In November Harry Bellamy, tall, broad, and brisk, came down from
his Northern city to spend four days. His intention was to
settle a matter that had been hanging fire since he and Sally
Carrol had met in Asheville, North Carolina, in midsummer. The
settlement took only a quiet afternoon and an evening in front of
a glowing open fire, for Harry Bellamy had everything she
wanted; and, beside, she loved him--loved him with that side of
her she kept especially for loving. Sally Carrol had several
rather clearly defined sides.
On his last afternoon they walked, and she found their steps
tending half-unconsciously toward one of her favorite haunts, the
cemetery. When it came in sight, gray-white and golden-green
under the cheerful late sun, she paused, irresolute, by the iron
gate.
"Are you mournful by nature, Harry?" she asked with a faint
smile.
"Mournful? Not I."
"Then let's go in here. It depresses some folks, but I like it."
They passed through the gateway and followed a path that led
through a wavy valley of graves--dusty-gray and mouldy for the
fifties; quaintly carved with flowers and jars for the seventies;
ornate and hideous for the nineties, with fat marble cherubs
lying in sodden sleep on stone pillows, and great impossible
growths of nameless granite flowers.
Occasionally they saw a kneeling figure with tributary flowers,
but over most of the graves lay silence and withered leaves with
only the fragrance that their own shadowy memories could waken in
living minds.
They reached the top of a hill where they were fronted by a tall,
round head-stone, freckled with dark spots of damp and half
grown over with vines.
"Margery Lee," she read; "1844-1873. Wasn't she nice? She died
when she was twenty-nine. Dear Margery Lee," she added softly.
"Can't you see her, Harry?"
"Yes, Sally Carrol."
He felt a little hand insert itself into his.
"She was dark, I think; and she always wore her hair with a
ribbon in it, and gorgeous hoop-skirts of Alice blue and old
rose."
"Yes."
"Oh, she was sweet, Harry! And she was the sort of girl born to
stand on a wide, pillared porch and welcome folks in. I think
perhaps a lot of men went away to war meanin' to come back to
her; but maybe none of 'em ever did."
He stooped down close to the stone, hunting for any record of
marriage.
"There's nothing here to show."
"Of course not. How could there be anything there better than
just 'Margery Lee,' and that eloquent date?"
She drew close to him and an unexpected lump came into his throat
as her yellow hair brushed his cheek.
"You see how she was, don't you Harry?"
"I see," he agreed gently. "I see through your precious eyes.
You're beautiful now, so I know she must have been."
Silent and close they stood, and he could feel her shoulders
trembling a little. An ambling breeze swept up the hill and
stirred the brim of her floppidy hat.
"Let's go down there!"
She was pointing to a flat stretch on the other side of the hill
where along the green turf were a thousand grayish-white crosses
stretching in endless, ordered rows like the stacked arms of a
battalion.
"Those are the Confederate dead," said Sally Carrol simply.
They walked along and read the inscriptions, always only a name
and a date, sometimes quite indecipherable.
"The last row is the saddest--see, 'way over there. Every cross
has just a date on it and the word 'Unknown.'"
She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears.
"I can't tell you how real it is to me, darling--if you don't
know."
"How you feel about it is beautiful to me."
"No, no, it's not me, it's them--that old time that I've tried to
have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or
they wouldn't have been 'unknown'; but they died for the most
beautiful thing in the world--the dead South. You see," she
continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears,
"people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've
always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was
all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've
tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse
oblige--there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the
roses of an old garden dying all round us--streaks of strange
courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories I used
to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a
few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was
something! I couldn't ever make you understand but it was there."
"I understand," he assured her again quietly.
Sally Carol smiled and dried her eyes on the tip of a
handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket.
"You don't feel depressed, do you, lover? Even when I cry I'm
happy here, and I get a sort of strength from it."
Hand in hand they turned and walked slowly away. Finding soft
grass she drew him down to a seat beside her with their backs
against the remnants of a low broken wall.
"Wish those three old women would clear out," he complained. "I
want to kiss you, Sally Carrol."
"Me, too."
They waited impatiently for the three bent figures to move off,
and then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all
her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.
Afterward they walked slowly back together, while on the corners
twilight played at somnolent black-and-white checkers with the
end of day.
"You'll be up about mid-January," he said, "and you've got to
stay a month at least. It'll be slick. There's a winter carnival
on, and if you've never really seen snow it'll be like fairy-land
to you. There'll be skating and skiing and tobogganing and
sleigh-riding, and all sorts of torchlight parades on snow-shoes.
They haven't had one for years, so they're gong to make it a
knock-out."
"Will I be cold, Harry?" she asked suddenly.
"You certainly won't. You may freeze your nose, but you won't be
shivery cold. It's hard and dry, you know."
"I guess I'm a summer child. I don't like any cold I've ever
seen."
She broke off and they were both silent for a minute.
"Sally Carol," he said very slowly, "what do you say to--March?"
"I say I love you."
"March?"
"March, Harry."