The Three Stages of Clarinda Thorbald

by William T. Hamilton

She knew her chimera was shattered. Everything she had planned was gone from her. All was changed. Clarinda felt the wrench from her old life and the cast into the new. An anguish greater than she had ever felt before came over her, and with a saddened spirit she turned from the window, from the garden, the paths and her childhood. As she turned she met the eyes of her father, who stood just below her in the doorway to the room.

The old man trembled and was uncertain, his mind was torn with conflicting emotions. He felt with the going of Clarinda it was the end, the disrupting of the one thing upon which he had built all his later life. Yet, he knew in his heart, it was but a natural sequence. He had built his temple around this slip of a girl. All the dreams of his life had been centered upon this one thing. He had so wished she would always be with him, and that she should gather his many years together, place them in his old dead hands and fold the curtain, when he should at last be placed where moth and rust do not corrupt nor thieves break through and steal.

No one knew with more certainty than he, that all things were futile and ephemeral, but a passing foment. As he stood below at the door and looked up at her with her luxuriant life, he knew he would soon go,—and in a short while she too would pass. Out of nature would come obliteration, and with this obliteration all things he had built crumbled into dust. Even the tiny traces he had made upon the shifting sands of time would be blotted out. His fortunes, his house built of iron and granite, in a few short strokes of the clock would return to their primordial condition; this, even, before the grass should grow green above him.

Clarinda moved quickly over to him and clutched his hand, as if she felt the thoughts that were going through his mind. The old man shook with fear. He feared death, for it was an obsession with him. The thought of his last hours filled him with an ineffable sorrow, and drove the sweat out upon his forehead. And he knew death was there, he felt it in his quaking limbs and in his unsteady gait. He felt at times as if he dwelt with the dead.

At night when he laid himself down to rest, after the multitudinous labors of his day, as he closed his eyes, he would see floating before him all those whom he had known and with whom he had lived and worked and who had died. He counted them as they passed before him. A cold perspiration as he counted them enveloped him while they beckoned to him to follow, with their denuded fingers, and laughed at his futility.

He shivered now and clasped Clarinda’s hand so firmly that she winced with pain. With an effort he gathered himself together. Clarinda stretched her arms out to him and put them gently around his neck, as if to protect him from his fears.

“Father!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, my child,” he said tremulously.

They turned and went slowly hand in hand down through the halls, from place to place, from room to room, on down to the place of the food.

Together they stood for a few moments at the bottom of the staircase and looked at the milling crowd. They, even, marked the steps of those who had fed and drunk too eagerly, as they weaved and staggered from one part of the hall to the other.