She read them over:
“Sweet love, too late!
Life is Time’s prisoner,
Love’s hour has fled,
The flowers are dead,
Love has passed by.
Sweet love, too late!
Death stands at the gate.”
She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth—autumn pools shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster, yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss Allison’s single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would seem, had not deprived her.
It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness, and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes.
Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an autumnal beauty of its own.
That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong friend, Miss Augusta Penfield:
I met Lucretia’s nephew, Mary’s boy, to-day. He is you know, a composer already on the road to fame. You remember that he was born abroad. There is for all his undiluted American ancestry a foreign touch about him, a something warm and ardent caught under the Italian skies that even our children seem to take on when born there. He is indeed a beautiful boy, a dreamer, yet manly. A boy I call him, yet he is twenty-nine. My dear father had four sons and a daughter at his age. Still he is a boy. It is strange in this generation, Augusta, that though in many ways they seem so advanced, so beyond us, in others they are further away from life’s responsibilities than we were at their age. There is a suggestion of his Uncle William about Mark, but he is somehow stronger, more imperative. I was drawn to him at once because of his music. And he has the charming manner, the almost excessive chivalry, toward our sex that we see so little of any more, or at least seldom encounter at our age. Lucretia had asked Stella in for tea. She is a dear child and quite alarmingly composed, but not altogether musical, despite her excellent musical opportunities. She played one of the boy’s songs, a delicious thing, rather dreadfully. I felt sorry for him. Lucretia insisted upon my playing his “Youth and Crabbed Age,” which every one has been singing, although he seems delightfully unaware of that fact. He was so courteous about insisting that I should play more, I ran through a bit of “Meistersinger,”—he seemed so truly a young Walther,—and then discovered another little song that he has not published, “Too Late for Love and Loving,” full of a kind of pathos that it seems impossible youth could understand. But I suppose that is where genius comes in.
The rest of the letter was made of messages and the mild, small daily occurrences that are of moment to such as Miss Augusta Penfield.
That night, searching in an old secretary in his room for some missing notes, Mark came upon a little daguerreotype in a drawer. It was of a young girl, taken apparently in the late sixties or early seventies. Something in the face, clear-eyed, warm-lipped, trusting, caught and held his attention. He turned it over to see if the girl’s name was on the back, but the only inscription was a date in his Uncle William’s writing, June, 1863. Poor Uncle William, who had been so full of promise, they said, but who had died from a bullet wound, a sacrifice to his country two years after the war!
Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man’s face, dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in uniform always on his mother’s dressing-table, rose before his mind’s eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him to the war. The date must have been just about the time that he had enlisted and marched away. He had gone without telling her perhaps; she could have been little more than a child. Perhaps he had never told. Or they might have had their brief tragic happiness upon the edge of death, they two “embracing under death’s spread hand.”