Six years after Miss Milray parted with Clementina in Venice she found
herself, towards the close of the summer, at Middlemount. She had
definitely ceased to live in Florence, where she had meant to die, and
had come home to close her eyes. She was in no haste to do this, and in
the meantime she was now at Middlemount with her brother, who had
expressed a wish to revisit the place in memory of Mrs. Milray. It was
the second anniversary of her divorce, which had remained, after a
married life of many vicissitudes, almost the only experience untried in
that relation, and which had been happily accomplished in the courts of
Dacotah, upon grounds that satisfied the facile justice of that State.
Milray had dealt handsomely with his widow, as he unresentfully called
her, and the money he assigned her was of a destiny perhaps as honored as
its origin. She employed it in the negotiation of a second marriage, in
which she redressed the balance of her first by taking a husband somewhat
younger than herself.
Both Milray and his sister had a wish which was much more than a
curiosity to know what had become of Clementina; they had heard that her
husband was dead, and that she had come back to Middlemount; and Miss
Milray was going to the office, the afternoon following their arrival, to
ask the landlord about her, when she was arrested at the door of the
ball-room by a sight that she thought very pretty. At the bottom of the
room, clearly defined against the long windows behind her, stood the
figure of a lady in the middle of the floor. In rows on either side sat
little girls and little boys who left their places one after another, and
turned at the door to make their manners to her. In response to each
obeisance the lady dropped a curtsey, now to this side, now to that,
taking her skirt between her finger tips on either hand and spreading it
delicately, with a certain elegance of movement, and a grace that was
full of poetry, and to Miss Milray, somehow, full of pathos. There
remained to the end a small mite of a girl, who was the last to leave her
place and bow to the lady. She did not quit the room then, like the
others, but advanced toward the lady who came to meet her, and lifted her
and clasped her to her breast with a kind of passion. She walked down
toward the door where Miss Milray stood, gently drifting over the
polished floor, as if still moved by the music that had ceased, and as
she drew near, Miss Milray gave a cry of joy, and ran upon her. "Why,
Clementina!" she screamed, and caught her and the child both in her arms.
She began to weep, but Clementina smiled instead of weeping, as she
always used to do. She returned Miss Milray's affectionate greeting with
a tenderness as great as her own, but with a sort of authority, such as
sometimes comes to those who have suffered. She quieted the older woman
with her own serenity, and met the torrent of her questions with as many
answers as their rush permitted, when they were both presently in Miss
Milray's room talking in their old way. From time to time Miss Milray
broke from the talk to kiss the little girl, whom she declared to be
Clementina all over again, and then returned to her better behavior with
an effect of shame for her want of self-control, as if Clementina's mood
had abashed her. Sometimes this was almost severe in its quiet; that was
her mother coming to her share in her; but again she was like her father,
full of the sunny gayety of self-forgetfulness, and then Miss Milray
said, "Now you are the old Clementina!"
Upon the whole she listened with few interruptions to the story which she
exacted. It was mainly what we know. After her husband's death Clementina
had gone back to his family for a time, and each year since she had spent
part of the winter with them; but it was very lonesome for her, and she
began to be home-sick for Middlemount. They saw it and considered it.
"They ah' the best people, Miss Milray!" she said, and her voice, which
was firm when she spoke of her husband, broke in the words of minor
feeling. Besides being a little homesick, she ended, she was not willing
to live on there, doing nothing for herself, and so she had come back.
"And you are here, doing just what you planned when you talked your life
over with me in Venice!"
"Yes, but life isn't eva just what we plan it to be, Miss Milray."
"Ah, don't I know it!"
Clementina surprised Miss Milray by adding, "In a great many things--I
don't know but in most--it's better. I don't complain of mine--"
"You poor child! You never complained of anything--not even of Mrs.
Lander!"
"But it's different from what I expected; and it's--strange."
"Yes; life is very strange."
"I don't mean--losing him. That had to be. I can see, now, that it had to
be almost from the beginning. It seems to me that I knew it had to be
from the fust minute I saw him in New Yo'k; but he didn't, and I am glad
of that. Except when he was getting wohse, he always believed he should
get well; and he was getting well, when he--"
Miss Milray did not violate the pause she made with any question, though
it was apparent that Clementina had something on her mind that she wished
to say, and could hardly say of herself.
She began again, "I was glad through everything that I could live with
him so long. If there is nothing moa, here or anywhe'a, that was
something. But it is strange. Sometimes it doesn't seem as if it had
happened."
"I think I can understand, Clementina."
"I feel sometimes as if I hadn't happened myself." She stopped, with a
patient little sigh, and passed her hand across the child's forehead, in
a mother's fashion, and smoothed her hair from it, bending over to look
down into her face. "We think she has her fatha's eyes," she said.
"Yes, she has," Miss Milray assented, noting the upward slant of the
child's eyes, which gave his quaintness to her beauty. "He had
fascinating eyes."
After a moment Clementina asked, "Do you believe that the looks are all
that ah' left?"
Miss Milray reflected. "I know what you mean. I should say character was
left, and personality--somewhere."
"I used to feel as if it we'e left here, at fust--as if he must come
back. But that had to go."
"Yes."
"Everything seems to go. After a while even the loss of him seemed to
go."
"Yes, losses go with the rest."
"That's what I mean by its seeming as if it never any of it happened.
Some things before it are a great deal more real."
"Little things?"
"Not exactly. But things when I was very young." Miss Milray did not know
quite what she intended, but she knew that Clementina was feeling her way
to something she wanted to say, and she let her alone. "When it was all
over, and I knew that as long as I lived he would be somewhere else, I
tried to be paht of the wo'ld I was left in. Do you think that was
right?"
"It was wise; and, yes, it was best," said Miss Milray, and for relief
from the tension which was beginning to tell upon her own nerves, she
asked, "I suppose you know about my poor brother? I'd better tell you to
keep you from asking for Mrs. Milray, though I don't know that it's so
very painful with him. There isn't any Mrs. Milray now," she added, and
she explained why.
Neither of them cared for Mrs. Milray, and they did not pretend to be
concerned about her, but Clementina said, vaguely, as if in recognition
of Mrs. Milray's latest experiment, "Do you believe in second marriages?"