said the leader, with a ceremonious bow. Now, the keeper had not much
sympathy with the strewing of flowers, North or South; he had seen the
beautiful ceremony more than once turned into a political demonstration.
Here, however, in this small, isolated, interior town, there was nothing
of that kind; the whole population of white faces laid their roses and
wept true tears on the graves of their lost ones in the village
churchyard when the Southern Memorial Day came round, and just as
naturally the whole population of black faces went out to the national
cemetery with their flowers on the day when, throughout the North,
spring blossoms were laid on the graves of the soldiers, from the little
Maine village to the stretching ranks of Arlington, from Greenwood to
the far Western burial-places of San Francisco. The keeper joined the
procession and led the way to the parade-ground. As they approached the
trenches, the leader began singing and all joined. "Swing low, sweet
chariot," sang the freedmen, and their hymn rose and fell with strange,
sweet harmony--one of those wild, unwritten melodies which the North
heard with surprise and marveling when, after the war, bands of singers
came to their cities and sang the songs of slavery, in order to gain for
their children the coveted education. "Swing low, sweet chariot," sang
the freedmen, and two by two they passed along, strewing the graves with
flowers till all the green was dotted with color. It was a pathetic
sight to see some of the old men and women, ignorant field-hands, bent,
dull-eyed, and past the possibility of education even in its simplest
forms, carefully placing their poor flowers to the best advantage. They
knew dimly that the men who lay beneath those mounds had done something
wonderful for them and for their children; and so they came bringing
their blossoms, with little intelligence but with much love.
The ceremony over, they retired. As he turned, the keeper caught a
glimpse of Miss Ward's face at the window.
"Hope we's not makin' too free, sah," said the leader, as the
procession, with many a bow and scrape, took leave, "but we's kep' de
day now two years, sah, befo' you came, sah, an we's teachin' de chil'en
to keep it, sah."
The keeper returned to the cottage. "Not a white face," he said.
"Certainly not," replied Miss Ward, crisply.
"I know some graves at the North, Miss Ward, graves of Southern
soldiers, and I know some Northern women who do not scorn to lay a few
flowers on the lonely mounds as they pass by with their blossoms on our
Memorial Day."
"You are fortunate. They must be angels. We have no angels here."
"I am inclined to believe you are right," said the keeper.
That night old Pomp, who had remained invisible in the kitchen during
the ceremony, stole away in the twilight and came back with a few
flowers. Rodman saw him going down toward the parade-ground, and
watched. The old man had but a few blossoms; he arranged them hastily on
the mounds with many a furtive glance toward the house, and then stole
back, satisfied; he had performed his part.
Ward De Rosset lay on his pallet, apparently unchanged; he seemed
neither stronger nor weaker. He had grown childishly dependent upon his
host, and wearied for him, as the Scotch say; but Rodman withstood his
fancies, and gave him only the evenings, when Miss Bettina was not
there. One afternoon, however, it rained so violently that he was forced
to seek shelter; he set himself to work on the ledgers; he was on the
ninth thousand now. But the sick man heard his step in the outer room,
and called in his weak voice, "Rodman, Rodman." After a time he went in,
and it ended in his staying; for the patient was nervous and irritable,
and he pitied the nurse, who seemed able to please him in nothing. De
Rosset turned with a sigh of relief toward the strong hands that lifted
him readily, toward the composed manner, toward the man's voice that
seemed to bring a breeze from outside into the close room; animated,
cheered, he talked volubly. The keeper listened, answered once in a
while, and quietly took the rest of the afternoon into his own hands.
Miss Ward yielded to the silent change, leaned back, and closed her
eyes. She looked exhausted and for the first time pallid; the loosened
dark hair curled in little rings about her temples, and her lips were
parted as though she was too tired to close them; for hers were not the
thin, straight lips that shut tight naturally, like the straight line of
a closed box. The sick man talked on. "Come, Rodman," he said, after a
while, "I have read that lying verse of yours over at least ten thousand
and fifty-nine times; please tell me its history; I want to have
something definite to think of when I read it for the ten thousand and
sixtieth."
