“Never, dearest!” exclaimed Cecilia, with much warmth and sincerity. “I shall love you only the more. We shall both love you. You will now have two friends instead of one.”
“Yes; but both will not be equal to the one I lose. No, Cecilia; let us not make to ourselves any illusions. I do not. You cannot now be with me so much and so often as you have been. Even if you were, your thoughts would be elsewhere. Ah, I have lost my friend, when most I needed her!”
Cecilia protested ardently and earnestly, and dilated with eagerness on her little plan of life, in which their romantic friendship was to gain only new strength and beauty from the more romantic love. She was interrupted by a knock at the street door; on hearing which, she paused a moment, and then said, —
“It is Arthur. He was to call for me.”
Ah, what glimpses of home, and fireside, and a whole life of happiness for Cecilia, were revealed by that one word of love and intimacy, “Arthur”! and for Alice, what a sentence of doom! what sorrow without a name! what an endless struggle of love and friendship, of duty and inclination! A little quiver of the eyelids and the hands, a hasty motion to raise her head from Cecilia’s shoulder, — these were the only outward signs of emotion. But a terrible pang went to her heart; her blood rushed eddying to her brain; and when Cecilia had taken leave of her with the triumphant look of love beaming upon her brow, and an elevation in her whole attitude and bearing, as if borne up by attendant angels, she sank back into her chair, exhausted, fainting, fearing, longing, hoping to die.
And below sat the two old women, talking of moths, and cheap furniture, and what was the best remedy for rheumatism; and from the door went forth two happy hearts, beating side by side with the pulse of youth and hope and joy, and within them and around them was a new heaven and a new earth!
Only those who have lived in a small town can really know how great an event therein is a new engagement. From tongue to tongue passes the swift countersign; from eye to eye flashes the illumination of joy, or the bale-fire of alarm; the streets and houses ring with it, as with the penetrating, all-pervading sound of the village bell; the whole community feels a thrill of sympathy, and seems to congratulate itself that all the great events are by no means confined to the great towns. As Cecilia and Kavanagh passed arm in arm through the village, many curious eyes watched them from the windows, many hearts grown cold or careless rekindled their household fires of love from the golden altar of God, borne through the streets by those pure and holy hands!
The intelligence of the engagement, however, was received very differently by different persons. Mrs. Wilmerdings wondered, for her part, why any body wanted to get married at all. The little taxidermist said he knew it would be so from the very first day they had met at his aviary. Miss Hawkins lost suddenly much of her piety and all her patience, and laughed rather hysterically. Mr. Hawkins said it was impossible, but went in secret to consult a friend, an old bachelor, on the best remedy for love; and the old bachelor, as one well versed in such affairs, gravely advised him to think of the lady as a beautiful statue!
Once more the indefatigable school-girl took up her pen, and wrote to her foreign correspondent a letter that might rival the famous epistle ofMadame de Sévigné to her daughter, announcing the engagement of Mademoiselle Montpensier. Through the whole of the first page, she told her to guess who the lady was; through the whole of the second, who the gentleman was; the third was devoted to what was said about it in the village; and on the fourth there were two postscripts, one at the top and the other at the bottom, the first stating that they were to be married in the Spring, and to go to Italy immediately afterwards, and the last, that Alice Archer was dangerously ill with a fever.
As for the Churchills, they could find no words powerful enough to express their delight, but gave vent to it in a banquet on Thanksgiving-day, in which the wife had all the trouble and the husband all the pleasure. In order that the entertainment might be worthy of the occasion, Mr. Churchill wrote to the city for the best cookery-book; and the bookseller, executing the order in all its amplitude, sent him the Practical Guide to the Culinary Art in all its Branches, by Frascatelli, pupil of the celebrated Carême, and Chief Cook to Her Majesty the Queen, — a ponderous volume, illustrated with numerous engravings, and furnished with bills of fare for everymonth in the year, and any number of persons. This great work was duly studied, evening after evening; and Mr. Churchill confessed to his wife, that, although at first startled by the size of the book, he had really enjoyed it very highly, and had been much pleased to be present in imagination at so many grand entertainments, and to sit opposite the Queen without having to change his dress or the general style of his conversation.
