For the Major: A Novelette

"But not enough to sit in it," said Madam Carroll, smiling.

"I really did not notice where I was sitting," said the girl, getting up; "I almost always sit in the easy-chair. But won't you take it yourself, mamma?"

"I would rather see you in it," answered Madam Carroll. "Besides, it is too deep for me; there is some difference in our lengths." She seated herself in a low chair, and looked at the long, lithe shape of Sara, opposite, her head thrown back, her slender feet out, her arms extended on the broad arms of the cushioned seat.

Sara, too, looked at herself. "I am afraid I loll," she said.

"Be thankful that you can," answered the smaller lady; "it is a most refreshing thing to do now and then. Short-backed women cannot loll. And then people say, 'Oh, she never rests! she never leans back and looks comfortable!' when how can she? It is a matter of vertebræ, and we do not make our own, I suppose. You did not stay long at Miss Dalley's. Didn't you find her agreeable?"

"She might have been – unaccompanied by Tasso."

Madam Carroll laughed. "He is her most intimate friend. She has quite taken him to her heart. She has been so anxious to see you, because you were acquainted with him in his own tongue, whereas she has been obliged to content herself with translations. She has a leaf from his favorite tree, and a small piece of cloth from his coat – or was it a toga? But no, of course not; doublet and hose, and those delightful lace ruffles which are such a loss to society. These valuable relics she keeps framed. It is really most interesting."

"I never cared much for Tasso," said Sara, indifferently.

"That is because you have had a large variety to choose from, reading as you do all the poets in the original, from Homer down to – to our sad but fascinating Lamartine," answered Madam Carroll, looking consideringly about the room, and finally staying her glance at the toilet-table, upon which she had expended much time and care. "But our poor Miss Dalley's life has been harshly narrowed down, narrowed, I may say, to Tasso alone. For all their small property was swept away by the war, and she is now obliged to support herself and her mother by dyeing: there is, fortunately, a good deal of dyeing in Far Edgerley, and so she took it up. You must have noticed her hands. But we always pretend not to notice them, because in all other ways she is so lady-like; when she expects to see any one, she always, and most delicately, wears gloves."

Madam Carroll related this little village history as though she were but filling an idle moment; but the listener received an impression, none the less, somewhere down in a secondary consciousness, that she had not quite done justice to poor Miss Dalley and her aspirations, and that some time she ought to try to atone for it.

But this secondary consciousness was small: it was small because the first was so wide and deep, and so filled with trouble – trouble composed in equal parts of perplexity, disappointment, and grief. She was at home, and she was not happy. This was a conjunction of conditions which she had not believed could be possible.

She had never had any disagreements with her father's wife, and she had been fond of her in a certain way. But the wife had never been to the daughter more than an adjunct – something added to her father, of qualifying but not independent importance; a little moon, bright, if you pleased, and pretty, but still a satellite revolving round its sun. As a child, she had accepted the new mother upon this basis, because she could make everything "more pleasant for papa;" and she had gone on accepting her upon the same basis ever since. Madam Carroll knew this. She had never quarrelled with it. She and her daughter had filled their respective positions in entire amity. But now that this daughter had come home to live, now that she was no longer a school-girl or child, this was what she had discovered: her father, her idol, had turned from her, and his wife had gained what his daughter had lost. There could be no doubt but that he had turned from her; his manner towards her was entirely changed. He seemed no longer to care to have her with him; he seemed to avoid her; he was not interested in anything that was connected with her – he who had formerly been so full of interest; he never kept up a conversation with her, but let it drop as soon as he could; he was so – so strange! Although she had now been at home two weeks, she had scarcely once been alone with him; Madam Carroll had either been present from the beginning, or she had soon come in; Madam Carroll had led the conversation, suggested the topics. The Major had always been fond of his pretty little wife; but he had also been devoted to his daughter. The change in him she could not understand; it made her very unhappy. It would have made her more than that – made her wretched beyond the possibility of concealment – had there not been in it an element of perplexity; perplexity which bewildered her, which she could not solve. For, while her own position and her father's regard for her seemed completely changed, life at the Farms went on day after day upon the distinct assumption that there was no change, that everything was precisely as it always had been. This assumption was not only mentioned, but insisted upon, the Major's wife often alluding with amusement to what she called their "dear obstinate old ways."