"Toujours femme varie,
Bien fou qui s'y fie;
Une femme souvent
N'est qu'une plume au vent,"
read the keeper slowly, with his execrable English accent. "Well, I
don't know that I have any objection to telling the story. I am not sure
but that it will do me good to hear it all over myself in plain language
again."
"Then it concerns yourself," said De Rosset; "so much the better. I hope
it will be, as the children say, the truth, and long."
"It will be the truth, but not long. When the war broke out I was
twenty-eight years old, living with my mother on our farm in New
England. My father and two brothers had died and left me the homestead;
otherwise I should have broken away and sought fortune farther westward,
where the lands are better and life is more free. But mother loved the
house, the fields, and every crooked tree. She was alone, and so I staid
with her. In the center of the village green stood the square, white
meeting-house, and near by the small cottage where the pastor lived; the
minister's daughter, Mary, was my promised wife. Mary was a slender
little creature with a profusion of pale flaxen hair, large, serious
blue eyes, and small, delicate features; she was timid almost to a
fault; her voice was low and gentle. She was not eighteen, and we were
to wait a year. The war came, and I volunteered, of course, and marched
away; we wrote to each other often; my letters were full of the camp and
skirmishes; hers told of the village, how the widow Brown had fallen
ill, and how it was feared that Squire Stafford's boys were lapsing into
evil ways. Then came the day when my regiment marched to the field of
its slaughter, and soon after our shattered remnant went home. Mary
cried over me, and came out every day to the farmhouse with her bunches
of violets; she read aloud to me from her good little books, and I used
to lie and watch her profile bending over the page, with the light
falling on her flaxen hair low down against the small, white throat.
Then my wound healed, and I went again, this time for three years; and
Mary's father blessed me, and said that when peace came he would call me
son, but not before, for these were no times for marrying or giving in
marriage. He was a good man, a red-hot abolitionist, and a roaring lion
as regards temperance; but nature had made him so small in body that no
one was much frightened when he roared. I said that I went for three
years; but eight years have passed and I have never been back to the
village. First, mother died. Then Mary turned false. I sold the farm by
letter and lost the money three months afterward in an unfortunate
investment; my health failed. Like many another Northern soldier, I
remembered the healing climate of the South; its soft airs came back to
me when the snow lay deep on the fields and the sharp wind whistled
around the poor tavern where the moneyless, half-crippled volunteer sat
coughing by the fire. I applied for this place and obtained it. That is
all."
"But it is not all," said the sick man, raising himself on his elbow;
"you have not told half yet, nor anything at all about the French
verse."
"Oh--that? There was a little Frenchman staying at the hotel; he had
formerly been a dancing-master, and was full of dry, withered conceits,
although he looked like a thin and bilious old ape dressed as a man. He
taught me, or tried to teach me, various wise sayings, among them this
one, which pleased my fancy so much that I gave him twenty-five cents to
write it out in large text for me."
"Toujours femme varie," repeated De Rosset; "but you don't really think
so, do you, Rodman?"
"I do. But they can not help it; it is their nature.--I beg your pardon,
Miss Ward. I was speaking as though you were not here."
Miss Ward's eyelids barely acknowledged his existence; that was all. But
some time after she remarked to her cousin that it was only in New
England that one found that pale flaxen hair.
June was waning, when suddenly the summons came. Ward De Rosset died. He
was unconscious toward the last, and death, in the guise of sleep, bore
away his soul. They carried him home to the old house, and from there
the funeral started, a few family carriages, dingy and battered,
following the hearse, for death revived the old neighborhood feeling;
that honor at least they could pay--the sonless mothers and the widows
who lived shut up in the old houses with everything falling into ruin
around them, brooding over the past. The keeper watched the small
procession as it passed his gate on its way to the churchyard in the
village. "There he goes, poor fellow, his sufferings over at last," he
said; and then he set the cottage in order and began the old solitary
life again.
He saw Miss Ward but once.
It was a breathless evening in August, when the moonlight flooded the
level country. He had started out to stroll across the waste; but the
mood changed, and climbing over the eastern wall he had walked back to
the flag-staff, and now lay at its foot gazing up into the infinite sky.
