"And now you have heard the story of my life, dear friend," said Dora, as she rose from the seat and lighted the rose-colored tapers in two low swinging Etruscan candlesticks just above our heads--"all that I can tell you," she added slowly. "You will understand that I cannot speak about the happiest part of it. But you have seen Robert. The only thing that troubles me is that I have no sorrow. It seems dangerous. Dear Nat, although he has all he ever hoped for, need not fear being too happy, because he has the ever-present pain, to make him earnest and keep him ready for more pain. I said so to him the day before I came away, and he gave me those verses I told you of, called 'The Angel of Pain,'"
Then she repeated them to me:--
The Angel of Pain.
Angel of Pain, I think thy face
Will be, in all the heavenly place,
The sweetest face that I shall see,
The swiftest face to smile on me.
All other angels faint and tire;
Joy wearies, and forsakes desire;
Hope falters, face to face with Fate,
And dies because it cannot wait;
And Love cuts short each loving day,
Because fond hearts cannot obey
That subtlest law which measures bliss
By what it is content to miss.
But thou, O loving, faithful Pain--
Hated, reproached, rejected, slain--
Dost only closer cling and bless
In sweeter, stronger steadfastness.
Dear, patient angel, to thine own
Thou comest, and art never known
Till late, in some lone twilight place
The light of thy transfigured face
Sudden shines out, and, speechless, they
Know they have walked with Christ all day.
When she had done we sat for some time silent. Then I rose, and kissing her, still silent, went out into the unlighted room where the gilt table stood. A beam of moonlight fell, broad and white, across its top, and flickered on the vine-leaves and the ferns. In the dim weird light their shapes were more fantastic than ever.
The door into the outer hall stood open. As I went toward it, I saw old Anita toiling slowly up the stairs, with a flat basket on her head. Her wrinkled face was all aglow with delight. As soon as she reached the threshold she set the basket down, and exclaiming, "Oh look, look, Signora!" lifted off the cover. It was full of fresh and beautiful anemones of all colors. She moved a few on top and showed me that those beneath were chiefly purple ones.
"Iddio mio! will not the dearest of Signoras be pleased now!" she said. "The saints wish that she shall have all she desires; did not my Biagio's brother come in from Albano this morning? and as I was in the Piazza Navona, buying oranges, I heard him calling from a long way off, 'Ho Anita, my Anita, here are anemones for your beautiful Signora with the bright hair.'
"They grow around an old tomb a mile away from his vineyard, and he set out from his home long before light to get them for me; for he once saw the Signora and he had heard me say that she never could have enough of anemones. Iddio mio! but my heart is glad of them. Ah, the dearest of Signoras!" and, with a tender touch, Anita laid the cool vine-leaves lightly back upon the anemones and hurried on in search of Dora.
How One Woman Kept Her Husband.
Why my sister married John Gray, I never could understand. I was twenty-two and she was eighteen when the marriage took place. They had known each other just one year. He had been passionately in love with her from the first day of their meeting. She had come more slowly to loving him: but love him she did, with a love of such depth and fervor as are rarely seen. He was her equal in nothing except position and wealth. He had a singular mixture of faults of opposite temperaments. He had the reticent, dreamy, procrastinating inertia of the bilious melancholic man, side by side with the impressionable sensuousness, the sensitiveness and sentimentalism of the most sanguine-nervous type. There is great charm in such a combination, especially to persons of a keen, alert nature. My sister was earnest, wise, resolute. John Gray was nonchalant, shrewd, vacillating. My sister was exact, methodical, ready. John Gray was careless, spasmodic, dilatory. My sister had affection. He had tenderness. She was religious of soul; he had a sort of transcendental perceptivity, so to speak, which kept him more alive to the comforts of religion than to its obligations. My sister would have gone to the stake rather than tell a lie. He would tell a lie unhesitatingly, rather than give anybody pain. My sister lived earnestly, fully, actively, in each moment of the present. It never seemed quite clear whether he were thinking of to-day, yesterday, or to-morrow. She was upright because she could not help it. He was upright,--when he was upright,--because of custom, taste, and the fitness of things. What fatal discrepancies! what hopeless lack of real moral strength, enduring purpose, or principle in such a nature as John Gray's! When I said these things to my sister, she answered always, with a quiet smile, "I love him." She neither admitted nor denied my accusations. The strongest expression she ever used, the one which came nearest to being an indignant repelling of what I had said, was one day, when I exclaimed:--
"Ellen, I would die before I'd risk my happiness in the keeping of such a man."