Men, Women, and Ghosts

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

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The battle-fields of life lie in ambush. We trip along on our smiling way and they give no sign. We turn sharp corners where they hide in shadow. No drum-beat sounds alarum. It is the music and the dress-parade to-night, the groaning and the blood to-morrow.

Sharley had been little more than a child, in her unreasoning young joy, when she knotted the barbe at her throat on Saturday night. "I am an old woman now," she said to herself on Monday morning. Not that her saying so proved anything,—except, indeed, that it was her first trouble, and that she was very young to have a trouble. Yet, since she had the notion, she might as well, to all intents and purposes, have shrivelled into the caps and spectacles of a centenarian. "Imaginary griefs are real." She took, indeed, a grim sort of pleasure in thinking that her youth had fled away, and forever, in thirty-six hours.

However that might be, that October morning ushered Sharley upon battle-ground; nor was the struggle the less severe that, she was so young and so unused to struggling.

I have to tell of nothing new or tragic in the child's days; only of the old, slow, foolish pain that gnaws at the roots of things. Something was the matter with the sunsets and the dawns. Moonrise was an agony. The brown and golden grass had turned dull and dead. She would go away up garret and sit with her fingers in her ears, that she might not hear the frogs chanting in the swamp at twilight.

One night she ran away from her father and mother. It chanced to be an anniversary of their wedding-day; they had kissed each other after tea and talked of old times and blushed a little, their married eyes occupied and content with one another; she felt with a sudden, dreary bitterness that she should not be missed, and so ran out into the field and sat down there on her stone in the dark. She rather hoped that they would wonder where she was before bedtime. It would be a bit of comfort. She was so cold and comfortless. But nobody thought of her; and when she came weakly up the yard at ten o'clock, the door was locked.

For a week she went about her work like a sleepwalker. Her future was settled. Life was over. Why make ado? The suns would set and the moons would rise: let them; there would always be suns to set and moons to rise. There were dinners to get and stockings to mend; there would always be dinners to get and stockings to mend. She was put into the world for the sake of dinners and stockings, apparently. Very well; she was growing used to it; one could grow used to it. She put away the barbe and the pink muslin, locked her ribbon-box into the lower drawer, gave up crimping her hair, and wore the chocolate calico all day. She went to the Thursday-evening conference, discussed the revival with Deacon Snow, and locked herself into her room one night to put the lamp on the bureau before the glass and shake her soft hair down about her colorless, inexpectant face, to see if it were not turning gray. She was disappointed to find it as brown and bright as ever.

But Sharley was very young, and the sweet, persistent hopes of youth were strong in her. They woke up presently with a sting like the sting of a frost-bite.

"O, to think of being an old maid, in a little black silk apron, and having Halcombe Dike's wedding-cards laid upon a shelf!"

She was holding the baby when this "came all over her," and she let him drop into the coal-hod, and sat down to cry.