Holly’s eighteenth birthday was but a fortnight distant when the quiet
stream of her life, which since her father’s death six years before had
flowed placidly, with but few events to ripple its tranquil surface,
was suddenly disturbed....
To the child of twelve years death, because of its unfamiliarity
and mystery, is peculiarly terrible. At that age one has become too
wise to find comfort in the vague and beautiful explanations of
tearfully-smiling relatives――explanations in which Heaven is pictured
as a material region just out of sight beyond the zenith; too selfishly
engrossed with one’s own loneliness and terror to be pacified by the
contemplation of the radiant peace and beatitude attained by the
departed one in that ethereal and invisible suburb. And at twelve one
is as yet too lacking in wisdom to realize the beneficence of death.
Thus it was that when Captain Lamar Wayne died at Waynewood, in his
fiftieth year, Holly, left quite alone in a suddenly empty world save
for her father’s sister, Miss India Wayne, grieved passionately and
rebelliously, giving way so abjectly to her sorrow that Aunt India,
fearing gravely for her health, summoned the family physician.
[Illustration]
“There is nothing physically wrong with her,” pronounced the Old
Doctor, “nothing that I can remedy with my poisons. You must get her
mind away from her sorrow, my dear Miss India. I would suggest that
you take her away for a time; give her new scenes; interest her in new
affairs. Meanwhile ... there is no harm....” The Old Doctor wrote a
prescription with his trembling hand ... “a simple tonic ... nothing
more.”
So Aunt India and Holly went away. At first the thought of deserting
the new grave in the little burying-ground within sight of the house
moved Holly to a renewed madness of grief. But by the time Uncle
Randall had put their trunk and bags into the old carriage interest
in the journey had begun to assuage Holly’s sorrow. It was her first
journey into the world. Save for visits to neighboring plantations and
one memorable trip to Tallahassee while her father had served in the
State Legislature, she had never been away from Corunna. And now she
was actually going into another State! And not merely to Georgia, which
would have been a comparatively small event since the Georgia line ran
east and west only a bare half-dozen miles up the Valdosta road, but
away up to Kentucky, of which, since the Waynes had come from there in
the first part of the century, Holly had heard much all her life.
As the carriage moved down the circling road Holly watched with
trembling lips the little brick-walled enclosure on the knoll. Then
came a sudden gush of tears and convulsive sobs, and when these had
passed they were under the live-oaks at the depot, and the train of
two cars and a rickety, asthmatic engine, which ran over the six-mile
branch to the main line, was posing importantly in front of the
weather-beaten station.
Holly’s pulses stirred with excitement, and when, a quarter of an hour
later,――for Aunt India believed in being on time,――she kissed Uncle Ran
good-bye, her eyes were quite dry.
That visit had lasted nearly three months, and for awhile Holly had
been surfeited with new sights and new experiences against which no
grief, no matter how poignant, could have been wholly proof. When,
on her return to Waynewood, she paid her first visit to her father’s
grave, the former ecstasy of grief was absent. In its place was a
tender, dim-eyed melancholy, something exaltedly sacred and almost
sweet, a sentiment to be treasured and nourished in reverent devotion.
And yet I think it was not so much the journey that accomplished this
end as it was a realization which came to her during the first month of
the visit.
[Illustration]
In her first attempts at comforting the child, and many times since,
Aunt India had reminded Holly that now that her father had reached
Heaven he and her mother were together once more, and that since they
had loved each other very dearly on earth they were beyond doubt very
happy in Paradise. Aunt India assured her that it was a beautiful
thought. But it had never impressed Holly as Miss India thought it
should. Possibly she was too self-absorbed in her sorrow to consider
it judicially. But one night she had a dream from which she awoke
murmuring happily in the darkness. She could not remember very clearly
what she had dreamed, although she strove hard to do so. But she knew
that it was a beautiful dream, a dream in which her father and her
mother,――the wonderful mother of whom she had no recollection,――had
appeared to her hand in hand and had spoken loving, comforting words.
For the first time she realized Aunt India’s meaning; realized how
very, very happy her father and mother must be together in Heaven,
and how silly and selfish she had been to wish him back. All in the
instant there, in the dim silence, the dull ache of loneliness which
had oppressed her for months disappeared. She no longer seemed alone;
somewhere,――near at hand,――was sympathy and love and heart-filling
comradeship. Holly lay for awhile very quiet and happy in the great
four-poster bed, and stared into the darkness with wide eyes that swam
in grateful tears. Then she fell into a sound, calm sleep.
