"'Too busy to mark to-day—send back after Christmas—sorry.Rowton.'"
"'Too busy to mark to-day—send back after Christmas—sorry.
Rowton.'"
"Why, it—an' here's another paper. What can this be, I wonder?"
"'To my darling wife, from her affectionate husband.'"
"'To my darling wife, from her affectionate husband.'"
The little wife colored as she read it.
"Oh, that ain't nothin' but the motter he was to print on it. But ain't it lucky thet he didn't do it? I'll change it—that's what I'll do—for anything you say. There, now. Don't that fix it?"
She was very still for a moment—very thoughtful. "An' affectionate is a mighty expensive word, too," she said, slowly, glancing over the intended inscription, in her husband's handwriting. "Yes. Your pitcher don't stand for a thing but generosity—an' mine don't mean a thing but selfishness. Yes, take it back, cert'nly, that is ef you'll get me anything I want for it. Will you?"
"Shore. They's a cow-topped butter-dish an' no end o' purty little things out there you might like. An' ef it's goin' back, it better be a-goin'. I can ride out to town an' back befo' breakfast. Come, kiss me, wife."
She threw both arms around her old husband's neck, and kissed him on one cheek and then on the other. Then she kissed his lips. And then, as she went for pen and paper, she said: "Hurry, now, an' hitch up, an' I'll be writin' down what I want in exchange—an' you can put it in yo' pocket."
In a surprisingly short time the old man was on his way—a heaped basket beside him, a tiny bit of writing in his pocket. When he had turned into the road he drew rein for a moment, lit a match, and this is what he read:
"My dear Husband,—I want one silver-mounted brier-wood pipe and a smoking set—a nice lava one—and I want a set of them fine overhauls like them that Mis Pope give Mr. Pope that time I said she was too extravagant, and if they's any money left over I want some nice tobacco, the best. I want all the price of the ice-set took up even to them affectionate words they never put on."Your affectionate and loving wife,"Kitty."
"My dear Husband,—I want one silver-mounted brier-wood pipe and a smoking set—a nice lava one—and I want a set of them fine overhauls like them that Mis Pope give Mr. Pope that time I said she was too extravagant, and if they's any money left over I want some nice tobacco, the best. I want all the price of the ice-set took up even to them affectionate words they never put on.
"Your affectionate and loving wife,
"Kitty."
When Ephraim put the little note back in his pocket, he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
Her good neighbors and friends, even as far as Simpkinsville and Washington, had their little jokes over Mis' Trimble's giving her splendor-despising husband a swinging ice-pitcher, but they never knew of the two early trips of the twin pitcher, nor of the midnight comedy in the Trimble home.
But the old man often recalls it, and as he sits in his front hall smoking his silver-mounted pipe, and shaking its ashes into the lava bowl that stands beside the ice-pitcher at his elbow, he sometimes chuckles to himself.
Noticing his shaking shoulders as he sat thus one day his wife turned from the window, where she stood watering her geraniums, and said:
"What on earth are you a-laughin' at, honey?" (She often calls him "honey" now.)
"How did you know I was a-laughin'?" He looked over his shoulder at her as he spoke.
"Why, I seen yo' shoulders a-shakin'—that's how." And then she added, with a laugh, "An' now I see yo' reflection in the side o' the ice-pitcher, with a zig-zag grin on you a mile long—yo' smile just happened to strike a iceberg."
He chuckled again.
"Is that so? Well, the truth is, I'm just sort o' tickled over things in general, an' I'm a-settin' here gigglin', jest from pure contentment."
A MINOR CHORD
I am an old bachelor, and I live alone in my corner upper room of an ancient house ofChambres garnies, down on the lower edge of the French quarter of New Orleans.
When I made my nest here, forty years ago, I felt myself an old man, and the building was even then a dilapidated old rookery, and since then we—the house and I—have lapsed physically with the decline of the neighborhood about us, until now our only claims to gentility are perhaps our memories and our reserves.
The habit of introspection formed by so isolated an existence tends to develop morbid views of life, and throws one out of sympathetic relations with the world of progress, we are told; but is there not some compensation for this in the acquisition of finer and more subtle perception of things hidden from the social, laughing, hurrying world? So it seems to me, and even though the nicer discernment bring pain, as it often does—as all refinement must—who would yield it for a grosser content resulting from a duller vision?
To contemplate the procession that passes daily beneath my window, with its ever-shifting pictures of sorrow, of decrepitude ill-matched with want, new motherhood, and mendicancy, with uplifted eye and palm—to look down upon all this with only a passing sigh, as my worthy but material fat landlady does, would imply a spiritual blindness infinitely worse than the pang which the keener perception induces.
There are in this neighborhood of moribund pretensions a few special objects which strike a note of such sadness in my heart that the most exquisite pain ensues—a pain which seems almost bodily, such as those for which we take physic; yet I could never confuse it with the neuralgic dart which it so nearly resembles, so closely does it follow the sight or sound which I know induces it.
There is a young lawyer who passes twice a day beneath my window.... I say he is young, for all the moving world is young to me, at eighty—and yet he seems old at five-and-forty, for his temples are white.
I know this man's history. The only son of a proud house, handsome, gifted—even somewhat of a poet in his youth—he married a soulless woman, who began the ruin which the wine-cup finished. It is an old story. In a mad hour he forged another man's name—then, a wanderer on the face of the earth, he drifted about with never a local habitation or a name, until his aged father had made good the price of his honor, when he came home—"tramped home," the world says—and, now, after years of variable steadiness, he has built upon the wreck of his early life a sort of questionable confidence which brings him half-averted recognition; and every day, with the gray always glistening on his temples and the clear profile of the past outlining itself—though the high-bred face is low between the shoulders now—he passes beneath my window with halting step to and from the old courthouse, where, by virtue of his father's position, he holds a minor office.
