CHAPTER XVIII
AND SO, GOOD-BY
Well, a right hand is a little price to pay for the love of a wife like mine, and if I have made no name in the world, I at least live happy in it, which is perhaps a greater thing. And I have grown to use my left hand very handily. I have learnt to write with it, as the reader knows,—and when I hold my wife to me, I have her ever next my heart.
It is the fashion, I know well, to stop the story on the altar's steps, and leave the reader to guess at all that may come after, but as I turn over the pages I have writ, they seem too much a tale of failure and defeat, and I would not have it so. For the lessons learned at Fort Necessity and Winchester and at Duquesne have given us strength to drive the French from the continent and the Indian from the frontier. So that now we dwell in peace, and live our lives in quiet and content, save for some disagreements with the king about our taxes, which Lord Grenville has made most irksome.
And even to my dearest friend, whose life, as I have traced it here, has been so full of sorrow and reverse, has come great happiness. He is honored of all men, and has found love as well, for he has brought a wife home to Mount Vernon. Dorothy declares that Mistress Washington is the very image of that Mary Cary who used him so ill years ago,—but this may be only a woman's leaning toward romance.
Indeed, we have a romance in our own home,—a bright-eyed girl of twenty, who, I fear, is soon to leave us, if a certain pert young blade who lives across the river has his way. It will be I who give her away at the altar, for her father lies dead beside the Monongahela,—brave, gentle-hearted Spiltdorph. My eyes grow dim even now when I think of you, yet I trust that I have done as you would have had me do. For I found the girl at Hampton, after a weary search,—perhaps some day I shall tell the story.
It is in the old seat by the river's edge I write these words, and as I lay down the pen, my hand falls on those carved letters, T and D, with a little heart around them,—very faint, now, and worn with frequent kisses,—and as I lift my head, I see coming to me across the grass the woman who carved them there and whom I love.