A step sounded on the gravel-walk; he turned his face that way, and
recognized Miss Ward. With confident step she passed the dark cottage,
and brushed his arm with her robe as he lay unseen in the shadow. She
went down toward the parade-ground, and his eyes followed her. Softly
outlined in the moonlight, she moved to and fro among the mounds,
pausing often, and once he thought she knelt. Then slowly she returned,
and he raised himself and waited; she saw him, started, then paused.
"I thought you were away," she said; "Pomp told me so."
"You set him to watch me?"
"Yes. I wished to come here once, and I did not wish to meet you."
"Why did you wish to come?"
"Because Ward was here--and because--because--never mind. It is enough
that I wished to walk once among those mounds."
"And pray there?"
"Well--and if I did!" said the girl defiantly.
Rodman stood facing her, with his arms folded; his eyes rested on her
face; he said nothing.
"I am going away to-morrow," began Miss Ward again, assuming with an
effort her old, pulseless manner. "I have sold the place, and I shall
never return, I think; I am going far away."
"Where?"
"To Tennessee."
"That is not so very far," said the keeper, smiling.
"There I shall begin a new existence," pursued the voice, ignoring the
comment.
"You have scarcely begun the old; you are hardly more than a child, now.
What are you going to do in Tennessee?"
"Teach."
"Have you relatives there?"
"No."
"A miserable life--a hard, lonely, loveless life," said Rodman. "God
help the woman who must be that dreary thing, a teacher from necessity!"
Miss Ward turned swiftly, but the keeper kept by her side. He saw the
tears glittering on her eyelashes, and his voice softened. "Do not leave
me in anger," he said; "I should not have spoken so, although indeed it
was the truth. Walk back with me to the cottage, and take your last look
at the room where poor Ward died, and then I will go with you to your
home."
"No; Pomp is waiting at the gate," said the girl, almost inarticulately.
"Very well; to the gate, then."
They went toward the cottage in silence; the keeper threw open the door.
"Go in," he said. "I will wait outside."
The girl entered and went into the inner room, throwing herself down
upon her knees at the bedside. "O Ward, Ward!" she sobbed; "I am all
alone in the world now, Ward--all alone!" She buried her face in her
hands and gave way to a passion of tears; and the keeper could not help
but hear as he waited outside. Then the desolate little creature rose
and came forth, putting on, as she did so, her poor armor of pride. The
keeper had not moved from the door-step. Now he turned his face. "Before
you go--go away for ever from this place--will you write your name in my
register," he said--"the visitors' register? The Government had it
prepared for the throngs who would visit these graves; but with the
exception of the blacks, who can not write, no one has come, and the
register is empty. Will you write your name? Yet do not write it unless
you can think gently of the men who lie there under the grass. I believe
you do think gently of them, else why have you come of your own accord
to stand by the side of their graves?" As he said this, he looked
fixedly at her.
Miss Ward did not answer; but neither did she write.
"Very well," said the keeper; "come away. You will not, I see."
"I can not! Shall I, Bettina Ward, set my name down in black and white
as a visitor to this cemetery, where lie fourteen thousand of the
soldiers who killed my father, my three brothers, my cousins; who
brought desolation upon all our house, and ruin upon all our
neighborhood, all our State, and all our country?--for the South _is_
our country, and not your North. Shall I forget these things? Never!
Sooner let my right hand wither by my side! I was but a child; yet I
remember the tears of my mother, and the grief of all around us. There
was not a house where there was not one dead."
"It is true," answered the keeper; "at the South, all went."
They walked down to the gate together in silence.
"Good-by," said John, holding out his hand; "you will give me yours or
not as you choose, but I will not have it as a favor."
She gave it.
"I hope that life will grow brighter to you as the years pass. May God
bless you!"
He dropped her hand; she turned, and passed through the gateway; then he
sprang after her.
"Nothing can change you," he said; "I know it, I have known it all
along; you are part of your country, part of the time, part of the
bitter hour through which she is passing. Nothing can change you; if it
could, you would not be what you are, and I should not--But you can not
change. Good-by, Bettina, poor little child--good-by. Follow your path
out into the world. Yet do not think, dear, that I have not seen--have
not understood."
He bent and kissed her hand; then he was gone, and she went on alone.
