Aftermath

My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen that I should have forborne returning to the arbor had I not felt assured that she must have escaped to the house through modesty and sheer shame. But she had not budged.

"I blush for you, Sylvia!" I exclaimed. "I know all about that fellow! He shouldn't kiss—my old cat!"

"I don't see what you have to do with it!" said Sylvia, placidly. "And I have waited to tell you that I hope you will never interrupt me again when I am engaged in entertaining a young gentleman."

"Sylvia, my dear child!" I said, gravely, sitting down beside her.

"How old are you?"

"I am of the proper age to manage my own affairs," said Sylvia, "with the assistance of my immediate family."

"Well, I don't think you are," I replied. "And since your brother is at West Point, there is one thing that I am going to take the liberty of telling you, which the other members of your family may not fully understand. If you were younger, Sylvia, you might do a good deal of this and not be hurt by it; or you might not be hurt by it if you were a good deal older; but at your age it is terrible; in time it will affect your character."

"How old must I be?" said Sylvia, wickedly.

"Well, in your case," I replied, warmly, a little nettled by her tone, "you'd better abstain altogether."

"And in your case?" said Sylvia.

"You never mind my case!" I retorted.

"But I do mind it when I suffer by it," said Sylvia. "I do mind it if it's going to affect my character!"

"You know very well, Sylvia," I replied, "that I never kissed you but three times, and then as a brother."

"I do not wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way," said Sylvia, with a pout of contempt.

It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia's powers of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent men—and as to the way that different men would try to act with her.

I had been talking to her in a low tone I do not know how long. Her ill-nature had quickly vanished; she was, in her way, provoking, charming. I was sitting close to her. The moonlight played upon her daring, wilful face through the leaves of the grape-vines. It was unpremeditated; my nature was, most probably, unstrung at the instant by ungratified longings for Georgiana; but suddenly I bent down and kissed her.

Instantly both Sylvia and I started from the seat. How long Georgiana had been standing in the entrance to the arbor I do not know. She may that instant have come. But there she was, dressed in white—pure, majestic, with the moon shining behind her, and shedding about her the radiance of a heavenly veil.

"Come, Sylvia," she said, with perfect sweetness; and, bidding me good-night with the same gentlewoman's calm, she placed her arm about the child's waist, and the two sisters passed slowly and silently out of my garden.

At that moment, if I could have squeezed myself into the little screech-owl perched in a corner of the arbor, I would gladly have crept into the hollow of an oak and closed my eyes. Still, how was I to foresee what I should do? A man's conversation may be his own; his conduct may vibrate with the extinct movements of his ancestors.

Georgiana's behavior then was merely the forerunner of larger marvels. For next morning I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman's inability to understand Man and Man's inability to understand Himself, and set it under her window. It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch's nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich egg. All day I waited with a heart as silent as a great clock run down; my system of philosophy swung dead in the air. To my tortured vision as I eyed it secretly from my porch, it took on the semblance of one of Sylvia's poetical potatoes, and I found myself urging in its behalf Sylvia's fondest epithets: "how homely, yet how beautiful," "little thought of, but very necessary," "unostentatious, but of lovely internal appearance."

Towards sunset I took it sadly down. On top of the nest lay Georgiana's old scarlet emery-bag stuck full of her needles! She had divined what all the writing meant and would not have it. Instead she sent me this emblem not only of her forgiveness but of her surrender. When a man expects a woman to scold him and she does not, he either gets to be a little afraid of her morally or he wants to take her in his arms. Henceforth, if Georgiana were removed to another planet, I would rather worship her there simply as my evening or morning star than coexist with any earthly woman. One thought besets me: did she realize that perhaps she herself was the cause of my misdemeanors with Sylvia? Has she the penetration to discover that when a woman is engaged to a man she cannot deny him all things except at her own peril?

This proof of her high-mindedness and the enchanting glimpses of her face that she has vouchsafed me since, goaded me yesterday morning to despatch a reckless note: "Will you come to the arbor for a little while tonight? I have never dared ask this before, but you know how I have desired it. It is so much more private there. Write on the back of this paper one word, 'Yes.' There is a pencil in the nest."

The shutters were nearly closed, but I caught sight of the curve of a shoulder and the movement of a busy hand. As I pushed the note up I said:

"Read it at once. I am waiting."

A hand came out and took in the note, then the pencil; then note and pencil were put back. On the former was written, "Yes."

I think I must have done a dozen things in five minutes, and then I started aimlessly off to town. On the way I met Georgiana.

"Good God, Georgiana!" I exclaimed. "You here!"

"Where else?" said she. "And why not?"

"I thought I just saw you at the window—" And then my awful soul within me said: "H-sh-sh-sh! Not a word of this to a human being!"

After supper last night I called old Jack and Dilsy into the garden, and led them around it, giving orders; thence to the arbor, where I bade them sit down.

In the year of 1805 Mr. Jefferson, as president of the Philosophical Society, ordered excavations to be made at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky for the skeletons of extinct animals. My father, who was interested in antiquities, had had much correspondence with Mr. Jefferson in regard to earlier discoveries at that spot; and when this expedition was undertaken he formed one of the explorers. Jack, his servant, at that time a strapping young fellow, had been taken along as one of the negroes who were to do the digging.

The wonders then unearthed have always been the greenest spot in old Jack's memory; so that they have been growing larger ever since. Whenever I wish to hear him discourse with the dogmatic bluster of a sage who had original information as to geological times, I set Jack to talking about the bones of the Mastodon-Maximus, the name of which he gets from me, with a puzzled shake of his head, about regularly once a year. It is my private opinion that old Jack believes Big Bone Lick to have been the place where the Ark settled, and these to have been the bones of animals that had been swept out by Noah on landing.

