It is not I who have told the story, but the girl from provinces that are no more on earth than if they had never been. The Spirit of that Past is the narrator. I sit with her by the open “chimney-piece,” packed as far as arms can reach with blazing hickory logs; as she talks, the imagery of a yet older day comes to my tongue. We knew our Bibles “by heart” in both senses of the term, then, and believed in the spiritual symbolism of that perfervid love-Canticle—the song of the Royal Preacher. I find myself whispering certain musical phrases while the tale goes on, and the story-teller’s face grows more rapt:
“Thy lips drop as the honey-comb; honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon;
“Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard;
“Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon.”
It is not a mystic love-chant, or a dreamy jargon, that I recite under my breath. The sadly few (more sad and few with each year) who recall with me the days that are no more—and forever—will feel what I cannot put into words.
Soon after the dawn of the year 1858, we had news of the death of my husband’s youngest sister, a bright, engaging matron, of whom I had grown very fond in my visits to her New Jersey home. The happy wife of a man who adored her, and the mother of a beautiful boy, she had but one unfulfilled wish on earth. When a baby-girl was put into her arms, she confessed this, and that now she could ask nothing more of heaven. The coveted gift cost her her life.
In March, my dearest friend, Mary Ragland, paid a long-promised visit to the “nest among the oaks.” She had not been strong all winter. She was never robust. I brought her up from town, in joyous confidence that the climate that had kept me well and vigorous would brace her up to concert pitch. For a few weeks she seemed to justify that belief. Then the languor and slow fever returned. She faded before our incredulous eyes as a flower droops on the stem. She had no pain, and so slight was the rise in temperature that made her thirsty by night, that we would not have detected it had she not mentioned casually at breakfast that she arose to get a drink of water, and chanced to see, through the window, a lunar rainbow. This led to the discovery that she always arose two or three times each night to quench her thirst. It was characteristic that she saw the rainbow, and was eager to report it next day. Beautiful things floated to her by some law of natural attraction. She never took to her bed. To the last, she averred, laughingly, that she was “only lazy and languid.” She “would be all right very soon.”
As a sort of low delirium overtook her senses, her fantasies were all of fair and lovely sights and sweet sounds. She asked me “where I got the chain of pearls I was wearing, and why she had never seen it before?” She exclaimed at the beauty of garlands of flowers wreathing pictures and window-cornices, invisible to our eyes. Music—a passion of her life—was a solace in the fearful restlessness of the dying hours. She would have us sing to her—first one, then the other, for an hour at a time—lying peacefully attent, with that unearthly radiance upon her face that never left it until the coffin-lid shut it from our sight, and joining in, when a favorite hymn was sung, with the rich contralto which was her “part” in our family concerts.
“She is singing herself away,” said my husband, at twilight on the ninth of May—my mother’s birthday.
At nine o’clock that evening the swan-song was hushed.