Mose Evans: Part Iii

IV.

SEVERAL weeks, I do not know how many, had passed away since my friend, — I confess I hesitated to speak of him since our meeting and parting in New York, even to my wife, as Mose Evans, —had gone West. No letter had arrived for her from Agnes Throop. You who are reading these lines may feel very certain as to the result, but Helen and myself, knowing the parties so much better than yourself, were not certain by any means; far from it! And if you, respected reader, find yourself wholly mistaken in the result in question, I think you will gracefully acknowledge it is not for the first time.

I remained silent, waiting anxiously the solving of this, as we always are of some one of the unceasing succession of conundrums coming up before and pressing upon us for solution, our life through. We were too deeply anxious to say much to each other upon the subject, Helen keeping up, whenever the matter was alluded to, something of her disdainful attitude. We all know that a woman holds to an opinion with a hundred times the grip of a man, unless where her heart is concerned, in which case she is far more eager to give up than she was, in the first place, to grasp; glad that she has something to give up. Well I knew, from her silence all along, still more from her dissent and criticism after I had told her of my meeting with Evans in New York, that she believed in that gentleman with all her soul, was eager as a child for his success. She had asked me with much unconcern for the one message I had from our friend after his arrival at Brownstown, — “My dear friend,” it ran, “ I have arrived safely. I have seen her. I will write,” — with the hope of squeezing, so to speak, more meaning out of the message as by very pressure. I suppose, of repeated perusal.

Our suspense was not, however, to last without end. I was in our office in Charleston one afternoon, when who should enter, with his usual eager step, but the Rev. Mr. Parkinson.

“ I am East to solicit help toward building our new church,” he said immediately after asking as to the health of my family. “ You may hate to hear it as heartily as I do to mention it. But I am compelled to get aid, and I speak of it at once, so as to have an unpleasant subject stated and done with!”

“I do not see why I should hate it,” I said. “ But, never mind about that. How is General Throop? ”

“Had you not heard? He is dead! He died very suddenly,” my friend replied. I was shocked, for death is something wholly unnatural to us, at last. We had every reason to expect it in this case, yet it is always a surprise. In the eager questioning and reply which followed, I learned that General Throop had fallen, struck by death, one afternoon. There was something rumored about an altercation on the part of the General with Dr. Alexis Jones, who had mismanaged the case of a sick negro on the place, as bringing about his death. “ The family were very reserved upon the subject,” Mr. Parkinson said.

“ The family? What family is there, beyond Miss Throop? ” I began.

“ Considering the circumstances, she is in excellent health. Do you know,” he said with some abruptness, “that I am married? that I have my bride with me? ” and he turned some shades paler as he said it, for excitement assumes that livery in the case of persons of his temperament.

“ Bride! ” I am certain I put too much astonishment in the exclamation, for my friend grew paler still. “ Can it be possible ’’ — and I had the sense to stop. My visitor understood me none the less. “It is not Miss Throop,” he said. “ I esteem and admire Miss Agnes Throop very greatly, but,” and he added it with a degree of self-respect which wonderfully became him, “I have done far better, for myself I mean, — yes, and for her, — than that. Surely you know who it is? Come, guess! ” with eager eyes. I knew politeness demanded I should say, and on the spot, “ Oh, Miss Smith, of course, and a charming lady she is; let me congratulate you! ” but, as I journeyed on the instant over the length and breadth of Brown County, in swift and eager search, I could not imagine anybody.

“Is it possible you do not remember Mary Robinson ? they called her Molly ! ” he said.

“ Why, my dear sir,” I exclaimed, “ you cannot mean little Molly Robinson, that rosy-cheeked dumpling” —

“ The very same,” he said with satisfaction.

“ Indeed! I used to kiss her when I stayed with her father — Judge, General, I mean Squire Robinson. I beg your pardon, she was merely a child! ” I exclaimed.

“ Not sixteen when we were married, and she is a child, a mere child still, the merest child in the world! ” and it was extraordinary, the glee with which the young husband said it, rubbing his hands.

“ Yes,” he said, as we hurried to the hotel. “ We had just risen from dinner when I left her. She never was away from home in her life before. I would not be surprised if she has had a good cry since I left; she is the merest child, you know! I bought and left with her all the picture papers I could lay hands on before starting.”

My friend would not allow me to wait in the parlor, but hurried me up with him to their room upon the highest floor, for hotel clerks can tell their grade of guest, city or rural, on sight; and we burst in upon the bride, to find her in a situation vastly more in keeping than if expecting us in parlor and in state. The little room was in utter confusion; clothing, picture papers, plates of fruit, a great paper of candy, too, I remember, strewed about on table, chair, and floor. Perched upon their great traveling trunk stood Mrs. Parkinson, hugging a cat to her bosom from the assaults of a poodle barking furiously below. “ She would have that dog, I got it for her as we came along,” my companion had explained the barking as we opened the door. " My dear, this is your old friend, Sir. Anderson,” he said, and she stooped down to be kissed as of yore when I approached. For she was nothing but a child, plump, her honest, somewhat freckled face round and full as a May moon, an abundance of brown hair down her back in the confusion of the moment, small and merry eyes, beautiful teeth, her dress a little short for a married woman, but that may have been owing to her pedestal — you can see scores of just such girls at Sunday-schools in country neighborhoods, without exaggeration, several millions of them, in fact, plentiful as daisies and buttercups! But I was far more interested in her husband’s beautiful illusion in reference to her than in herself; you can witness the same — I did not say delusion — in the case of many a pale, bookish man. But I am bound to say that Mr. Parkinson was vastly improved since that day I first saw him when shaving by the roadside. He was in stouter health, sturdier, manlier in every sense.

I did not enjoy our merry greeting and after conversation as much as I otherwise would, on account of conjecturing how Helen would like the matter.

My wife, I knew, understood how to manage matters far better than myself. Besides, they would have to get ready to go to my house. Bidding them goodby, in twenty minutes I was at my office and had sent our messenger boy home with this note: “ Dear Helen. Mr. Parkinson and bride are at our old hotel! Have them to tea.” I sat in my office-chair imagining my wife’s bewilderment, the meeting and all, laughing as I had not laughed for months.

Somehow, exert myself as I will, Helen always gets the better of me, — always! When I entered our sitting-room I found the newly married pair, apart from a little shyness in their strange surroundings, peacefully at home with Helen. Largely on account of my wife being in such excellent spirits, evidently relieved in mind. A moment’s reflection explained why, and I wondered I had not thought of it before. As I entered, Mr. Parkinson said, “I was just telling Mrs. Anderson about General Throop’s funeral! I was speaking about the grief of the negroes. He had never owned those Brown County people, you know, yet they felt he was their natural master; on both sides they had been used all their life to the relation of slave and master as to nature itself. No monarch more feared and respected than that stately old gentleman by the entire county; it was the largest funeral ever known.”

“ Mr. Parkinson tells me Agnes bore it better than he could have hoped,” Helen began.

“ Much better! ” our guest said, paling a little I imagined, and hastening to say, “ I did not like to marry so soon after the funeral. I suppose I am somewhat impulsive, but we had made all our arrangements to be married, and I was anxious to be abroad in search of funds for our new church. And Molly, here, had never been out of the county. I was eager to show her the world. Harry Peters was greatly missed at the wedding, for he would not come, sending his wife instead. They ought to build the church themselves, I know, but I shrank from pressing it, as, I dare say, I should. I do not mean to urge the matter upon any one. To tell the truth, I hate to beg; I am the poorest person, for such business, living! ”

They were our guests for some weeks, the bride remaining with us while Mr. Parkinson journeyed around upon his mission in other places. But Helen gave up, as well as myself, obtaining any final information in reference to Agnes Throop, to whom my wife had, of course, written in condolence immediately, urging her to make our house her home. “As to Mr. Parkinson’s wife,” Helen said to me the moment we were alone together, “ she is a good, simple country girl. You need not have looked at me on Sunday when I spoke of my headache. I could not have accompanied her to church in that fearful white hat! How perfectly Mr. Parkinson has succeeded in deluding himself! ” For the young husband had theorized his heart into entire sincerity in the matter!

“ Nothing more natural than that,” Helen explained to me. “ He is a person of highly imaginative temperament, as you know. His failure in reference to Agnes, his daily association with Miss Molly as her father’s guest, too — nothing more natural, foolish as it seems! ”

“ She is so young, so uninformed in regard to everything! " he said to Helen and myself one confidential evening when his wife was out of the room. “ She is like the whitest and softest of wax in my hands. If it is a glorious thing to be an artist and to carve an ideal nymph, or queen of wisdom or power or love, how much nobler to mold a living soul, to form and inspire an immortal for eternity! It came to me, — I boarded at her father’s you know, — as a mere fancy. I was sitting on their front porch one afternoon when she came in from school, — her hat in one hand, her books in the other, her hair down upon her shoulders, —all glowing from her walk. I never was so lonely in my life, so desponding, I fear. As she came in, the idea flashed upon me, merely as a beautiful fancy at first, you observe. It slowly grew to be a glorious reality before I knew it! I do believe if you were to ask Molly the distance, say, to the moon, she would reply, I haven’t the least idea! I intend to teach her Latin myself; I have bought the books already. I am advertising for a music teacher, some lady to play upon our melodeon at church, to return with us! ”

“ You have talked with her about it? ” asked my wife without a smile, and with a measure of sympathy of manner for which I kissed her afterward.

“ Of course ! We talked of nothing else before we were married. Of nothing else, I assure you,” Mr. Parkinson said eagerly. “Very often since! She is perfectly willing! The best-natured little darling you ever saw! I love her with all my heart, for what I am to make her. And she loves me far more than brides generally do, having some idea, at least, of all I will be to her! ”

We sincerely liked Mr. Parkinson, but I fear we encouraged him to open his whole heart in reference to Mrs. Molly, in order to learn the sooner what he knew in regard to Agnes Throop and Mose Evans. “ I know none of the circumstances of Mr. Evans' first visit to General Throop’s after his arrival,” Mr. Parkinson said at last one evening. “ There was much confusion; all my conversation with Miss Throop was, of course, in regard to her sudden and terrible loss. I know you have been anxious to have me say more about her and Mr. Evans, but we have talked since I came so much in regard to my plans for the church, and specially about Molly. Besides, to tell the truth, I was so taken up then, as I have said, with our getting married ” —

“ You have seen Evans? ” I asked.

“ Oh, certainly. He and Harry Peters had charge of the funeral, we were all so very busy. He seemed to me to be much improved.”

I think our guest was somewhat ashamed of saying so little on that occasion, for it must have been the next evening at tea, he gave us an account of his first meeting with Evans.

“ It was at their place, a day or two after the General’s death,” he said. “ Miss Agnes was in her own room. I was seated beside the body, which had been prepared for burial. I was looking at the face of the dead, and thinking. Did you ever notice the aspect, Mrs. Anderson, of dignity in the countenance of the dead? I was never so struck with it as in the instance of General Throop. There was the grave, set, imperial something in the countenance of the grand old man, as of a monarch. It was Mr. Evans remarked all this to me as he seated himself by my side that day. I recall his remarks now, but I must say my attention was diverted at the moment entirely from the dead to Mr. Evans himself. I confess I was greatly struck by the transformation. Knowing, as I did through our old postmaster, that he had long been a hard student. I expected great change in him, of course. He had been abroad, too. You cannot tell how I look forward to that some day with Molly! I know,” he added, with changing color, “ that you are laughing at me, with all your kindness. But just wait and see! ” “We men, Mr. Anderson,” he added, ‘‘of slight build, cannot help envying stronger men. At least, a person of somewhat feeble physique from underexercise and over-study, like myself, cannot but admire any person of Mr. Evans’ health and vigor. He came into the room that day where I sat beside the dead, in such a glow, I had almost said glory, of full life and energy! not at all boisterous, saying little, very quiet — there is such evidence of reserve of power and happiness! I wish I had such stamina, constitution; heartily wish it, I confess. ”

“ Do you know, Mr. Parkinson,” my wife asked, “ if they are to be married, Miss Throop and Mr. Evans? ” We had to find out some time.

Our friend dropped his eyes to his plate as we sat after our tea, then raised them to my wife’s face and gravely made answer. “ No, madam, I do not. Owing in part to the hurry of funeral and wedding and — other matters. I esteem and honor Miss Throop,” he continued, after some silence, “ as we all cannot help doing. Her peculiar trials also have been such. She is so singularly alone in the world, too. I have spoken of Mr. Evans coming suddenly upon me. It was the strong contrast in him, that hour, of vigorous life side by side with the aged and the dead! The whole place, with its loss and sorrow and seclusion, even before death arrived, was like a sepulchre. Miss Throop, I say it sincerely, was like the angel at the sepulchre, full of life herself, but her work there ended with the death of her parents. All the circumstances help Mr. Evans, — are as shadow and background to him, so to speak.”

“And you think Mr. Evans — one cannot well call him Mose Evans now — improved ? ” my wife asked, as she drew Molly to a seat beside her upon the sofa; “you know I have not seen him since we parted at that roadside hotel after his sickness.”

“ I knew him well before he went,” our guest answered, “ and I could not have imagined it even of him! He is as modest, I may say as simple, in his mode of thought and feeling, as ever. He had little to say except in reply to questions, but I was impressed with the force because of the freshness of what he said. I had asked him in one of our few interviews, I remember, as to the leading preachers in the East and in Europe. ‘ It seems absurd for a person like myself,’ he remarked, ‘to. say such a thing, but it is a fact, and you cannot imagine how it has comforted and assured me, being what I am. What I mean is this. I attended service in a different place every Sabbath I could, in America and Europe, and I found that the praise, for instance, in the most successful churches of whatever sect, was as that of children together, simple and heartfelt. Exactly the same with the preachers who sway and impel the masses; in every case it was as a strong child, if I may so speak, talking in simplest words to the understanding and heart of children! I felt,’ he added,

‘ that it was not such a hopeless thing with a man like myself, at last. I found that plain, childlike common-sense held the money of the world, and is rapidly coming to hold and wield all political power. Look at a picture or statue,’ he added; ‘ listen to a leading scientist; it is the same! ’ ”

“ Ah, Mr. Parkinson,” my wife said, drawing Mrs. Parkinson nearer to her as they sat on the sofa, “that was merely an effort of Mr. Evans to make the world into his own image. You are, like my husband here, perfectly infatuated about your Mr. Evans, with his external improvement, and that lying largely in his better clothing; abundant jewelry, too, I have not the least doubt. It is not so with us women; we have intuition, insight. That is my comfort in regard to Agnes Throop; she is too much like her mother to be deceived by externals, I am sure ” —

Mr. Parkinson was regarding Helen as she spoke with eagerness so peculiar that I thought it well to say, “I do not think it respectful in you to your sex, Helen, to speak of — was it not? —their instinct! ”

“ Insight, Mrs. Anderson said,” our friend corrected me, “ but it is instinct with Mose Evans. It would be more respectful to him to speak of a planet as true to its sun, in referring to his connection with Miss Agnes. It is nearer the truth to say his devotion to her is as that of a noble animal to its owner; the idea, even, of any other woman has never entered his mind!" There was so much in the tones with which Mr. Parkinson said it! “ I do not know how Miss Throop will like one thing,” he added, after a little. “ Our friend does not bemoan the Confederacy, although he abhors the injustice, in many respects, of the North; and suffers with the South in its defeat. All this wretched devastation of greed and ignorance, North and South, he told some of us one day at the post-office, is but a transition period to such a oneness of prosperity and nobler freedom and civilization as none of us can yet understand. He is a child, too, in his perfect faith in our future.”

“Just like your Molly,” my wife said, “ for I am tired of Mr. Evans.

I am so glad you brought her with you, Mr. Parkinson. She has been everywhere over Charleston with me, and I have given her ever so much matronly advice. I think you and she have done wisely,” my wife added, with a degree of conviction at which I winced a little. “ I am sure she will make you,” Helen added with singular warmth, “ a wife true and good.”

“ I see that she is asleep,” Mr. Parkinson said, looking lovingly upon his bride. With her head resting upon my wife’s shoulder, the poor little girl was sound asleep, sure enough. It may have been the alterations made by my wife in the arrangement of the child’s hair, the style and color of her dress, possibly the exchange of her set of jewelry for a much more costly but modest set, — Helen retaining the bride’s as a keepsake in exchange, she said, —but she was improved, no denying that. Her perfect childishness, too, as to being married so soon and to such a man: one could not but take an interest in this brace of babes in the wood. She would outgrow her form of childhood; her husband would never get beyond his! As you would have acknowledged had you heard him then and there! He hoped to make a sort of evangelical Paris of Brownstown, whose lady of leading culture and Christian influence was to be the round and wholly unconscious Molly sleeping so sweetly, her careless head upon Helen’s shoulder.

I ventured to ask him in regard to Odd Archer. Sure enough, as New Hampshire had informed Mr. Evans in his letter, the lawyer seemed, at least, to have reformed. “ He has made some of the most eloquent temperance addresses ever heard,” Mr. Parkinson told us. “After some hesitation, we have even called upon him to lead in our prayer-meetings. Impossible for a man to speak more earnestly and effectively! He has given me new ideas as to the best way of preaching, altogether, I assure you! But” —

“ Yes, but,” I echoed — “ but ! ” And Helen, too, shook her head in concert with us.

“ He is studying for the ministry at Columbia,” Mr. Parkinson added. “ So far he has stood firm. I have a good deal of hope, but, I am ashamed to say, very little faith. 'I would a little rather he was safely dead,’ Harry Peters said.”

However, up to the date of this writing, so far as I know, Mr. Archer stands like rock, and we can at least leave him in the existing halo of hope. But from the bottom of my heart I, for one, do wish we had a more honest faith in Him whose life and death and life again in this world it is to save; a loyal and entire faith that he can and does save any and every man who puts himself in his hands, body and soul, for time and eternity, from everything and thoroughly! Possibly if we immaculate people had such belief in him for the desperately hopeless cases, such sinners might have the same, as being the current religion, for themselves!

This is all incidental. It made but an eddy in our talk, which lasted till very late that evening. We dropped the lawyer out of our conversation, but not more utterly than Mr. Parkinson did Miss Throop. She evidently was, like Madame Roland, the beautiful heroine of an extinct era! — so far, at least, as he was concerned.

And so our guests came and departed. It is an easy matter to imagine our deep anxiety in reference thereafter to our friends West; so anxious were we, in fact, that we ceased almost altogether from conversation, Helen and myself, upon the subject. She relieved her mind by writing every day or two to Agnes — like her sex. I presume I was true, likewise, to mine, in leaving Evans to write or not exactly as he saw fit; and in plunging myself all the deeper into my own matters, especially as real estate was beginning to look up again.

V.

I have run many risks in my diversified life. Sometimes it was on water. At times it was, and in more senses than one, by reason of the peculiarity of my business, and very literally on land; to say nothing of peril to life itself during my toils, compulsory, in the service of the late lamented Confederacy. But I do say that I never undertook adventure quite so hazardous as I now do, in my mode of closing this narrative. The truth is, I should not have undertaken it, not having, to say the least, the necessary time from other and pressing and very different engagements. I had even contemplated abandoning the task altogether; possibly would have done so, although at this eleventh hour, for the present, at least, had not the recent letters to my wife from General Throop’s daughter occurred to me. From sheer habit, which I have taught Helen as to documents, these letters have been carefully filed away, and they lie before me now, beautifully written, but crossed and reerossed as is tlie habit of the sex. They can but slay me — I refer to Helen, who is on a brief visit to her relatives to exhibit our latest baby, and Agnes — when they find it out; but, I have read it somewhere, and say it here to soften their coming wrath, Happy even death inflicted by hands so fair! Moreover I will carefully omit, from the copying of the letters, all I can of the correspondence, for my sake as well as theirs!

I should explain that matters may appear a little confused at the outset of what is here copied. It is always confusion where the heart precedes the intellect, which is why woman is so much better adapted to heaven and to home than to anything else.

“ I am, this most beautiful morning, Helen dear, the happiest woman living,” this first letter runs. “I am today as radiant as an angel in heaven, so far as happiness goes. I say this to explain why I write so freely, and we who have known each other all our lives, have sympathized in our terrible sorrows, certainly can feel with each other in our joys! Who would have supposed the languid brunette you are, Helen, would have made so spirited a woman? It was your marrying a New Englander. What noble children yours are! They are already urging him to run for Congress, and when he is elected I will get him to have a law passed that all marriages shall be illegal except between Northerners and Southerners; will speak to him about it this very afternoon as we ride to the post-office! I cannot help it! It is change of climate, I suppose, change only less than from earth to heaven in every respect. The day, too, is so brilliant, the very birds twitter and wheel about in the cloudless light as if they were beside themselves; I must write, too, as I please! And before I forget it, do invite Mr. Archer to visit you in Charleston. In his worst days he was always of good blood; he will make one of our most eloquent divines! I do believe it was because our dear, disagreeable old postmaster felt assured of this, at last, that he consented to die in his attack of pneumonia. What a grim, yet sincere Christian he was! I wonder if he allows himself to show any outer interest in what he sees and hears there! In heaven, I mean. But he must, I know, for we will all be transparent to each other there, translucent to the light which falls upon us from God; just as I am this radiant day! You know he left enough to the church to build a handsome edifice and parsonage. There are some things I could tell you, Helen, about that excellent Mr. Parkinson! I am so glad he has found such a nice little wife, and that he has settled comfortably down; he has certainly done a world of good there. Was it not strange, the legacy of the dear old New Hampshire to me, when he hardly seemed to know of my existence! Yet we did endure actual poverty, Helen, and for years. One can neither eat nor wear land, you know. That was merely a portion, the smallest fraction of the long, long, long suffering, even from the beginning of the war. I suppose my gladness is reaction after so much, so very much pain, Helen. I do not want to tire you, but let me write, please, if it is only to calm myself. I can write from this distance, although I know I could not talk with you, were we together, with the same freedom.

“It was terrible as death, our loss of Theodore, then our breaking up from Charleston and moving West; the ending of the world to us! Death itself closes all, and this was the having to live on for years, alive yet in the utter wreck and dust of the grave! First, there was that gloomy old home of ours below Brownstown, old, at least, in the bearded and decaying live-oaks and the loneliness! The muddy river, the cypress swamp behind us, the dense forest, the very magnolias with their oppressive perfume, the heavy fog covering the world almost every morning like a shroud! We lived in miasma, in contrast Avith which this pure mountain air is like that of Paradise. Then Ave had so much trouble with the freedmen, at least until he took charge. Except when Mr. Anderson and yourself visited us, there was not a soul with whom we could associate, Mr. Parkinson excepted,—I mean with sympathy and pleasure, — and day after day for so very long. Next, and all the time, there Avas — you knew of it, Helen — my great trouble! I was so young and ignorant when it began! If I bad a story to tell your little Henry, dear, I would take him on my lap and do it in this way: Once on a time there was a certain young woman, — not a man as the books have it, — who carved out of pure, cold, beautiful white marble the statue of a god. Her name was Pygmalia, not Pygmalion at all. She was very young and very foolish, and very skillful with her chisel, because she wanted a god to worship, and worked with all her ardent heart. It was a shame, but her statue seemed so beautiful that she loved it as if it was a living god. She found out afterward that the great God himself can and does make, and alone makes in his own time and way, the only objects that are really worthy of our love. But that Avas afterward, I say. I will add nothing about the incense, the tears and prayers, nor of what sort was the sacrifice she consumed before it. But, in this case, the statue never came to life, is merely marble still and forever. That is all! It was not the fault of the statue!

“ And I will tell you here, Helen, a thing you never knew before. It happened Avhen he and I were East — we were so sorry we could not run down to see you, dear, that trip! We were staying at a hotel in New York ; we were in the parlor, just going out. Suddenly they came into the room, Mr. Clammeigh and his wife. Some power, with far-reaching hands, brought us all together in that way! The two men stood for the moment side by side, by His placing! It is not what I thought of the unspeakable contrast. It was not what she, poor thing, thought of it, for she is also a woman, and they did not even pretend to marry from love. I would have cheerfully taken what the little bell-boy, handing them the key of their room at the moment, thought of the two men in contrast! Ague in comparison with health; yes, ague, pallid, feeble, shrinking, beside noblest manhood in supreme vigor of body and soul! He could no more help himself, Helen, than the coal on your hearth can keep from growing ashen when the strong sun shines full upon it! And I could not but be aware, too, of my husband’s eyes, on her, on me!

“ As it is only for your reading, Helen, I might tell you how people looked at us in the cars, in hotel parlors and dining-rooms! It was at him, Helen, my man of men! Who could believe that even the Creator could work, at least in this world, such change in a human being, and that person remain the same! And change, through awful suffering, in me, Helen. My only beauty, the overflowing of my great gladness: if there was but more of my father in me to weigh down the mother I inherit!

“ My mother! That was the next in our terrible changes. Before we left Charleston she had abandoned almost everything to me, but she was never out of her mind, dear, if you ever feared so. It was years of intense, unintermitting affliction wearing upon a nature too sensitive at the beginning. You know the sainted dead are utterly withdrawn from earth, and us, although they love us still. Really, my mother died with Theodore! They neither read the Scriptures nor pray in heaven; she had heaven, if I may speak about such a matter, so steadily before her that she imagined herself done with all the means of approach thereto. Her death was a shock, and yet nothing could have seemed more natural, even beautiful, when we found her that morning not awakened out of her sleep, nor to awaken until another voice than ours shall break her slumber. I cannot speak of what followed upon that!

“ Our home seemed afterward, as you may suppose, yet more like a cemetery, the great oaks closing nearer in upon us still with their drooping boughs and long gray moss. Oh, the sense of separation; the loneliness; the slow-footed hours; the sleepless nights; the winds sighing among the trees, —often the weeping clouds; the round of weary household affairs, day after day, and for what? I look back with amazement that I could have endured it all and live. Yet I did endure it. Along with unspeakable despair there was unceasing hope, actual gladness. When I had time I sang at my instrument, sang, sang! I was in such continual practice that I was not conscious half the time of the keys as I sang, especially with earliest waking, and every evening before the lamps were lit; and very often they were not lit except for prayers and to go to bed. There was I, far from all the world, no one left me but Aunty Washington, our one slave, — surely Heaven allowed her to fall into that delusion in kindness to us, — and my father! I cannot write any more today.

“I ceased writing yesterday, Helen, and for more reasons than because the weary days in my ‘ moated grange ’ had come back to my mind so vividly! To-day I have sat for hours by my open desk at the window, trying to think when it all began; I mean about him! I have often tried, but I cannot remember. I recall, of course, a day at the old church, the first day I was there, when I saw him as I did the rest, merely a good-looking country youth. When they told me, laughingly, the effect I had on him, it amused rather than pleased me. Afterward the mention of the matter wearied me, I was tired of the nonsense! Then, when you, Helen, and your husband spoke of it, I was deeply offended; you regarded me, I thought, as fallen indeed from former days!

“ After that, without his seeking, he was much upon the place; came, in fact, and by a process as certain as summer, to have sole charge of our plantation, my father had become so feeble. Neither my mother nor my father ever dreamed, as you may well imagine, of such a thing; they fully believed—but I cannot speak of that! Should anything happen to them they relied entirely on that! I knew the deep and silent affection, devotion, rather, of the man, but not in any way from him. Had he said anything, done anything, I would have ended the matter instantly. I wonder if he knew it, or was it, as it was, the instinctive nobleness of his nature! If he had been a coward as well as a country youth, had been sentimental, maudlin, pining, I would have laughed at and despised him; but with all his simple manhood he was, Helen, so calm, so strong, had mastery of himself as well as our freed-people, so quiet yet complete! When it was urged upon him by my father, he took charge of the place only after my father had made him full and distinct promise that the plantation should be absolutely under his control. He held and managed it with a hand so gentle and yet so strong, that no one ever thought even of making a suggestion. I knew that he loved me with all his soul, yet I knew he would not allow even me to interfere. I grew to respect him, Helen, as one does nature, so serene yet sovereign! And I had despised him because he was inferior — God help me! — to my marble god, marble so symmetrical, polished, beautiful!

“ I had a last letter from him one day, Helen, and it happened it was this other that brought it from the office and handed it to me. I was at the front gate waiting, and with certainty, for a letter from Mr. Clammeigh, when he arrived with it from town. Part of the marble of the writer was that he had never prepared me for what was to come, or in the blind excess of my devotion I did not see it. The letter struck me like a dagger. I never yielded before, nor after; but it was following upon so long a strain, I was so entirely alone in the world, it was so sudden! I believe I fell. I was told he took me in his arms like a babe, his beard over my breast as he bore me into the house. Not the ‘greathouse; ’ he had the singular thoughtfulness for my poor father to carry me around it and into Aunty Washington’s cabin. Beside her and himself no soul has known of that until now; I could not tell even you, Helen, when you were with us.

“ It chanced that the crop was all in. That very day he arranged with my father, as you know, that Harry Peters, our next neighbor, should manage our plantation, as well as his own, which he had leased to him. It was the afternoon of the day following. I would not have spoken to my mother, had she been alive. I had gone to my piano, partly from force of habit, largely in very desperation. It was all over in an instant. He merely stood beside me and said, ‘Miss Agnes! I have come to bid you good-by. ’

“ I did not cease playing, but looked up. He stood there with the innocent and steady eyes of a child in mine.

“ ‘ I am learning, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘ I wanted to say that I know what I am as well as you. I want to say this, too: I love you, —I must love you forever, even if I am only what I am. ’

“ That was all. I did not cease playing for a moment; it must have been the last sounds he heard as he rode away. I was too stunned, then, to be capable of feeling; stunned by other things; and I want to say this, and just here: I know nothing more of it all, Helen, than I do how the little seed begins to grow deep down in the earth. It was there long before I knew it, had life and growth and color before I was conscious it existed! I had your letters. I had his absence! I love, Helen dear, for the first time in my life! Before, it was half uneasy apprehension; now, I give my whole heart with certainty of my perfect safety in loving, I ‘ rest in my love,’ in the delicious words of old. But I hear the sound of hoofs, on the gallop, Helen! He is coming, and I prefer him to you, dear, a million times over! Good-by! ’ ’

So much for these two letters!

VI.

“It seemed to me, after Mr. Anderson and yourself had left us,” this next letter runs, “as if not so much weary weeks, months, years, but centuries rather, were rolling over my head. Our solemn home was like a great clock whose pendulum had ceased to swing. Time itself had stopped! The last relative left on earth to occupy my heart or my hand was my father. My great regret was that he left me so little to do for him. My mother’s death had whitened him, so to speak, as with a sudden winter. Although more excitable, he grew more still and silent as he became more feeble. I will always have the sincerest regard for our overseer, Mr. Harry Peters, and his excellent little wife; they had given up their own home near by to live with us these days, and Mr. Peters overflowed as steadily as a mountain spring with his humor. It was only at times he could interest my father, at my request, in the affairs of our plantation ; for my father had long since turned over the freed men to themselves and to Mr. Peters in disgust. For months before his death I never knew him to open a paper. Ever since I can remember he had read the Charleston Mercury, and the extinction of that journal was to him the going out of the last orb of light in a sky of otherwise utter darkness! I so dreaded the stagnation of mind into which he might fall that I got Mr. Peters to tell him, of evenings, as we sat together upon our front porch, the last items of political news. My dear father would sit and smoke, his beard grown so long and white, as Mr. Peters read, wholly unmoved and uninterested as to events in the Northern States, at Washington even. The Federal government and people were more foreign to him than China or Beloochistan. It was only when Mr. Peters recounted some fresh injustice of the North, and its consummation at the South, that he would express, as of old, his deep indignation, Mr. Peters most heartily concurring with him; for my dear father was held, you know, Helen, in profound reverence and veneration by the entire county; they wanted to send him, at one election, to the Legislature, and thought that much the more of him for the loathing and contempt with which, under existing circumstances, he rejected the suggestion. And so he slept and waked, ate and conversed, confining himself gradually to the place, and at last to the house, so utterly alien to the present, so wholly wrapped up, almost even from me, in the past!

“ I occupied myself as fully as possible in housekeeping, poor old Aunty Washington at my side all day, and I had no trouble with the freed women, — it all lies so much in putting yourself in their place, being patient and kind as if they were still your slaves. Then I would throw myself, as 1 have said, into music as if I was in training to be a prima donna; and I really have perfected myself, Helen, to a degree which has made our home out here the happier for it, if anything could make it happier. All at once I took to reading aloud to my father of mornings. Not fiction or poetry. My own experiences made these seem pale and poor in comparison. I wanted to get into another world, as it were, so I read history. I happened upon the years of strife between Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots, I being a third and vastly wiser queen, forever coming between the other two to set them right. I do think it consoled my father a little as to the Federal government when I told him that, as the history showed, the race and the reformation seemed given over then of Heaven, and wholly, into the hands, as if it was a bonnet or a ball-dress, of two such squabbling milliners. The reading helped us both, helped my dear father in regard to the past, helped me in reference to the future Besides, I would not tell you, but I will write it, — and for your eyes, not your husband’s, — I constructed, all along as I read, a king for myself out of such material as the men of those days afforded, the courtiers and polished gentlemen of the time supplying me extremely little of it, I assure you. In fact, all my world had crumbled into chaos and was very slowly changing and reforming, as if during centuries on centuries, just then. God has finished it for me, at last, dear, and I know he pronounces it very good, for oh, Helen, Helen, it is beyond my poor pen to say how much, how very much my new world is better than my old!

“ I was occupied, too, with keeping in excellent health, for my father’s sake and for the sake of my — future! Whenever I could I walked and walked. Several times during the week I would have Aunty Washington drive me to the post-office for your dear letters. As if I did not fully know that he knew every line he wrote so politely to you was intended for me, and, really, for me alone, Helen! And I slowly began to answer them, every one. Not that I ever actually wrote a syllable, as you and he well know; but, beginning with a cold line or two, I wrote at last sheets on sheets of replies, as I walked and rode and sat at my piano! It is the greatest pity they are not in real writing; I would love dearly to read them over to him now; would like so much to see how matters in regard to him began and grew and took the hues of life; for I do solemnly assure you, Helen, I have no more idea when it was nor how it was, than has either he or yourself!

“ Every Sunday, through the rain even, I rode to church to hear Mr. Parkinson. Because I knew he would miss me so, but more especially to let him see that it could never be! I was so sorry for him then. But, dear, how could I love him ? He was part of the poetry and fiction from which I shrank. I was so weary of it all, if it were only that we had just come out of the terrible epic of the war and the siege of Charleston. What I thirsted for was, not wine, but simple water from the rock; I wanted to get down out of the air upon the earth again. What I craved was nature, reality, fact. I am so glad he has married that good little Molly Robinson. She is as like to a thousand other country girls as one blackberry is to all the rest, but she will be the very wife, true and strong and sensible, that he needs. And I am so glad that, instead of molding her as he imagines he will into his ideal, she will steadily and very sweetly make him forget that such an ideal ever had place in his imagination. How wonderfully wisely, dear, Heaven orders all such things; and not in the least as we arrange, because so much better! Speaking of Molly reminds me of Mr. Peters’s odd little children. When Mr. Peters began to live with us I took such a fancy to them. They had been lost once in the ‘ bottom ’ for days, and I think their experience has changed them for life; they were so quiet, with such wondering and sorrowful eyes, the mice hardly more stealthy and mute. I was glad of it on account of my father.

“I can almost hear you say, ‘You provoking thing, why do you not go on to tell about Mr. Evans? ’ Did you ever hear, Helen, about people who never opened a letter from their dearest friend for days on days, reserving it, tantalizing themselves with the future enjoyment of it? Be patient, dear; I want to tell you about Mr. Harry Peters. You know all the negroes ceased to laugh and sing over their work, and when cooking and eating together almost all night in their cabins, as they used to do before freedom brought all the care and weight of themselves upon them. After Mr. Peters came be got them to laughing and singing again almost as much as before — he was so full of bis fun, and bis dear little wife of her responsive laughter, as much of an accomplishment in her as music, and far sweeter and more natural. He always had some funny kindness to show me. One day he brought me a tin bucket of — tadpoles! ‘ I wanted you to watch their legs come,’ he explained. So I poured them into an old fruit-dish of glass, one of the few relics left by the cannon and shells of the siege.

“ ‘ Not a single sign of any legs as yet,’ he said, ‘only head and tail. Yet you wait, Miss Agnes, and as sure as you live the legs do come! Things don’t stay as they now are forever. Changes do happen! Without the seeking of those tadpoles God gives them what they need. If we could only float about and wait as they do! ’ There was more in the merry eyes and manner of the man than in his words! I thought of my own helplessness, it flashed upon me about him. By him I don’t mean Mr. Peters. I laughed and laughed until Mrs. Peters and I cried for company. Now, worms browsing upon green leaves while their wings were forming within, to break forth some fine day into radiant butterflies, would have been more poetical. But one is so very familiar with that; the ugly tadpoles were more in keeping with my matters. I laughed every day as I leaned over them, swimming around and around in their world of water in the bowl on one end of my piano, as the people in the other world lean over and look and, possibly, laugh at us. I even told my father about it, and he used to smoke his cigar and watch them himself in his silent way. It did us good, and their legs did come; I saw the whole transition! A ludicrous medicine, but it did us good!

“ So did Aunty Washington. You know the freeing of the slaves was merely the success of irreligion to her, the overturning of the Bible. It was like Philip of Spain, in my history, and the insurgent reformation. Aunty Washington would have had her race back into their normal and Heaven-ordained slavery if she could, was as bigoted as an inquisitor in her views of religion and heresy, her horror being at the ‘ fool talk ’ of the negro men, her double horror at the infatuation of the freed women. It was all I could do to keep anything like peace upon the plantation ; she took an aversion to Mr. Parkinson, even, because he neglected in his preaching so fundamental a doctrine as that of slavery. Dr. Alexis Jones, the foppish young doctor, you remember, Helen, was liked by her because they agreed in the matter. It is hardly worth writing, but he argued from the researches of some Philadelphia Dr. Brown, I believe, that the blacks were not human; the hair being oval like that of animals, under the microscope,— ‘ trichometer,’ he called it,— not round like that of the whites; but I would not mention this if it were not what followed from it, for she only knew he was pro-slavery and would have him as her physician! I had no idea of writing so much; it is the climate, the weather, my husband! And I have been much more eager to speak of him all this time than you can possibly have been to hear.

“ How slowly my thoughts turned to him during all those long, long ages of time, as it seemed! He was away at college, in Europe, learning so much and so rapidly; and I was in my school, too, learning and unlearning even more. But, oh, the suffering, Helen! Mamma had said to me, ‘ I used to think, Agnes, that even the infinite God would grow tired with inflicting so much pain upon his creatures during so many ages! But we will soon know the meaning, love!’ Her ideas, however, were more general, Helen, than mine. I have to centre my heart upon some one person, and it helped me to submit, knowing the Father that held the rod. But when I came to know the Son that stooped by our side, and for our sake, to the; same terrible blows, I could endure it better! Some awful necessity of pain when even the eternal God stoops to suffer it, for us and with us! We will soon understand, it is eternity without pain, Helen, dear! Sometimes I would say, O man born of Mary, why not some little touch of womanly tenderness to me alone in the world! But, as I asked, it was like a mother’s palm upon my head, Helen, the actual pressure of his peace! He was with me! I trembled sometimes in the hush and throbbing sense of his actual presence! No fanaticism, dear, for I would bathe my face afterward and go out and feed the chickens, visit the cabins, do household things, with a positive happiness which could not have sprung merely from within me, no material there for it at all!

“You see how I shrink from telling about the end! I cannot speak of my growing affection; it is a mystery sacred even to myself! Now and then a halfword from the old postmaster about him. Plenty of letters concerning him from yourself—I say nothing of the letters of his you forwarded; I will love you, darling, as long as I live! — and Mr. Harry Peters was, in his way, the ally of the absent. I stood by him, I remember, one day, where the hands were digging yams; for I stayed in the house as little as possible, was over the whole plantation and in all weather, and took my father, if I could, with me; though time stood still, I must be in motion, or die! ‘See this yam, Miss Agnes,! he said, holding up a potato which was half mud. ‘ Too muddy to touch. Now, see! ’ and he washed it in the bucket of water standing by, with its gourd, for the hands, and then held it up perfectly clean, as beautiful in its way as an orange. ‘ A man may be born,’ Mr. Peters went on to say, ‘ may live all his life in a cypress swamp, and be clean from the mud himself all the time. Father Hailstorm said last Sunday, we will be dug out of the dust one day clean as you please; on the last day, I mean!’ For matters changed after we came, Helen, and Harry is a ‘ shouting disciple ’ now; full and purified opportunity he has, these days, for his singular humor! And, by the bye, in the absence East of good Mr. Parkinson with his bride, it was Father Hailstorm who married us: only Harry Peters and his wife being present, for, with one soul beside, all Brown County must have been invited or mortally insulted at not being ‘ norated ’ to be present!

“ I cannot hasten as I would; my mind came so slowly, in fact, to centre upon him; it was centuries, Helen! But it came, that day, that terrible yet happy day, at last! Aunty Washington’s latest folly, poor soul, was her faith in Dr. Jones. We feared he was experimenting with her as he would have done with a dog. It was on his last visit to her cabin he persisted, I remember, — please have patience with me, Helen,— in telling me how his Dr. Brown of Philadelphia had written to him for specimens of the hair of all the Indians possible, to be put up in quills duly labeled, and he laughed about entering into competition with Indians, themselves too actively engaged already in a collection of human hair! Nonsense, but it all comes back so vividly I must write it to have it out of the way. The negro, he urged, was but a species of beaver; he had the folly to tell me that Aunty Washington need not concern herself about her soul; ‘ Has none,’ he said, ‘ any more,’ he added as he rode off, 1 than any of the rest of us! ’ Pardon my recording such folly.

“ She died before he was out of sight; died, Helen, as true to us and to her old-fashioned religion as any martyr of us all. I was worn out the next day, for she could not endure one of the ‘ colored ladies,’ as she called them, near her when she could help it. I had been beside the dead all night. It was the gloomiest of days. It seemed as if the live-oaks had come yet closer about the house, to droop their mournful moss like crape over the dead. The air itself had halted, as it were. The river ran sullenly through the heavy silence. Except one or two very old negroes tending young turkeys in the yard, all the people were in the field, for Mrs. Peters had gone to her own house with her children for a few hours, after helping me with the dead. It was the deliberatedoing of God, the arrival of such an hour, Helen! I had reached, at that moment, the deepest point of descent into the dark valley. My soul, partly in consequence of my reading about Queen Elizabeth, — the history did me that good, — had reached its strongest strength as by pressure of supreme strain. But the body was failing! It seemed to me I could not bear a straw’s weight more and live.

“It is as if it took place yesterday. About four o’clock that dreadful afternoon I heard a noise! When I heard the front gate open and fall to in the dead silence, I knew it was not my father, for he had ridden to town, for the first time in months, in vague idea of seeing Dr. Jones, though what for he could have told no more than myself! And Dr. Jones need not have fled the county as he afterward did! Every one knew how very heavy, tremulous, feeble my father had grown! God forbid I should ever see that silly young physician again, but I do not think my father could have lasted, if he had not met him, much longer.

“ I was sewing at a white band for poor Aunty Washington, not weeping, too exhausted for that, not thinking, or feeling even; in the condition, I suppose, of the dying during the one moment before entering upon eternal life. The front gate fell to upon its latch, and all my soul returned again as from its lowest ebb! I knew who it was! I was calm, far more so than I am while I write, Helen. In one moment! And during that moment the centuries had rolled away! Were gone forever and ever! I rose and went out upon the porch. I knew him and did not know him as he stood there. On the instant of seeing him it was with me as when you look at an object in a stereoscope, first a blurring as by the slow blending of the two objects which are the same into one. One! It was but a moment, Helen, and the rude countryman of the centuries ago is blended into and forever lost in the noble Christian gentleman of to-day! But an instant, and we were to each other, and forever, as if we had known and loved each other all our lives. Natural! It was so perfectly natural ! As it will be at death to us and our friends in heaven forever, after the first moment or two. Yes, natural as trees and sky and every other daily matter; not rapture, nor astonishment, — simple, sweet nature, and matter of course!

“I acknowledge I do not know how or when we would have first met had it not been as it was. He stood there, his hat in his hand, calm, strong, confident, like some royal duke; don’t smile, Helen! In that one first glance I saw all he had gained during absence; observed, even, the slight band of red upon his brow from the pressure there of his hat.

“ ‘ Please do not be alarmed,’ he said, ‘ but your father needs your care; ’ his manner expressed all the rest. You have heard it over and over again, Helen. My father had met Dr. Alexis Jones on the road coming to our house. I do not know that he said a syllable to exasperate my father when they met. I do not know what my father may have said to him, for he was greatly angered at his treatment of our poor servant; and then he was so shaken and feeble! He had fallen from his horse. Dr. Jones was off his horse too, trying with terrified face, his lancet in his hand, to lift the poor body from the mire, when he rode up from his long absence! It was near the door of Harry Peters’ house, and now, there at our gate, was Mr. Peters’ ambulance, and laid along in it and covered with a blanket, was my last relative on earth—and dead!

“It relieves me to write it, Helen! I was glad when Mr. Peters had gone home to bring his wife back, and he and I were left alone upon one side and the other of the lounge on which they had laid my father. I was not afraid, with him there, to uncover after a while the face of my, and his, dead. You know, Helen, the noble bearing of my father, and now his whole aspect was nobler than ever; the set face of a king throned forever far above the wreck of South, or North, or the world, or —of himself! You know, dear, I never speak upon such matters to any one, but I can write it; could it have been ordered better? The terrible preparation in both of us, my husband and myself, going before; the pain, in my case who needed it most, continued to the last degree I could endure and exist, and then? That when, in my father, my last hope was gone, with my dead father he should come! That, of all the world, he only should be there to aid me with my poor father as with the hands of a son! In the same act, Helen, he had brought me the last of all I had loved most dearly, and the first of all I now love, love, oh how much more! I suppose it will be that way at death; when I let go hereafter my husband’s hand in dying, it will be to clasp, as I do so, the hands again of father, mother, Theodore, in heaven! Is it morbid, my talking so much of death and the other life? You know we do die as well as live, and that there is another world as well as this! and I dare say I will soon grow out of this period of my life, and become worldly enough.

“ I spoke of heaven! I tremble at my happiness, Helen. He has come as [ write, to the gate, riding his horse, leading mine saddled for our afternoon ride to the post-office, over the prairie. I will seal this without reading it and take it with me, for we gallop together every afternoon we can through the pure, bracing wind, to the next town for our mail, the very brooks we leap our horses over sparkling with secrets of the silver and gold below the soil. How my blood bounds, and, he says so, my cheeks glow and my eyes brighten! It is not fever but pure health, even if I laugh so much, have so much of nothing to say! Oh, beautiful world! Oh, beautiful God! My eyes dim with happy tears. God has been, in and by all my pain, too, so very, very good! I have called to him to wait only a moment while I beg of you, Helen, to look through my glad eyes at the glorious landscape in this our new home. Brown plain, glittering river, snowcapped mountains in the distance, atmosphere pure and brilliant and laughing with life. The people, too, are free and strong and impulsive as I am. But what do I care for anything else? There he sits upon his horse at the gate, Helen, in the glory of his pure and magnificent manhood, modest as a woman, wise and good and true! He is going into hard work. It may be at railroads, or mines, or schools, or politics if necessary, — pure and strong enough even for that! — whatever is best. For it is Eden, a new world; for a new man and a new woman! Wo are very happy! I know that it is as natural to our veins, after our long winter, as is its exuberant life, when spring comes to oak and to rose-bush, even if other winters are sure to come hereafter! Strange as it seems to say, part of the solid ground of my happiness is in knowing so well how he will endure calamity when it comes, as in some form it must come to us, too, in the future as in the past; endure it as the cliff of rock endures the sea! No, rather as a child, grown strong enough in virtue of all that has gone before, endures the dealing of one whom he has thoroughly found out to be his personal friend. And next to that other, Helen, I love this man! Love him, Helen, love him, love him! If I could only tell you, not merely write you, how I love him! I love, Helen darling, as I will love my Saviour and him in heaven eternally! Because by these two I have been made all I am. And he believes the same of me, as if my poor hands had ever lifted him from such a cypress swamp as his hands have lifted me! I respect and esteem your admirable husband, my dear; but mine is a grand duke, an emperor ’ ’ —

And here I do sincerely think it is time to stop copying her letters! My nerve fails, and I will hasten, too, to mail all this, before reading it over, to the editor of this magazine, lest Helen should suddenly return and I should never do it at all. It is very hazardous! Besides, the entire venture is out of my line of business altogether. I am not as concerned about the opinions of the reader as I am in reference to what these two ladies will think of my mode of closing this simple narrative. Opinion of the reader? I make no pretense as to my way of relating matters, and what to anybody is the opinion people have of facts? You might as well speak of their opinions about iron or coal or land. Which reminds me to state that I intend to make it convenient to be at our company’s office on Wall Street about the time the final chapters of this narrative are due in Charleston! I am safe, for the present, from the friends in California; unless, indeed, as is sure to be the case sooner or later, I fear, we have him in Congress; in which case there will be one man, at least, staunch as oak in Washington even!

Few readers of this magazine, to close with due solemnity, but must have heard something of the circumstances of this narrative, which got into certain papers both South and North. If we will wait awhile, unless I greatly mistake, we will all of us hear plenty more about him. About him, I mean, and I inscribe it here in no sense as an epitaph, whom I designate in these pages as — MOSE EVANS.

William M. Baker.