"And that is why, as the outside world looks in upon us to-day and sifts the evidence of whether or not we are a brave people, it does not find the proof of this in our homicides and duels, but in the spirit of our forefathers of the Revolution, in the soldiers of the wilderness and of Indian warfare, of the war of 1812, of the war with Mexico, at Cerro Gordo, at Buena Vista, at Palo Alto, at Resaca de la Palma. Wherever the Kentuckians have fought as soldiers, many or few, on whatever battle-field, in whatsoever cause, there you may see whether they know what it is to be men, and whether they have an ideal of courage that is worth the name.
"Then a few years ago in Frankfort twenty thousand people followed to the grave the bodies of the men who had fallen in Mexico. The State has raised a monument to them, to the soldiers of 1812, to those who fought at the river Raisin. The Legislature has ordered a medal to be struck in honor of a boy who had defended his ensign. No man can make a public speech in Kentucky without mention of Encancion and Monterey, or of the long line of battles in which every generation of our people has fought. This is the other proof that in times of peace we do not forget. It is not much, but it is of the right kind—it is the soldier's monument, it is the soldier's medal, it is the soldier's funeral oration, it is the recognition by the people of its ideal of courage in times of peace. And with every other brave people this proof passes as the sign universal. But our homicides and our duels, nearly all of them brought about in the name—even under the fear—of courage, what effect have they had in giving us abroad our reputation as a community? I ask myself the question, what if all the men who have killed their personal enemies or been killed by them in Kentucky, and if all the men who have killed their personal friends or been killed by them in Kentucky, had spent their love of fighting and their love of courage upon a monument to the Pioneers—such a monument as stands nowhere else in the world, and might fitly stand in this State to commemorate the winning of the West? Would the world think the better or the worse of the Kentucky ideal of bravery?
"I had not meant to talk to you so long on this subject," I added, in apology, "but I have been thinking of these things lately since I have been so much in town."
"I am interested," said Georgiana; "but as I agree with you we need not both speak." But she looked pained, and I sought to give a happier turn to the conversation.
"There is only one duel I ever heard of that gave me any pleasure, and that one never came off. A few years ago a Kentuckian wrote a political satire on an Irishman in Illinois—wrote it as a widow. The Irishman wished to fight. The widow offered to marry the Irishman, if such a sacrifice would be accepted as satisfactory damages. The Irishman sent a challenge, and the Kentuckian chose cavalry broadswords of the largest size. He was a giant; he had the longest arms of any man in Illinois; he could have mowed Erin down at a stroke like a green milkweed; he had been trained in duelling with oak-trees. You never heard of him: his name is Abraham Lincoln."
"I have heard of him, and I have seen him—in Union County before I came here," said Georgiana, with enthusiasm.
"He came here once to hear Mr. Clay speak," I resumed; "and I saw them walking together one day under the trees at Ashland—the two most remarkable-looking men that I ever beheld together or in human form."
My few acres touch the many of the great statesman. Georgiana and I often hear of the movements of his life, as two little boats in a quiet bay are tossed by the storms of the ocean. Any reference to him always makes us thoughtful, and we fell silent now.
"Georgiana," I said at length, softly. "It's all in self-defence. I believe you promised to marry me in self-defence."
"I did!" she said, promptly.
"Well, I certainly asked you in self-defence, Miss Cobb," I replied. "And now in a few days, according to the usage of my time, I am going to take your life—even at the peril of my own. If you desire, it is your privilege to examine the deadly weapons before the hour of actual combat," and I held out my arms to her appealingly.
She bent her body delicately aside, as always. "I am upset," she said, discouragingly. "You have been abusing Kentucky."
"Ah, that is the trouble!" I answered. "You wish me to become more interested in my fellow-creatures. And then you will not let me speak of what they do. And the other day you told me that I am not perfectly natural with anything but nature. Nature is the only thing that is perfectly natural with me. When I study nature there are no delicate or dangerous or forbidden subjects. The trees have no evasions. The weeds are honest. Running water is not trying to escape. The sunsets are not colored with hypocrisy. The lightning is not revenge. Everything stands forth in the sincerity of its being, and nature invites me to exercise the absolute liberty of my mind upon all life. I am bidden to master and proclaim whatsoever truth she has fitted me to grasp. If I am worthy to investigate, none are offended; if I should be wise enough to discover any law of creation, the entire world would express its thanks. Imagine my being assassinated because I had published a complete report upon the life and habits of the field-mouse!"
