For the Major: A Novelette

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

"Not for me," observed the Major. "My time for sleep is always brief; five or six hours are quite enough."

"I remember," said his daughter. And the memory, as a memory, was a true one. Until recently the Major's sleep had been as he described it. He had forgotten, or rather he had never been conscious of, the long nights of twelve or thirteen hours' rest which had now become a necessity to him.

"I am afraid I am not like you, father. I am very apt to be sleepy about ten," said Sara. "And I suspect it is the same with mamma."

Madam Carroll did not deny this assertion. The Major, laughing at the early somnolence of the two ladies, rose to light a candle for his daughter, in the old way. As she took it, and bent to kiss her stepmother good-night, Madam Carroll's eyes met hers, full of an expression which made them bright (ordinarily they were not bright, but soft); the expression was that of warm congratulation.

The next day dawned fair and cloudless—Trinity Sunday. The mountain breeze and the warm sun together made an atmosphere fit for a heaven. On the many knolls of Far Edgerley the tall grass, carrying with it the slender stalks of the buttercups, was bending and waving merrily; the red clover, equally abundant, could not join in this dance, because it had crowded itself so greedily into the desirable fields that all that its close ranks could do was to undulate a little at the top, like a swell passing over a pond. Madam Carroll, the Major, and Scar were to drive to church as usual, in the equipage. Sara had preferred to walk. She started some time before the hour for service, having a fancy to stroll under the churchyard pines for a while by herself. These pines were noble trees; they had belonged to the primitive forest, and had been left standing along the northern border of the churchyard by the Carroll who had first given the land for the church a hundred years before. The ground beneath them was covered with a thick carpet of their own brown aromatic needles. There were no graves here save one, of an Indian chief, who slept by himself with his face towards the west, while all his white brethren on the other side turned their closed eyes towards the rising sun. It was a beautiful rural God's-acre, stretching round the church in the old-fashioned way, so that the shadow of the cross on the spire passed slowly over all the graves, one by one, as the sun made his journey from the peak of Chillawassee across to Lonely Mountain, behind whose long soft line he always sank, and generally in such a blaze of beautiful light that the children of the village grew up in the vague belief that the edge of the world must be just there, that there it rounded and went downward into a mysterious golden atmosphere, in which, some day, when they had wings, they, too, should sport and float like birds.

Early though it was, Miss Carroll discovered when she entered the church gate that she was not the first comer; the choir ladies were practising within, and other ladies of floral if not musical tastes were arranging mountain laurel in the font and chancel—to the manifest disapproval of Flower, the disapproval being expressed in the eye he had fixed upon them, his "mountain eye," as he called his best one. "It be swep, and it be dustered," he said to himself. "What more do the reasonless female creatures want?" Miss Carroll had not joined the choir, although the rector, prompted by his junior warden, had suggested it; Miss Sophia Greer would, therefore, continue to sing the solos undisturbed. She was trying one now. And the other ladies were talking. But this music, this conversation, this arrangement of laurel, and this disapproval of Flower went on within the church. The new-comer had the churchyard to herself; she went over to the pines on its northern side, and strolled to and fro at the edge of the slope, looking at the mountains, whose peaks rose like a grand amphitheatre all round her against the sky.

Her face was sad, but the bitterness, the revolt, were gone; her eyes were quiet and sweet. She had accepted her sorrow. It was a great one. At first it had been overwhelming; for all the brightness of the past had depended upon her father, all her plans for the present, her hopes for the future. His help, his comprehension, his dear affection and interest, had made up all her life, and she did not know how to go on without them, how to live. Never again could she depend upon him for guidance, never again have the exquisite happiness of his perfect sympathy—for he had always understood her, and no one else ever had, or at least so she thought. She had cared only for him, she had found all her companionship in him; and now she was left alone.

But after a while Love rose, and turned back this tide. The sharp personal pain, the bitter loneliness, gave way to a new tenderness for the stricken man himself. Evidently he was at times partly conscious of this lethargy which was fettering more and more his mental powers, for he exerted himself, he tried to remember, he tried to be brighter, to talk in the old way. And who could tell but that he perceived his failure to accomplish this? Who could tell, when he was silent so often, sitting with his eyes on the carpet, that he was not brooding over it sadly? For a man such as he had been, this must be deep suffering—deep, even though vague—like the sensation of falling in a dream, falling from a height, and continuing to fall, without ever reaching bottom. Probably he did not catch the full reality; it constantly eluded him; yet every now and then some power of his once fine mind might be awake long enough to make him conscious of a lack, a something that gave him pain, he knew not why. As she thought of this, all her heart went out to him with a loving, protecting tenderness which no words could express; she forgot her own grief in thinking of his, and her trouble took the form of a passionate desire to make him happy; to keep even this dim consciousness always from him, if possible; to shield him from contact with the thoughtless and unfeeling; to so surround his life with love, like a wall, that he should never again remember anything of his loss, never again feel that inarticulate pain, but be like one who has entered a beautiful, tranquil garden, to leave it no more.

This morning, under the pines, she was thinking of all this, as she walked slowly to and fro past the Indian's grave. Flower came out to ring his first bell. His "first bell" was unimportant, made up of short, business-like notes; he rang it in his working jacket, an old mountain homespun coat, whose swallow-tails had been cut off, so that it now existed as a roundabout. But when, twenty minutes later, he issued forth a second time, he was attired in a coat of thin but shining black, with butternut trousers and a high pink calico vest. Placing his hat upon the ground beside him, he took the rope in his hand, made a solemn grimace or two to get his mouth into position, and then, closing his eyes, brought out with gravity the first stroke of his "second bell." His second bell consisted of dignified solo notes, with long pauses between. Flower's theory was that each of these notes echoed resonantly through its following pause. But as the bell of St. John's was not one of size or resonance, he could only make the pauses for the echoes which should have been there.

As the first note of this second bell sounded from the elm, all the Episcopal doors of Far Edgerley opened almost simultaneously, and forth came the congregation, pacing with Sunday step down their respective front paths, opening their gates, and proceeding decorously towards St. John's in groups of two or three, or a family party of father, mother, and children, the father a little in advance. They all arrived in good season, passed the semi-unconscious Flower ringing his bell, and entered the church. Next, after an interval, came "clatter," "clatter:" they knew that "the equipage" was coming up the hill. Then "clank," "clank:" the steps were down.