“And your father?”
“He is more to me than anything in the world,” she replied with the same simplicity. “He was my mother’s last charge to me.”
“And no doubt you are often anxious about him?”
“Anxious?” For once she looked at me. And then in a tone of feeling, too tragic, as it seemed to me, for the occasion, “God knows how anxious!” she said. “God knows what is the weight I have to bear!”
I thought her answer over-strained. I thought her anxiety more than the occasion required; and I felt about for an explanation. “You are so near the fighting,” I said lamely, for I felt that I was making excuse for her. “Doubtless it is more trying to you.”
“I am so near,” she answered with the same depth of feeling. “And so helpless! So helpless! I sit and wait! And wait!”
“That is too often the woman’s part, I fear.”
“God forbid,” she replied with extraordinary bitterness, “that my part should fall to the lot of many women. He cannot be so cruel!”
I drew away after that. I did not dare to press her farther, for I thought that she was overwrought and hardly herself. The note of tragedy seemed to be out of place in face of this calm country-side, of the still woods, of the lowing cattle, of the smiling negroes going about their tasks under our eyes.
But all our talks were not of this nature, and stoutly as she guarded the approaches to intimacy, there were times when I caught her in a gentler mood or by sheer meekness broke down the barrier of her reserve; so that perforce she grew more kind. At such times she listened while I talked of my home and my people and the England, which she knew only through the pages of Addison and Goldsmith and Richardson; or I described the long voyage with its stale water and sour beef which had brought me hither; or she spoke herself, not willingly, of the old plantation on the Ashapoo, of society on the French Santee, where she had visited the Marions, of her boarding school at Charles Town, of the Cecilia Society with its concerts, and the old Provincial Library. It was clear that Wilmer had been in better circumstances, but when I ventured to sympathize with her on her isolation her only answer was, “Give us peace! Only give us peace!”