The dinner hour, as well as the dinner itself, was duly debated. Mr. Churchill was in favor of the usual hour of one; but his wife thought it should be an hour later. Whereupon he re marked, —
“King Henry the Eighth dined at ten o’clock and supped at four. His queen’s maids of honor had a gallon of ale and a chine of beef for their breakfast.”
To which his wife answered, —
“I hope we shall have something a little more refined than that.”
The day on which the banquet should take place was next discussed, and both agreed that no day could be so appropriate as Thanksgiving-day; for, as Mrs. Churchill very truly remarked, it was really a day of thanksgiving to Kavanagh. She then said, —
“How very solemnly he read the Governor’s Proclamation yesterday! particularly the words ‘God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!’ And what a Proclamation it was! When he spread it out on the pulpit, it looked like a table-cloth!”
Mr. Churchill then asked, —
“What day of the week is the first of December? Let me see, —
‘At Dover dwells George Brown, Esquire,
Good Christopher Finch and Daniel Friar!’
Thursday.”
“I could have told you that,” said his wife, “by a shorter process than your old rhyme. Thanksgiving-day always comes on Thursday.”
These preliminaries being duly settled, the dinner was given.
There being only six guests, and the dinner being modelled upon one for twenty-four persons, Russian style in November, it was very abundant. It began with a Colbert soup, and ended with a Nesselrode pudding; but as no allusion was made in the course of the repast to the French names of the dishes, and the mutton, and turnips, and pancakes were all called by their English patronymics, the dinner appeared less magnificent in reality than in the bill of fare, and the guests did not fully appreciate how superb a banquet they were enjoying. The hilarity of the occasion was not marred by any untoward accident; though once or twice Mr. Churchill was much annoyed, and the company much amused, by Master Alfred, who was allowed to be present at the festivities, and audibly proclaimed what was coming, long before it made its appearance. When the dinner was over, several of the guests remembered brilliant and appropriate things they might have said, and wondered they were so dull as not to think of them in season; and when they were all gone, Mr. Churchill remarked to his wife that he had enjoyed himself very much, and that he should like to ask his friends to just such a dinner every week!
XXVIII.
The first snow came. How beautiful it was, falling so silently, all day long, all night long, on the mountains, on the meadows, on the roofs of the living, on the graves of the dead! All white save the river, that marked its course by a winding black line across the landscape; and the leafless trees, that against the leaden sky now revealed more fully the wonderful beauty and intricacy of their branches!
What silence, too, came with the snow, and what seclusion! Every sound was muffled, every noise changed to something soft and musical. No more trampling hoofs, — no more rattling wheels! Only the chiming sleigh-bells, beating as swift and merrily as the hearts of children.
All day long, all night long, the snow fell on the village and on the church-yard; on the happyhome of Cecilia Vaughan, on th
e lonely grave of Alice Archer! Yes; for before the winter came she had gone to that land where winter never comes. Her long domestic tragedy was ended. She was dead; and with her had died her secret sorrow and her secret love. Kavanagh never knew what wealth of affection for him faded from the world when she departed; Cecilia never knew what fidelity of friendship, what delicate regard, what gentle magnanimity, what angelic patience had gone with her into the grave; Mr. Churchill never knew, that, while he was exploring the Past for records of obscure and unknown martyrs, in his own village, near his own door, before his own eyes, one of that silent sisterhood had passed away into oblivion, unnoticed and unknown.