"If one mouse published a report on the life and habits of another, there'd be a fight all over the field," said Georgiana.
"A ridiculous extreme," I replied. "But after you have grown used to study nature with absolute freedom and absolute peace, think how human life repels you. You may not investigate, you may not speak out, you may not even think, you may not even feel. You are not allowed to reveal what is concealed, and you are required to conceal what is revealed. Natural! Have you ever known any two men to be perfectly natural with each other except when they were fighting? As for the men that I associate with every day, they weigh their words out to one another as the apothecary weighs his poisons, or the grocer his gunpowder."
"You forget," said Georgiana, "that we are living in a very extraordinary time, when everybody is sensitive and excited."
"It is so always and everywhere," I replied. "You may never study life as you study nature. With men you must take your choice: liberty for your mind and a prison for your body; liberty for your body and a prison for your mind. Nearly all people choose the latter; we know what becomes of the few who do not."
But this reference to the times led us to speak slowly and solemnly of what all men now are speaking—war that must come between the North and the South. We agreed that it would come from each side as a blazing torch to Kentucky, which lies between the two and is divided between the two in love and hate—to Kentucky, where the ideal of a soldier's life is always the ideal of a man's duty and utmost glory.
At last I felt that my time had come.
"Georgiana," I said, "there is one secret I have never shared with you. It is the only fear I have ever felt regarding our future. But, if there should be a war—you'd better know it now—leave you or not leave you, I am going to join the army."
She grew white and faint with the thought of a day to come. But at last she said:
"Yes; you must go."
"I know one thing," I added, after a long silence; "if I could do my whole duty as a Kentuckian—as an American citizen—as a human being—I should have to fight on both sides."
I have thus set down in a poor way a part of the only talk I ever had with Georgiana on these subjects during the year 1851.
Yesterday, about sunset, the earth and sky were beautiful with that fulness of peace which things often attain at the moment before they alter and end. The hour seemed to me the last serene loveliness of summer, soon to be ruffled by gales and blackened by frosts.
Georgiana stood at her window looking into the west. The shadows of the trees in my yard fell longer and longer across the garden towards her. Darkest among these lay the shapes of the cedars and the pines in which the redbird had lived. Her whole attitude bespoke a mood surrendered to memory; and I felt sure that we two were thinking of the same thing.
As she has approached that mystical revelation of life which must come with our marriage, Georgiana's gayety has grown subtly overcast. It is as if the wild strain in her were a little sad at having to be captured at last; and I too experience an indefinable pain that it has become my lot to subdue her in this way. The thought possesses me that she submits to marriage because she cannot live intimately with me and lavish her love upon me in any other relation; and therefore I draw back with awe from the idea of taking such possession of her as I will and must.
As she stood at her window yesterday evening she caught sight of me across the yard and silently beckoned. I went over and looked up at her, waiting and smiling.
"Well, what is it?" I asked at length, as her eyes rested on me with the fulness of affection.
"Nothing. I wanted to see you standing down there once more. Haven't you thought of it? This is the last time—the last of the window, the last of the garden, the end of the past. Everything after this will be so different. Aren't you a little sorry that you are going to marry me?"
"Will you allow me to fetch the minister this instant?"
In the evening they put on her bridal dress and sent over for me, and, drawing the parlor doors aside, blinded me with the sight of her standing in there, as if waiting in duty for love to claim its own. As I saw her then I have but to close my eyes to see her now. I scarce know why, but that vision of her haunts my mind mysteriously.
I see a fresh snow-drift in a secret green valley between dark mountains. The sun must travel far and be risen high to reach it; but when it does, its rays pour down from near the zenith and are most powerful and warm; then in a little while the whole valley is green again and a white mist, rising from it, muffles the face of the sun.
Oh, Georgiana! Georgiana! Do not fade away from me as I draw you to me.
My last solitary candle flickers in the socket: it is in truth the end of the past.
Last summer I felled a dead oak in the woods and had the heart of him stored away for my winter fuel: a series of burnt-offerings to the worshipful spirit of my hearth-stone. There should have been several of these offerings already, for October is almost ended now, and it is the month during which the first cool nights come on in Kentucky and the first fires are lighted.
