The Attic Guest: A Novel

by Robert E. Knowles

Till she is about eighteen. Then comes, or almost always comes, the first waterfall in the stream of time. And what a wild cataract it is, leaping with the tidal movement of her soul! And how mystically deep that spring of love which is its far-off source! And how the light of heaven plays upon it all!

I was just eighteen when this first came to me. And all my eighteen years before seem now, as I recall them, like a placid afternoon such as slips by unnoticed in the summer-time; the clock strikes the hour, I suppose, but no one hears it.

I was born in 187-. No woman is ever quite content to tell the very year, but the decade does not matter. And my mother has often told me what a lovely October day it was—my dawn was mingled with the deepening twilight, and the flowers were still abloom in the garden, and some darky children were playing in the dusty road before the door, and the soft autumn sky was now wreathed in smiles, now bathed in tears, fitting symbol of the checkered life that lay before me.

My father died when I was two and a half. My only recollection of him is an impression of his great height and strength as he once bore me on his shoulder, when I had toddled a few yards from the door to meet him. My mother tells me I often started forth on very uncertain feet, as often borne back with my arms about his neck—but there lingers with me the memory of only one such pilgrimage. Yet it is distinct and vivid, I am thankful to say, and I can see yet the low brick fence, with its cope of stone, all vine-entangled as it was; and to this day I never catch the breath of the magnolia without seeing again the full-bloomed beauty that stood close to the steps within the wall. I think I plucked a spray as I was borne past it that evening on my father's shoulder.

Both my mother and my aunt thought it strange that I have no recollection of my father as he lay in the calm majesty of death; for my mother took me with her alone into the parlour and shut the door upon us three when she took her last farewell—so she has often told me, her voice breaking as she spoke. And she says I wanted to linger after she turned to go, gazing steadfastly upon the silent face, fascinated by the master mystery of life; it seems, too, that even in her grief she noticed my disdain of the lovely flowers that ensconced the coffin, though I had the child's passion for those gratuities of God, so all-absorbing was the witchery of death. And I have been told, though none of my kinsfolk ever mentioned it—the old undertaker told me himself one day when I was playing among the shavings in his shop—how pitifully hard I fought when they began to shovel in the clay after my father had been lowered to his grave. It is one of our Southern customs for the ladies, veiled past recognition, to follow their dead to the uttermost; and it was in the cemetery I dropped my mother's hand and began my unavailing struggle to rescue my father from suffocation and eternal night. I was borne away, probably easily beguiled, and my father was left to his long loneliness. But I remember nothing of either of these incidents, great and tragical as I thought them, and still think them to be; even yet, I never turn away from a new-filled grave without a sense of selfish cruelty—there seem such oceans of God's fresh air everywhere, yet denied to those we leave behind. And I have never been able to free myself from the pain of this bitter helplessness—that there comes a time when the best we can do for our nearest and dearest is to leave them all alone beneath the darkening sky.

Those who knew her best say that my mother was never the same again. No melancholy, or despondency, or indifference to life came to mark the change, but her soul took new depth under the influence of sorrow and her outlook was more to the eternal. There was plenty of brightness and merriment—frank laughter, too—all of her after life; but it was the play of the sunlight upon the noble gloom of ocean, stirred gently by some influence from afar.

She soon abandoned her own home, leaving it to strangers; they saw no white face on the pillow in the front room up-stairs—they gave dances in the parlour, and no recumbent form disturbed the revelry. My mother's sister was Mrs. Lundy, my Aunt Agnes; her husband was Henry Lundy, my Uncle Henry. To their home we went to live, I in unconscious glee, my mother in hope of healing. There my life was spent till I was eighteen years of age—and later; but my story begins with that particular year, which, as I have hinted, is to so many a maiden's life like the month of April to the Northern river—for then the ice breaks up and the stream moves outward to the sea.

I was eighteen when I fell in love. That is, if I fell at all—concerning which I have my doubts. For many a girl thinks she has fallen in love when all the time she walked in.

Ah me! those days are far past now; but the words I have just written gave my pen a good half hour's rest while I mused on all the meaning of them. For after a girl becomes a mother, after she has children of her own—which is about the same thing—she is far more fastidious about love, and far more solicitous that it should be genuine, than when she was choosing for herself. And she knows then, what she knew not at eighteen, that the difference between falling in love and walking into it, is just the difference between Heaven and—Hades. (What a convenient word "Hades" is! It was made, I reckon, expressly for woman's use.)

Well, I am afraid I walked in, the first time I got in love. Yet I feel it is a sort of blasphemy to say the first time—for no true girl is ever really in love but once; born, loved, died, thus stand the mountain peaks of life, and each can rise but once. So I must amend by saying that the first time I tried to be in love, and everybody else thought I really was, I got there by the pedestrian route. I rather think I honestly wanted to be in love, had almost resolved to be; and when a girl's face is once set in that direction she will see land ahead, though half an ocean lie between—or, to change the figure, she is like those silly chanticleers that crow at midnight, thinking it the dawn.