EARLY FRIENDS
Where are they?
Where are they? I can not sit now, as once, upon the edge of the brook hour after hour, flinging off my line and hook to the nibbling roach, and reckon it great sport. There is no girl with auburn ringlets to sit beside me and to play upon the bank. The hours are shorter than they were then; and the little joys that furnished boyhood till the heart was full can fill it no longer. Poor Tray is dead long ago, and he can not swim into the pools for the floating sticks; nor can I sport with him hour after hour and think it happiness. The mound that covers his grave is sunken, and the trees that shaded it are broken and mossy.
Little Lilly is grown into a woman, and is married; and she has another little Lilly, with flaxen hair, she says—looking as she used to look. I dare say the child is pretty; but it is not my Lilly. She has a little boy, too, that she calls Paul—a chubby rogue, she writes, and as mischievous as ever I was. God bless the boy!
Ben—who would have liked to ride in the coach that carried me away to school—has had a great many rides since then—rough rides, and hard ones, over the road of life. He does not rake up the falling leaves for bonfires, as he did once; he is grown a man, and is fighting his way somewhere in our western world, to the short-lived honors of time. He was married not long ago; his wife I remembered as one of my playmates at my first school; she was beautiful, but fragile as a leaf. She died within a year of their marriage. Ben was but four years my senior; but this grief has made him ten years older. He does not say it, but his eye and his figure tell it.
The nurse who put the purse in my hand that dismal morning is grown a feeble old woman. She was over fifty then; she may well be seventy now. She did not know my voice when I went to see her the other day, nor did she know my face at all. She repeated the name when I told it to her—Paul, Paul—she did not remember any Paul, except a little boy, a long while ago.
—“To whom you gave a purse when he went away, and told him to say nothing to Lilly or to Ben?”
—“Yes, that Paul”—says the old woman exultingly—“do you know him?”
And when I told her—“She would not have believed it!” But she did, and took hold of my hand again (for she was blind), and then smoothed down the plaits of her apron, and jogged her cap strings, to look tidy in the presence of “the gentleman.” And she told me long stories about the old house and how other people came in afterward; and she called me “sir” sometimes, and sometimes “Paul.” But I asked her to say only Paul; she seemed glad for this, and talked easier, and went on to tell of my old playmates, and how we used to ride the pony—poor Jacko!—and how we gathered nuts—such heaping piles; and how we used to play at fox and geese through the long winter evenings; and how my poor mother would smile—but here I asked her to stop. She could not have gone on much longer, for I believe she loved our house and people better than she loved her own.
As for my uncle, the cold, silent man, who lived with his books in the house upon the hill, and who used to frighten me sometimes with his look, he grew very feeble after I had left, and almost crazed. The country people said that he was mad; and Isabel, with her sweet heart, clung to him, and would lead him out, when his step tottered, to the seat in the garden, and read to him out of the books he loved to hear. And sometimes, they told me, she would read to him some letters that I had written to Lilly or to Ben, and ask him if he remembered Paul, who saved her from drowning under the tree in the meadow? But he could only shake his head and mutter something about how old and feeble he had grown.
They wrote me afterward that he died, and was buried in a far-away place, where his wife once lived, and where he now sleeps beside her. Isabel was sick with grief, and came to live for a time with Lilly; but when they wrote me last she had gone back to her old home—where Tray was buried—where we had played together so often through the long days of summer.
I was glad I should find her there when I came back. Lilly and Ben were both living nearer to the city when I landed from my long journey over the seas; but still I went to find Isabel first. Perhaps I had heard so much oftener from the others that I felt less eager to see them; or perhaps I wanted to save my best visits to the last; or perhaps (I did think it), perhaps I loved Isabel better than them all.
So I went into the country, thinking all the way how she must have changed since I left. She must be now nineteen or twenty; and then her grief must have saddened her face somewhat; but I thought I should like her all the better for that. Then perhaps she would not laugh and tease me, but would be quieter, and wear a sweet smile—so calm and beautiful, I thought. Her figure, too, must have grown more elegant, and she would have more dignity in her air.
