“I got home just in time to help Mea with the preparations for her Northern trip, and to get ready for Sarah Ragland’s wedding—an event that had its influence in shaping my summer plans.
“We enjoyed the ‘occasion’ heartily. How could I do otherwise when my attendant groomsman was ordered for the affair from Charlottesville?—the very youth who smote my already beriddled heart when I was up in that region. He is a cousin of the Raglands—Charley Massie by name—and the arrangement was Mary’s (bless her heart!). Mr. Budwell, the bridegroom, was indisputably the handsomest man in the room. This was as it should be; but I never attended another wedding where this could be said with truth. My knight was the next best-looking, and for once I was content with a second-best article.”
I allude in this letter to “Cousin Mollie’s” illness, but with no expression of anxiety as to the result. She had been delicate ever since I could recollect anything. She went to Saratoga every summer, and now and then to Florida in the winter. The only intimation I ever had from her as to the cause of her continued singlehood was in answer to the girlish outburst: “Cousin Mary, you must have been beautiful when you were young! You will always be charming. I can’t comprehend why you have never married!”
Her speech was ever even and sweet. I detected a ring of impatience or of pain in it, as she said: “Why should I marry, Namesake? To get a nurse for life?”
I had suspected all along that she had a history known to none of us. After that I knew it, and asked no more questions.
Patient, brave, unselfishly heroic—
“The sweetest soul
That ever looked with human eyes,”
—she lingered day after day, now weaker, now rallying, until she spoke her own conviction to me one day in late July, as I sat by, fanning her, and no one else was present.
I smiled as she opened her large dark eyes, the only beauty left in the wasted face, and saw me.