CHAPTER XLVIII
By the window of Beacon Street, that looked over toward the west and the south, there sat a lonely woman. “After all,” she said to herself, as the bitterness of her thoughts puckered her heart more and more, “this world is but one of the seventy-four comedies with which the Eternal amuses himself.”
The deep tragedy of her life had embittered her soul and of late she had grown more and more to tell herself alone her thoughts. Now that her husband was dead, each wound would re-open. Yet memory came with little pictures of the Ashley, of the golden rice fields, of one who had loved her there. And these pictures made the dull gray of the Boston evening slowly light up with glory. A mocking bird swings in the orchard bough at Camellia-on-the-Ashley, the mellow notes of the cotton pickers are wafted softly, lowly—
“Swing low, sweet chariot—comin’ for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.”
Thus her thoughts were gentle, sweet, like the cooing of a mother’s first-born, winsome as his first smile, which makes her forget her hour of travail.
A dog bays in the distance, a deer bounds again into the forest—a young man comes from the chase—a smile, a kiss—an—
She waked suddenly from her dream. Some one was coming up the street, staring earnestly at the numbers. He was an elderly man, who moved as softly toward the grave as the gentle notes of the flute sinking along the last octave. Yet there was life in his step, and she could see that he handled himself well on the slippery pavement, where the half-melted snow had frozen again. There was a look about his face that touched a chord down in her heart, and the expression he wore as if he, an old man, were almost a youth again, set her once more to dreaming.
The bell rang. “A gentleman to see you, ma’am,” said Hilda, entering. “He will not give his name. He says he is from Charleston.”
A man in whose eyes an infinite fire seemed burning, entered close on Hilda’s heels.
“Mrs. Brooks,” he said, and his voice made her think of the notes of a passion swept violin, “I trust you will pardon my intrusion in this manner, and I scarcely know how to explain it so that it will seem less rude.” He was staring intently at the woman before him. His deep eyes took in the details of her mourning garments, her face with its fine lines of settled sadness and the abundant threads of white sprinkled through the thick brown braids, gathered under her widow’s cap.
Her mother’s heart prompted the swift question:
“You come from Charleston? Helen—is she—?”
“Your daughter is quite well, madam, and safe in the little hamlet of Dunvegan, in North Carolina, whither I—whither she and her aunts were conveyed after the burning of—.” He paused, knowing the thoughts that the name of Columbia would awaken.
Sighing deeply, Mrs. Brooks motioned her visitor to a chair and looked at him inquiringly. “I am pleased to see you, sir,” she said courteously; “I knew and loved Charleston well in my girlhood.”
“You were, before your marriage, Miss Lezare? Forgive me if I seem rudely inquisitive.”
“Yes, sir, Lezare was my maiden name.”
“Ah, yes—Lezare of Camellia? While you were living there was there a man—Masters, Charles Masters?”
“Stop, sir!” she interrupted. “What right have you to bring back that name into my life—what—?”
“Has it then left your life?” he asked, with a touch of fear in his voice. “Forgive me if I have given you pain, madam. My honor is my pledge that I mean no wrong. It is necessary—do you understand?—absolutely necessary for me to proceed.”
She was silent and seemed as one lost in a deep forest who seems to see a face in the darkness about.
“This man Masters was among those who went to Texas in her struggle for independence, was he not, madam? And after the battle of San Jacinto was reported among the killed? He loved a young lady of Charleston, one whom you may know—a young lady whose proud family were opposed to her union with one who had come to Charleston a penniless youth and had been the architect of his own fortunes—they preferred a wealthy young Bostonian, who brought letters to every family of influence in the state. You knew this, madam?”
His eyes asked pardon for this direct question and his voice was low with tenderness.
“Yes, yes, I knew this,” she responded, lacing and interlacing her slow, slender fingers. “What—what more?”
“You doubtless know, too, madam, that the report of his death was false and that he returned after peace was declared, to find his sweetheart had wedded his rival and gone to Boston to live. What you do not know”—here his voice took on a deep, full ring of joy—“is that he never, for one moment, never did and never has, doubted his sweetheart’s truth. To many men it is given to pass with unseeing eyes the holy worth of a woman’s love, but to Charles Masters it was given to know, when he had plighted his troth in the garden at Camellia, the sacredness of the gift that was his. Never once since then has his reverence for it or his belief in it failed.”
Colonel Masters was doing more than telling a harrowing story—he was reading his own fate in her eyes.
“Sir,” Mrs. Brooks started from her chair, “I will give you all I have in this world, I will give you all God gives me in Heaven to say those words again!”
Word by word her voice had risen, growing stronger under the intense passion of her soul till it touched the highest note of her life, till it quivered like the tremulous tones of the flute thrilled at the holy reaches of the Infinite Beyond.
“He still believes!”
“Then where is he? Has he—”
She shrank back from him, for there was a smile on his features, and though faces grow old, smiles never do.
Reading her thoughts, he lifted her hand to his lips, and it was to her as when the mute touches the chords of the violin. The music was deep and plaintive, and the strain was one that makes all things possible.
“He is here!”
A cold, sleety rain was falling on the street outside, and the ice was forming on the elms of Beacon street. The shadows which sprang from the window that looked toward the west and the south lengthened themselves along the floor. Men hastened homeward in the gathering night, and a damp darkness settled down over the bleak landscape.
But they sat by the window that looked toward the west, and though they faced the sunset, they saw it not, for the morning had come.