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My heart aches helplessly for him when he shall have become a man and have grown less wise: when he shall find it necessary to act for himself and shall yet be troubled by what his companions may think; when he shall no longer live within the fortress of the vital, but take up his wandering abode with the husks and swine; when he shall no longer let the world pass by him with heed only as there is need, but weary himself to better the unchangeable; when space shall not be some quiet nook of the world large enough for the cradle of his life, but the illimitable void filled with floating spheres, out upon the myriads of which, with his poor, puzzled, human eyes, he will pitifully gaze; when time shall not be his instant of action, but two eternities, past and future, along the baffling walls of which he will lead his groping faith; and when the questioning of his stoutest years shall be: Whence came I? And what am I? Why here for a little while? Where to be hereafter? A swimmer is drowned by a wave originating in the moon; a traveller is struck down by a bolt originating in a cloud; a workman is overcome by the heat originating in the sun; and so, perhaps, the end will come to him through his solitary struggle with the great powers of the universe that perpetually reach him, but remain forever beyond his reach. If I could put forth one protecting prayer that would cover all his years, it would be that through life he continue as wise as the day he was born.
The third of June once more. Rain fell all yesterday, all last night. This morning earth and sky are dark and chill. The plants are bowed down, and no wind releases them from their burden of large white drops. About the yard the red-rose bushes fall away from the fences, the lilacs stand with their purple clusters hanging down as heavily as clusters of purple grapes. I hear the young orioles calling drearily from wet nests under dripping boughs. A plaintive piping of lost little chickens comes from the long grass.
How unlike the day is to the third of June two years ago. I was in the strawberry bed that crystalline morning; Georgiana came to the window, and I beheld her for the first time. How unlike the same day one year back. Again I was in the strawberry bed, again Georgiana came to window and spoke to me as before. This morning as I tipped into her room where she lay in bed, she turned her face to me on the pillow, and for the third time she said, fondly;
"Old man, are you the gardener?"
The sky being so blanketed with cloud, although the shutters were open only a faint gray light filled the room. It was the first day that she had been well enough to have it done; but now the bed in which Georgiana lay was spread with the most beautiful draperies of white; the pillows were rich with needle-work and lace, and for the first time she had put on the badge of her new dignity, a little white cap of ribbons and lace, the long wide streamers of which, edged with lace, lay out upon the counterpane like bauds of the most delicate frost. The fingers of one hand rested lightly on the child beside her, as though she were counting the pulse of its oncoming life. Out in the yard the lilies of the valley, slipping out of their cool sheaths of green leaves, were not more white, more fresh. And surely Georgiana's gayety is the unconquerable gayety of the world, the youthfulness of youth immortal.
I went over to her with the strange new awe I feel at my union with the young mother, where hitherto there has but been a union with the woman I love. She stretched out her hands to me, almost hidden under the lace of her sleeves, and drew my face down against hers, as she said in my ear,
"Now you are the old Adam!"
When she released me, she bent over the child and added, reproachfully,
"You haven't paid the least attention to the baby yet."
"I haven't noticed that the baby has bestowed the least attention upon me. He is the youngest."
"He is the guest of the house! It is your duty to speak to him first."
"He doesn't act like a guest in my house. He behaves as though he owned it. I'm nobody since he arrived—not even his body-servant."
Georgiana, who was still bending over the child, glanced up with a look of confidential, whimsical distress.
"How could anything so old be born so young!"
"He will look younger as he gets older," I replied. "And he will not be the first bachelor to do that. At present this youngster is an invaluable human document in too large an envelope; that's all."
Georgiana, with a swift, protecting movement, leaned nearer to the child, and spoke to him:
"It's your house; tell him to leave the room for his impertinence."
"He may have the house, since it's his," I replied. "But there is one thing I'll not stand; if he ever comes between me and you, he'll have to go; I'll present him to Mrs. Walters."
I was not aware of the expression with which I stood looking down upon my son, but Georgiana must have noticed it.
"And what if he supplants me some day?" she asked, suddenly serious, and with an old fear reviving.
"Oh, Georgiana!" I cried, kneeling by the bedside and putting my arms around her, "you know that as long as we are in this world I am your lover."
"No longer?" she whispered, drawing me closer.
"Through eternity!"
By-and-by I went out to the strawberry-bed. The season was too backward. None were turning. With bitter disappointment I searched the cold, wet leaves, bending them apart for the sight of as much as one scarlet lobe, that I might take it in to her if only for remembrance of the day. At last I gathered a few perfect leaves and blossoms, and presented them to her in silence on a plate with a waiter and napkin.
