“Strangest thing on earth!” I once heard a physician say,—“the mysterious power that the dying so often have to fix the very hour of their approaching end!” It was so in John Richling’s case. It was as he said. Had Mary and Alice not come when they did, they would have been too late. He “tarried but a night;” and at the dawn Mary uttered the bitter cry of the widow, and Doctor Sevier closed the eyes of the one who had committed no fault,—against this world, at least,—save that he had been by nature a pilgrim and a stranger in it.
CHAPTER LIX.
AFTERGLOW.
Mary, with Alice holding one hand, flowers in the other, was walking one day down the central avenue of the old Girod Cemetery, breaking the silence of the place only by the soft grinding of her footsteps on the shell-walk, and was just entering a transverse alley, when she stopped.
Just at hand a large, broad woman, very plainly dressed, was drawing back a single step from the front of a tomb, and dropping her hands from a coarse vase of flowers that she had that moment placed on the narrow stone shelf under the tablet. The blossoms touched, without hiding, the newly cut name. She had hung a little plaster crucifix against it from above. She must have heard the footfall so near by, and marked its stoppage; but, with the oblivion common to the practisers of her religion, she took no outward notice. She crossed herself, sank upon her knees, and with her eyes upon the shrine she had made remained thus. The tears ran down Mary’s face. It was Madame Zénobie. They went and lived together.
The name of the street where their house stood has slipped me, as has that of the clean, unfrequented, round-stoned way up which one looked from the small cottage’s veranda, and which, running down to their old arched gate, came there to an end, as if that were a pretty place to stop at in the shade until evening. Grass grows now, as it did then, between the round stones; and in the towering sycamores of the reddened brick sidewalk the long, quavering note of the cicada parts the wide summer noonday silence. The stillness yields to little else, save now and then the tinkle of a mule-bell, where in the distance the softly rumbling street-car invites one to the centre of the town’s activities, or the voice of some fowl that, having laid an egg, is asserting her right to the credit of it. Some forty feet back, within a mossy brick wall that stands waist-high, surmounted by a white, open fence, the green wooden balls on top of whose posts are full eight feet above the sidewalk, the cottage stands high up among a sweet confusion of pale purple and pink crape myrtles, oleanders white and red, and the bristling leaves and plumes of white bells of the Spanish bayonet, all in the shade of lofty magnolias, and one great pecan.
“And this is little Alice,” said Doctor Sevier with gentle gravity, as, on his first visit to the place, he shook hands with Mary at the top of the veranda stairs, and laid his fingers upon the child’s forehead. He smiled into her uplifted face as her eyes examined his, and stroked the little crown as she turned her glance silently upon her mother, as if to inquire if this were a trustworthy person. Mary led the way to chairs at the veranda’s end where the south breeze fanned them, and Alice retreated to her mother’s side until her silent question should be settled.