LAST WORDS.
"As the bird to its sheltering nest,
When the storm on the hills is abroad.
So his spirit has flown from this world of unrest,
To repose on the bosom of God."
--W. H. BURLEIGH.
"Who has not kept some trifling thing,
More prized than jewels rare,
A faded flower, a broken ring,
A tress of golden hair?"
"Grace, love, will you go to Willard? He has something to say to you."
The southern sun hung low in the western heavens; the day was
excessively warm for April, and a little cloud in the sky, "no bigger
than a man's hand," foreboded a shower. Grace turned from the window
where she stood watching the shifting white clouds in the blue sky, and
went back to the room from which she had stolen to hide the bitter pain
at her heart.
A very solemn silence hung about the white-draped chamber. The window
shutters were open to admit the balmy air, and a slanting ray of
sunshine had stolen in and brightened the top of the sick man's pillow,
touching into golden radiance the dark locks pushed away from his brow.
The wan and wasted face wore a beautiful serenity that was not of
earth. "God's finger" had "touched him" very gently, but palpably.
Grace bent over him, taking his cold white hand in hers with voiceless
emotion. She had grown so fond of him in a warm, sisterly fashion,
reverenced his brave, pure, upright spirit so highly that it seemed to
her a close and kindred soul was winging its way from her side to the
bright beyond, leaving her more alone and desolate than ever.
"It is almost over," he said, looking up at her with the reflex of a
smile in the beautiful dark-gray orbs that kept their luminous radiance
to the last.
She answers not. How can she break with the sounds of human grief the
brooding peace that shines on the pathway of this departing spirit? Her
voice, the sweetest one he will ever hear on this side of eternity,
rises low but firm in one of the old-fashioned hymns the old-fashioned
captain loved:
"Fear not, I am with thee. O be not dismay'd,
I, I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.
"When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of grief shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."
"Amen," he whispers, lowly. "His rod and His staff they comfort me."
Silence falls for a brief space. He is gathering his fainting strength
for the words that come slowly from his lips:
"I have been the bearer to you of unwelcome tidings so often, Mrs.
Winans, that it absolutely pains me now to recall it."
"Do not recall it," she rejoins, earnestly. "Why should you? The power
overruling such things is higher than we are. You have been a comforter
to me more often than you know of--take only that thought with you."
He smiles as she re-arranges his pillows, lifting his head so that
his faint breath comes more evenly. The stray end of one of her long
silken curls falls over his breast an instant, and he touches it with a
caressing hand.
"It is given to me," he answers, "to bear you good tidings before I go.
Your memories of me--will not thus be all unpleasant ones."
The eager remonstrance forming itself on her lip dies unspoken as he
goes on:
"You have borne sorrow with a very brave heart, Gracie--have been, as
you once told me, and as I really think, _fireproof_! Can you bear joy
as well?"
She cannot possibly speak. Something rising in her throat literally
chokes her breath.
"Little sister, be strong. Lulu has written--well, that your
husband--that Winans is in London, alive and well--and is coming home
to you--in May."
There is utter silence. She is quiet always, in pain or pleasure. He
sees only her small hands clasping each other close, and her violet
eyes--those unerring indices of her feelings--growing dusk black under
the lashes. But something in the curve of her firm lip does not satisfy
him. He feebly lifts his hand to touch hers.
"You will not be hard and unforgiving? It is not like Grace Winans
to be that. Promise me that you will forgive him freely! If he acted
wrongly he has suffered for it. It is so easy to go wrong--to err is
human, you know."
No wavering in that sternly curved red lip shows acquiescence. His
voice rises higher, with a throb of pain in it:
"'If ye forgive not men their trespasses how shall my Father which is
in heaven forgive you?' Gracie, say 'I promise.'"
All the sudden hot anger against the husband she had loved--the husband
who had wronged her, and left desolate the sweetest years of her
life--fades out of her heart. The words falter as hollowly from her
lips as from his:
"I promise."
"Thanks. May God bless you--and--and make all your future years happy
ones. Mother--call mother, please."
