Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1875 — AFTER MANY YEARS. [ARTICLE]

AFTER MANY YEARS.

“ Well, darling,” I said, catching her two hands in mine, as we met under the trees in the loveliest corner of the square. I had no other words, and she did not need any. _ “The old story,” looking up at me, just a glance that showed her pretty eyes had been crying. “ I’m —I’m here, Shirley.” J Do you guess what those three words meant ? That Edna Verdery, before the first star looked out of the opal sky up above us, would be my wife. It was the old story, you see—a penniless lover, a true-hearted little woman clinging to her faith, and a parental curse impending over both our heads. I drew her hand tight through my arm, and we walked away very quietly, for she was tired, and the little hand trembled against my side. She only told me that she was not afraid, that she loved me, and she would be glad to rest when it was all. over and we two safe and far away together. And so we went on and were married. Then I took home my wife. It was a poor home, but she was not afraid to sweeten it with herself, and she had said that she was glad to come. She never spoke of her father and mother and never seemed to miss them or regret what she had lost in them. I never should have known that was a grief to her but for one day. She met me when I came home at night, with her face all sparkling and her voice unsteady with excitement, and even before she kissed me cried out: “ I’ve seen my mother!” “ Your mother? Has she been here?” I asked. “Yes! Only think how glad I was—how surprised! She came and she kissed me, and forgave me,” putting her arms around my neck and beginning to cry in her gladness, “and forgave you, too; and she said she couldn’t live and lose her only daughter. Oh, Shirley, it was the only thing more that I wanted on earth! I’m so happy, darling!” “ And your father?”

“He couldn’t be as kind as she was,” said my little wife, with her cheek on mine. “Fathers never are; but she thought—she was sure, she said—that he’d forgive it all, and that she loved me just as much all the time, and it would be all right at last, Shirley. Ohl aren’t you happy, too? Look glad! Tell me you’re glad, dear; you don’t know how I wanted it.” I was glad, for her sake, God knows; for my own, I would never have cared to look on their faces again. But all that was changed now. Mrs. Verdery’s carriage rattled, day after day, down the little dull street and stood at Mrs. Lecompte’s door, and Edna Lecompte was pardoned and petted and caressed as if Edna Verdery had never disobeyed. And then we were asked to dine “at home,” she andl; and the old man greeted us both kindly and kissed his daughter with two tears in his cold eyes, and seemed to bury our old enmity as he shook my hand; and after that night it was all sunshine between us. But I never ceased to feel an odd chill in my heart like a prophecy of something bitter coming between us. Perhaps it was because instead of growing richer since I married a wife I only grew poorer, and the world outside our little room got dark and threatening overhead and seemed only a cold place for my child to inherit. * He came to test its tender mercies just with the early winter and,as he came, Edna was very nigh going out forever She was a delicate little thing and needed so much petting and nursing and tender care that my heart ached, as many a poor man’s has done before me, when I looked in the white little face that had been so rosy when I first took her from her home. And instead of growing stronger she only drooped more, like a flower in the first frost; and the child was as pale as she. There was a season of business losses and heavy failures; firm after firm gave way and men went home idle, and my turn came with the rest. And I knelt down by my wife’s bed, looked into her eyes, and told her and asked her to for,