How often, ah, how often, between the desire of the heart and its fulfilment, lies only the briefest space of time and distance, and yet the desire remains forever unfulfilled! It is so near that we can touch it with the hand, and yet so far away that the eye cannot perceive it. What Mr. Churchill most desired was before him. The Romance he was longing to find and record had really occurred in his neighbourhood, among hisown friends. It had been set like a picture into the frame-work of his life, inclosed within his own experience. But he could not see it as an object apart from himself; and as he was gazing at what was remote and strange and indistinct, the nearer incidents of aspiration, love, and death, escaped him. They were too near to be clothed by the imagination with the golden vapors of romance; for the familiar seems trivial, and only the distant and unknown completely fill and satisfy the mind.
The winter did not pass without its peculiar delights and recreations. The singing of the great wood fires; the blowing of the wind over the chimney-tops, as if they were organ pipes; the splendor of the spotless snow; the purple wall built round the horizon at sunset; the sea-suggesting pines, with the moan of the billows in their branches, on which the snows were furled like sails; the northern lights; the stars of steel; the transcendent moonlight, and the lovely shadows of the leafless trees upon the snow; — these things did not pass unnoticed nor unremembered. Every one of them made its record upon the heart of Mr. Churchill.
His twilight walks, his long Saturday afternoonrambles, had again become solitary; for Kavanagh was lost to him for such purposes, and his wife was one of those women who never walk. Sometimes he went down to the banks of the frozen river, and saw the farmers crossing it with their heavy-laden sleds, and the Fairmeadow schooner imbedded in the ice; and thought of Lapland sledges, and the song of Kulnasatz, and the dismantled, ice-locked vessels of the explorers in the Arctic Ocean. Sometimes he went to the neighbouring lake, and saw the skaters wheeling round their fire, and speeding away before the wind; and in his imagination arose images of the Norwegian Skate-Runners, bearing the tidings of King Charles’s death from Frederickshall to Drontheim, and of the retreating Swedish army, frozen to death in its fireless tents among the mountains. And then he would watch the cutting of the ice with ploughs, and the horses dragging the huge blocks to the store-houses, and contrast them with the Grecian mules, bearing the snows of Mount Parnassus to the markets of Athens, in panniers protected from the sun by boughs of oleander and rhododendron.
The rest of his leisure hours were employed in any thing and every thing save in writing hisRomance. A great deal of time was daily consumed in reading the newspapers, because it was necessary, he said, to keep up with the times; and a great deal more in writing a Lyceum Lecture, on “What Lady Macbeth might have been, had her energies been properly directed.” He also made some little progress in a poetical arithmetic, founded on Bhascara’s, but relinquished it, because the school committee thought it was not practical enough, and more than hinted that he had better adhere to the old system. And still the vision of the great Romance moved before his mind, august and glorious, a beautiful mirage of the desert.
XXIX.
The wedding did not take place till Spring. And then Kavanagh and his Cecilia departed on their journey to Italy and the East, — a sacred mission, a visit like the Apostle’s to the Seven Churches, nay, to all the Churches of Christendom; hoping by some means to sow in many devout hearts the desire and prophecy that filled his own, — the union of all sects into one universal Church of Christ. They intended to be absent one year only; they were gone three. It seemed to their friends that they never would return. But at length they came, — the long absent, the long looked for, the long desired, — bearing with them that delicious perfume of travel, that genial, sunny atmosphere, and soft, Ausonian air, which returning travellers always bring about them.
It was night when they reached the village, and they could not see what changes had taken place in it during their absence. How it had dilated and magnified itself, — how it had puffed itself up, and bedizened itself with flaunting, ostentatious signs, — how it stood, rotund and rubicund with brick, like a portly man, with his back to the fire and both hands in his pockets, warm, expansive, apoplectic, and entertaining a very favorable opinion of himself, — all this they did not see, for the darkness; but Kavanagh beheld it all, and more, when he went forth on the following morning.
