I will attempt no painting of the effect that confession had upon him. But after a long, long time she whispered, "I will sing the last verse of your song, dear, which only you shall ever hear." And lying on his breast, she sang--
"Dear love I thy face above me gleaming
A sunset radiance gives:
Ah, love! thy tones' sweet cadence dying
Sings in my heart and lives.
Clasped, love, close to thy heart, thy birdling
Foldeth her wings in peace--
Trusts, love! feeling nor cold nor shadow,
Finding at last her ease,
From fear a safe release,
Heart's love, with thee."
Margret Field.
The Victims of Dreams.
My friend Bessie Haines had no mother, but her father was such a very large man that I remember thinking, when I was quite a child, that a kind Providence had intended to make up her loss in that way. She and I did not live in the same city, but managed to keep up a lively friendship through the medium of correspondence and half-yearly visits.
I was a complete orphan, and my uncle, with whom I lived, was her father's attached friend. She had a very happy home, and I was glad to enjoy it with her, particularly when my uncle accompanied me, for then her father and he became absorbed in each other, and left us to our own devices--not very evil ones, but too childish and trifling to claim the sympathy of such very grave men as they were.
We had both become tall, womanly girls, but Uncle Pennyman and Mr. Haines called us children, and treated us as such; and Bessie was just writing to me about her father's telling her she must begin to think of serious things, when my uncle remarked to me that the time was approaching when I should prepare myself to assume the duties and responsibilities of a rational female. Just as if we had waited to be told this, when in fact Bessie and I had been consulting about our bonnets and dresses in the most grave and mature manner for years past, and arranging our future on plans that for variety and agreeability could not have been surpassed had we been brought up on the Arabian Nights and Moore's Poems, instead of Baxter's Saint's Rest and Pollok's Course of Time.
"There are several questions of vital importance that have been growing daily stronger in my mind," said my uncle Pennyman. "My friend Thomas Haines has a gift in clearing points and expounding meanings; so that I feel it to be for my mind's edifying and my soul's profit to go to him for counsel."
I was delighted to hear this. I wanted to see Bessie, and I blessed the bond that united these good brothers in Israel and drew us together so often. Mr. Haines was good at texts, and my uncle was wonderfully expert at dreams. Mr. Haines was a great dreamer, and my uncle constantly stumbled over passages needing elucidation. So we lived in harmonious intercourse, and Bessie and I talked of all our plans and delights while they got themselves entangled in obscurities with a commentary under each arm.
It would have appeared, from Mr. Haines' dreams, that Bessie's mother had been a most fussy and bothering lady, though I was told by the housekeeper, who knew her well, that she was the mildest and most timid of little wives while living.