CHAPTER VI.
"And oh, the carven mouth, with all its great
Intensity of longing frozen fast
In such a smile as well may designate
The slowly murdered heart, that, to the last,
Conceals each newer wound, and back at fate
Throbs Love's eternal lie:—'Lo, I can wait!'"
"And all that now is left me, is to bear."
That night in the darkness, Homer Wilson's lip curled as he thought of his mother's too ready fears for him, nor could he refrain a sneer at the idea of Mrs. Deans' disinterested benevolence. But after that, he set himself to slumber, but in vain. Sleep, that
"Comfortable bird,
That broodeth o'er the troubled sea of the mind
Till it is hush'd and smooth,"
would not bestow its benison upon his tired brain and weary heart, for he was haunted by the memory of Myron Holder's hopeless face.
It had been, these past years, no unusual thing for this poor countryman to lie the long nights through, tortured by the vision of a woman's face: but it had ever been a fair, pretty, laughing face that had thus enthralled him within the bounds of painful thought; a face that by its brightness cast a shadow upon every other vision that strove to tempt him to forget; a face he had worshipped, and thought on tenderly, as his own; a face he had striven to imagine old; a face he had even dared to think of, dead, and always—always as his own precious possession.
But this night his reverie was no selfish one of bygone bliss, or present pain, or future hopelessness; it was wholly of a woman's pale face, carven cameo-like against a night of hair, and exceeding sorrowful. He recalled Myron Holder as she had been, a plump and pretty girl; one whom all the boys in Jamestown had liked, but who had been kept rigidly away from all the village gatherings by her grandmother. He recalled the cadence of her voice, softened always and made richer than the strident Jamestown voice by the English accent she had inherited. He remembered having heard her singing once as he drove past the little hop-clad cottage; as he thought of it, the words came back to him in part:
"Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie.
* * * * * *
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
He recollected how a rippling laugh prolonged the song. He had caught a glimpse of her that day; she was standing beneath a cherry tree—her upstretched arms held a blossomed bough, and she gave it little jerks in time to her singing—the white petals of the cherry blooms showered down upon her hair in fragrant snow. Her grandmother called her in—scolding her as an "idle maid"; Myron had fled into the house still laughing, and with the cherry blooms clinging to her dark hair; and as Homer drove on, he thought what a light-hearted girl she was. That was in the first year of his sacrifice—now he caught his breath as he mentally compared the girl beneath the cherry tree finishing her song with thrills of laughter with the woman standing mute in the moonlight as he had so late beheld her.