Part 25 (2/2)

”It was not strange,” they said; and Aunt Elsie added, steadying her voice for the girl's sake, ”It was better so; the kindest way it could have come.”

It was a wonderful night. The first snow of the season had fallen while the old man lay dying, and now the moon shone out with a still, white glory, in which all the world lay new and clean. In the orchard beyond her window some boughs of trees, cut by the saw of the pruner and not yet gathered from the ground, lay glistening like great branches of coral; and the old stone wall had been builded anew, touched with masonry of silver. Strange how every detail of the scene swept in upon the girl, as she stood there looking out upon it, wide-eyed and silent!

It was a picture in which her thoughts would frame themselves again and again in the years that were coming, when the solemn moods of life should bring her face to face with the things of the soul. And in that clearness and stillness, things which had puzzled her grew plain, and she knew her own heart as she had not known it before. She could not have explained how it came; but before that great reality of death, the unrealities of life slipped noiselessly away. The things which had been of the surface fell off, and the needs, the loves, that were deepest only were left. To have seen them once in that clear light was to know them for what they were, and she could not afterward forget.

They sent word to Stella in the morning, and late that night Tom brought her from the station. She had not loved her grandfather as Esther had-she had not so enjoyed his companions.h.i.+p; but the knowledge that he was gone brought tears and genuine sorrow.

”Dear old grandfather!” she said, looking down at the still face. ”How we shall miss him! It won't seem like home with him gone.” And then she drew her mother away to talk over the details of the event that was coming. There must be no flowers about his coffin, only one long beautiful sheaf of wheat; and she would have no c.r.a.pe on the door, only a branch of evergreen from the woods he had planted, with a sprig of myrtle.

It was at the church that the last services were held. The rooms at the old house could not have contained the throng that gathered to do him honor. He had been a diligent attendant at funerals himself, and had been frankly in favor of extended remarks on the character of the deceased, even though the custom put the preacher to sore straits sometimes, when the virtues of the departed were not too many or luminous.

Indeed, he had been known to excuse the preacher under such circ.u.mstances for blinking the facts a little. At least he had called the attention of captious critics to that funeral lament of David's, in which he distinctly alluded to a very persistent persecutor of his as ”lovely and pleasant,”-language which, to tell the truth, had really seemed to Ruel Saxon a little excessive, and had led him to wonder at times what the generous psalmist would have done if he had not been able to couple Saul's name with Jonathan's.

There was no lack of words at his own funeral, words spoken with impressive earnestness and warmth, and it was a tribute to the wide regard in which Ruel Saxon was held that not only the minister of his own church, but others from towns around, begged the privilege of a part in the service.

”He would have liked it if he had been there; it was a funeral after his own heart,” Stella said, talking it over that evening with Esther. She drew a long soft sigh, and added, ”I declare I can't realize yet that it was actually grandfather himself. He was trying sometimes, but never tiresome; and life will lose part of its spice here at home, with him gone out of it.”

Esther did not reply. Somehow she could not talk about things which were close to her heart in the cool way Stella could. After a little silence the latter said: ”You'll go to Boston with me, of course, when I go back. I shall stay at home long enough to get things settled for mother, and there'll be no need of either of us staying after that.”

”Stella,” said Esther, speaking very quietly, ”I suppose you'll think it's strange, but I've decided not to go to Boston.” The other started, and she went on hurriedly, ”I should like to be with _you_, and I know there'd be a great deal to enjoy, but grandfather's dying has changed everything for the present, and honestly, there's nothing I want now so much as to be at home.”

For a minute Stella seemed too much surprised to speak. Then she said, with a peculiar look at her cousin, ”There's somebody besides me who'll be dreadfully disappointed if you don't come.”

Esther returned the look without flinching, though her color rose a little. ”If you mean Mr. Hadley,” she said, ”I should be very sorry to think he'd care much, and truly I don't think he would; at least not after the very first. I shall write to him. I must; for he sent such kind messages to grandfather, and he'd want to know how it all was at the last. I think he'll understand how I feel. I can't quite explain it, but it's home and the home people I want. There's nothing here now that I care for as I care for them.”

