How long had seemed the waiting till God should shift the scene! And how vain the straining of the eyes for the faintest movement of the proscenium! He had used to think as a student that he understood how slow the Unchanging One was in doing things, but he had not then put it away in his heart, nor meditated over it in sorrow. He had almost ceased to expect another act, though he believed in it, and it hurt him when the curtain quivered as if it were lifting at last.
Sometimes he wished he knew that the play was over altogether and that he was on the untrodden way homeward; but when the melancholia passed he heard distinctly the rumble of the scenery behind the curtain, and it was as if the footlights were already aglow. Once there had been music while he waited. It was when Helen, her daughter, came to visit Charleston. Yet her coming would only add tragedy to the denouement. It introduced another complication into a play already tangled, but it lightened the burden of his accumulating toils.
Now at last the curtain had risen and the final scheme stood revealed. The old actors who had begun the play with him had all vanished save one, and the stage was almost empty. The chairs were there—vacant—chairs that other playgoers had loved in previous acts. He, almost alone, had been chosen by the great Playwright, to live and be, and perhaps triumph.
CHAPTER XLVIII
By the window of Beacon Street, that looked over toward the west and the south, there sat a lonely woman. “After all,” she said to herself, as the bitterness of her thoughts puckered her heart more and more, “this world is but one of the seventy-four comedies with which the Eternal amuses himself.”
The deep tragedy of her life had embittered her soul and of late she had grown more and more to tell herself alone her thoughts. Now that her husband was dead, each wound would re-open. Yet memory came with little pictures of the Ashley, of the golden rice fields, of one who had loved her there. And these pictures made the dull gray of the Boston evening slowly light up with glory. A mocking bird swings in the orchard bough at Camellia-on-the-Ashley, the mellow notes of the cotton pickers are wafted softly, lowly—
“Swing low, sweet chariot—comin’ for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.”
Thus her thoughts were gentle, sweet, like the cooing of a mother’s first-born, winsome as his first smile, which makes her forget her hour of travail.
A dog bays in the distance, a deer bounds again into the forest—a young man comes from the chase—a smile, a kiss—an—