A few twilights ago I stood at my yard gate watching the red domes of the forest fade into shadow and listening to the cawing of crows under the low gray of the sky as they hurried home. A chill crept over the earth. It was a fitting hour; I turned in-doors and summoned Georgiana.
"We will light our first fire together," I said, straining her to my heart.
Kneeling gayly down, we piled the wood in the deep, wide chimney. Each of us then brought a live coal, and together we started the blaze. I had drawn Georgiana's chair to one side of the fireplace, mine opposite; and with the candles still unlit we now sat silently watching the flame spread. What need was there of speech? We understood.
By-and-by some broken wreaths of smoke floated, outward into the room. My sense caught the fragrance. I sniffed it with a rush of memories. Always that smell of smoke, with other wild, clean, pungent odors of the woods, had been strangely pleasant to me. I remember thinking of them when a boy as incense perpetually and reverently set free by nature towards the temple of the skies. They aroused in me even then the spirit of meditation on the mystery of the world; and later they became in-wrought with the pursuit and enjoyment of things that had been the delight of my life for many years. So that coming now, at the very moment when I was dedicating myself to my hearth-stone and to domestic life, this smell of wood smoke reached me like a message from my past. For an instant ungovernable longings surged over me to return to it. For an instant I did return; and once more I lay drowsing before my old camp-fires in the autumn woods, with the frosted trees draping their crimson curtains around me on the walls of space and the stars flashing thick in the ceiling of my bedchamber. My dog, who had stretched himself at my feet before the young blaze, inhaled the smoke also with a full breath of reminiscence, and lay watching me out of the corner of his eye—I fancied with reproachful constancy. I caught his look with a sense of guilt, and glanced across at Georgiana.
Her gaze was buried deep in the flames. And how sweet her face was, how inexpressibly at peace. She had folded the wings of her whole life, and sat by the hearth as still as a brooding dove. No past laid its disturbing touch upon her shoulder. Instead, I could see that if there were any flight of her mind away from the present it was into the future—a slow, tranquil flight across the years, with all the happiness that they must bring. As I set my own thoughts to journey after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld Georgiana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temples, spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with unconquerable gayety and youth.
"How sweet that smoke is, Georgiana," I said, rousing us both, and feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may speak. "And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back into his elements—smoke and light, heat and ashes. What a magnificent work he was on natural history, requiring hundreds of years for his preparation and completion, written in a language so learned that not the wisest can read him wisely, and enduringly bound in the finest of tree calf! It is a dishonor to speak of him as a work. He was a doctor of philosophy! He should have been a college professor! Think how he could have used his own feet for a series of lectures on the laws of equilibrium, capillary attraction, or soils and moisture! Was there ever a head that knew as much as his about the action of light? Did any human being ever more grandly bear the burdens of life or better face the tempests of the world? What did he not know about birds? He had carried them in his arms and nurtured them in his bosom for a thousand years. Even his old coat, with all its rents and patches—what roll of papyrus was ever so crowded with the secrets of knowledge? The august antiquarian! The old king! Can you imagine a funeral urn too noble for his ashes? But to what base uses, Georgiana! He will not keep the wind away any longer; we shall change him into a kettle of lye with which to whiten our floors."
What Georgiana's reply could have been I do not know, for at that moment Mrs. Walters flitted in.
"I saw through the windows that you had a fire," she said, volubly, "and ran over to get warm. And, oh! yes, I wanted to tell you—"
"Stop,please, Mrs. Walters!" I cried, starting towards her with an outstretched hand and a warning laugh. "You have not yet been formally introduced to this room, and a formal introduction is necessary. You must be made acquainted with the primary law of its being;" and as Mrs. Walters paused, dropping her hands into her lap and regarding me with an air of mystification, I went on:
"When I had repairs made in my house last summer, I had this fireplace rebuilt, and I ordered an inscription to be burnt into the bricks. We expect to ask that all our guests will kindly notice this inscription, in order to avoid accidents or misunderstandings. So I beg of you not to speak until you have read the words over the fireplace."
Mrs. Walters wonderingly read the following legend, running in an arch across the chimney:
Good friend, around these hearth-stones speakno evil word of any creature.
She wheeled towards me with instantaneous triumph.