A week later the keeper strolled over toward the old house. It was
twilight, but the new owner was still at work. He was one of those
sandy-haired, energetic Maine men, who, probably on the principle of
extremes, were often found through the South, making new homes for
themselves in the pleasant land.
"Pulling down the old house, are you?" said the keeper, leaning idly on
the gate, which was already flanked by a new fence.
"Yes," replied the Maine man, pausing; "it was only an old shell, just
ready to tumble on our heads. You're the keeper over yonder, an't you?"
(He already knew everybody within a circle of five miles.)
"Yes. I think I should like those vines if you have no use for them,"
said Rodman, pointing to the uprooted greenery that once screened the
old piazza.
"Wuth about twenty-five cents, I guess," said the Maine man, handing
them over.
SISTER ST. LUKE.
She lived shut in by flowers and trees,
And shade of gentle bigotries;
On this side lay the trackless sea,
On that the great world's mystery;
But, all unseen and all unguessed,
They could not break upon her rest.
The world's far glories flamed and flashed,
Afar the wild seas roared and dashed;
But in her small dull paradise,
Safe housed from rapture or surprise,
Nor day nor night had power to fright
The peace of God within her eyes.
JOHN HAY.
They found her there. "This is more than I expected," said Carrington as
they landed--"seven pairs of Spanish eyes at once."
"Three pairs," answered Keith, fastening the statement to fact and the
boat to a rock in his calm way; "and one if not two of the pairs are
Minorcan."
The two friends crossed the broad white beach toward the little stone
house of the light-keeper, who sat in the doorway, having spent the
morning watching their sail cross over from Pelican reef, tacking lazily
east and west--an event of more than enough importance in his isolated
life to have kept him there, gazing and contented, all day. Behind the
broad shoulders of swarthy Pedro stood a little figure clothed in black;
and as the man lifted himself at last and came down to meet them, and
his wife stepped briskly forward, they saw that the third person was a
nun--a large-eyed, fragile little creature, promptly introduced by
Melvyna, the keeper's wife, as "Sister St. Luke." For the keeper's
wife, in spite of her black eyes, was not a Minorcan; not even a
Southerner. Melvyna Sawyer was born in Vermont, and, by one of the
strange chances of this vast, many-raced, motley country of ours, she
had traveled south as nurse--and a very good, energetic nurse too,
albeit somewhat sharp-voiced--to a delicate young wife, who had died in
the sunny land, as so many of them die; the sun, with all his good will
and with all his shining, not being able to undo in three months the
work of long years of the snows and bleak east winds of New England.
The lady dead, and her poor thin frame sent northward again to lie in
the hillside churchyard by the side of bleak Puritan ancestors, Melvyna
looked about her. She hated the lazy tropical land, and had packed her
calf-skin trunk to go, when Pedro Gonsalvez surprised her by proposing
matrimony. At least that is what she wrote to her aunt Clemanthy, away
in Vermont; and, although Pedro may not have used the words, he at least
meant the fact, for they were married two weeks later by a justice of
the peace, whom Melvyna's sharp eyes had unearthed, she of course
deeming the padre of the little parish and one or two attendant priests
as so much dust to be trampled energetically under her shoes, Protestant
and number six and a half double-soled mediums. The justice of the
peace, a good-natured old gentleman who had forgotten that he held the
office at all, since there was no demand for justice and the peace was
never broken, married them as well as he could in a surprised sort of
way; and, instead of receiving a fee, gave one, which Melvyna, however,
promptly rescued from the bridegroom's willing hand, and returned with
the remark that there was no "call for alms" (pronounced as if rhymed
with hams), and that two shilling, or mebbe three, she guessed, would be
about right for the job. This sum she deposited on the table, and then
took leave, walking off with a quick, enterprising step, followed by her
acquiescent and admiring bridegroom. He had remained acquiescent and
admiring ever since, and now, as lighthouse-keeper on Pelican Island, he
admired and acquiesced more than ever; while Melvyna kept the house in
order, cooked his dinners, and tended his light, which, although only
third-class, shone and glittered under her daily care in the old square
tower which was founded by the Spaniards, heightened by the English, and
now finished and owned by the United States, whose Lighthouse Board said
to each other every now and then that really they must put a first-class
