It was easy enough to train Miss Judy, whose nature responded to exquisiteness as an æolian harp responds to the breeze. Miss Sophia was different, but the little mother did not live long enough to find it out. Perhaps no true mother ever lives long enough to find anything lacking in her child. Miss Sophia was standing on the threshold of womanhood, and Miss Judy had barely crossed it, when the little mother died, worn out by hardship and broken-hearted by exile, but cheerful and uncomplaining to the last, as such mothers always are.
Is it not amazing that a small, soft woman can leave such a large, hard void in the world? Is it not bewildering to learn, as most of us do, sooner or later, that those whom we have always believed we were taking care of, were really stronger than ourselves, and that we have always leaned on them. The very foundations of life seem falling away, when the truth first comes home to the heart. No one knew what Major Bramwell felt or thought when the gentle wife who had yielded in everything first left him to stand alone. He was naturally a silent, reserved man, and misfortune had embittered him. Within the year following her death he returned to Virginia for a visit, apparently unable to endure the exile without her. His daughters were lonely too, but they were glad to have him go. That is, Miss Judy was glad, and Miss Sophia was always pleased with anything that pleased Miss Judy. They were still content, believing him to be happier, when the visit went on into the second year, and even into the third. But as the fourth and the fifth passed, they grew anxious, and the neighbors wondered, and gradually began to shake their heads. News travelled slowly over the Alleghanies even yet, but it was whispered at last that the major would never come back,—that he could not,—because he had been arrested for old debts left unpaid when he came to Kentucky, and that he was thus held "within prison bounds."
The Oldfield people could never tell whether the sisters were aware of the truth. The neighbors noticed that as the years went by Miss Judy said less and less about his coming back, though she spoke of him as often and as proudly as ever, and that Miss Sophia, who never had much to say about anything, now rarely mentioned her father at all. They heard from him, however, at long intervals. The neighbors were sure of so much concerning the major, by reason of Miss Judy's being sometimes compelled to borrow the two bits to pay the postage on the letter. Nothing else ever forced her to borrow, though she had not a penny to call her own for weeks together, and Miss Sophia—poor soul—never had one. Everybody in Oldfield knew when anybody got a letter. The stage carrying the mail came twice a week. The postmaster, who was also a tailor, always locked the door of his little shop as soon as he had taken the mail-bag inside. He could not read writing very readily, and he did not wish to be hurried. The villagers fumed outside as they looked through the one smoky, broken window, and saw him deliberately spelling out his own letters, sitting down with his feet on the stove. In the winter when the days were short, and it began to grow dark early, they used to stuff something into the stovepipe which came out of a broken pane, so that the smoke soon compelled him to open the door. In the summer the heat prevented the postmaster's keeping the door closed for any great length of time; but no matter what the season most of the Oldfield people were waiting when the mail came; consequently, everybody knew what everybody else received. And then Miss Judy used to give out kind messages to the neighbors from her father's letters; messages which did not sound at all like the major. But Miss Judy was wholly unconscious that her own sweetness colored whatever it may have been that her father had really written. She was as unconscious of this as of any reason that she herself might have had for growing sour, as her lovely youth faded, neglected like the wild flowers blooming unseen in the shadowy woods.
The quiet lives of the little sisters thus went on uneventfully from youth to maturity. They were as utterly alone, so far as association with their own class was concerned, as if they had lived on a desert island. Only the occasional letter from their father marked the passing of the years. They were sheltered by the old log house, and they subsisted somehow on what grew from its bit of ground. It was the same now that it had always been; it was still the same, except that the little sisters had passed unawares into middle age, when they heard that their father was dead.
No one ever knew whether the daughters were told the whole sad truth: that this gallant old soldier of the Revolution, who had done much for the winning of Independence, had died in prison bounds for debts which he was never able to pay. Miss Judy's beautiful eyes were dim with weeping for a long time. Miss Sophia was sad for many months through sympathy with her sister's grief. Miss Judy took the purple bow off Miss Sophia's cap and a blue one off her own and dyed them black. Their Sunday coats, as they called two thread-bare bombazines, were black already, and their everyday coats had also been black before turning brown. So that those two poor little bits of lutestring ribbon were the only outward signs of new bereavement.
II
THE OLDFIELD PEOPLE
Living was leisurely down in the Pennyroyal Region of those old days. About the middle of the last century, some twenty years after the major's death, the weeks and months and years went by so quietly that his daughters grew old without knowing it.
No one indeed ever thought of Miss Judy as old. Charm so purely spiritual as hers has never any age. And then it would seem as if an element of perpetual youth often lingers to the last around a lovable unmarried woman as it rarely does around the married. The rose keeps its beauty and sweetness longest when left to fade ungathered.