Saxe Holm's Stories Part 31

I shed grateful tears that night before I went to sleep. How I longed to write to Ellen of the incident; but I had resolved not once to disregard her request that the whole subject be a sealed one. And I trusted that Alice would remember to tell it. Well I might! At breakfast Alice said,--

"Oh, papa, I told mamma that you carried her to the party in your breast-pocket; that is, you carried her letter!"

I fancied that John's cheek flushed a little as he said,--

"You might tell mamma that papa carries her everywhere in his breast-pocket, little girlie, and mamma would understand."

I think from that day I never feared for Ellen's future. I fancied, too, that from that day there was a new light in John Gray's eyes. Perhaps it might have been only the new light in my own; but I think when a man knows that he has once, for one hour, forgotten a promise to meet a woman whose presence has been dangerously dear to him, he must be aware of his dawning freedom.

The winter was nearly over. Ellen had said nothing to us about returning.

"Dr. Willis tells me that, from what Ellen writes to him of her health, he thinks it would be safer for her to remain abroad another year," said John to me one morning at breakfast.

"Oh, she never will stay another year!" exclaimed I.

"Not unless I go out to stay with her," said John, very quietly.

"Oh, John, could you?" and, "Oh, papa, will you take me?" exclaimed Alice and I in one breath.

"Yes," and "yes," said John, laughing, "and Sally too, if she will go."

He then proceeded to tell me that he had been all winter contemplating this; that he believed they would never again have so good an opportunity to travel in Europe, and that Dr. Willis's hesitancy about Ellen's health had decided the question. He had been planning and deliberating as silently and unsuspectedly as Ellen had done the year before. Never once had it crossed my mind that he desired it, or that it could be. But I found that he had for the last half of the year been arranging his affairs with a view to it, and had entered into new business connections which would make it not only easy, but profitable, for him to remain abroad two years. He urged me to go with them, but I refused. I felt that the father and the mother and the children ought to be absolutely alone in this blessed reunion, and I have never regretted my decision, although the old world is yet an unknown world to me.

John Gray was a reticent and undemonstrative man, in spite of all the tenderness and pa.s.sionateness in his nature. But when he bade me good-by on the deck of the steamer, as he kissed me he whispered:--

"Sally, I shall hold my very breath till I see Ellen. I never knew how I loved her before." And the tears stood in his eyes.

I never saw Emma Long after she knew that John was to go abroad to join Ellen. I found myself suddenly without courage to look in her face. The hurry of my preparations for Alice was ample excuse for my not going to her house, and she did not come to ours. I knew that John spent several evenings with her, and came home late, with a sad and serious face, and that was all. A week before he sailed she joined a large and gay party for San Francisco and the Yosemite. In all the newspaper accounts of the excursion, Mrs. Long was spoken of as the brilliant centre of all festivities. I understood well that this was the first reaction of her proud and sensitive nature under an irremediable pain. She never returned to ----, but established herself in a Southern city, where she lived in great retirement for a year, doing good to all poor and suffering people, and spending the larger part of her fortune in charity. Early in the second year there was an epidemic of yellow fever: Mrs. Long refused to leave the city, and went as fearlessly as the physicians to visit and nurse the worst cases. But after the epidemic had pa.s.sed by, she herself was taken ill, and died suddenly in a hospital ward, surrounded by the very patients whom she had nursed back to health. Nothing I could say in my own words would give so vivid an idea of the meeting between John Gray and his wife, as the first letter which I received from little Alice:--

"DARLING AUNTIE,--

"It is too bad you did not come too. The voyage was horrid. Papa was so much sicker than I, that I had to take care of him all the time; but my head ached so that I kept seeing black spots if I stooped over to kiss papa; but papa said, I was just like another mamma.