How Cecilia’s heart beat as they drove up the avenue to the old house! The piny odors in the night air, the solitary light at her father’s window, the familiar bark of the dog Major at the sound of the wheels, awakened feelings at once new and old. A sweet perplexity of thought, a strange familiarity, a no less pleasing strangeness! The lifting of the heavy brass latch, and the jarring of the heavy brass knocker as the door closed, were echoes from her childhood. Mr. Vaughan they found, as usual, among his papers in the study; — the same bland, white-haired man, hardly a day older than when they left him there. To Ceciliathe whole long absence in Italy became a dream, and vanished away. Even Kavanagh was for the moment forgotten. She was a daughter, not a wife; — she had not been married, she had not been in Italy!
In the morning, Kavanagh sallied forth to find the Fairmeadow of his memory, but found it not. The railroad had completely transformed it. The simple village had become a very precocious town. New shops, with new names over the doors; new streets, with new forms and faces in them; the whole town seemed to have been taken and occupied by a besieging army of strangers. Nothing was permanent but the work-house, standing alone in the pasture by the river; and, at the end of the street, the school-house, that other work-house, where in childhood we pick and untwist the cordage of the brain, that, later in life, we may not be obliged to pull to pieces the more material cordage of old ships.
Kavanagh soon turned in despair from the main street into a little green lane, where there were few houses, and where the barberry still nodded over the old stone wall; — a place he had much loved in the olden time for its silence and seclusion. He seemed to have entered his ancientrealm of dreams again, and was walking with his hat drawn a little over his eyes. He had not proceeded far, when he was startled by a woman’s voice, quite sharp and loud, crying from the opposite side of the lane. Looking up, he beheld a small cottage, against the wall of which rested a ladder, and on this ladder stood the woman from whom the voice came. Her face was nearly concealed by a spacious gingham sun-bonnet, and in her right hand she held extended a large brush, with which she was painting the front of her cottage, when interrupted by the approach of Kavanagh, who, thinking she was calling to him, but not understanding what she said, made haste to cross over to her assistance. At this movement her tone became louder and more peremptory; and he could now understand that her cry was rather a warning than an invitation.
“Go away!” she said, flourishing her brush. “Go away! What are you coming down here for, when I am on the ladder, painting my house? If you don’t go right about your business, I will come down and—”
“Why, Miss Manchester!” exclaimed Kavanagh; “how could I know that you would be going up the ladder just as I came down the lane?”
“Well, I declare! if it is not Mr. Kavanagh!”
And she scrambled down the ladder backwards with as much grace as the circumstances permitted. She, too, like the rest of his friends in the v
illage, showed symptoms of growing older. The passing years had drunk a portion of the light from her eyes, and left their traces on her cheeks, as birds that drink at lakes leave their foot-prints on the margin. But the pleasant smile remained, and reminded him of the by-gone days, when she used to open for him the door of the gloomy house under the poplars.
Many things had she to ask, and many to tell; and for full half an hour Kavanagh stood leaning over the paling, while she remained among the hollyhocks, as stately and red as the plants themselves. At parting, she gave him one of the flowers for his wife; and, when he was fairly out of sight, again climbed the perilous ladder, and resumed her fresco painting.
Through all the vicissitudes of these later years, Sally had remained true to her principles and resolution. At Mrs. Archer’s death, which occured soon after Kavanagh’s wedding, she had retired to this little cottage, bought and paid for by her own savings. Though often urged by Mr. Vaughan’s man, Silas, who breathed his soul out upon the air of Summer evenings through a keyed bugle, she resolutely refused to marry. In vain did he send her letters written with his own blood, — going barefooted into the brook to be bitten by leeches, and then using his feet as inkstands: she refused again and again. Was it that in some blue chamber, or some little warm back parlour, of her heart, the portrait of the inconstant dentist was still hanging? Alas, no! But as to some hearts it is given in youth to blossom with the fragrant blooms of young desire, so others are doomed by a mysterious destiny to be checked in Spring by chill winds, blowing over the bleak common of the world. So had it been with her desires and thoughts of love. Fear now predominated over hope; and to die unmarried had become to her a fatality which she dared not resist.
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 181