"I'm glad you put it there!" she cried. "I'm glad you put it there!It will teach them a lesson about their talking. If there is one thingIcannotstand it is a gossip."
I have observed that a fowl before a looking-glass will fight its own image.
"Take care, Mrs. Walters!" I said, gently. "You came very near to violating the law just then."
"He meant it for me, Mrs. Walters," said Georgiana, fondling our neighbor's hand, and looking at me with an awful rebuke.
"I meant it for myself," I said. "And now it is doing its best to make me feel like a Pharisee. So I hasten to add that there are other rooms in the house in which it will be allowed human nature to assert itself in this long-established, hereditary, and ineradicable right. Our guests have only to intimate that they can no longer restrain their propensities and we will conduct them to another chamber. Mrs. Moss and I will occasionally make use of these chambers ourselves, to relieve the tension of too much virtue. But it is seriously our idea to have one room in the house where we shall feel safe, both as respects ourselves and as respects others, from the discomfort of evil-speaking. As long as these walls stand or we dwell in them, this is to be the room of charity and kindness to all creatures."
Although we exerted ourselves, conversation flagged during the visit of Mrs. Walters. Several times she began to speak, but, with a frightened look at the fireplace, dropped into a cough, or cleared her throat in a way that called to mind the pleasing habit of Sir Roger de Coverly in the Gardens of Gray's Inn.
Later in the evening other guests came. Upon each the law of that fireside was lightly yet gravely impressed. They were in the main the few friends I know in whom such an outward check would call for the least inner restraint; nevertheless, on what a footing of confidence it placed our conversation! To what a commanding level we were safely lifted! For nothing so releases the best powers of the mind as the understanding that the entire company are under bond to keep the peace of the finest manners and of perfect breeding.
And Georgiana—how she shone! I knew that she could perfectly fill a window; I now see that she can as easily fill a room. Our bodies were grouped about the fireplace; our minds centred around her, and she flashed like the evening star along our intellectual pathway.
The next day Mrs. Walters talked a long time to Georgiana on the edge of the porch.
Thus my wife and I have begun life together. I think that most of our evenings will be spent in the room dedicated to a kind word for life universal. No matter how closely the warring forces of existence, within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there we enter peace. We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous hours. And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household than to escape an ignoble evening. To attain a noble one is like lying calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have struggled upward amid enemies all day long.
Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now that I never shall. The charm in her which I pursue, yet never overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit—of that elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose. Even while I live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does not end and has no waking.
This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold her entire self into mine. We have been a revelation to each other, but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains, which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the discoveries of our union. Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live. Yet, folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment. Often she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere, seeking an entrance to where I really am. Even during the intimate silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing walls of flesh—we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs of individual being.
During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the earth been flooded with beauty.
Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky its rays stream through the open shutter and fall upon Georgiana in her sleep. Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily downward along her figure. How august she is in her purity! The whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the silvering orb is as pitch to the whiteness of her nature.
The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin covering had slipped aside, leaving Georgiana's feet exposed.
With a start of pain I recollected an old story about her childhood: that one day for the sake of her rights she had received a wound in one of her feet—how serious I had never known, but perhaps deforming, irremediable. My head was raised on the pillow; the moonlight was moving down that way; it would cross her feet; it would reveal the truth.
I turned my face away and closed my eyes.
It is nearly dark when I reach home from town these January evenings. However the cold may sting the face and dart inward to the marrow, Georgiana is waiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled and ringed about with petticoats—like a tree within its layers of bark—that she looks like the most thick-set of ordinary sized women; for there is a heavenly but very human secret hiding in this household now, and she is thoughtfully keeping it.
"We press our half-frozen cheeks together, as red as wine-sap apples, and grope for each other's hand through our big lamb's-wool mittens, and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes. One evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle. When I started to enter she seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the countersign.
"Love, captain," I said, "If it be not that, slay me at your feet!"
She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck.
"It is 'Peace,'" she said. "But I desert to the enemy."
Without going to my fireside that evening I hurried on to the stable; for I do not relinquish to my servants the office of feeding my stock.
Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the divine right to be kingly men, which all men share; but truly a divine right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in winter. It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who dwell in the Dark Ages of their kind—dwell on and on in affection, submission, and trust, while their lord demands of them their labor, their sustenance, or their life.