"The Major ties his cravat precisely as he did twenty-five years ago – he has acknowledged it to me," she said, glancing at him merrily. "We have the same things for dinner; we wear the same clothes, or others made exactly like them; we read the same books because we think them so much better than the new; we discuss the same old topics for the same prejudiced old reason. We remain so obstinately unchanged that even Time himself does not remember who we are. Each year when he comes round he thinks we belong to a younger generation."

The Major always laughed at these sallies of his wife. "You forget, my dear, my gray hairs," he said.

"Gray hairs are a distinction," answered Madam Carroll, decisively. "And besides, Major, they're the only sign of age about you; your figure, your bearing, are as they always were."

And on Sundays, when he carried round the plate at St. John's, and at his wife's receptions once in two weeks, this was true.

Sara came out of her troubled revery at the sound of Madam Carroll's voice. This lady was going on with her subject, as her step-daughter had not spoken.

"Yes, Caroline Dalley is really very intelligent; she is one of the subscribers for our Saturday Review. You know we subscribe for one copy – about twelve families of our little circle here – and it goes to all in turn, beginning with the Farms. The Major selected it; the Major prefers its tone to that of our American journals as they are at present. Not that he cares for the long articles. With his – his wide experience, you know, the long articles could only be tiresome; they weary him greatly."

"I must have tired him, then, this morning; I read some of the long articles aloud."

"You had forgotten; you have been so long absent. It was very natural, I am sure. You will soon recall those little things."

"How can I recall what I never knew? No, mamma, it is not that; it is the – the change. I am perplexed all the time. I don't know what to do."

"It isn't so much what to do as what not to do," replied Madam Carroll, looking now at the lounge she had designed, and surveying it with her head a little on one side, so as to take in its perspective. "The Major has not yet recovered entirely from his illness of last winter, you know, and his strength cannot be overtaxed. A – a tranquil solitude is the best thing for him most of the time. I often go out of the room myself purposely, leaving him alone, or with Scar, whose childish talk, of course, makes no demand upon his attention; I do this to avoid tiring him."

"I don't think you ever tire him," said Sara.

The Major's wife glanced at her step-daughter; then she resumed her consideration of the lounge. "That is because I have been with him so constantly. I have learned. You will soon learn also. And then we shall have a very happy little household here at the Farms."

"I doubt it," said the girl, despondently. She paused. "I am afraid I am a disappointment to my father," she went on, with an effort, but unable longer to abstain from putting her fear into words – words which should be in substance, if not in actual form, a question. "I am afraid that as a woman, no longer a school-girl or child, I am not what he thought I should be, and therefore whenever I am with him he is oppressed by this. Each day I see less of him than I did the day before. There seems to be no time for me, no place. He has just told me that all his mornings would be occupied; by that he must have meant simply that he did not want me." Tears had come into her eyes as she spoke, but she did not let them fall.

"You are mistaken," said Madam Carroll, earnestly. Then in her turn she paused. "I venture to predict that soon, very soon, you will find yourself indispensable to your father," she added, in her usual tone.

"Never as you are," answered Sara. She spoke with a humility which, coming from so proud a girl, was touching. For the first time in her life she was acknowledging her step-mother's superiority.