She puts a little cordial to the panting lips and tearfully obeys.
On her knees at the other side of the bed the anguished mother listens
to the tender message to the absent sister, the soft words of comfort,
the low farewell. With the last kiss of her son on her lips she buries
her face speechlessly in his pillow.
"Gracie, will _you_ raise me a little?"
She bends with one arm under his shoulders, the other across his
breast, and lifts him so that his head rests comfortably against her
shoulder--an easy task, fragile and wearied as she is, for he has
wasted in the grasp of that destroying fever until he is scarcely more
than a wan shadow of himself.
Bending to look into his face, she asks, softly:
"Willard, are you easy now?"
"Quite _easy_," he answers, in a strangely contented tone, with such
a tender caress in it that Grace starts; and as he falters "good-by,"
she bends with a sudden impulse and just touches her lips to his in a
pure thrill of sisterly affection and grief; his glance lifts to hers
an instant and remains fixed; a quivering sigh, a scarcely perceptible
shudder, and Willard Clendenon's spirit has flown out of the earthly
heaven of her arms to the higher heaven of his soul.
* * * * *
Later, as Grace lay weeping in her own room, the bereaved mother came
gliding in. The soft flame of a wax candle lent a faint, pure light to
the room, and showed her gentle face, free from tears, but seamed with
a touching resignation beautiful in the extreme. What a mournful pathos
lies in the grief of an old face! It is more eloquent than tears, even
as silence can be more eloquent than speech.
Sitting on the edge of Grace's lounge, gently smoothing the disheveled
curls with her cool fingers, it would seem as if the younger woman were
the mourner, she the comforter.
"God knows best," she says, with a Christian's strong reliance; and
then she added, pathetically: "And it has come to me suddenly, Gracie,
child, that my poor boy was not, perhaps, quite happy, or, at least,
that some grief, at which we never guessed, was mingled with the quiet
thread of his life."
A sudden memory of words of his came into Grace's mind.
"God, when He puts a life-long sorrow on our hearts, usually
compensates for it by giving us a brief span of life in which to endure
it."
"He deserved to be happy," she answered, warmly. "He was so good, so
true. If any merited perfect content, it was your son."
"You have seen him sometimes in the whirl of gay society, Grace; did
you ever notice in him any peculiar attachment for a woman?"
"Never," Grace answered, wondering. "He was courteously polite,
deferentially chivalrous to all, but seemed attached to none in
particular. Why do you ask?"
"Because I found this--I would show it to none but you, Grace--on his
poor dead heart. It tells its own sad story."
She put into the young girl's hand a broad, flat gold locket, swinging
by a slight gold chain. Almost as if she touched a coffin-lid, Grace
moved the spring.
It flew open. No woman's pictured face smiled back at her--the upper
lid had a deeply cut inscription, _February_, 1871--in the other deeper
side lay a dead white rose, its short, thorny stem wound about with a
tangle of pale-gold hair.
That was all. A sudden memory stirred at Grace's heart, and it all came
back to her. The winter morning in her conservatory at Norfolk--the
white rose on her breast, the tangled, broken curl, the gentle good-by.
Warm flushes of irrepressible color surged up to her pale face, and
with a sudden shocked horror Mrs. Clendenon glanced from the stem of
the withered rose to the soft curls she was mechanically smoothing.
It was enough. "My poor boy!" she murmured and taking Grace Winans in
her tender, forgiving, motherly arms, kissed her forehead.
And the tie between the two women never grew less close and warm. The
still form they carried home to Norfolk to lay in its grave was a
mutual sorrowful tie between them forever.
Stella De Vere came next day, heavily vailed, on her father's arm, and
kissed Captain Clendenon in his coffin, leaving a bouquet of lilies on
his pulseless breast.
But at early morning's dawn a slender, white-robed form bent over him,
all her golden tresses sweeping over the heart that lay under its
treasured keepsake still, and a sister's pained and tender kiss rested
warmly on the sealed lips whose untold secret had come so strangely
into her keeping.