A Summer's Outing, and The Old Man's Story

by Carter H. Harrison

For awhile he was silent, and his soul seemed to be working in his face; then, with a sigh of pain, he continued:

"I graduated from one of the best colleges in the land at twenty, and at once with a learned tutor, was sent abroad. We traveled in continental Europe for a few months and I was intensely happy. Before the first year had half ran out, we were summoned home. My father was ill, and would probably not live to see me. This was my first great pain, for my mother had died at my birth. We hurried to New York by the first steamer, then by rail and coach we flew southward without having heard a word from home. We were too late; my poor father had been dead nearly a fortnight. I had loved him with intense devotion.

My uncle having died three years before, Belle had been living since then with my father at Clifton. She met me at the door, enveloped in black, and looking the very embodiment of decorous grief. She kissed me on the forehead, and when within told me in a voice as calm as ice of my poor father's last illness, of his death, and of the immensely attended funeral. She opened her writing desk, read letter after letter of condolence, and with a fitting sigh spoke of the gratification we should feel, 'that dear uncle had so many admirers among the best people of the south.' Her well-poised calmness nearly stifled me. Yearning for love and sympathy, all I received from the only relative I had on earth, at least of near degree, were congratulations that my father had found in death the cold esteem of friends.

As soon as I could decently leave the house, I hurried to the negro quarters to see my foster mother, Dinah, and her husband, Jim. There I found loving hearts, and for many minutes was clasped in the arms of her who had nursed me on her bosom through my babyhood. I lay upon a settee, given Dinah by myself as a Christmas present years before, and with my head on the old negress' lap, let her comb the hair over my aching brow. Soothed and rested by the kind, homely sympathy, I lay with closed eyes, when the cabin became redolent of that peculiar odor given out by genuine crepe, and Belle walked in. In calm, cold words she said she was sorry John could not find some one at the house to brush his head.

The next day my cousin handed me a letter, 'the last,' she said 'Uncle had ever written.' It told me where I would find his will; that everything he possessed was left to me, and asked, as a dying request, that I should marry my cousin the day I became twenty-one. He told me how all the love he had borne my mother had been centered upon me; gave me a few words of advice, but said he felt advice unnecessary, as he knew how good his only son was.

When I had finished reading I handed the letter to Belle, saying there was something in it concerning her. I watched her through my fingers and saw that her reading was simply perfunctory; she had evidently read it before. She sighed, came to my seat, put her arms about my neck—called me her dear John, and kissed me on the lips. I felt like one fettered and powerless. My heart was filled with a sort of numbness—despair. Two facts were as clear to me as daylight: that I did not love my cousin, that she did not love me; she was incapable of real passion. I turned to her and said:

'Belle you have read my father's letter, what do you suggest?'

'Why, of course, John, we will be married on the 20th day of February. We have a month to get ready, besides we need not much preparation, for we will at once go to Europe for a year, until the sad events of the past few weeks shall have been obliterated from our minds.'

Good God! she could speculate on the death of grief. I hated her. But I would as soon have thought of exhuming my father's body and scattering it to the four winds of heaven, as to think of not obeying his wishes.

Well, we were married, and at once went abroad. I tried to and did respect my wife. She attracted great attention, for she was superbly beautiful—queenly. But there was never a moment when I felt like pressing her stately form to my breast; never had the slightest inclination to kiss her lips; never once felt I could look into her great blue eyes, and breathe out my life on her bosom.