Of a winter's day, when these poor dumb serfs have been scattered over the portionless earth, how often they look towards this fortress and lift up their voices with cries for night to come; the horses, ruffled and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded to leeward of some deep-buried haystack, the exposed side of the outermost of them white with whirling flakes; the sheep, turning their pitiful, trusting eyes about them over the fields of storm in earth and sky!
What joy at nightfall to gather them home to food and warmth and rest! If there is ever a time when I feel myself a mediaeval lord to trusty vassals, it is then. Of a truth I pass entirely over the Middle Ages, joining my life to the most ancient dwellers of the plains, and becoming a simple father of flocks and herds. When they have been duly stabled according to their kinds, I climb to the crib in the barn and create a great landslide of the fat ears that is like laughter; and then from every stall what a hearty, healthy chorus of cries and petitions responds to that laughter of the corn! What squeals and grunts persuasive beyond the realms of rhetoric! What a blowing of mellow horns from the cows! And the quick nostril trumpet-call of the horse, how eager, how dependent, yet how commanding! As I mount to the top of the pile, if I ever feel myself a royal personage it is then; I ascend my throne; I am king of the corn; and there is not a brute peasant in my domain that does not worship me as ruler of heaven and earth.
Or I love to catch up the bundles of oats as they are thrown down from the loft and send them whirling through the cutting-box so fast that they pour into the big baskets like streams of melted gold; or, grasping my pitchfork, I stuff the ricks over the mangers with the rich aromatic hay until I am as warm as when I loaded the wagons with it at midsummer noons.
With what sweet sounds and odors now the whole barn is filled! How robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts! In what comfort of mind I can turn to my own roof and store!
This hour in my stable is the only one out of the twenty-four left to me in which my feet may cross the boundary of human life into the world of the other creatures; for I have gone into business in town to gratify Georgiana. I think little enough of this business otherwise. Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual satisfaction in it than I feel an intellectual satisfaction in passing my legs through my pantaloons of a morning. But a man can study nothing in nature that does not outreach his powers.
If time is left, I veer off from the barn to the wood-pile, for I love to wield an axe, besides having a taste to cut my own wood for the nightly burning. This evening I could but stop to notice how the turkeys in the tree tops looked like enormous black nutgalls on the limbs, except that the wind whisked their tails about as cheerily as though they were already hearth-brooms.
It is well for my poor turkeys that their tails contain no moisture; for on a night like this they would freeze stiff, and the least incautious movement of a fowl in the morning would serve to crack its tail off—up to the pope's-nose.
As I set my foot on the door-step, I went back to see whether the two snow-birds were in their nightly places under the roof of the porch—the guardian spirits of our portal. There they were, wedged each into a snug corner as tightly as possible, so not to break their feathers, and leaving but one side exposed. Happening to have some wheat in my pocket, I pitched the grains up to the projecting ledge; they can take their breakfast in bed when they wake in the morning. Little philosophers of the frost, who even in their overcoats combine the dark side and the white side of life into a wise and weathering gray—the no less fit external for a man.
The thought of them to-night put me strongly in mind of a former habit of mine to walk under the cedar-trees at such dark winter twilights and listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and settled down. I have no time for such pleasant ways now, they have been given up along with my other studies.
This winter of 1851 and 1852 has been cold beyond the memory of man in Kentucky—the memory of the white man, which goes back some three-quarters of a century. Twice the Ohio River has been frozen over, a sight he had never seen. The thermometer has fallen to thirty degrees below zero. Unheard of snows have blocked the two or three railroads we have in the State.
News comes that people are walking over the ice on East River, New York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis bears the weight of a man a hundred yards from the bank.
Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown, destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants. It set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners. If he had had opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer left shivering outside as truly as if they had all been human beings.
Such a spring, with its destruction of seed-bearing and nut-hearing vegetation, followed by a winter that seals under ice what may have been produced, has spread starvation among the wild creatures. A recent Sunday afternoon walk in the woods—Georgiana being away from home with her mother—showed me that part of the earth's surface rolled out as a vast white chart, on which were traced the desperate travels of the snow-walkers in search of food. Squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit, weasel, mouse, mink, fox—their tracks crossed and recrossed, wound in and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful and pitiful to behold. Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the field. At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove—starved at the brink of plenty. Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I buried my vegetables. I told Georgiana:
"They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets out what we need. Think of it—a whole neighborhood of rabbits hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible leaf." Once that night I turned in bed, restless. Georgiana did the same.
