Kitabı oku: «Aftermath», sayfa 6

VII

A month has gone by since Georgiana passed away.

To-day, for the first time, I went back to the woods. It was pleasant to be surrounded again by the ever-living earth that feels no loss and has no memory; that was sere yesterday, is green to-day, will be sere again to-morrow, then green once more; that pauses not for wounds and wrecks, nor lingers over death and change; but onward, ever onward, along the groove of law, passes from its red origin in universal flame to its white end in universal snow.

And yet, as I approached the edge of the forest, it was as though an invisible company of influences came gently forth to meet me and sought to draw me back into their old friendship. I found myself stroking the trunks of the trees as I would throw my arm around the shoulders of a tried comrade; I drew down the branches and plunged my face into the new leaves as into a tonic stream.

Yesterday a wind storm swept this neighborhood. Later, deep in the woods, I came upon an elm that had been struck by a bolt at the top. Nearly half the trunk had been torn away; and one huge limb lay across my path.

As I stood looking at it, the single note of a bird fell on my ear—always the same note, low, quiet, regular, devoid of feeling, as though the bird had been stunned and were trying to say: What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?

I knew what that note meant. It was the note with which a bird now and then lingers around the scene of the central tragedy of its life.

After a long search I found the nest, crushed against the ground under the huge limb, and a few feet from it, in the act of trying to escape, the female. The male, sitting meantime on the end of a bough near by, watched me incuriously, and with no change in that quiet, regular, careless note—he knew only too well that she was past my harming. The plan for his life had reached an end in early summer.

I sat down near him for a while, thinking of the universal tragedy of the nest.

It was the second time to-day that this divine wastage in nature had forced itself on my thought, and this morning the spectacle was on a scale of tragic greatness beyond anything that has ever touched human life in this part of the country: Mr. Clay was buried amid the long sad blare of music, the tolling of bells, the roll of drums, the boom of cannon, and the grief of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people—a vast and solemn pageant, yet as nothing to the multitude that will attend afar. For him this day the flags of nations will fly at half-mast; and the truly great men of the world, wherever the tidings may reach them of his passing, will stand awe-stricken that one of their superhuman company has been too soon withdrawn.

Too soon withdrawn! Therein is the tragedy of the nest, the wastage of the divine, the law of loss, whose reign on earth is unending, but whose right to reign no creature, brute or human, ever acknowledges.

The death of Mr. Clay is one of the many things that are happening to change all that made up my life with Georgiana. She was a true hero-worshipper, and she worshipped him. I no less. Now that he is dead, I feel as much lonelier as a soldier feels whose chosen tent-mate and whose general have fallen on the field together.

As I turned, away from the overcrowded town this afternoon towards the woods and was confronted by the wreck of the storm, my thoughts being yet full of Mr. Clay, of his enemies and disappointment, there rose before my mind a scene such as Audubon may once have witnessed:

The light of day is dying over the forests of the upper Mississippi. The silence of high space falls upon the vast stream. On a thunder-blasted tree-top near the western bank sits a lone, stern figure waiting for its lordliest prey—the eagle waiting for the swan. Long the stillness continues among the rocks, the tree-tops, and above the river. But far away in the north a white shape is floating nearer. At last it comes into sight, flying heavily, for it is already weary, being already wounded. The next moment the cry of its coming is heard echoing onward and downward upon the silent woods. Instantly the mighty watcher on the summit is alert and tense; and as the great snowy image of the swan floats by, in mid-air and midway of the broad expanse of water, he meets it. No battle is fought up there—the two are not well matched; and thus, separated from all that is little and struggling far above all that is low, with the daylight dying on his spotlessness, the swan receives the blow in its heart.

So came Death to the great Commoner.

Oh, Georgiana! I do not think of Death as ever having come to you. I think of you as some strangely beautiful white being that one day rose out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler, and uttering your note of divine farewell, spread your wings towards the open sea of eternity, there to await my coming.