"Oh, Auntie, only think, there was a mistake about the letters, and mamma never got the letter to tell her that we were coming; and she was out on the balcony of the hotel when we got out of the carriage, and first she saw me; and the lady who was with her said she turned first red and then so white the lady thought she was sick; and then the next minute she saw papa, and she just fell right down among all the people, and looked as if she was dead; and the very first thing poor papa and I saw, when we got up-stairs, was mamma being carried by two men, and papa and I both thought she was dead; and papa fell right down on his knees, and made the men put mamma down on the floor, and everybody talked out loud, and papa never spoke a word, but just looked at mamma, and n.o.body knew who papa was till I spoke, and I said,--

"'That's my mamma, and papa and I have just come all the way from America,"--and then a gentleman told me to kiss mamma, and I did; and then she opened her eyes; and just as soon as she saw papa, she got a great deal whiter and her head fell back again, and I was so sure she was dying, that I began to cry out loud, and I do think there were more than a hundred people all round us; but Louise says there were only ten or twelve; and then the same gentleman that told me to kiss mamma took hold of papa, and made him go away; and they carried mamma into a room, and laid her on a bed, and said we must all go out; but I wouldn't: I got right under the bed, and they didn't see me; and it seemed to me a thousand years before anybody spoke; and at last I heard mamma's voice, just as weak as a baby's--but you know n.o.body could mistake mamma's voice; and said she, 'Where is John--I saw John;' and then the gentleman said,--oh, I forgot to tell you he was a doctor,--he said,--

"'My dear madam, calm yourself'--and then I cried right out again, and crept out between his legs and almost knocked him down; and said I, 'Don't you try to calm my mamma; it is papa--and me too, mamma!' and then mamma burst out crying; and then the old gentleman ran out, and I guess papa was at the door, for he came right in; and then he put his arms round mamma, and they didn't speak for so long, I thought I should die; and all the people were listening, and going up and down in the halls outside, and I felt so frightened and ashamed, for fear people would think mamma wasn't glad to see us. But papa says that is always the way when people are more glad than they can bear; and the surprise, too, was too much for anybody.

But I said at the tea-table that I hoped I should never be so glad myself as long as I lived; and then the old gentleman,--he's a very nice old gentleman, and a great friend of mamma's, and wears gold spectacles,--he said, 'My dear little girl, I hope you _may_ be some day just as glad,'

and then he looked at papa and mamma and smiled,--and mamma almost cried again! Oh, altogether it was a horrid time; the worst I ever had; and so different from what papa and I thought it would be.

"But it's all over now, and we're all so happy, we laugh so all the time, that papa says it is disgraceful; that we shall have to go off and hide ourselves somewhere where people can't see us.

"But Auntie, you don't know how perfectly splendid mamma is. She is the prettiest lady in the hotel, Louise says. She is ever so much fatter than she used to be. And the baby has grown so I did not know her, and her curls are more than half a yard long. Louise and Mary have got their hair cut short like boys, but their gowns are splendid; they say it was such a pity you had any made for me at home. But oh, dear Auntie, don't think I shall not always like the gowns you made for me. Charlie isn't here; he's at some horrid school a great way off; I forget the name of the place. But we are all going there to live for the summer. Mamma said we should keep house in an 'apartment,' and I was perfectly horrified, and I said, 'Mamma, in one room?' and then Louise and Mary laughed till I was quite angry; but mamma says that here an 'apartment' means a set of a good many rooms, quite enough to live in. I don't believe you can have patience to read this long letter; but I haven't told you half; no, not one half of half. Good-by, you darling aunty. ALICE.

"P.S.--I wish you could just see mamma. It isn't only me that thinks she is so pretty; papa thinks so too. He just sits and looks, and looks at her, till mamma doesn't quite like it, and asks him to look at baby a little!"

Ellen's first letter was short. Her heart was too full. She said at the end,--

"I suppose you will both laugh and cry over Alice's letter. At first I thought of suppressing it. But it gives you such a graphic picture of the whole scene that I shall let it go. It is well that I had the excuse of the surprise for my behavior, but I myself doubt very much if I should have done any better, had I been prepared for their coming.

"G.o.d bless and thank you, dear Sally, for this last year, as I cannot.

"ELLEN."

These events happened many years ago. My sister and I are now old women.

Her life has been from that time to this, one of the sunniest and most unclouded I ever knew.

John Gray is a hale old man; white-haired and bent, but clear-eyed and vigorous. All the good and lovable and pure in his nature have gone on steadily increasing: his love for his wife is still so full of sentiment and romance that the world remarks it.