"Are you awake?" she said, softly.
"Are you?"
"Are you thinking about the rabbits?"
"Yes; are you?"
"What do you suppose they think about us?"
"I'd rather not know."
Georgiana tells me that the birds in unusual numbers are wintering among the trees, driven to us with the boldness of despair. God and nature have forgotten them; they have nothing to choose between but death and man. She has taken my place as their almoner and nightly renders me an account of what she has done. This winter gives her a great chance and she adorns it. It seems that never before were so many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never mentioned between us, unconsciously she dwells upon these in her talk, and plainly favors them in her affection for the sake of the past. There are many stories I could relate to show how simple and beautiful is this whole aspect of her nature.
A little thing happened to-night.
Towards ten o'clock she brought my hat, overcoat, overshoes, mittens, comforter.
"Put them on," she said, mysteriously.
She also got ready, separating herself from me by so many clothes thatI could almost have felt myself entitled to a divorce.
It was like day out-of-doors with the moon shining on the snow. We crept towards the garden, screened behind out-buildings. When we reached the fence, we looked through towards the white pyramids. All that part of the ground was alive with rabbits. Georgiana had spread for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar's feast. It had been done to please me, I knew, and out of a certain playfulness of her own; out there are other charities of hers, which she thinks known only to herself, that show as well the divine drift of her thoughtfulness.
She is asleep now—for the sake of the Secret. After she had gone to bed, what with the spectacle of the rabbits and what with our talk beforehand of the many cardinals in the cedars, my thoughts began to run freshly on old subjects, and, unlocking my bureau, I got out my notes and drawings for the work on Kentucky birds. Georgiana does not know that they exist; she never shall. With what authority those studies call me still, as with a trumpet from the skies! and I know that trumpet will sound on till my ears are past hearing. Sometimes I look upon myself as a man who has had two hearts; one lies buried in the woods, and the other sits at the fireside thinking of it. But sleep on, Georgiana—mother that is to be. The dreams of your life shall never be disturbed by the old dreams of mine.
The population of this town on yesterday was seven thousand nine hundred and twenty; today it is seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty-one. The inhabitants of the globe are enriched by the same stupendous unit; the solar system must adjust itself to new laws of equilibrium; the choir of angels is sweetened by the advent of another musician. During the night Georgiana bore a son—not during the night, but at dawn, and amid such singing of birds that every tree in the yard became a dew-hung belfry of chimes, ringing a welcome to the heir of this old house and of these old trees—to the dispenser of seed during winters to come—to the proprietor of a whole race of seed-scatterers as long as nature shall be harsh and seasons shall return.
I had already bought the largest family Bible in the town as a repository for his name, Adam Cobb Moss, which in clear euphony is most fit to be enrolled among the sweetly sounding vocables of the Hebrew children. The page for the registration of later births in my family is so large and the lines ruled across it are so many that I am deeply mortified over this solitary entry at the top. But surely Georgiana and I would have to live far past the ages of Abraham and Sarah to fill it with the requisite wealth of offspring, beginning as we do, and being without divine assistance. When the name of our eldest-born is inscribed in this Bible, not far away will be found a scene in the home of his first parents, Georgiana and I being only the last of these, and giving, as it were, merely the finishing Kentucky touch to his Jewish origin.
But I gambol in spirit like a hawk in the air. Let me hood myself with parental cares: I have been a sire for half a day.
I am speechless before the stupendous wisdom of my son in view of his stupendous ignorance. Already he lectures to the old people about the house on the perfect conduct of life, and the only preparation that he requires for his lectures is a few drops of milk. By means of these, and without any knowledge of anatomy, he will show us, for instance, what it is to be master of the science of vital functions. When he regards it necessary to do anything, he does it instantly and perfectly, and the world may take the consequences and the result. He forthwith addresses himself to fresh comfort and new enterprises for self-development. Beyond what is vital he refuses to go; things that do not concern him he lets alone. He has no cares beyond his needs; all space to him is what he can fill, all time his instant of action. He does not know where he came from, what he is, why here, whither bound; nor does he ask.
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,
"Nowyou 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.
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.
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.