Little Stories of Married Life

by Mary Stewart Cutting

“I cannot let you go—I cannot!” she sobbed, and her lover had to loosen her arms from around his neck and dry her eyes with his handkerchief, whispering soothing words, and then she must be led out into the glaring sunlight and turn her face away from the group of friends, while her hand still lay in Norton’s. And then the bell rang—the signal for parting—and then—do we not know it all? The last look from the pier at the beloved face, and then the slow watching, watching until the vessel is out of sight and the vision is filled with green overlapping waves, and afterwards the walk back again along the wharf, among bales and vans of plunging horses, out into the world of dusty streets and houses, and the midsummer sights and smells, and the busy, empty life that is left.

Milly was grateful to Mrs. Preston for not talking. She blindly let herself be piloted anywhere to find that she was at last ensconced in a hurrying train proceeding homeward through a green landscape, with freshly cooler air blowing in through the open window to soothe her aching head. When they reached the village in the dusk it was Mrs. Preston who walked home with her up the long hill (and, oh, the going home when the one we love most has just left it) and answered all the questions that were showered upon both, and afterward went upstairs to Milly’s room and saw that the girl put on a loose gown to rest in, and made her drink the cup of tea she had brought up. She gave Milly a little kiss, “like a peck,” thought Milly, suddenly alive to the remembrance of those other kisses, and after the elder woman had left, she slipped from the bed where she had even submitted to have her feet covered, and went over to the window and knelt down by it with her head on the sill almost in the branches of the maple tree through which she could see the moon rising in golden quiet. He was looking at the same moon now, and the Lord was watching between them. She pressed the ring to her lips, she pressed it to her bosom—the ring that made her his—joy flooded back upon her with the thought. She had forgotten that she could speak to him still, that she could write.

Oh, quick, quick, lose not a moment; it was treachery to have a thought in her soul and he not know it! Down on her knees in the moonlight she wrote, and wrote, and wrote, all that she never could have said—her very heart.

She woke to joy the next morning, still in this consciousness of new-found power, and with a high ideal of the life before her. She was to grow and grow that she might be worthy of him—that she might help him grow to be worthy of the highest. Every minute of the day she could live for him, just as in every minute of the day he was living for her. She went about her daily tasks with renewed energy, because he was thinking of her while she performed them. Even during little Letty Stevens’s tedious music lesson she smiled, thinking how she would write him that the child’s halting five-finger exercise counted itself out to her in the words, “How I love you, how I love you, how I love you, how I love you, dear!”

She had a little note from him by the pilot boat, written a few hours after they had parted; how little it seemed after all she had thought and felt in this twenty-four hours! But it made the color rise in her soft cheeks, and she cried over it and wore it next her bosom by day and laid it under her pillow by night. For many long weeks it was the only message from him that she had to feed on. The mail does not come quickly from Australia. She had sent off pages and pages to him in the two or three months before his first letter came, and it was much longer before she had an answer to hers. How she studied those letters—simple, almost boyish effusions—full of wondering pride in those that she wrote to him.

“Why, you are a real poetess, Milly; I don’t see how you manage to think of such things. I wish I had been thinking of you at the time you speak of, but I’m afraid that must have been when I was staying at Jackson’s, and he and Blessington and I played cards every evening; awfully poor luck I had, too. I suppose I must have been thinking of you, after all, and that’s what made me play so badly, don’t you believe it? No, I don’t do much reading out here; you’ll have to do the reading for both of us, and you can tell it all to me when I get home. When I get home. Oh, Milly! I can’t write about it as you do, but I’m working for my sweet, sweet girl with all the strength I’ve got.”

The girl bloomed as she never had before with this quickening of her soul. The days were so full of duties; her music scholars, the household matters, in which she helped her widowed aunt, the two young cousins to be looked after, her reading, and, when she could attend them, the weekday afternoon prayers at the little church where she sometimes, with the sexton, represented all Mr. Preston’s congregation. Milly’s people were of the Congregational faith, but Norton and she had gone to St. John’s together. People found fault with Mr. Preston—a rather dull man with impassive wooden features—because he had no variety of expression; he read service and sermon in a low monotonous voice which, however, grew to have a soothing charm for Milly. Why need anyone express anything? It was all in herself—other people’s expression only jarred. Those few moments in the half light of the empty church gave a sense of peace that was an actual physical rest, undisturbed by the personality of others. She was even guilty of slipping from the church afterwards to avoid Mr. Preston’s perfunctory handshake.

Then, after each quickly-passing day, came the long evening when in her little white room she wrote to him—wrote to Norton, her own, own lover. Ah, what fire there can be in the veins of a little Puritan girl!

So the swift winter passed and the spring came around again, and he had not returned.

Then came hours when the sense of separation began to press more heavily upon her, when the soft breeze wearied her and the common roadside flowers brought tears to her eyes—especially when the Australian mail was long delayed. It was in a mood of this kind that she went one day to see Mrs. Preston, whose sharp features relaxed at the sight of her. Mrs. Preston was sitting in the front parlor by the window, with her sleeves rolled up a little, and a gingham apron tied around her waist, beating up eggs in a large bowl.