VIII

It is a year and four months since Georgiana left me, and now everything goes on much as it did before she came. The family have moved back to their home in Henderson, returning like a little company of travellers who have lost their guide. Sylvia has already married; her brother writes me that he is soon to be; the mother visits me and my child, yearningly, but seldom, on account of her delicate health; and thus our lives grow always more apart. None take their places, the house having passed to people with whom, beyond all neighborly civilities, I have naught to do. Nowadays as I stroll around my garden with my little boy in my arms strange faces look down upon us out of Georgiana's window.

And I have long since gone back to nature.

When the harvest has been gathered from our strong, true land, a growth comes on which late in the year causes the earth to regain somewhat of its old greenness. New blades spring up in the stubble of the wheat; the beeless clover runs and blossoms; far and wide over the meadows flows the tufted billows of the grass; and in the woods the oak-tree drops the purple and brown of his leaf and mast upon the verdure of June. Everywhere a second spring puts forth between summer gone and winter nearing. It is the overflow of plenty beyond the filling of the barns. It is a wave of life following quickly upon the one that broke bountifully at our feet. It is nature's refusal to be once reaped and so to end.

The math: then the aftermath.

Upon the Kentucky landscape during these October days there lies this later youth of the year, calm, deep, vigorous. And as I spend much time in it for the fine, fresh work it brings to hand and thought, I feel that in my way I am part of it, that I can match the aftermath of nature with the aftermath of my life. The Harvester passed over my fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the winter's edge.

The thought has now come into my mind that I shall lay aside these pages for my son to ponder if he should ever grow old enough to value what he reads. They will give him some account of how his father and mother met in the old time, of their courting days, of their happy life together. And since it becomes more probable that there will be a war, and that I might not be living to speak to him of his mother in ways not written here, I shall set down one thing about her which I pray he may take well to heart. He ought to know and to remember this: that his life was the price of hers; she was extinguished that he might shine, and he owes it to her that the flame of his torch be as white as the altar's from which it was kindled.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing, then, in the character of his mother—which, please God, he will have, or, getting all things else, he can never be a gentleman—was honor. It shone from her countenance, it ran like melody in her voice, it made her eyes the most beautiful in expression that I have ever seen, it enveloped her person and demeanor with a spiritual grace. Honor in what are called the little things of life, honor not as women commonly understand it, but as the best of men understand it—that his mother had. It was the crystalline, unshakable rock upon which the somewhat fragile and never to be completed structure of her life was reared.

If he be anything of a philosopher, he may reason that this trait must have made his mother too serious and too hard. Let him think again. It was the very core of soundness in her that kept her gay and sweet. I have often likened her mind to the sky in its power of changeableness from radiant joyousness to sober calm; but oftenest it was like the vault of April, whose drops quicken what they fall upon; and she was of a soft-heartedness that ruled her absolutely—but only to the unyielding edge of honor. Yet she did not escape this charge of being both hard and serious upon the part of men and women who were used to the laxness of small misdemeanors, and felt ill at ease before the terrifying truth that she was a lady.

Beyond this single trait of hers—which, if it please God that he inherit it, may he keep though he lose everything else—I set nothing further down for his remembrance, since naught could come of my writing. By words I could no more give him an idea of what his mother was than I could point him to a few measures of wheat and bid him behold a living harvest.

Upon these fields of cool October greenness there risen out of the earth a low, sturdy weed. Upon the top of this weed small white blossoms open as still as stars of frost. Upon these blossoms lies a fragrance so pure and wholesome that the searching sense is never cloyed, never satisfied. Years after the blossoms are dried and yellow and the leaves withered and gone, this wholesome fragrance lasts. The common people, who often put their hopes into their names, call it life-everlasting. Sometimes they make themselves pillows of it for its virtue of bringing a quiet sleep.

This plant is blooming out now, and nightly as I wend homeward I pluck a handful of it, gathering along with its life the tranquil sunshine, the autumnal notes of the cardinal passing to better lands, and all the healthful influences of the fields. I shall make me a tribute of it to the memory of her undying sweetness.

If God wills, when I fall asleep for good I shall lay my head beside hers on the bosom of the Life Everlasting.