“I am talking of the one my husband left for me. I will show it to you. I have never shown it before to any person.” And Mrs. Stondon rose and left the room, returning in a few minutes, however, with the letter, which has previously been copied into these pages.
“Read that,” she said, “and never speak again as if I could marry a second time. Oh! if I had but known; if I had but known!”
If she had but known! Ah, Phemie, not alone by you have those words been spoken. Tremblingly, despairingly, when it was too late, white lips have murmured that sentence—faltering tongues uttered it hopelessly.
If she had but known! Is not that the burden of most human lamentations, of most mortal regret? What might we not all, men and women alike, have made of our lives, which are now past and gone, squandered and lost to us, if we had but known—oh, God! if we had but known!
Silently Miss Derno folded up the letter and gave it back to her friend. Quietly and thoughtfully she looked out at the landscape which lay before her, clad in its autumn robes of gold and russet, of red and brown, then she said—
“Dear Phemie—let me call you Phemie—if he could speak to you now, he would bid you be happy; and you will try to be happy for our sakes—for his and for mine—for love of your dead husband and your dead friend.”
“I will try.”
“And supposing, Phemie, that in the future some good and faithful man should come, praying you to be his wife, and that you hesitate whether to say yea or nay, will you think of this letter and of me, and remember that both told you it would be no treachery to those you loved in the past for you to be happy in the future?”
Then in a moment Phemie’s grief broke out again.
“You will have it, then?” she said. “Well, then, you shall, only never mention the matter to me more. If I had loved less, I should have suffered less. Basil Stondon was so dear to me, that no man could ever win my heart again. This is the simple truth; and it is the truth, also, that I would not marry Basil Stondon were he single to-morrow, and came praying to me—praying as——”