She rewarded me with a laugh, and lifted from the plate a spray of blossoms.
"They will be ripe by the time I am well," she said, the sunlight of memory coming out upon her face. Then having touched the wet blossoms with her finger-tips, she dropped them quickly back into the plate.
"How cold they are!" she said, as a shiver ran through her. At the same time she looked quickly at me, her eyes grown dark with dread.
I set the plate hastily down, and she put her hands in mine to warm them.
VII
A month has gone by since Georgiana passed away.
To-day, for the first time, I went back to the woods. It was pleasant to be surrounded again by the ever-living earth that feels no loss and has no memory; that was sere yesterday, is green to-day, will be sere again to-morrow, then green once more; that pauses not for wounds and wrecks, nor lingers over death and change; but onward, ever onward, along the groove of law, passes from its red origin in universal flame to its white end in universal snow.
And yet, as I approached the edge of the forest, it was as though an invisible company of influences came gently forth to meet me and sought to draw me back into their old friendship. I found myself stroking the trunks of the trees as I would throw my arm around the shoulders of a tried comrade; I drew down the branches and plunged my face into the new leaves as into a tonic stream.
Yesterday a wind storm swept this neighborhood. Later, deep in the woods, I came upon an elm that had been struck by a bolt at the top. Nearly half the trunk had been torn away; and one huge limb lay across my path.
As I stood looking at it, the single note of a bird fell on my ear—always the same note, low, quiet, regular, devoid of feeling, as though the bird had been stunned and were trying to say: What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?
I knew what that note meant. It was the note with which a bird now and then lingers around the scene of the central tragedy of its life.
After a long search I found the nest, crushed against the ground under the huge limb, and a few feet from it, in the act of trying to escape, the female. The male, sitting meantime on the end of a bough near by, watched me incuriously, and with no change in that quiet, regular, careless note—he knew only too well that she was past my harming. The plan for his life had reached an end in early summer.
I sat down near him for a while, thinking of the universal tragedy of the nest.
It was the second time to-day that this divine wastage in nature had forced itself on my thought, and this morning the spectacle was on a scale of tragic greatness beyond anything that has ever touched human life in this part of the country: Mr. Clay was buried amid the long sad blare of music, the tolling of bells, the roll of drums, the boom of cannon, and the grief of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people—a vast and solemn pageant, yet as nothing to the multitude that will attend afar. For him this day the flags of nations will fly at half-mast; and the truly great men of the world, wherever the tidings may reach them of his passing, will stand awe-stricken that one of their superhuman company has been too soon withdrawn.
Too soon withdrawn! Therein is the tragedy of the nest, the wastage of the divine, the law of loss, whose reign on earth is unending, but whose right to reign no creature, brute or human, ever acknowledges.
The death of Mr. Clay is one of the many things that are happening to change all that made up my life with Georgiana. She was a true hero-worshipper, and she worshipped him. I no less. Now that he is dead, I feel as much lonelier as a soldier feels whose chosen tent-mate and whose general have fallen on the field together.
As I turned, away from the overcrowded town this afternoon towards the woods and was confronted by the wreck of the storm, my thoughts being yet full of Mr. Clay, of his enemies and disappointment, there rose before my mind a scene such as Audubon may once have witnessed:
The light of day is dying over the forests of the upper Mississippi. The silence of high space falls upon the vast stream. On a thunder-blasted tree-top near the western bank sits a lone, stern figure waiting for its lordliest prey—the eagle waiting for the swan. Long the stillness continues among the rocks, the tree-tops, and above the river. But far away in the north a white shape is floating nearer. At last it comes into sight, flying heavily, for it is already weary, being already wounded. The next moment the cry of its coming is heard echoing onward and downward upon the silent woods. Instantly the mighty watcher on the summit is alert and tense; and as the great snowy image of the swan floats by, in mid-air and midway of the broad expanse of water, he meets it. No battle is fought up there—the two are not well matched; and thus, separated from all that is little and struggling far above all that is low, with the daylight dying on his spotlessness, the swan receives the blow in its heart.
So came Death to the great Commoner.
Oh, Georgiana! I do not think of Death as ever having come to you. I think of you as some strangely beautiful white being that one day rose out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler, and uttering your note of divine farewell, spread your wings towards the open sea of eternity, there to await my coming.
