Spring, who breaks all promises in the beginning to keep them in the
end, had ceased from chilling caprice and withdrawals: the whole land
was now the frank revelation of her loveliness. Autumn--the hours of
falling and of departing; spring--season of rise and of return. The
rise of sap from root to summit; the rise of plant from soil to sun;
the rise of bud from bark to bloom; the rise of song from heart to
hearing: vital days. And days when things that went away come back,
when woods, fields, thickets, and streams are full of returns.
Gabriella was not disappointed. Those provident old tree-mothers on the
orchard slope, whose red-cheeked children are autumn apples, had not
let themselves be fatally surprised by the great February frost: their
bark-cradled bud-infants had only been wrapped away the more warmly
till danger was over. For many days now the hillside had been a grove
of pink and white domes under each of which hung faint fragrance: the
great silent marriage-bells of the trees.
After the early family supper, Gabriella, if there had been no shower,
would take her shawl to sit on and some bit of work for companionship.
She would go out to the edge of this orchard away from the tumult of
the house. The hill sloped down into a wide green valley winding away
toward the forest below. Through this valley a stream of white spring
water, drunk by the stock, ran within banks of mint and over a bed of
rocks and moss. On the hillside opposite was a field of young hemp
stretching westward--soon to be a low sea of rippling green. Beyond
this field was the sunset; over it flashed the evening star; and for
the past few days beside the star had hung the inconstant, the
constant, crescent of ages.
She liked to spread her shawl on the edge of the orchard overlooking
the valley--a deep carpet of grass sprinkled with wind-blown petals; to
watch the sky kindle and burn out; see the recluse Evening come forth
before the Night and walk softly down the valley toward the woods; feel
as an elixir about her the air, sweet from the trees, sweet with earth
odors, sweet with all the lingering history of the day. Nearer, ever
nearer would swing the stars into her view. The moon, late a bow of
thinnest, mistiest silver, now of broadening, brightening gold, would
begin to drive the darkness downward from the white domes of the trees
till it lay as a faint shadow beneath them. These were hours fraught
with peace and rest to her tired mind and tired body.
One day she was sitting thus, absently knitting herself some bleaching
gloves, (Gabriella's hands were as if stained by all the mixed petals
of the boughs.) The sun was going down beyond the low hills, In the
orchard behind her she could hear the flutter of wings and the last
calls of quieting birds.
She had dropped the threads of her handiwork into her lap, and with
folded hands was knitting memories.
At twilights such as this in years gone by, she, a little girl, had
been used to drive out into the country with her grandmother--often
choosing the routes herself and ordering the carriage to be stopped on
the road as her fancy pleased. For in those aristocratic days, Southern
children, like those of royal families, were encouraged early in life
to learn how to give orders and to exact obedience and to rule: when
they grew up they would have many under them: and not to reign was to
be ruined. So that the infantile autocrat Gabriella was being
instructed in this way and in that way by the powerful, strong-minded,
efficient grandmother as a tender old lioness might train a cub for the
mastering of its dangerous world. She recalled these twilight drives
when the fields along the turnpikes were turning green with the young
grain; the homeward return through the lamp-lit town to the big iron
entrance-gate, the parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the great
house, the noiseless movements, the perfect manners of the many
servants; later in the evening the music, the dancing, the wild
joy--fairyland once more. But how far, far away now! And how the forces
of life had tossed things since then like straws on the eddies of a
tempest: her grandmother killed, thousands of miles away, with sorrow;
her uncles with their oldest sons, mere boys, fighting and falling
together; tears, poverty, ruin everywhere: and she, after years of
struggle, cast completely out of the only world she had ever known into
another that she had never imagined.
Gabriella felt this evening what often came to her at times: a deep
yearning for her own people of the past, for their voices, their ways
of looking at life; for the gentleness and courtesy, and the thousand
unconscious moods and acts that rendered them distinguished and
delightful. She would have liked to slip back into the old elegance, to
have been surrounded by the old rich and beautiful things. The
child-princess who was once her sole self was destined to live within
Gabriella always.
But she knew that the society in which she had moved was lost to her
finally. Not alone through the vicissitudes of the war; for after the
war, despite the overthrow, the almost complete disappearance, of many
families, it had come together, it had reconstituted itself, it
flourished still. It was lost to her because she had become penniless
and because she had gone to work. When it transpired that she had
declined all aid, thrown off all disguises, and taken her future into
her own hands, to work and to receive wages for her work, in the social
world where she was known and where the generations of her family had
been leaders, there were kind offers of aid, secret condolences,
whispered regrets, visible distress: her resolve was a new thing for a
girl in those years. She could, indeed, in a way, have kept her place;
but she could not have endured the sympathy, the change, with which she
would have been welcomed--and discarded. She made trial of this a few
times and was convinced: up to the day of the cruel discovery of that,
Gabriella had never dreamed what her social world could be to one who
had dropped out of it.
Her church and the new life--these two had been left her. She no longer
had a pew, but she had her faith and this was enough; for it always
gave her, wherever she was, some secret place in which to kneel and
from which to rise strengthened and comforted. As for the fearful
fields of work into which she had come, a strange and solitary learner,
these had turned into the abiding, the living landscapes of life now.
Here she had found independence--sweet, wholesome crust; found another
self within herself; and here found her mission for the future--David.
So that looking upon the disordered and planless years, during which it
had often seemed that she was struggling unwatched, Gabriella now
believed that through them she had most been guided, When many hands
had let hers go, One had taken it; when old pathways were closed, a new
one was opened; and she had been led along it--home.
David's illness had deepened beyond any other experience her faith in
an overruling Providence. His return to health was to her a return from
death: it was an answer to her prayers: it was a resurrection.
Henceforth his life was a gift for the second time to himself, to her,
to the world for which he must work with all his powers and work
aright. And her pledge, her compact with the Divine, was to help him,
to guide him back into the faith from which he had wandered. Outside of
prayer, days and nights at his bedside had made him hers: vigils,
nursing, suffering, helplessness, dependence--all these had been as
purest oil to that alabaster lamp of love which burned within her
chaste soul.
The sun had gone down. The hush of twilight was descending from the
clear sky, in the depths of which the brightest stars began to appear
as points of silvery flame. The air had the balm of early summer, the
ground was dry and warm.
Gabriella began to watch. The last time she had gone to see him, as he
walked part of the way back with her, he had said:--
"I am well now; the next time _I_ am coming to see YOU."
Soon, along the edge of the orchard from the direction of the house,
she saw him walking slowly toward her, thin, gaunt; he was leaning on a
rough, stout hickory, as long as himself, in the manner of an old man.