Rena's experiment

by Mary Jane Holmes

Sandy laughed his broad, good-humored laugh, which always grated a little on Nannie, as he paid her one kiss with many, and held her close for a moment.

“Not good enough for me, my pearl, my lily! I wish I were half as good as you,” he said, and the thought kept him laughing during his walk home, which lay through the woods and past the well, at which he stopped to look, as his hired man had told him the curb was a little shaky. “I’ll have it fixed after the wedding. Just now I can think of nothing but that and Nannie,” he said, as he continued his way home, trying to whistle, an accomplishment in which he was not an expert.

Arrived at home and alone in his room, he said to himself, “To-morrow at this time she will be here, my very own,” and he stretched out his arms to embrace an imaginary form with brown hair and soft-gray eyes, and cheeks like the summer roses.

Alas for the morrow and the anguish it brought! and alas for the young girl who at midnight, when the moon was high in the heavens, stood again by the fatal well, looking down into its depths with despair in her eyes and determination in her face! She could not marry Sandy, and she could not brave the world’s censure if she did not, and so she chose the coward’s part, to die. There was a hurried look around her, a thought of Jack, and a prayer to be forgiven, and then the cold, dark waters closed over her with a splashing, gurgling sound, and Nannie Wilkes had gone out into the great unknown, away from Sandy and away from Jack—both dreaming of her and both waking on the morrow to a horror which filled them with dismay. A note was found in her room which read:

“I cannot marry Sandy because I love Jack. I have wanted to do right and cannot. I tried the charm at the well, hoping it would be Jack’s face I saw, but it was Sandy’s which came and stood by mine in the mirror. I saw it so plain, and I cannot marry him, and so I must die. I shall not jump into the well. I can push the curb aside, it is so loose, and shall slip down the stones into the water, so as not to be bruised. Tell Sandy I am sorry and hope he will forget me and take some girl for his wife better than I am. Tell Jack—but, no, don’t tell him anything, except that I loved him and died for him. Good-by.”

It was Sandy who took her from the well and laid her on the soft bed of needles under the pines, wringing the water from her dripping garments and her long hair which clung to her face and which he put back behind her ears, saying nothing except, “Poor little Nannie! If you had told me, you would not have been lying here dead. Poor Nannie! I wish I had known.”

He even tried to comfort Jack, whose grief at first was violent and noisy, but like such grief, was easily consoled when another pretty face caught his fancy. They buried Nannie in the McPherson lot, for Sandy would have it so, and he bought the headstone and put upon it simply, “Nannie, Aged 19.” Then he went about his usual business, with a pain in his heart which time never fully healed. Naturally domestic in his nature, he wanted a home, with wife and children in it, and after a few years he married a Mrs. Travers, a young widow with an only son. He seemed happy, but Nannie was never forgotten, and not an hour of his life that he did not see her in fancy as she was when he kissed her in the moonlight, and again when he laid her upon the pine-needles, cold and dead, but with a look of peace on her face as if at the very last there had been upon her lips a prayer for forgiveness which God had heard and answered. When his wife died, which she did within two years of his marriage, the great house was so silent and lonely that he soon married again, and this time a cousin of Nannie’s, who, like his first wife, was a widow, with an only child, a little daughter, so that he had two stepchildren to whom he gave a father’s care and love.

What came next after his second marriage is not essential to the story. His wife died. His stepchildren were married and had families of their own to the second generation, when they, too, died, and still old Sandy lived on, his only companion now his half-brother Colin, who had come from Scotland to join him. One by one the descendants of his wives died and were scattered until in his last years, when nearly ninety, he knew of only one, and that was Reginald Travers, great-grandson of his first wife, in whom he felt no particular interest, until Reginald, who had heard of the rather eccentric old man, came to call upon him and claim relationship through the great-grandmother, dead years and years ago. Something in the young man pleased the older one, who kept him for weeks and finally conceived the idea of making him heir to a part of his fortune, which had grown steadily and was greater than his brother would care for. Colin, to whom he broached the subject, and who, being so much younger, was his right hand and left hand and brain, made no objections, but said:

“Why leave everything to Reginald? There may be some member of the other branch of your family. You had two wives, you know, and one was Nannie’s cousin.”

“To be sure; to be sure, I did,” Sandy answered, rubbing his bald head as if to recall an incident of more than fifty years ago. “You see I lived with Susie so short a time, and that girl of hers was married so young that things slip my mind, and sometimes it seems as if I was never married at all. Nothing is real but Nannie, who is as fresh in my mind as she was that last night when I kissed her for the last time. Poor little Nannie! and Susie was her cousin and looked some like her. There must be somebody somewhere related to her. I wish you’d hunt it up.”