Madam Carroll rose, came across, and kissed her. "My dear," she said, "a wife has more opportunities than a daughter can have; that is all. The Major loves you as much as ever. He is also very proud of you. So proud, indeed, that he has a great desire to have you proud of him as well; you always have been extremely proud of him, you know, and he remembers it. This feeling causes him, perhaps, to make something of – of an effort when he is with you, an effort to appear in every respect himself, as he was before his illness – as he was when you last saw him. This effort is at times fatiguing to him; yet it is probable that he will not relinquish it while he feels that you are noticing or – or comparing. I have not spoken of this before, because you have never liked to have me tell you anything about your father; even as a child you always wanted to get your knowledge directly from him, not from me. I have never found fault with this, because I knew that it came from your great love for him. As I love him too, I have tried to please, or at least not to displease, his daughter; not to cross her wishes, her ideas; not to seem to her officious, presuming. Yet at the same time remember that I love him probably as much as you do. But now that you have asked me, now that I know you wish me to speak, I will say that if you could remove all necessity for the effort your father now makes, by placing yourself so fully upon a lower plane – if I may so express it – that his former self should not be suggested to him by anything in you, in your words, looks, or manner, you would soon find, I think, that this slight – slight constraint you have noticed was at an end. In addition, he himself would be more comfortable. And our dearest wish is of course to make him happy and comfortable, to keep him so."

As she uttered these sentences quietly, guardedly, Sara had grown very pale. Her eyes, large and dark with pain, were searching her step-mother's fair little face. But Madam Carroll's gaze was fixed upon the window opposite; not until she had brought all her words to a close did she let it drop upon her daughter. Then the two women looked at each other. The girl's eyes asked a mute question, a question which the wife's eyes, seeing that it was an appeal to her closer knowledge, at length answered – answered bravely and clearly, sympathetically, too, and with tenderness, but – in the affirmative.

Then the daughter bowed her head, her face hidden in her hands.

Madam Carroll sat down upon the arm of the easy-chair, and drew that bowed head towards her. No more words were spoken. But now the daughter understood all. Her perplexity and her trouble were at an end; but they ended in a grief, as a river ends in the sea – a grief that opened out all round her, overwhelming the present, and, as it seemed to her then, the future as well. Madam Carroll said nothing; the bereavement was there, and the daughter must bear it. No one could save her from her pain. But the girl knew from this very silence, and the gentle touch of the hand upon her hair, that all her sorrow was comprehended, her desolation pitied, understood. For her father had been her idol, her all; and now he was taken from her. His mind was failing. This was the bereavement which had fallen upon her heart and life.

CHAPTER III

AT sunset of the same day Madam Carroll was in her dining-room; she had changed her dress, and now wore a fresh muslin, with a bunch of violets in her belt. Sara, coming down the stairs, saw the bright little figure through the open door; Judith Inches was bringing in the kettle (for Madam Carroll always made the tea herself), and on the table were one or two hot dishes of a delicate sort, additions to the usual meal. Sara recognized in these added dishes the never-failing touch of the mistress's hand upon the household helm. The four-o'clock dinner had come and gone, but no summons had been sent to her – that pitiless summons which in so many households remains inflexible, though stricken hearts may be longing for solitude, for a respite, however brief, from the petty duties of the day. Through the long hours of the afternoon there had been no knock, not so much even as a footstep outside her door. But now, in the cool of the evening, the one who had thus protected her seclusion was hoping that she would of her own accord come down and take again her accustomed place at the family table. Sara did this. She did more. She had put away the signs of her grief so completely that, save for an added pallor and the dark half-circle under her eyes, she was quite herself again. Her soft hair was smooth, her black dress made less severe by a little white scarf which encircled the narrow linen collar. Scar was sitting on the bottom stair as she came down. She put her hand on his head. "Where is papa?" she said.

"Papa is in the library. I think he is not coming out to tea," answered the child.

"Oh, but we must make him come – the dining-room is so dull without papa. Let us go and ask him." She took his hand, and they went together to the library. Madam Carroll, who had heard their words through the open door, watched them go. She did not interfere. She told Judith Inches to take back the hot dishes to the kitchen.

The Major was sitting in his easy-chair, looking at the pictures in an old book. He closed the volume and hastily drew off his spectacles as his daughter came in. "It has been a beautiful afternoon," he remarked, speaking promptly and decidedly. "Have you been out? or were you at home with a book – in your old way? What do you find to read nowadays? I find almost nothing." And he folded his arms with a critical air.

"I find little that can be compared with the old English authors, the ones you like," answered his daughter. "The old books are better than the new."