His grandchildren will read these pages, no doubt, but they will never dream that it could have been their sweet and placid and beloved old grandmother who, through such sore straits in her youth, kept her husband!

Esther Wynn's Love-Letters.

My uncle, Joseph Norton, lived in a very old house. It was one of those many mansions in which that father of all sleepers, George Was.h.i.+ngton, once slept for two nights. This, however, was before the house came into the possession of our family, and we seldom mentioned the fact.

The rooms were all square, and high; many of the walls were of wood throughout, panelled from the floor to the ceiling, and with curious china tiles set in around the fire-places. In the room in which I always slept when I visited there, these wooden walls were of pale green; the tiles were of blue and white, and afforded me endless study and perplexity, being painted with a series of half-allegorical, half-historical, half-Scriptural representations which might well have puzzled an older head than mine. The parlors were white, with gold ornaments; the library was of oak, with mahogany wainscoting, and so were the two great central halls, upper and lower. The bal.u.s.trade of the staircase was of apple-tree wood, more beautiful than all the rest, having fine red veins on its dark polished surface. These halls were lined with portraits of dead Nortons, men and women, who looked as much at home as if the grand old house had always borne their name. And well they might, for none of the owners who had gone before had been of as gentle blood as they; and now they would probably never be taken down from the walls, for my uncle had bought the house, and my uncle's son would inherit it; and it had never yet been known that a Norton of our branch of Nortons had lived wastefully or come to want.

My uncle had married very late in life: he was now a gray-haired man, with little children around his knee. It was said once in my presence, by some one who did not know I listened, that his heart had been broken when he was little more than a boy, by the faithlessness of a woman older than himself, and that he would never have married if he had not seen that another heart would be broken if he did not. Be that as it may, his bearing towards his wife was always of the most chivalrous and courteous devotion, so courteous as perhaps to confirm this interpretation of his marriage.

My aunt was an uninteresting woman, of whom, if she were not in sight, one never thought; but she had great strength of affection and much good sense in affairs. Her children loved her; her husband enjoyed the admirably ordered system of her management, and her house was a delightful one to visit. Although she did not contribute to the flavor of living, she never hindered or thwarted those who could. There was freedom in her presence, from the very fact that you forgot her, and that she did not in the least object to being forgotten. Such people are of great use in the world; and make much comfort.

At the time when the strange incidents which I am about to tell occurred, my aunt had been married twelve years, and had four children; three girls, Sarah, Hilda, and Agnes, and a baby boy, who had as yet no name. Sarah was called "Princess," and her real name was never heard. She was the oldest, and was my uncle's inseparable companion. She was a child of uncommon thoughtfulness and tenderness. The other two were simply healthy, happy little creatures, who gave no promise of being any more individual than their serene, quiet mother.

I was spending the winter in the family, and going to school, and between my uncle and me there had grown up an intimate and confidential friends.h.i.+p such as is rare between a man of sixty and a girl of fifteen. I understood him far better than his wife did; and his affection for me was so great and so caressing that he used often to say, laughingly, "Nell, my girl, you'll never have another lover like me!"

We were sitting at breakfast one morning when Princess came in, holding a small letter in her hand.

"Look, papa mia!" she said; "see this queer old letter I found on the cellar stairs. It looks a hundred years old."

My uncle glanced up, carelessly at first, but as soon as he saw the paper he stretched out his hand for it, and looked eager. It did indeed seem as if it were a hundred years old; yellow, crumpled, torn. It had been folded in the clumsy old way which was customary before the invention of envelopes; the part of the page containing the address had been torn out.

He read a few words, and the color mounted in his cheek.

"Where did you say you found it, Princess?" he said.

"On the cellar stairs, papa; I went down to find Fido, and he was playing with it."

"What is it, Joseph?" said Aunt Sarah, in tones a shade more eager than their wont.

"I do not know, my dear," replied my uncle; "it is very old," and he went on reading with a more and more sobered face.

"Robert," said he, turning to the waiter, "do you know where this paper could have come from? Have any old papers been carried down from the garret, to light the fire in the furnace?"

"No, sir," said Robert, "not that I know, sir."