Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches Part 17

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, pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion.

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.

THE END