"What ails you, gineral? You look that glum you might have been hearing of your brother's death," said Martha, making room for him on the garden seat where she sat.
"I am well, madam. I heard you allude just now to a Mr. Selby as having married the sister of Mrs. Bunce. Are you acquainted with the lady?"
"To be sure I am. She is Ralph's aunt. A dear good soul as ever lived, but real sorrowful-like and sickly now--she that used to be as peart and blooming as the flowers in May. It's heart-breaking to see her. She has never got over the loss of her child ten years ago, and it has fairly broke her up. Her hair is white like a woman of sixty. She might be older than Judy, there; and yet she is just one age with Ralph--not forty yet."
"I recollect her very distinctly in her brother Gerald's lifetime--a beautiful young lady. That was before the war; the first time I was in Canada."
"Were you in Canady then? But to be sure you were! You were Gerald's friend, and are a trustee of his property. Ah, yes! I recollect. And you were----"
But she did not say any more; only she looked in his face with a new interest, and what would have been a kind and sympathizing smile if good manners had not restrained the manifestation. Nothing awakens the interest of a good woman so warmly as a story of true enduring love. If the love have been unrequited, its constancy seems but the more rarely and touchingly beautiful. It is something to be dealt with delicately, and spoken to in low, soft, ambiguous words that may soothe but will not flutter the tender thing. It was such love that Martha dreamed of in her youth, and humbly hoped for; and when Ralph, young, eager and impetuous, found her in the New England homestead, she dreamed the divine influence had descended to stir the hushed and waiting waters of her life. She cheerfully left home and kindred to dwell with the man who loved her, and she had been his true and devoted wife. Yet often when she recalled the enthusiasm of that early time it seemed to her that the love-feast had been but a Barmecide's banquet after all, or like the husks with which another adventurer had to stay his hunger when he left the shelter of the paternal home. She lavished the wealth of her own affection, but the return had seemed but slender and humdrum to her high-wrought expectations. The young couple went to housekeeping, which is something quite different from the life of the hummingbirds among the flowers: Love's dainty fare of sighs and kisses gave place to the grosser nourishment of bread and beef. The bread had to be earned, the house had to be kept, and very soon the pair of Arcadians found themselves toilers like the rest of the world. He toiled with a will, nay with a relish; it was what he was better fitted for than the fantastic joys of feeling; and she did her part at least without repining. It was what she had promised, and she did it loyally, if wearily at times, in the colourless greyness of daily life, when she recalled the rosy dawn of maiden love, with the heavens above all shining and the world sparkling with dew. So Eve, mayhap, looked back on Paradise when she was sent forth with her lord into common life, and doubtless she would sigh at times to remember it, even with her boys growing up around her. And so with Martha in her prosperity, to fancy Considine cherishing the ashes of a blighted love, stirred feelings not dead, but long since grown to be a mere luxurious pain--a poignancy of plaintive delight.
"Yes," said Considine, after allowing time for the completion of Martha's interrupted sentence, "yes, I believe it was to Miss Mary's adherence to her own choice in the matter of a husband that I owe my association with Jordan as trustee under that eccentric will. People cannot control their likings, I suppose, and I do think the young lady was hardly dealt with. I hope the marriage she was so set on has turned out well. Is she in good circumstances?"
"They are very comfortable; but not rich, of course. People do not make fortunes in Selby's profession; but when a woman throws away one fortune she has no right to expect another. However they'd have done well enough if it had not been for losing the child. That has fairly broke them up. They live retired, and don't care to see anybody. Mary keeps her room half the time, and if it was not for Susan, who lives with them since Judy married, I don't know what they would do. But it gives me the dumps to think of them. Is this not a nice place, gineral? And how do you like the ladies? Seems to me Miss Matildy is just too altogether awful nice for anything."
And so she ran on, good soul. She was bent on withdrawing Considine from what she considered his "just too beautiful" contemplation of an ancient grief, and resolved to find him a suitable consoler. The consoler, indeed, was already fixed upon in her own mind, and ere she went home that afternoon, she had already begun to depict the interesting bachelor in colours which, but for the incipient baldness above his temples, the shaggy moustache, and the absence of wings, might have stood for the Cupid on an old-fashioned valentine.
Her auditor was quite interested, in a pleasant heart-whole way, and much as she might have been over a new variety of Brahmah or other fowl; for besides her lively sensibility, Matilda had a considerable fund of sober sense, though she was scarcely herself aware of it. Nevertheless, it was interesting to hear of the vanquished hero. Martha dwelt much on his warlike exploits, and his cherishing through years and battles the memory of his old attachment. Captain Lorrimer--who knew?--might have done the same, and Matilda still thought kindly of him, though she had never read his name in any list of killed or wounded, and she had seen or heard nothing of him since he marched his men on board the steamer to the strains of "The girl I left behind me," amid the waving handkerchiefs of the ladies on the wharf; and henceforth Matilda felt very friendly and exerted herself to be pleasant whenever she found herself in Considine's company.