Last night I had merely to ask him whether he credited the story of an old traveller that he had once used some ribs found there for his tent-poles and a tooth for his hominy beater; whereupon Dilsy, foreseeing what was coming, excused herself on the plea of sudden rheumatism and went to bed, as I wished she should.

The hinges on the little private gate under Georgiana's window I keep rusty; this enables me to note when any one enters my garden. By-and-by I heard the hinges softly creak, whereupon I feigned not to believe what Jack was telling me; whereupon he fell into an harangue of such affectionate and sustained vehemence that when the hinges creaked again I was never able to determine. Was ever such usage made before of an antediluvian monster?

To-day the sewing-girl thrust out spiteful faces at me several times.

She is the one that helped Georgiana last year when she was making her wedding-clothes to marry the West Point cousin. God keep him safely in the distance, or guide him firmly to the van of war! How does a woman feel when she is making her wedding-clothes for the second time and for another man? I know very well how the other man feels. Upon my urging Georgiana to marry me at once—nature does not recognize engagements; they are a device of civilization—she protested:

"But I must get ready! Think of the sewing!"

"Oh, bother!" I grumbled. "Where are all those clothes that you made last year?"

How was I to suppose that Georgiana must have everything made over as part of her feeling for me? I would not decree it otherwise; yet I question whether this delicacy may not impose reciprocal obligations, and remove from my life certain elements of abiding comfort. What if it should engender a prejudice against my own time-worn acquaintances—the familiars of my fireside? It might be justifiable sagacity in me to keep them locked up for the first year or so after Georgiana and I become a diune being; and, upon the whole, she should never know what may have been the premarital shortcomings of my wardrobe as respects things unseen. No matter how well a bachelor may appear dressed, there is no telling what he conceals upon his person. I feel sure that the retrospective discovery of a ravelling would somehow displease Georgiana as a feature of our courtship. Nature is very stringent here, very guarded, truly universal. Invariably the young men of my day grow lavish in the use of unguents when they are preparing for natural selection; and I flatter myself that even my own garments—in their superficial aspects at least, and during my long pursuit of Georgiana—have not been very far from somewhat slightly ingratiating.

This pursuit is now drawing to a close. It is nearly the last of June. She has given me her word that she will marry me early in September. Two months for her to get the bridal feathers ready; two for me to prepare the nest.

II

I have forgotten nature. I barely know that July, now nearly gone, has passed, sifted with sweetness and ablaze with light. Time has swept on, the world run round; but I have stood motionless, abiding the hour of my marriage as a tree the season of its leaves. For all that it looks so calm, within goes on a tremendous surging of sap against its moments of efflorescence.

After which I pray that, not as a tree, but as a man, I may have a little peace. When Georgiana confessed her love, I had supposed this confession to mark the end of her elusiveness. When later on she presented to me the symbol of a heart pierced with needles, I had taken it for granted that thenceforth she would settle down into something like a state of prenuptial domestication, growing less like a swift and more like a hen. But there is nothing gallinaceous about my Georgiana. I took possession of her vow and the emery-ball, not of her; the privilege was merely given to plant my flag-staff on the uncertain edge of an unknown land. In war it sometimes becomes necessary to devastate a whole country in order to control a single point: I should be pleased to learn what portion of the earth's surface I am required to subdue ere I shall hold one little citadel.

As for me, Georgiana requires that I shall be a good deal like an old rock jutting out of the quiet earth: never ruffled, never changing either on the surface or at heart, bearing whatever falls upon me, be it frost or sun, and warranted to waste away only by a sort of impersonal disintegration at the rate of half an inch to the thousand years. Meantime she exacts for herself the privilege of dwelling near as the delighted cave of the winds. The part of wisdom in me then is not to heed each sallying gust, but to capture the cave and drive the winds away.

For I know in whom I have believed; I know that this myriad caprice is but the deepening of excitement on the verge of captivity; I know that on ahead lie the regions of perpetual calm—my Islands of the Blest.

Georgiana does not play upon the pianoforte; or, as Mrs. Walters would declare, she does not perform upon the instrument. Sylvia does; she performs, she executes. There are times when she will execute a piece called "The Last Hope" until the neighbors are filled with despair and ready to stretch their heads on the block to any more merciful executioner. Nor does Georgiana sing to company in the parlor. That is Sylvia's gift; and upon the whole it was this unmitigated practice in the bosom—and in the ears—of her family that enabled Sylvia to shine with such vocal effulgence in the procession on the last Fourth of July and devote a pair of unflagging lungs to the service of her country.

But Georgiana I have never known to sing except at her sewing and alone, as the way of women often is. During a walk across the summer fields my foot has sometimes paused at the brink of a silvery runlet, and I have followed it backward in search of the spring. It may lead to the edge of a dark wood; thence inward deeper and deeper; disappearing at last in a nook of coolness and shadow, green leaves and mystery. The overheard rill of Georgiana's voice issues from inner depths of being that no human soul has ever visited, or perhaps will ever visit. What would I not give to thread my way, bidden and alone, to that far region of uncaptured loveliness?

Of late some of the overhead lullabies have touched me inexpressibly. They beat upon my ear like the musical reveries of future mother hood—they betoken in Georgiana's maidenhood the dreaming unrest of the maternal.

One morning not long ago, with a sort of pitiful gayety, her song ran in the wise of saying how we should gather our rose-buds while we may. The warning could not have been addressed to me; I shall gather mine while I may—the unrifled rose of Georgiana's life, body and spirit.

Naturally she and I have avoided the subject of the Cardinal. But to the tragedy of his death was joined one circumstance of such coarse and brutal unconcern that it had left me not only remorseful but resentful. As we sat together the other evening, after one of those silences that fall unregarded between us, I could no longer forbear to face an understanding.