Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales

by Mary Jane Holmes

Here her voice grew indistinct, and for a few moments she seemed to be sleeping; then, suddenly, opening her eyes wide, she exclaimed, as an expression of joy broke over her face: “It is here,—the glory which shineth as the noonday. In another moment I shall be walking the golden streets. Good-bye, Max; good-bye.”

Grace was dead, and Maude made her ready for the coffin, her tears falling like rain upon the shrivelled feet and on the waxen hands which she folded over the pulseless bosom, placing in them the flowers her mistress had loved best in life. She was to be buried in Mt. Auburn, and Maude went with the remains to Boston, as Grace had requested her to do, caring nothing because Mrs. Marshall-More hinted broadly at the impropriety of the act, wondering how she could have done it.

“She did it at Grace’s request, and to please me,” Max said; and that silenced the lady, who was afraid of her brother, and a little afraid of Maude, who did not seem quite the girl she had last seen in Merrivale.

“What will you do now? Go back to your teaching?” she asked, after the funeral was over.

“I shall go home to mother,” Maude replied, and that afternoon she took the train for Merrivale, accompanied by Max, who was going on to New York, and thence to keep his appointment in London.

Few were the words spoken between them during the journey, and those mostly of the dead woman lying under the snow at Mt. Auburn; but when Merrivale was reached, Max took the girl’s hands and pressed them hard as he called her a second time by her name.

“God bless you, Maude, for all you were to Grace. When I can I will write to you. Good-bye.”

Only for a moment the train stopped at the station, and then it moved swiftly on, leaving Maude standing upon the platform with her mother and John, while Max resumed his seat, and pulling his hat over his eyes, never spoke again until New York was reached. A week later and a ship of the Cunard line was plowing the ocean to the eastward, and Max Gordon was among the passengers, silent and abstracted, with a bitter sense of loneliness and pain in his heart as he thought of the living and the dead he was leaving behind,—Grace, who was to have been his bride, dead in all her sweetness and beauty, and Maude, who was nothing to him but a delicious memory, alive in all her freshness and youthful bloom. He could hardly tell of which he thought the more, Grace or Maude. Both seemed ever present with him, and it was many a day before he could rid himself of the fancy that two faces were close against his own, one cold and dead, as he had seen it last, with the snowy hair about the brow and a smile of perfect peace upon the lips which had never said aught but words of love to him,—the other glowing with life and girlish beauty, as it had looked at him in the gathering darkness when he stood upon the car step and waved it his good-bye.

CHAPTER X.
AT LAST.

Five years had passed since Grace was laid in her grave in Mt. Auburn, and Max was still abroad, leading that kind of Bohemian life which many Americans lead in Europe, when there is nothing to call them home. And to himself Max often said there was nothing to call him home, but as often as he said it a throb of pain belied his words, for he knew that across the sea was a face and voice he was longing to see and hear again, a face which now visited him in his dreams quite as often as that of his dead love, and which he always saw as it had looked at him that summer afternoon in the log house among the Richland hills, with the sunlight falling upon the rings of hair, and lending a warmer tint to the glowing cheeks. Delicious as was the memory of that afternoon, it had been the means of keeping Max abroad during all these years, for, in the morbid state of mind into which he had fallen after Grace’s death, he felt that he must do penance for having allowed himself for a moment to forget her, who had believed in him so fully.