She did not tell Aunt India of her dream; not because there was any
lack of sympathy between them, but because to have shared it would have
robbed it of half its dearness. For a long, long time it was the most
precious of her possessions, and she hugged it to her and smiled over
it as a mother over her child. And so I think it was the dream that
accomplished what the Old Doctor could not,――the dream that brought,
as dreams so often do, Heaven very close to earth. Dreams are blessed
things, be they day-dreams or dreams of the night; and even the ugly
ones are beneficent, since at waking they make by contrast reality more
endurable.
If Aunt India never learned the cause she was at least quick to note
the result. Holly’s thin little cheeks borrowed tints from the Duchess
roses in the garden, and Aunt India graciously gave the credit to
Kentucky air, even as she drew her white silk shawl more closely about
her slender shoulders and shivered in the unaccustomed chill of a
Kentucky autumn.
Then followed six tranquil years in which Holly grew from a small,
long-legged, angular child to a very charming maiden of eighteen,
dainty with the fragrant daintiness of a southern rosebud; small of
stature, as her mother had been before her, yet possessed of a gracious
dignity that added mythical inches to her height; no longer angular but
gracefully symmetrical with the soft curves of womanhood; with a fair
skin like the inner petal of a La France rose; with eyes warmly, deeply
brown, darkened by large irises; a low, broad forehead under a wealth
of hair just failing of being black; a small, mobile mouth, with lips
as freshly red as the blossoms of the pomegranate tree in the corner
of the yard, and little firm hands and little arched feet as true to
beauty as the needle to the pole. God sometimes fashions a perfect
body, and when He does can any praise be too extravagant?
For the rest, Holly Wayne at eighteen――or, to be exact, a fortnight
before――was perhaps as contradictory as most girls of her age.
Warm-hearted and tender, she could be tyrannical if she chose;
dignified at times, there were moments when she became a breath-taking
madcap of a girl,――moments of which Aunt India strongly but patiently
disapproved; affectionate and generous, she was capable of showing a
very pretty temper which, like mingled flash of lightning and roar of
thunder, was severe but brief; tractable, she was not pliant, and from
her father she had inherited settled convictions on certain subjects,
such for instance as Secession and Emancipation, and an accompanying
dash of contumacy for the protection of them.
She was fond of books, and had read every sombre-covered volume of
the British Poets from fly-leaf to fly-leaf. She preferred poetry to
prose, but when the first was wanting she put up cheerfully with the
latter. The contents of her father’s modest library had been devoured
with a fine catholicity before she was sixteen. Recent books were few
at Corunna, and had Holly been asked to name her favorite volume of
fiction she would have been forced to divide the honor between certain
volumes of The Spectator, St. Elmo, and The Wide, Wide World. She was
intensely fond of being out of doors; even in her crawling days her
negro mammy had found it a difficult task to keep her within walls; and
so her reading had ever been _al fresco_. Her favorite place was under
the gnarled old fig-tree at the end of the porch, where, perched in
a comfortable crotch of trunk and branch, or asway in a hammock, she
spent many of her waking hours. When the weather kept her indoors,
she never thought of books at all. Those stood with her for filtered
sunlight, green-leaf shadows, and the perfume-laden breezes.
Her education, begun lovingly and sternly by her father, had ended with
a four-years’ course at a neighboring Academy, supplying her with as
much knowledge as Captain Wayne would have considered proper for her.
He had held to old-fashioned ideas in such matters, and had considered
the ability to quote aptly from Pope or Dryden of more appropriate
value to a young woman than a knowledge of Herbert Spencer’s absurdities
or a bowing acquaintance with Differential Calculus. So Holly graduated
very proudly from the Academy, looking her sweetest in white muslin and
lavender ribbons, and was quite, quite satisfied with her erudition and
contentedly ignorant of many of the things that fit into that puzzle
which we are pleased to call Life.
And now, in the first week of November in the year 1898, the tranquil
stream of her existence was about to be disturbed. Although she could
have no knowledge of it, as yet, Fate was already poising the stone
which, once dropped into that stream, was destined to cause disquieting
ripples, perplexing eddies, distracting swirls and, in the end, the
formation of a new channel. And even now the messenger of Fate was
limping along with the aid of his stout cane, coming nearer and nearer
down the road from the village under the shade of the water-oaks, a
limp and a tap for every beat of Holly’s unsuspecting heart.