Rosamond’s eyes twinkled again, as she listened to Mrs. Lee’s charitable paraphrase on local jealousy.
“What do you suppose it could have been, about Roseborough, that appealed to the Balkan person?” she asked. “Try to imagine Roseborough in the Balkans!”
“Do you know I, too, wondered about that at first? Then I saw how natural it was—and felt that I had been stupid not to comprehend it at once. What should appeal to those poor, sad, explosive Balkans so much as Roseborough’s peacefulness? They must grow very tired of the continuous gun-popping and broken glass, and long for the ‘twelve hours of dreamless sleep’ to which Professor Lee alludes in the article. I always think that the sound of windows, or even glass tumblers, breaking is such a sharp, perturbing noise. I particularly dislike it. And then, too, the pieces of broken glass, flying through the air or scattered in profusion about the roads, are really dangerous.”
She was adjusting her glasses, so did not see the sparkles of merriment in Rosamond’s eyes.
“The article is short—only a few hundred words—let me read it to you. It is entitled” (she paused—dwelling lovingly on the written word before she uttered it) “‘Roseborough.’ Listen.” She repeated “Roseborough.”
“Here, where all hearts are tender and sincere, and no harsh word is ever breathed aloud, I will spend my days—be they few or many. Roseborough, thou art the other name of Happiness! Thy fragrance is a spiritual sweet that exudes from fadeless petals. Thy calm days are the flower, and thy velvety, star-veined nights of twelve hours of dreamless sleep are the leafy stem, of my perfect Rose of Content. I am happy indeed to be a busy bee plying my simple art at the centre of this sweetness. For what is my art—and all art? What is the art of pen, brush, chisel, and melodic strain? These are but parts of the great Art of Life, namely the distillation of love. If Happiness be thy other earthly name, dear Roseborough, thy ‘new name’—written in the heavens—is Love. To every seeker of harmony, thou art his end of journeying; to every wanderer, his home.
(Signed) Ph. Autocritus Lee,
21st June, 1895.
“He did not even initial all that he wrote; but he must have felt himself that this was especially fine—of course, as a professor of literature, with degrees, he would know that about his own work as well as about another’s—for he signed it in full and dated it. Except the first name,” she added. “He never signed Phineas but always used Ph. instead, saying that Ph. was short for philosophy and so was he, short of it, in spite of all his profound cogitations.”
She sat gazing at the faded handwriting, though the tears, that slowly formed and coursed her finely wrinkled cheeks, entirely blurred the lines for her.
“‘Here where all hearts are tender and sincere.’ To think that he wrote that about Roseborough nearly twenty years ago, my dear! And it was just as true then as it is now.”
Rosamond put both her arms about the older woman’s neck and leaned her cheek against hers.