Fresnel on Pelican Island and a good substantial tower instead of that
old-fashioned beacon. They did so a year or two later; and a hideous
barber's pole it remains to the present day. But when Carrington and
Keith landed there the square tower still stood in its gray old age at
the very edge of the ocean, so that high tides swept the step of the
keeper's house. It was originally a lookout where the Spanish soldier
stood and fired his culverin when a vessel came in sight outside the
reef; then the British occupied the land, added a story, and placed an
iron grating on the top, where their coastguardsman lighted a fire of
pitch-pine knots that flared up against the sky, with the tidings, "A
sail! a sail!" Finally the United States came into possession, ran up a
third story, and put in a revolving light, one flash for the land and
two for the sea--a proportion unnecessarily generous now to the land,
since nothing came in any more, and everything went by, the little
harbor being of no importance since the indigo culture had failed. But
ships still sailed by on their way to the Queen of the Antilles, and to
the far Windward and Leeward Islands, and the old light went on
revolving, presumably for their benefit. The tower, gray and crumbling,
and the keeper's house, were surrounded by a high stone wall with angles
and loopholes--a small but regularly planned defensive fortification
built by the Spaniards; and odd enough it looked there on that peaceful
island, where there was nothing to defend. But it bore itself stoutly
nevertheless, this ancient little fortress, and kept a sharp lookout
still over the ocean for the damnable Huguenot sail of two centuries
before.
The sea had encroached greatly on Pelican Island, and sooner or later it
must sweep the keeper's house away; but now it was a not unpleasant
sensation to hear the water wash against the step--to sit at the narrow
little windows and watch the sea roll up, roll up, nearer and nearer,
coming all the way landless in long surges from the distant African
coast, only to never quite get at the foundations of that stubborn
little dwelling, which held its own against them, and then triumphantly
watched them roll back, roll back, departing inch by inch down the
beach, until, behold! there was a magnificent parade-ground, broad
enough for a thousand feet to tread--a floor more fresh and beautiful
than the marble pavements of palaces. There were not a thousand feet to
tread there, however; only six. For Melvyna had more than enough to do
within the house, and Pedro never walked save across the island to the
inlet once in two weeks or so, when he managed to row over to the
village, and return with supplies, by taking two entire days for it,
even Melvyna having given up the point, tacitly submitting to loitering
she could not prevent, but recompensing herself by a general cleaning on
those days of the entire premises, from the top of the lantern in the
tower to the last step in front of the house.
You could not argue with Pedro. He only smiled back upon you as sweetly
and as softly as molasses. Melvyna, endeavoring to urge him to energy,
found herself in the position of an active ant wading through the downy
recesses of a feather bed, which well represented his mind.
Pedro was six feet two inches in height, and amiable as a dove. His wife
sensibly accepted him as he was, and he had his two days in town--a very
mild dissipation, however, since the Minorcans are too indolent to do
anything more than smoke, lie in the sun, and eat salads heavily dressed
in oil. They said, "The serene and august wife of our friend is well, we
trust?" and, "The island--does it not remain lonely?" and then the
salad was pressed upon him again. For they all considered Pedro a man of
strange and varied experiences. Had he not married a woman of wonder--of
an energy unfathomable? And he lived with her alone in a lighthouse, on
an island; alone, mind you, without a friend or relation near!
The six feet that walked over the beautiful beach of the southern ocean
were those of Keith, Carrington, and Sister St. Luke.
"Now go, Miss Luke," Melvyna had said, waving her energetically away
with the skimmer as she stood irresolute at the kitchen door. "'Twill do
you a power of good, and they're nice, quiet gentlemen who will see to
you, and make things pleasant. Bless you, _I_ know what they are. They
ain't none of the miserable, good-for-nothing race about here! Your
convent is fifty miles off, ain't it? And besides, you were brought over
here half dead for me to cure up--now, warn't you?"
The Sister acknowledged that she was, and Melvyna went on:
"You see, things is different up North, and I understand 'em, but you
don't. Now you jest go right along and hev a pleasant walk, and I'll hev
a nice bowl of venison broth ready for you when you come back. Go right
along now." The skimmer waved again, and the Sister went.