THE PARLOR.
In the dusk of the old-fashioned best room of a farm-house, in the faint
glow of the buried sun through the sods of his July grave, sat two
elderly persons, dimly visible, breathing the odor which roses unseen
sent through the twilight and open window. One of the two was scarcely
conscious of the odor, for she did not believe in roses; she believed
mainly in mahogany, linen, and hams; to the other it brought too much
sadness to be welcomed, for it seemed, like the sunlight, to issue from
the grave of his vanished youth. He was not by nature a sad man; he was
only one that had found the past more delightful than the present, and
had not left his first loves.
The twilight of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he
felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more
education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had
married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to
which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of
moral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the
eternal sort. While many of their neighbors were vying with each other
in the effort to dress, and dwell, and live up to their notion of
_gentility_, Richard Colman and his wife had never troubled themselves
about fashion, but had sought to please each the taste of the other, and
cultivate their own. Perhaps now as he sat thus silent in the _dimmits_,
he was holding closer converse than he knew, or any of us can know, with
one who seemed to have vanished from all this side of things, except the
heart of her husband. That clung to what people would call _her memory_;
I prefer to call it _her_.
The rose-scented hush was torn by the strident, cicala-like shrilling of
a self-confident, self-satisfied female voice--
“Richard, that son of yours will come to no good! You may take my word
for it!”
Mr. Colman made no answer; the dusky, sweet-smelling waves of the
silence closed over its laceration.
“I am well aware my opinion is of no value in your eyes, Richard; but
that does not absolve me from the duty of stating it: if you allow him
to go on as he is doing now, Walter will never eat bread of his own
earning!”
“There are many who do, and yet don’t come to much!” half thought, but
nowise said the father.
“What do you mean to make of him?” persisted Miss Hancock, the
half-sister of his wife, the _a_ in whose name Walter said ought to have
been an _e_.
“Whatever he is able to make himself. He must have the main hand in it,
whatever it be,” answered Mr. Colman.
“It is time twice over he had set about something! You let him go on
dawdling and dawdling without even making up his mind whether or not he
ought to do anything! Take my word for it, Richard, you’ll have him on
your hands till the day of your death!”
The father did not reply that he could wish nothing better, that the
threat was more than he could hope for. He did not want to provoke his
sister-in-law, and he knew there was a shadow of reason in what she
said, though even perfect reason could not have sweetened the mode in
which she said it. Nothing could make up for the total absence of
sympathy in her utterance of any modicum of truth she was capable of
uttering. She was a very dusty woman, and never more dusty than when she
fought against dust as in a warfare worthy of all a woman’s
energies--one who, because she had not a spark of Mary in her, imagined
herself a Martha. She was true as steel to the interests of those in
whose life hers was involved, but only their dusty interests, not those
which make man worth God’s trouble. She was a vessel of clay in an
outhouse of the temple, and took on her the airs--not of gold, for gold
has no airs--but the airs of clay imagining itself gold, and all the
golden vessels nothing but clay.
“I put it to you, Richard Colman,” she went on, “whether good ever came
of reading poetry, and falling asleep under hay-stacks! He actually
writes poetry!--and we all know what that leads to!”
“Do we?” ventured her brother-in-law. “King David wrote poetry!”
“Richard, don’t garble! I will not have you garble! You know what I mean
as well as I do myself! And you know as well as I do what comes of
writing poetry! That friend of Walter’s who borrowed ten pounds of
you--did he ever pay you?”
“He did, Ann.”
“You didn’t tell _me_!”
“I did not want to disappoint you!” replied Richard, with a sarcasm she
did not feel.
“It was worth telling!” she returned.
“I did not think so. Everybody does not stick to a bank-note like a
snail to the wall! I returned him the money.”
“Returned him the money!”
“Yes.”
“Made him a present of _ten pounds_!”
“Why not?”
“Why then?”
“I had more reasons than one.”
“And no call to explain them! It was just like you to throw away your
hard earnings upon a fellow that would never earn anything for himself!
As if one such wasn’t enough to take all you’d got!”
“How could he send back the money if that had been the case! He proved
himself what I believed him, ready and willing to work! The money went
for a fellow’s bread and cheese, and what better money’s worth would you
have?”
“You may some day want the bread and cheese for yourself!”
“One stomach is as good as another!”
“It never was and never will be any use talking to some people!”
concluded sister Ann, in the same tone she began with, for she seldom
lost her temper--though no one would have much minded her losing it, it
was so little worth keeping. Rarely angry, she was always disagreeable.
The good that was in her had no flower, but bore its fruits, in the
shape of good food, clean linen, mended socks, and such like, without
any blossom of sweet intercourse to make life pleasant.
Aunt Ann would have been quite justified in looking on poetry with
contempt had it been what she imagined it. Like many others, she had
decided opinions concerning things of which her idea nowise corresponded
with the things themselves.