shrugged. "There
will be another," you said. Yes, there will always be more butterflies
in the garden, and there will always be more lovers in the world for
such as you while your sweet youth lasts, whether I live to woo you or
not. That thought saddens me. Yet should I not feel it enough to have
known and loved you? Suppose you had never been in the world, and I had
loved some commonplace pretty girl instead of little Allison, with eyes
like an autumn brook in the sun?
Oh, my dear, the time is long, and I grow weary with my make-believing.
I am a thousand miles away. A cold rain is falling. I could not bear it
were it not for your voice in my ears: "Fight a good fight. Come back
home soon, William." As soon, God pity me as I can. My country first,
even if it robs me of life's dearest treasure. Ah, that I had dared
before I left to speak the words in my heart, "Wait for me, sweetheart,
wait till I come home; for it will be no true home unless you make it
for me."
But I did not say it. The hour was not yet. Pray God it may come for us
both, for never will another know how to love you as I do, my Allison.
YOUR FAITHFUL WILLIAM.
March, '65.
In battle, on the march, there has been no time for my letters, my
sweetheart, and only in my dreams have I been able to fancy myself at
the window overlooking your garden. But now there is a lull for writing.
We feel that the end is drawing near. And so once more I can trust my
dream self back in Beechwood with you.
Last night I took you home from Uncle Alvin's. We walked slowly
under the moon. The air was cool. You wore your little brown hood.
You are taller now, little Allison. I lingered at the gate when I
said good night. You lingered, too, and for the first time I knew--I
cannot say how--that your soft childhood was unfolding its wings to
depart. Not that I dared even to linger over your hand, still less
to pull off the brown mitten and kiss the little hand curled soft and
warm within; but the eyes that you turned to me had a graver light.
Was it the sad news of the war, the death and tragedy about you?
Jolly Dick Burrows, Arthur and Henry, struck down, blotted out. These
are aging times, my sweetheart. Had you the consciousness of me as
anything nearer than your old friend Lucretia's brother? Some day
life will bring to you this thing that tears at my heart. Some day not
so far off now. Sometimes I wonder that I dare hope it will come to me.
WILLIAM.
April 10, '65.