For the Major: A Novelette

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

CHAPTER VII.

A FEW days after the funeral of the musician the Major was taken ill. It was not the failure of strength, which often came over him, nor the confused feeling in the head, of which he never spoke, but which his wife always recognized when she saw him sitting with his forehead bent and his hand over his eyes. This time he had fever, and was slightly delirious; he seemed also to be in pain. Madam Carroll and Sara did not leave him; they were in deep anxiety. But in the evening relief came; the fever ceased, and he fell into a quiet sleep. The two women kissed him softly, and, still anxious, stole into the next room to keep the watch, leaving the door open between the two. A shaded night-lamp faintly illumined the room where he lay, but the outer one was in darkness. Scar had gone to bed, and the house was very still; they could hear the murmur of the brook through the open window; for although it was now towards the last of October, it was still summer in that favored land. The outer room was large, and they sat on a sofa at its far end; they could talk in low tones without danger of disturbing the Major, whose sleeping face they could see through the open door.

The moon rose. Madam Carroll went into the Major's room and closed the dark curtains, so that the increasing light should not waken him; when she came back the silver radiance had reached Sara, and was illuminating her face and figure as she leaned against the cushions of the sofa. "He is sleeping naturally and restfully now," said the wife, as she took her seat again; "his face has lost that look of pain it has had all day. But do you know that you yourself are looking far from well, Sara?"

"I know it. And I am ashamed of it. When I see you doing everything, and bearing everything, without one outward sign, without the least change in your face or expression, I am ashamed that I have so little self-control."

"Have you been supposing, then, that all this unvarying pink and white color was my own? Have you never suspected that I put it on?—that it was fictitious? I began in July—you know when. It was for that reason that I altered the hours of our receptions from afternoon to evening: candle-light is more favorable, you know. I also began then to wear a little lace veil. You think me about thirty-five, don't you? I am forty-eight. I was thirty-five when I married the Major. All this golden hair would be heavily streaked with gray if I should let it alone."

"Do not feel obliged to tell me anything, mamma."

"I prefer that you should know; and it is also a relief to me to tell," answered Madam Carroll, her eyes on the dark outline of the mountains, visible in the moonlight through the open window. "My poor little Cecilia passed easily for six, she was so small and frail, like Scar; in reality she was over ten. The story was, you know, that I had been married the first time at sixteen. That part was true; but nineteen years had passed instead of seven, as they supposed. You are wondering, probably, why I should have deceived your father in such little things, matters unimportant. There had been no plan for deceiving him; it had been begun before I met him; he simply believed what the others believed. And later I found that they were not unimportant to him—those little things; they were important. He thought a great deal of them. He thought a great deal of my youth; youth and ignorance of the world, child-like inexperience, had made up his ideal of me, and by the time I found it out, his love and goodness, his dear protection, had become so much to me that I could not run the risk of losing them by telling him his mistake. I know now that I need not have feared this, I need not have feared anything where he was concerned; but I did not know then, and I was afraid. He saw in me a little blue-eyed, golden-haired girl-mother, unacquainted with the dark side of life, trusting, sweet. It was this very youth and childlike look which had attracted him, man of the world as he was himself, and no longer young. I feared to shatter his dream. In addition, that part did not seem to me of any especial consequence; I knew that I should be able to live up to his ideal, to maintain it not only fully, but longer, probably, than as though I had been in reality the person he supposed me to be; for now it would be a purpose, determinedly and carefully carried out, and not mere chance. I knew that I could look the same for years longer; I have that kind of diminutive prettiness which, with attention, does not change; and I should give the greatest attention. I felt, too, that I should always be entirely devoted to him. Gallant and handsome as he was, he was not young, and I knew that I should care for him just the same through illness, age, or infirmity; for I have that kind of faithfulness (many women haven't) and—I loved him.

"And as to my little dead boy, there again there had been no plan for deceiving him. People had supposed from my young face that I could have been married but a year or two, and that Cecilia had been my only child. It was imagined from my silence that my marriage had not been a happy one—they said I had that look—and therefore no one questioned me; they took it all for granted. I said that my husband was dead. But I said no more. I had decided, for Cecilia's sake, to keep the secret of the manner of his death: why should her innocent life be clouded by the story of her father? Besides, could I go about proclaiming, relating, his—shortcomings? He was my husband, though he had cared so little for me; he was my husband, though he had taken from me my darling little son. And about that son, my poor little drowned boy, I simply had never been able to speak; the hurt was too deep; I could not have spoken without telling what I had decided not to tell, for where he was concerned I could not have invented. Thus I had kept the secret at first from loyalty to my dead husband, and for the sake of my little girl; I kept it later, Sara, because I was afraid. The Major loved me—yes; but would he continue to love me if he should know that instead of being the youthful little woman barely twenty-three, I was over thirty-five? that instead of being inexperienced, unacquainted with the dark side of life, I knew all, had been through all? that instead of the dear little girl's being my only child, I was the mother of a son who, had he lived, would have been a man almost full-grown—would he continue to love me through all this? I was afraid he would not.

"Remember that I had not planned his idea of me, I had had nothing to do with it; he had made it himself. Remember, too, that such as it was, I knew I could live up to it, that he need never be disappointed, that I could fully realize his dream. In that, at least, I have succeeded. I have lived up to it, I have been it, so long, that there have even been times when I have seemed to myself to really be the pretty, bright little wife, thirty years younger than her husband, that I was pretending to be. But that feeling can never come again.

"I am not excusing myself to you, Sara, in all this; I am only explaining myself. Under the same circumstances you would never have done it, nor under twenty times the same circumstances. But I am not you; I am not anybody but myself. That lofty kind of vision which sees only the one path, and that the highest, is not mine; I always see all the shorter paths, lower down, that lead to the same place—the cross-cuts. I can do little things well, and I can do a great many of them; I have that kind of small and ever-present cleverness. But the great things, the wide view—they are beyond me. And do not forget, too, how much it was to me. It was everything. I was alone in the world with my delicate little girl, who needed so much that I could not give—luxuries, constant care, the best advice. I had strained every nerve, made use of all my poor little knowledge and my trifling accomplishments; I had worked as hard as I possibly could; and the result of all my efforts was that I had barely succeeded in getting our bread from day to day, with nothing laid up for the future, and the end of my small strength near at hand. For I was not fitted for that kind of struggle, and I knew that I was not. I could work and plan and accomplish, and even, I believed, successfully, but only when sheltered—sheltered in a home, no matter how plain, protected from actual contact with the crowd. In a crowd there is always brutality; in a crowd I lost heart. What were my small plans, which always concerned themselves with the delicate little things and details, in the great pushing struggle for bread? It was when I was fully realizing the hopelessness of all my efforts, when the future was at its blackest, and I could not look at Cecilia without danger of tears—for they had told me that something might be done for her during the next year—for her poor spine—and I had not the money to pay for it—it was then that your father's love came to me like a gift straight down from heaven. But do not think that I did not love him in return—really love him for himself, not for what he gave me. I did. I do. I had suffered so much, my life had been so crushed under sorrow and trouble, that, save my love for Cecilia, I seemed to myself to have no feelings left; I thought they were all dead. But when the Major began to love me, when he spoke—oh, then I knew that they were not! I felt that I had never known what real happiness was until that day; and my whole heart turned to him. There was gratitude in my love, I do not deny it; but the gratitude was for my little girl—the love was all for him. It has never lessened, Sara, from that hour.