"So they are, so they are," replied the Major, with satisfaction. "I have often made the remark myself."

"Now that I am at home again," continued Sara, "I want to look over all those old books I used to have before I went to Longfields – those that were called mine. I hope we have them still?"

"Yes," said Scar, in his deliberate little voice, "we have. I read them now. And the long words I look out in the dictionary."

"It is a very good exercise for him. I suggested it," said the Major.

"I want to see all their old pictures again," pursued Sara. "I know I shall care a great deal about them; they will be like dear old friends."

"Very natural; I quite understand the feeling," said the Major, encouragingly. "And as Scar reads the books, perhaps you will find some of them lying about this very room. Let me see – didn't I have one just now? Yes, here it is; what was it?" And taking up the volume he had laid down a moment before, he opened it, and read, or repeated with the air of reading (for his spectacles were off), "'The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and his Servant-man Friday. Defoe. London.'"

Sara came to his side and looked at the title-page. "Yes, that is my dear old book. I loved it better than any other, excepting, perhaps, 'Good Queen Bertha's Honey-Broth.' I wonder if the old pictures are all there?"

"I think they are," said the Major, turning the leaves. They looked at one or two together, recalling reminiscences of the days when she used to talk about them as a child. "You always insisted that this print of Friday's foot was not of the right shape, and once you even went out in the garden, took off your shoe and stocking, and made a print in a flower-bed to show me," said the Major, laughing.

"Let us look them all over after tea, and 'Good Queen Bertha' too," said Sara. "For Scar and I have come to take you out to tea, father; the dining-room is so dull without you. Besides, I want you to give me some peach preserves, and then say, 'No, Sara, not again,' when I ask for more; and then, after a few minutes, put a large table-spoonful on my plate with your head turned away, while talking to some one else, as though unconscious of what you were doing."

Scar laughed over this anecdote, and so did Scar's father. "But perhaps we shall have no peach preserve," he said, rising.

"We will ask mamma to give us some," answered Sara. She took his arm, and Scar took his other hand; thus together they entered the dining-room.

Madam Carroll welcomed them; but placidly, as though the Major's coming was a matter of course. Since his daughter's return, however, it had not been a matter of course: first for this reason, then for that, his meals had almost always been sent to the library. Now he was tired; and now the dining-room floor might be damp after Judith Inches' scrubbing-brush; now there was an east wind, and now there was a west; or else he was not feeling well, and some one might "drop in," in which case, as the dining-room opened only into the hall, which was wide, like a room, he should not be able to escape. In actual fact, however, there was very little "dropping in" at Carroll Farms, unless one should give that name to the visits of the rector, Mr. Owen. Once in a while, in the evening, when the weather was decisively pleasant, the junior warden came to see them. But all their other acquaintances came to the receptions, made a brief call upon the first Thursday afternoon following, and that was all. The sweet little mistress of the mansion had never uttered one syllable upon the subject, yet each member of the circle of Far Edgerley society knew as well as though it had been proclaimed through the town by a herald with a silver trumpet emblazoned with the Carroll arms, that these bimonthly receptions (which were so delightful) and the brief following call comprised all the visits they were expected to pay at Carroll Farms. And surely, when one considered the great pleasure and also improvement derived from these receptions, the four visits a month at the Farms were worth more than forty times four visits at any other residence in the village or its neighborhood. True, Mrs. Hibbard endeavored to maintain an appearance of importance at her mansion of yellow wood called Chapultepec; but as General Hibbard (of the Mexican War) had now been dead eight years, and as his old house had not been opened for so much as the afternoon sewing society since his departure, its importance, socially considered, existed only in the imagination of his relict – which was, however, in itself quite a domain.