Stella's eyes were on the floor, and she did not raise them as she said, after a long pause, ”I don't quite make you out, Esther, but you are an awfully nice girl. I wish it wasn't so far between here and Indiana.”

”I shall never think it's far after this,” said Esther, giving her cousin's hand a little squeeze. And then she added cheerfully, ”Don't you think it would be nice to give Mr. Hadley one of grandfather's old books? There are some of them, you know, that are really very curious, and he's so fond of those rare old things. I'll tell him that you've taken one for him; I believe it would please him.”

She had more misgiving as to how Aunt Katharine would receive the news of her changed intention, but not from her either did she meet any entreaties. The old woman seemed strangely broken by her brother's death. It was she beyond all others who had been stricken. An apathy which was wholly new had settled upon her, and was only shaken off at moments when she talked of him.

”I thought he'd outlive me by years,” she said to Esther. ”I always twitted him with thinking that he was so much smarter than the rest of us; but he was, and I used to think, as he did, that he might live to see his hundred years. I don't know why he shouldn't have had 'em.” And then she added, with a quaver in her voice: ”I wish I'd spoke up when he said what he did the day I came in. I've riled him too, sometimes, when I needn't, but it took me so by surprise that I couldn't answer then.

All I could think of was that he was going to die.” She drew a long sigh, and ended, ”You must do as you think best, child, about going home. I don't blame you any for changing your plans.”

She went back to her own house the day after the funeral, in spite of Aunt Elsie's entreaty that she should stay. ”It's good of you, Elsie,”

she said, with a shake of her head, ”and I guess I could live with you as easy as I could with anybody; but I should miss him more here than I should anywhere else, and I'd rather be in my own place.”

They let her go, but Aunt Elsie said the last word with affectionate earnestness, as she pa.s.sed out at the door: ”Don't be sick or in any kind of trouble without letting us know. I'll do for you there just as willingly as here if you should happen to need me.”

Three days later Esther was gone too. She took a silent farewell of her grandfather's room, looked long from the windows at the hills she had come to love so much and stepped out of the family circle like a daughter of the house whose place no one else would ever quite fill.

Stella went with her to the depot, and their hands unclasped reluctantly when the last moment came. There were thoughts which neither whispered to the other, and they wondered as they looked in each other's eyes whether the time would ever come when they could fully tell them, but Esther understood best what the silence held.

It was that other day over again when she came home to her own, but the welcome lacked something of the boisterous gladness which had greeted Kate, and the mother's smile was full of tears as she clasped the girl in her arms. No one, not even Mrs. Northmore, understood exactly why she had given up the Boston plan. The grandfather's going away, in the fullness of his ripe old age, hardly seemed a reason why she should relinquish pleasures which had looked so bright, and an opportunity which had meant so much to her. However, they were all most heartily glad to have her at home again, especially Kate, and the latter felt a little foolish, remembering that morning at Aunt Katharine's, when it appeared from Esther's report that the old woman had not objected at all to her giving up the engagement which she had believed to be planned with such deep and deadly designs. Really, it seemed that she had lashed herself up to that affair and been disagreeable on quite gratuitous grounds. She admitted it, to herself, with her usual frankness, and thanked her stars, in a strictly private manner, that no one but Aunt Katharine and herself knew it, save Tom.

To Mrs. Northmore, watching Esther thoughtfully by the steady light of mother-love, it seemed that the girl had found real value in the summer.

She seemed somehow older, looking at things more quietly, and with a leisure from herself which, in spite of her ready sympathy for others, had too often been wanting in the past. It was an aid against the restlessness which might have come when a sudden vacancy in one of the Rushmore schools brought her at Christmas an unexpected offer of the position. She accepted it with her mother's quick consent, doing good work and enjoying it, as well as the pay that came with it. Indeed, as she carried home her check at the end of each month, she was impressed more than ever with the soundness of certain views of Aunt Katharine's on the moral value of earning and owning. She wrote to the latter repeatedly, and once Aunt Katharine replied; but she was not fond of her pen, and the letter, though affectionate, was brief.

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