Almost within a stone's throw of my chamber this man and his aged father—the latter now a hopeless paralytic—live together in the ruins of their old home.
Year by year the river, by constant cavings, has swallowed nearly all its extensive grounds, yet beyond the low-browed Spanish cottage that clings close within the new levee, "the ghost of a garden" fronts the river. Here, amid broken marbles—lyreless Apollos, Pegasus bereft of wings, and prostrate Muses—the hardier roses, golden-rod, and honeysuckle run riot within the old levee, between the comings of the waters that at intervals steal in and threaten to swallow all at a gulp.
The naked old house, grotesquely guarded by the stately skeleton of a moss-grown oak, is thus bereft, by the river in front and the public road at its back, of all but the bare fact of survival.
No visitor ever enters here; but in the summer evenings two old men may be seen creeping with difficult steps from its low portal up to the brow of the bank, where they sit in silence and watch the boats go by.
The picture is not devoid of pathos, and even the common people whisper together as they look upon the figures of father and son sitting in the moonlight; and no one likes to pass the door at night, for there are grewsome tales of ghosts afloat, in which decapitated statues are said to stalk about the old garden at nightfall.
A sigh always escapes me as I look upon this desolate scene; but it is not now, but when the old-young man, the son, passes my door each day, carrying in his pale hands a bunch of flowers which he keeps upon his desk in the little back office, that my mysterious pain possesses me.
Why does this hope-forsaken man carry a bunch of flowers? Is it the surviving poet within him that finds companionship in them, or does he seem to see in their pure hearts, as in a mirror, a reflection of his own sinless youth?
These questions I cannot answer; but every day, as he passes with the flowers, I follow him with fascinated eye until he is quite lost in the distance, my heart rent the while with this incisive pain.
Finally, he is lost to view. The dart passes through and out my breast, and, as I turn, my eye falls upon a pretty rose-garden across the way, where live a mother and her two daughters.
Seventeen years ago this woman's husband—the father—went away and never returned. The daughters are grown, and they are poor. The elder performs some clerical work up in Canal Street, and I love to watch her trig little figure come and go—early and late.
The younger, who is fairer, has a lover, and the two sit together on a little wrought-iron bench, or gather roses from the box-bordered beds in the small inland garden, which lies behind the moss-grown wall and battened gate; and sometimes the mother comes out and smiles upon the pair.
The mother is a gentlewoman, and though she wears a steel thimble with an open top, like a tailor's, and her finger is pricked with the needle, she walks and smiles, even waters her roses, with a lady's grace; but it seems to me that the pretty pink daughter's lover is less a gentleman than this girl's lover should be—less than her grandfather must have been when he courted her grandmother in this same rose-garden—less than this maid's lover would be if her father had not gone to India, and her mother did not sew seams for a living.
As I sit and watch this peaceful fragment of a family, my heart seems to find repose in its apparent content; but late at night, when the lover has gone and the mother and daughters are asleep, when I rise to close my shutters I perceive, between the parted curtains in the mother's window, a light dimly burning. When I see this beacon in the deserted wife's chamber, and remember that I have seen it burning there, like the faint but steadfast hope that refuses to be extinguished, for seventeen years, the pain of pains comes into my heart.
There is a little old man with a hump upon his shoulder who passes often in the crowd, and a sight of him always awakens this pain within me.
It is not the tragedy of senility which his extreme age pictures, nor yet the hump upon his back, which stirs my note of pain.
Years ago this man left his wife, for a price, to another who had betrayed her, and disappeared from the scene of his ignominy. When the woman was dead and her betrayer gone, the husband came back, an old man; and now, as I see him bending beneath its weight, the hump upon his shoulder seems to be labelled with this price which, in my imagination, though originally the bag of gold, has by a slow and chemically unexplained process of ossification, become a part of himself, and will grotesquely deform his skeleton a hundred years to come. When, morning and evening, I see this old man trudge laboriously, staggering always towards the left, down the street, until he disappears in the clump of willows that overshadow the cemetery gate, and I know that he is going for a lonely vigil to the grave of the dishonored woman, his lost wife, pain, keen as a Damascus blade, enters my heart.
I close my window and come in, for the night dews are falling and I am rheumatic and stiff in the legs.
So, every night, musing, I go early to my bed, but before I lie down, after my prayer is said, I rise to put fresh water in the vase of flowers, which are always fresh, beneath the picture upon my wall.
For one moment I stand and gaze into a pure, girlish face, with a pallid brow and far-away blue eyes.
She was only fifteen years old, and I twice as many, when we quarrelled like foolish children.
The day she married my brother—my youngest, best-beloved brother Benjamin—I laid this miniature, face downward, in a secret drawer of my desk.
In the first year she died, and in another Benjamin had taken to himself a new wife, with merrier eyes and ruddier lips.
My heart leaped within me when I kissed my new sister, but she knew not that my joy was because she was giving me back my love.
Trembling with ecstasy, I took this image from its hiding-place, and for nearly fifty years the flowers beneath it have not withered.
As I stood alone here one night, ere I knew he had entered, my little brother's hand was upon my shoulder. For a moment only he was silent, awe-stricken.
"She was always yours, my brother," he said, presently, in a tremulous whisper. "I did not know until it was too late. She had misunderstood—but God was very merciful," and turning he left her to me.
And still each day I lay fresh flowers at her shrine, cherishing the dart that rends my heart the while, for its testimony to the immortality of my passion.
Do you smile because a trembling old man feasts his failing eyes on a fair woman's face and prates of love and flowers and beauty? Smile if you will, but if you do it is because you, being of the earth, cannot understand.
These things are of the spirit; and palsy and rheumatism and waning strength are of the flesh, which profiteth nothing.