“Three weeks later Lee surrendered and the Confederacy was over.”
The sun had slipped, as if by magic, behind the tops of the cedars, and dusk fell quickly, like a heavy shadow, over the terrace. In the dimness a piercing sweetness floated up from the garden of herbs, and it seemed to me that in a minute the twilight was saturated with fragrance. Then I heard the cry of a solitary whippoorwill in the graveyard, and it sounded so near that I started.
“So she died of the futility, and her unhappy ghost haunts the house?”
“No, she is not dead. It is not her ghost; it is the memory of her act that has haunted the house. Lucy Dare is still living. I saw her a few months ago.”
“You saw her? You spoke to her after all these years?”
He had refilled his pipe, and the smell of it gave me a comfortable assurance that I was living here, now, in the present. A moment ago I had shivered as if the hand of the past, reaching from the open door at my back, had touched my shoulder.
“I was in Richmond. My friend Beverly, an old classmate, had asked me up for a week-end, and on Saturday afternoon, before motoring into the country for supper, we started out to make a few calls which had been left over from the morning. For a doctor, a busy doctor, he had always seemed to me to possess unlimited leisure, so I was not surprised when a single visit sometimes stretched over twenty-five minutes. We had stopped several times, and I confess that I was getting a little impatient when he remarked abruptly while he turned his car into a shady street,
“‘There is only one more. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to see her. She is a friend of yours, I believe.’
“Before us, as the car stopped, I saw a red-brick house, very large, with green shutters, and over the wide door, which stood open, a sign reading ‘St. Luke’s Church Home.’ Several old ladies sat, half asleep, on the long veranda; a clergyman, with a prayer-book in his hand, was just leaving; a few pots of red geraniums stood on little green-wicker stands; and from the hall, through which floated the smell of freshly baked bread, there came the music of a victrola—sacred music, I remember. Not one of these details escaped me. It was as if every trivial impression was stamped indelibly in my memory by the shock of the next instant.
“In the centre of the large, smoothly shaven lawn an old woman was sitting on a wooden bench under an ailantus-tree which was in blossom. As we approached her, I saw that her figure was shapeless, and that her eyes, of a faded blue, had the vacant and listless expression of the old who have ceased to think, who have ceased even to wonder or regret. So unlike was she to anything I had ever imagined Lucy Dare could become, that not until my friend called her name and she glanced up from the muffler she was knitting—the omnipresent dun-coloured muffler for the war relief associations—not until then did I recognize her.
“‘I have brought an old friend to see you, Miss Lucy.’
“She looked up, smiled slightly, and after greeting me pleasantly, relapsed into silence. I remembered that the Lucy Dare I had known was never much of a talker.
“Dropping on the bench at her side, my friend began asking her about her sciatica, and, to my surprise, she became almost animated. Yes, the pain in her hip was better—far better than it had been for weeks. The new medicine had done her a great deal of good; but her fingers were getting rheumatic. She found trouble holding her needles. She couldn’t knit as fast as she used to.
“Unfolding the end of the muffler, she held it out to us. ‘I have managed to do twenty of these since Christmas. I’ve promised fifty to the War Relief Association by autumn, and if my fingers don’t get stiff I can easily do them.’
“The sunshine falling through the ailantus-tree powdered with dusty gold her shapeless, relaxed figure and the dun-coloured wool of the muffler. While she talked her fingers flew with the click of the needles—older fingers than they had been at Dare’s Gift, heavier, stiffer, a little knotted in the joints. As I watched her the old familiar sense of strangeness, of encompassing and hostile mystery, stole over me.
“When we rose to go she looked up, and, without pausing for an instant in her knitting, said, gravely, ‘It gives me something to do, this work for the Allies. It helps to pass the time, and in an Old Ladies’ Home one has so much time on one’s hands.’
“Then, as we parted from her, she dropped her eyes again to her needles. Looking back at the gate, I saw that she still sat there in the faint sunshine knitting—knitting—”
“And you think she has forgotten?”
He hesitated, as if gathering his thoughts. “I was with her when she came back from the shock—from the illness that followed—and she had forgotten. Yes, she has forgotten, but the house has remembered.”
Pushing back his chair, he rose unsteadily on his crutch, and stood staring across the twilight which was spangled with fireflies. While I waited I heard again the loud cry of the whippoorwill.
“Well, what could one expect?” he asked, presently. “She had drained the whole of experience in an instant, and there was left to her only the empty and withered husks of the hours. She had felt too much ever to feel again. After all,” he added slowly, “it is the high moments that make a life, and the flat ones that fill the years.”