He saw the nursery windows wide open to the air,
But the faces of the children they were no longer there;
and that, wherever it may be, is too sad a sight to look upon.
But what a wife the old man had, to make up, as it seemed even to me, for all! I say to me, for one of those lost children, a maiden of seventeen, was my betrothed bride—the gentlest and most gracious creature eyes ever looked upon; I think if I could write my thoughts of her, I should move those to tears who never saw her face, when they read “Gertrude died.” She gave herself to me: the old man never could have given her. I say no more.
This is why Tremadyn House has become to me a home. It pleases Robert Chetwood to have his friend’s son with him, above all, because he was his daughter’s plighted husband, and my father’s friend is trebly dear to me as Gertrude’s father. When the Christmas party has dispersed, and the great house is quite emptied of its score of guests, I still remain with the old couple over the new year. They call me son, as though I were their son, and I call them my parents. If Heaven had willed it so, dear Gertrude and myself could not have hoped for greater wedded happiness, more love between us, than is between those two. “Perhaps,” he says, with a smile I never saw a young man wear, “perhaps it is that my old eyes are getting dim and untrustworthy, but Charlotte seems to me the dearest and most pleasant-looking dame in all the world.” And his wife makes answer that her sight also is just as little to be depended on. To each of them has come the silver hair, and the reverence with it that alone makes it beautiful; and if their steps are slower than in youth, it is not because their hearts are heavier; they are indeed of those, so rare ones, who make us in love with life down even to its close. They always seemed to me as having climbed the hill together their whole lives long, and never was I more astonished than upon this new year’s eve, when, Mrs. Chetwood being with us two in after-dinner talk, as custom was when all her guests were gone, her husband told this history. He had always talked quite openly to me,
A pair of friends, though I was young,
And Robert, seventy-two;
and then, at the end of another year of love and confidence, I could not resist inquiring of them how long they two had been one.
“Well, on my word, George,” said the dear old lady, “you should be more discreet than to ask such questions.”
But her husband answered readily: