"Yes"," she had said, "I shall go softly all my years."
The plants she had brought that summer from Virginia had long since become
old bushes. The Virginia Creeper had climbed to the tops of the trees. The
garden, though in the same spot, was another place now, with vine-heavy
arbours and sodden walks running between borders of flowers and
vegetables--daffodils and thyme--in the quaint Virginia fashion. There was a
lawn covered as the ancestral one had been with the feathery grass of
England. There was a park where the deer remained at home in their
wilderness.
Crowning this landscape of comfort and good taste, stood the house. Often of
nights when its roof lay deep under snow and the eaves were bearded with
hoary icicles, there were candles twinkling at every window and the sounds
of music and dancing in the parlours. Once a year there was a great venison
supper in the dining-room, draped with holly and mistletoe. On Christmas eve
man a child's sock or stocking was hung--no one knew when or by whom--around
the shadowy chimney-seat of her room; and every Christmas morning the little
negros from the cabins knew to whom each of these belonged. In spring,
parties of young girls and youths came out from town for fishing parties and
picknicked in the lawn amid the dandelions and under the song of the
blackbird; during the summer, for days at a time, other gay company filled
the house; of autumns there were nutting parties in the russet woods. Other
guests also, not young, not gay. Aaron Burr was entertained there; there met
for counsel the foremost Western leaders in his magnificent conspiracy. More
than one great man of his day, middle-aged, unmarried, began his visits,
returned oftener for awhile--always alone--and one day drove away
disappointed.
Through seasons and changes she had gone softly: never retreating from life
but drawing about her as closely as she could its ties, its sympathies, it
duties: in all things a character of the finest equipois, the truest
moderation.
But these are women of the world--some of us men may have discerned one of
them in the sweep of our experiences--to whom the joy and the sorrow come
alike with quietness. For them there is neither the cry of sudden delight
nor the cry of sudden anguish. Gazing deep into their eyes, we are reminded
of the light of dim churches; hearing their voices, we dream of some
minstrel whose murmurs reach us imperfectly through his fortress wall;
beholding the sweetness of their faces, we are touched as by the appeal of
the mute flowers; merely meeting them in the street, we recall the
long-vanished image of the Divine Goodess. They are the women who have
missed happiness and who know it, but having failed of affection, give
themselves to duty. And so life never rises high and close about them as
about one who stands waist-deep in a wheat-field, gathering at will either
its poppies or its sheaves; it flows forever away as from one who pauses
waist-deep in a stream and hearkens rather to the rush of all things toward
the eternal deeps. It was into the company of theses quieter pilgrims that
she had passed: she had missed happiness twice.