Judith Inches, tall and serious, now brought back the hot dishes, Madam Carroll made the tea (with many pretty little motions and attitudes, which her husband watched), and the meal began. The Major was in excellent spirits. He told stories of Sara's childhood, her obstinacy, her never-failing questions. "She came to me once, Scar," he said, "and announced that Galileo was a humbug. When I asked her why, she said that there was good King David, who knew all about astronomy long before he did; for didn't he say, 'the round world, and they that dwell therein'? We sang it every Sunday. So that proved plain as day that David knew that the world was round, and that it moved, and all about it, of course. Yet here was this old Italian taking everything to himself! Just like Amerigo Vespucci, another old Italian, who had all America named after himself, leaving poor Columbus, the real discoverer, with nothing but 'Hail, Columbia!' to show for it. She announced all this triumphantly and at the top of her voice, from a window; for I was in the garden. When I told her that the word 'round,' upon which all her argument had been founded, was not in the original text, you should have seen how crest-fallen she was. She said she should never sing that chant again."

Scar laughed over this story. He did not laugh often, but when he did, it was a happy little sound, which made every one join in it by its merry glee.

"I am afraid I was a very self-conceited little girl, Scar," his sister said.

As the meal went on, the Major's manner grew all the time more easy. His eyes were no longer restless. His old attention returned, too, in a measure; he kept watch of his wife's plate to ask if she would not have something more; he remembered that Sara preferred bread to the beat biscuit, and placed it near her. The meal ended, they went back to the library. Sara found her old copy of "Good Queen Bertha's Honey-Broth," and she and her father looked at the pictures together, as well as at those of "Robinson Crusoe." Each had its association, a few recalled by him, but many more by her. After Scar had gone to bed, and the books had been laid aside, she still sat there talking to him. She talked of her life at Longfields, telling stories in connection with it – stories not long – bright and amusing. The Major's wife meanwhile sat near them, sewing; she sat with her back to the lamp, in order that the light might fall over her shoulder upon the seam. The light did the work she assigned to it, but it also took the opportunity to play over her curls in all sorts of winsome ways, to gleam on her thimble, to glide down her rosy muslin skirt, and touch her little slipper. She said hardly anything; but, as they talked on, every now and then she looked up appreciatively, and smiled. At last she folded up her work, replacing it in her neat rose-lined work-basket; then she sat still in her low chair, with her feet on a footstool, listening.

The old clock, with its fierce gilt corsair climbing over a glass rock, struck ten.

"Bed-time," said Sara, pausing.

"Not for me," observed the Major. "My time for sleep is always brief; five or six hours are quite enough."

"I remember," said his daughter. And the memory, as a memory, was a true one. Until recently the Major's sleep had been as he described it. He had forgotten, or rather he had never been conscious of, the long nights of twelve or thirteen hours' rest which had now become a necessity to him.

"I am afraid I am not like you, father. I am very apt to be sleepy about ten," said Sara. "And I suspect it is the same with mamma."

Madam Carroll did not deny this assertion. The Major, laughing at the early somnolence of the two ladies, rose to light a candle for his daughter, in the old way. As she took it, and bent to kiss her stepmother good-night, Madam Carroll's eyes met hers, full of an expression which made them bright (ordinarily they were not bright, but soft); the expression was that of warm congratulation.

The next day dawned fair and cloudless – Trinity Sunday. The mountain breeze and the warm sun together made an atmosphere fit for a heaven. On the many knolls of Far Edgerley the tall grass, carrying with it the slender stalks of the buttercups, was bending and waving merrily; the red clover, equally abundant, could not join in this dance, because it had crowded itself so greedily into the desirable fields that all that its close ranks could do was to undulate a little at the top, like a swell passing over a pond. Madam Carroll, the Major, and Scar were to drive to church as usual, in the equipage. Sara had preferred to walk. She started some time before the hour for service, having a fancy to stroll under the churchyard pines for a while by herself. These pines were noble trees; they had belonged to the primitive forest, and had been left standing along the northern border of the churchyard by the Carroll who had first given the land for the church a hundred years before. The ground beneath them was covered with a thick carpet of their own brown aromatic needles. There were no graves here save one, of an Indian chief, who slept by himself with his face towards the west, while all his white brethren on the other side turned their closed eyes towards the rising sun. It was a beautiful rural God's-acre, stretching round the church in the old-fashioned way, so that the shadow of the cross on the spire passed slowly over all the graves, one by one, as the sun made his journey from the peak of Chillawassee across to Lonely Mountain, behind whose long soft line he always sank, and generally in such a blaze of beautiful light that the children of the village grew up in the vague belief that the edge of the world must be just there, that there it rounded and went downward into a mysterious golden atmosphere, in which, some day, when they had wings, they, too, should sport and float like birds.

