For two years the gentle, little silent singer had been lying in her lonely and neglected grave, when I paid my only visit to the Hyler family. Circumstances had brought me into the neighborhood, and I felt in duty bound to “pay my respects,” as they called it. Poor Alfred’s fear seemed to have been justified, for the neighbors declared that since Linda’s death the boys had become a “hard lot,” and seemed actually to be growing more boldly bad week by week.
The Rev. Hyler and his wife at first seemed to derive a sort of sour satisfaction from my visit to them. The boys received me with noisy greetings and many poundings on the shoulders, and young savages that they were, they expressed their hospitality by the making of gifts, such as horse-hair rings, matched jack-stones, and several chunks of not-too-clean flag-root, both the smell and taste of which were particularly offensive to me.
Before tea was over all the kindness had gone out of Mrs. Hyler’s face, and it began to wear the look I had known well in former days, of dull, sullen dissatisfaction. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, she said: “I suppose, Carrie, you have heard all about Linda?”
With some hesitation I answered: “Yes, I think so. I heard that she—she went away in her sleep, and that you held her hand—but never knew when—”
“Oh yes,” she broke in, angrily, “and they told you, too, that I had sat there asleep, or I would have known—I know their tales.”
“Oh dear, Mrs. Hyler,” I cried, “indeed no one ever implied such a cruel thing! They only said she passed so gently that no one could have known the actual moment.”
She seemed somewhat mollified by this assurance, and went on more rapidly, and as she spoke she slowly turned her cup round and round in its saucer: “Linda had been so much better that last day that it seemed almost foolish when she expressed her wish to see each one of the boys alone for a few minutes. I told her so, but she only smiled and said, ‘so much the better for the boys.’ The memory of her last words to them should not be associated with suffering and pain, and so she had her way, and held each brother in her arms and whispered some last words—but smiling, smiling all the time.”
I clasped my hands tight beneath the table, and my heart seemed to beat out those cruel words, “smiling, smiling all the time,” and I whispered “Miss Linda, oh, dear Miss Linda!”
“Yes, and she had a little gift for each—and—well, later in the afternoon she was lying on the sofa, her eyes were closed, and beneath the cover her hand seemed to be moving all the time. Perhaps she was nervous, but she was saying, or repeating-to-herself-like, the words—”
I could not help it—from my lips sprang the line: “Just as I Am, Without One Plea!”