A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

“Very well,” was the answer, and as Gulielma turned back, a letter in her hand, she found Anna sitting up, leaning upon her elbow, her eyes strangely eager. She held out her hand, not speaking, and received the letter. The upper line, which struck her eyes instantly, was her own name, and it had been written by Keith. She could not be mistaken. The mother’s anxious eyes saw every trace of colour ebb away from Anna’s face and lips, and then stream back until the faint flush rose to her forehead. She had not stopped to decipher the many addresses written below, crossed and recrossed by many pens, but, seeing her own name written by the dear dead hand, she pressed the letter hard against her heart and so lay a moment, silent.

Soon she looked up and met her mother’s eyes. A wistful, heart-breaking request was in her own, which she hardly dared to speak.

“May I be all alone, mother?” she asked faintly; “my letter is from him. It has gone wrong, but it has come to me, you see, at last. In the morning I will see you. I will tell you then—all.”

In another minute, the door quietly closing, Anna found herself alone. Breaking the seal, she saw that the letter had been written three days before Keith’s death. An error in the original address, doubtless due to his exhaustion, had sent it far astray. The letter said:—

My own Anna,—I am here in Raleigh in a comfortable house, and with kind people, but I fear that I am very ill, and that the end is now not far away, and I want you as soon as you can come to me. I hope there will be no need of alarming you with a telegram, for I know that you will start as soon as this reaches you, and that will be in good time.

Do not think that this crisis is sudden and unforeseen. The physician in Baltimore told me plainly that I could have but a short time to live, and when I knew that I hastened to reach you as quickly as I might. It was for you only, Anna, in all the world that I longed. I believed that a few weeks of quietness were for us, not harder than we could bear, being together.

I think you will know that something turned me back almost at my journey’s end. John Gregory is honest, and he will tell you, if indeed he knows himself.

I do not know now what he said to me, I do not care to remember. Whatever it was it should have had no weight, being spoken, I know, under some strong excitement, but with it there went that strange, irresistible influence which Gregory exerts over me, and before which I was, or seemed to myself, powerless. I felt his will was for me to go back, not onward to you, and I yielded as if unable to do otherwise. I do not know, I cannot understand. I wish it had not been so, but rather for him than for myself, for I know that in his higher mood the thought of that night must be hateful to him.

I want to say now while I can that neither you nor he must look upon these events in a way to exaggerate or overemphasize their importance. I can see that you with your sensitive conscience and he with his great moral severity may judge over hardly. The difference to me has not been great. The end was very near, and is not hastened, and I shall see you yet before it comes. If I had not been weak I should have kept on my way. It was my weakness that sent me back rather than the outward compulsion.

I shall not want to talk of this when I see you, Anna, and so I will write to-day some things which have come to my mind this winter, for I have come to see many things in a new light.