Early though it was, Miss Carroll discovered when she entered the church gate that she was not the first comer; the choir ladies were practising within, and other ladies of floral if not musical tastes were arranging mountain laurel in the font and chancel – to the manifest disapproval of Flower, the disapproval being expressed in the eye he had fixed upon them, his "mountain eye," as he called his best one. "It be swep, and it be dustered," he said to himself. "What more do the reasonless female creatures want?" Miss Carroll had not joined the choir, although the rector, prompted by his junior warden, had suggested it; Miss Sophia Greer would, therefore, continue to sing the solos undisturbed. She was trying one now. And the other ladies were talking. But this music, this conversation, this arrangement of laurel, and this disapproval of Flower went on within the church. The new-comer had the churchyard to herself; she went over to the pines on its northern side, and strolled to and fro at the edge of the slope, looking at the mountains, whose peaks rose like a grand amphitheatre all round her against the sky.

Her face was sad, but the bitterness, the revolt, were gone; her eyes were quiet and sweet. She had accepted her sorrow. It was a great one. At first it had been overwhelming; for all the brightness of the past had depended upon her father, all her plans for the present, her hopes for the future. His help, his comprehension, his dear affection and interest, had made up all her life, and she did not know how to go on without them, how to live. Never again could she depend upon him for guidance, never again have the exquisite happiness of his perfect sympathy – for he had always understood her, and no one else ever had, or at least so she thought. She had cared only for him, she had found all her companionship in him; and now she was left alone.

But after a while Love rose, and turned back this tide. The sharp personal pain, the bitter loneliness, gave way to a new tenderness for the stricken man himself. Evidently he was at times partly conscious of this lethargy which was fettering more and more his mental powers, for he exerted himself, he tried to remember, he tried to be brighter, to talk in the old way. And who could tell but that he perceived his failure to accomplish this? Who could tell, when he was silent so often, sitting with his eyes on the carpet, that he was not brooding over it sadly? For a man such as he had been, this must be deep suffering – deep, even though vague – like the sensation of falling in a dream, falling from a height, and continuing to fall, without ever reaching bottom. Probably he did not catch the full reality; it constantly eluded him; yet every now and then some power of his once fine mind might be awake long enough to make him conscious of a lack, a something that gave him pain, he knew not why. As she thought of this, all her heart went out to him with a loving, protecting tenderness which no words could express; she forgot her own grief in thinking of his, and her trouble took the form of a passionate desire to make him happy; to keep even this dim consciousness always from him, if possible; to shield him from contact with the thoughtless and unfeeling; to so surround his life with love, like a wall, that he should never again remember anything of his loss, never again feel that inarticulate pain, but be like one who has entered a beautiful, tranquil garden, to leave it no more.

This morning, under the pines, she was thinking of all this, as she walked slowly to and fro past the Indian's grave. Flower came out to ring his first bell. His "first bell" was unimportant, made up of short, business-like notes; he rang it in his working jacket, an old mountain homespun coat, whose swallow-tails had been cut off, so that it now existed as a roundabout. But when, twenty minutes later, he issued forth a second time, he was attired in a coat of thin but shining black, with butternut trousers and a high pink calico vest. Placing his hat upon the ground beside him, he took the rope in his hand, made a solemn grimace or two to get his mouth into position, and then, closing his eyes, brought out with gravity the first stroke of his "second bell." His second bell consisted of dignified solo notes, with long pauses between. Flower's theory was that each of these notes echoed resonantly through its following pause. But as the bell of St. John's was not one of size or resonance, he could only make the pauses for the echoes which should have been there.