VIII
It is a year and four months since Georgiana left me, and now everything goes on much as it did before she came. The family have moved back to their home in Henderson, returning like a little company of travellers who have lost their guide. Sylvia has already married; her brother writes me that he is soon to be; the mother visits me and my child, yearningly, but seldom, on account of her delicate health; and thus our lives grow always more apart. None take their places, the house having passed to people with whom, beyond all neighborly civilities, I have naught to do. Nowadays as I stroll around my garden with my little boy in my arms strange faces look down upon us out of Georgiana's window.
And I have long since gone back to nature.
When the harvest has been gathered from our strong, true land, a growth comes on which late in the year causes the earth to regain somewhat of its old greenness. New blades spring up in the stubble of the wheat; the beeless clover runs and blossoms; far and wide over the meadows flows the tufted billows of the grass; and in the woods the oak-tree drops the purple and brown of his leaf and mast upon the verdure of June. Everywhere a second spring puts forth between summer gone and winter nearing. It is the overflow of plenty beyond the filling of the barns. It is a wave of life following quickly upon the one that broke bountifully at our feet. It is nature's refusal to be once reaped and so to end.
The math: then the aftermath.
Upon the Kentucky landscape during these October days there lies this later youth of the year, calm, deep, vigorous. And as I spend much time in it for the fine, fresh work it brings to hand and thought, I feel that in my way I am part of it, that I can match the aftermath of nature with the aftermath of my life. The Harvester passed over my fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the winter's edge.
The thought has now come into my mind that I shall lay aside these pages for my son to ponder if he should ever grow old enough to value what he reads. They will give him some account of how his father and mother met in the old time, of their courting days, of their happy life together. And since it becomes more probable that there will be a war, and that I might not be living to speak to him of his mother in ways not written here, I shall set down one thing about her which I pray he may take well to heart. He ought to know and to remember this: that his life was the price of hers; she was extinguished that he might shine, and he owes it to her that the flame of his torch be as white as the altar's from which it was kindled.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing, then, in the character of his mother—which, please God, he will have, or, getting all things else, he can never be a gentleman—was honor. It shone from her countenance, it ran like melody in her voice, it made her eyes the most beautiful in expression that I have ever seen, it enveloped her person and demeanor with a spiritual grace. Honor in what are called the little things of life, honor not as women commonly understand it, but as the best of men understand it—that his mother had. It was the crystalline, unshakable rock upon which the somewhat fragile and never to be completed structure of her life was reared.
If he be anything of a philosopher, he may reason that this trait must have made his mother too serious and too hard. Let him think again. It was the very core of soundness in her that kept her gay and sweet. I have often likened her mind to the sky in its power of changeableness from radiant joyousness to sober calm; but oftenest it was like the vault of April, whose drops quicken what they fall upon; and she was of a soft-heartedness that ruled her absolutely—but only to the unyielding edge of honor. Yet she did not escape this charge of being both hard and serious upon the part of men and women who were used to the laxness of small misdemeanors, and felt ill at ease before the terrifying truth that she was a lady.
Beyond this single trait of hers—which, if it please God that he inherit it, may he keep though he lose everything else—I set nothing further down for his remembrance, since naught could come of my writing. By words I could no more give him an idea of what his mother was than I could point him to a few measures of wheat and bid him behold a living harvest.
Upon these fields of cool October greenness there risen out of the earth a low, sturdy weed. Upon the top of this weed small white blossoms open as still as stars of frost. Upon these blossoms lies a fragrance so pure and wholesome that the searching sense is never cloyed, never satisfied. Years after the blossoms are dried and yellow and the leaves withered and gone, this wholesome fragrance lasts. The common people, who often put their hopes into their names, call it life-everlasting. Sometimes they make themselves pillows of it for its virtue of bringing a quiet sleep.
This plant is blooming out now, and nightly as I wend homeward I pluck a handful of it, gathering along with its life the tranquil sunshine, the autumnal notes of the cardinal passing to better lands, and all the healthful influences of the fields. I shall make me a tribute of it to the memory of her undying sweetness.
If God wills, when I fall asleep for good I shall lay my head beside hers on the bosom of the Life Everlasting.
1
The elder Miss Cobb was wrong in thinking this poem Sylvia's. It was extant at the time over the signature of another writer, whose authorship is not known to have been questioned. Miss Sylvia perhaps copied it out of admiration, or as a model for her own use.
J.L.A.
2
Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote that she had "composed" this poem. It is known to be the work of another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and produced a version of her own.
J. L. A.