I shuddered a little at this, for, I thought, she will hardly think so much of me then; perhaps she will have seen those whom she likes a great deal better. Perhaps she will not like me at all; yet I knew very well that I should like her.
I had gone up almost to the house; I had passed the stream where we fished on that day, many years before; and I thought that now, since she was grown to womanhood, I should never sit with her there again, and surely never drag her as I did out of the water, and never chafe her little hands, and never, perhaps, kiss her, as I did when she sat upon my mother’s lap—oh, no—no—no!
I saw where we buried Tray, but the old slab was gone; there was no ribbon there now. I thought that at least Isabel would have replaced the slab, but it was a wrong thought. I trembled when I went up to the door, for it flashed upon me that perhaps Isabel was married. I could not tell why she should not; but I knew it would make me uncomfortable to hear that she had.
There was a tall woman who opened the door; she did not know me, but I recognized her as one of the old servants. I asked after the housekeeper first, thinking I would surprise Isabel. My heart fluttered somewhat, thinking that she might step in suddenly herself—or perhaps that she might have seen me coming up the hill. But even then I thought she would hardly know me.
Presently the housekeeper came in, looking very grave; she asked if the gentleman wished to see her.
The gentleman did wish it, and she sat down on one side of the fire—for it was autumn, and the leaves were falling, and the November winds were very chilly.
—Shall I tell her—thought I—who I am, or ask at once for Isabel? I tried to ask, but it was hard for me to call her name; it was very strange, but I could not pronounce it at all.
“Who, sir?” said the housekeeper, in a tone so earnest that I rose at once and crossed over and took her hand. “You know me,” said I—“you surely remember Paul?”
She started with surprise, but recovered herself and resumed the same grave manner. I thought I had committed some mistake, or been in some way cause of offense. I called her madame, and asked for—Isabel.
She turned pale, terribly pale. “Bella?” said she.
“Yes. Bella.”
“Sir—Bella is dead!”
I dropped into my chair. I said nothing. The housekeeper—bless her kind heart!—slipped noiselessly out. My hands were over my eyes. The winds were sighing outside, and the clock ticking mournfully within.
I did not sob, nor weep, nor utter any cry.
The clock ticked mournfully, and the winds were sighing; but I did not hear them any longer; there was a tempest raging within me that would have drowned the voice of thunder.
It broke at length in a long, deep sigh—“Oh, God!”—said I. It may have been a prayer—it was not an imprecation.
Bella—sweet Bella, was dead! It seemed as if with her half the world were dead—every bright face darkened—every sunshine blotted out—every flower withered—every hope extinguished!
I walked out into the air and stood under the trees where we had played together with poor Tray—where Tray lay buried. But it was not Tray I thought of, as I stood there, with the cold wind playing through my hair and my eyes filling with tears. How could she die? Why was she gone? Was it really true? Was Isabel indeed dead—in her coffin—buried? Then why should anybody live? What was there to live for, now that Bella was gone?
Ah, what a gap in the world is made by the death of those we love! It is no longer whole, but a poor half-world, that swings uneasy on its axis and makes you dizzy with the clatter of its wreck!
The housekeeper told me all—little by little, as I found calmness to listen. She had been dead a month; Lilly was with her through it all; she died sweetly, without pain, and without fear—what can angels fear? She had spoken often of “Cousin Paul;” she had left a little packet for him, but it was not there; she had given it into Lilly’s keeping.
Her grave, the housekeeper told me, was only a little way off from her home—beside the grave of a brother who died long years before. I went there that evening. The mound was high and fresh. The sods had not closed together, and the dry leaves caught in the crevices and gave a ragged and a terrible look to the grave. The next day I laid them all smooth—as we had once laid them on the grave of Tray; I clipped the long grass, and set a tuft of blue violets at the foot, and watered it all with—tears. The homestead, the trees, the fields, the meadows, in the windy November, looked dismally. I could not like them again—I liked nothing but the little mound that I had dressed over Bella’s grave. There she sleeps now—the sleep of death!