A Village Ophelia, and Other Stories

by Anne Reeve Aldrich

"Do not think you will hear anything new. It will bore you. Are you willing to listen?"

"I am indeed," I replied. We had come to a lonely farm-house, its roofs moss-grown and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness.

My companion lifted the gray gate's rusty latch. The grass was crushed enough to form a path to the front door, which stood open. She led the way into a large, low room off the little hall. The floor was bare. There was a large table in the centre, heaped with books, and some withering flowers stood in a glass. A couple of common chairs, a mattress, on which was thrown an antique curtain of faded blue as a drapery; on the white-washed wall, a tiny and coquetish slipper of yellowish silk, nailed through the sole. This was all the furnishing.

She stood looking around at the barrenness curiously, trying perhaps to see it with the eyes of a stranger. "This is my room," she said, "and the very walls and floor are saturated with my sufferings." She went restlessly to the window, and threw open the broken blind. As the radiance of the afternoon flooded the place with light, I seemed to see it and its wasting occupant, here in this horrible desolation, in the changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one of the marvels of the brain's endurance, with which nature sometimes surprises us. It seemed to me that this might be the hour of partial deliverance to the poor soul who had evidently lived and died so much.

"Why have you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal about the wreck.

"What difference could it make?" she asked in her slightly husky voice, with faint surprise. "It is only the old love-story of a village girl you will hear. My mother was different from these people, but I had never known anything beside this life, except books. Of course you can understand how much else than love the man brought me. I was quite beautiful then. Does it not seem strange that it could have been true! I burst into real blossom for him—like Aaron's rod, was it not? And now you see, I am only the bare rod."

She dropped her lids and looked down at herself calmly. The warmth had curled the short hairs into a light halo around her forehead, the little neck was bent, she had folded her hands in her lap. The piteous child-like chest and limbs revealed by the tight white gown, brought tears to my eyes. There was something solemn, terrible, in this virginal decay.

"All that I was to be, was forced into growth at once. He made me a new self; he was in a sense creator, teacher, parent, friend, idol, lover. He was the world I have not known; he taught me that I could myself write, create. I was nearer madness in those days than now, for when he threw himself here—" She rose and pointed to the floor near the table—"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his love, to be his wife—I, his wife!—it was as strange, as unreal as a vision.—I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one great month of life. Even you cannot have had more in all your years of the world than I in my month! And then he returned to his work again. He was very busy, you understand, a great man, even then, in the world of letters. He could not come to see me, could not leave; but he wrote every day. He will never put into his book such words as he wrote me; he gave me more than he has ever given the world. It may have his books. I have read them, but I have his very soul in these letters!

"I told you he made me believe that I could write. 'What was I, what was I,' I used to ask myself, 'to be lifted from this to his height?' And then I had a secret, which began in that thought. I wrote a novel. It is eight years back now. I never mentioned it in my letters. I knew it was good, as good as his own work. He would be so proud! He talked of publishing-houses, books, authors. I had not forgotten one word. I sent it to a house, one of the largest and best, and it was accepted. It is strange, but I was not at all surprised. Somehow I had never doubted it would be accepted. And then I went to the city alone for a day. I had only a little time; it seemed to me the greatest act of my life to be there, where he was, yet not to see him! But you see I had planned it all in those long nights when the autumn storms would not let me sleep. The rain would dash against this window, and half awake, I would see myself when he should come, with my head against his arm, saying, 'I have been making something for you. Guess.' And then he would laugh and say, 'Perhaps—is it a cake for my tea, home-darling? Is it—is it a cover for my writing-table? No, you do not sew. Tell me.' And then I should say proudly. 'It is nothing of that kind. It is a book, and the people whom you think such good judges say it must be a success!' I saw it again as I was coming down the stairs from the publisher's office. They had praised my work until the blood seemed all in my head and made me dizzy, and the sounds of Broadway confused my country ears.

"At home that dusk my letter stood against the mantel as I came in here. I laughed when I saw the post-mark, to think I had been there. I laid it against my cheek softly where his hand had touched it, writing my name. It so prolonged the pleasure—you know—you are a woman like that. And at last I read it here." She posed herself unconsciously by the table. "It said, 'Have I loved you? I do not know. Curse me, and forget me. I am to be married to-day.'"