give me for the wrong I had done in loving her. “ Don’t feel so badly, Shirley,” she whispered, moving her head on my shoulder. “I know I am a burden to you, darling; but I—l can’t wish it undone; we are so happy still—we’ve got each other and baby and such a long life yet for all these little troubles to pass away in! And it can’t last long; you’ll get something better than what you lost. Perhaps it will be the very best thing for us, after all, that you should lose this place and be forced to make a change.” “Perhaps! It’s all a chance,” I said, bitterly, “ and I must sit with my hands tied, and you—Edna, they were right! I was a selfish brute to draw you down to this.” She clasped her arms around my neck and kissed me and stopped my mouth, and we were silent for awhile and the room grew dark in the twilight. “ Shirley,” she said softly, at last, “ would you let my father help you?” “ What do you mean?” “ Mamma asked me a month ago if you would leave New Orleans and take a position in my uncle’s house in New York. I never told you, because—she wanted me to come home then, Shirley, and let you go alone, and I couldn’t.” “ Go home!” I gathered her closer—the baby in her arms, too. “ Child, has it come to that?” “ No,” she whispered softly. “ Itnever will. I’ll go with you there, or anywhere else on earth, Shirley.” “Is it too late to take the offer now?” I asked, starting up. “ Why do you ask if I’ll let him help me, Edna? Better that than taking his alms, God knows, and I’ve done that so long. What is this place? Child, I’d almost beg at the street corners for you if that was all!” “Will you go and see papa?” she cried, lighting up all over her wasted little face. “ I don’t know about it, only that mamma said there might be an opening for you, and it would be much better than your old place, and papa would use his influence for you. Will you go, Shirley?” “Yes, I will!” I said, stooping down to kiss her. Something was dragging me back all the while—holding me fast to the bedside, within touch of her little, hot hand and hearing of my baby’s sleepy-soft breath but I didn’t heed it. I was desperate, and her eyes drove me out into the world to struggle with it and win for her sake —and I went. So the end of it was that letters went back and forth, and in two weeks from the day that I was discharged from my clerkship I was engaged by the New York house of which Mr. Verdery’s brother was head, at a salary that would keep Edna safe all the winter far enough out of the reach of want or the need of alms. Only—it was a desperate man’s resources, you know—she must be in New Orleans while I was in New York. A winter at the North, they said, would kill her, and I must not dream of taking her away until she was thoroughly well again. This was the way it happened. They were so glad to take her back; they had “ forgiven” her so entirely and wanted her so, and they were so fond of little Shirley I ought to have been willing and glad to leave them both in such tender care. I was neither, but I knew it was my duty to give her up and I did it I kissed her good-by at the last and dragged myself away from her arms, that tried to hold me back even then, and the last glimpse I had of wife or child was a little, slender figure at an open window, halfburied in white, soft wrappings, holding up a baby, who laughed and sprang in her arms, and whose little hand she tried to wave to me.

Then came the lonely winter at the North—the silent starvation of my heart through nights and days, the longing impatience, hope. It only lasted a little while. I knew I should have her in the spring, in a home of our own that I had planned already. Itjvas in March when her letters, which had "come faithfully all winter on their stated days, failed suddenly. A week went by without a message from New Orleans ; and when it came at last it was written in another hand. It was a long letter, but I never read it through. I only read three lines. That told me that she was dead, that my baby was buried in her arms. The yellowfever had broken out in the city and my two were among the first to go; her parents had left New Orleans, and before their letters reached me would have sailed for England.

Sb I never saw the little, white-wrapped figure and the laughing baby any more. I never saw either of their parents again. It was better for tre all, Mr. Verdery had said, that the intercourse should cease with Edna’s and the child’s death; and, God knows, I felt so, too. So I lived on in New York alone, and rose in the firm, traveled, and tnade money ; and wandered from city to city, at last successful in everything that I touched, without a trouble or anxiety in life—only the burden of my empty heart. I was thirty years old when my darling died ; I had plenty more years to live, and death was still a long way off. People called me a young man still, after my hair was very gray, and I seemed to have grown old and tired down to my heart’s core. And the years went by wearily; and I was forty-eight, and my hair was white. It was at Fleming’s House that ! met Harriet Stanhope. She was a cousin of his wife’s and an attractive woman—-not a girl. The sort of woman whom everyone calls interesting; clever and cultivated to the utmost; sweet-natured and adapted and good, with even more than a woman’s share of tact. J had not known her very long before I

could talk to her of the story that she knew already, and tell her about the day when I looked back and saw the little figure in the'window holding up my child for me to see. Well, you have guessed already, I suppose, at the end of this beginning. I never loved Harriet Stanhope—never. But it came to me slowly at first, and very reluctantly, and then with a great shock, that this woman cared for me. And I began to think of the possibility of her taking—in men’s eyes at least and to outward seeming—Edna’s empty place. She was lonely, too, as I was, with no near relatives, no home, and a sorrowfill outlook before her. I never could bear the sight of a solitary and uncared-for 'woman, and this woman touched all my pity and sympathy. I gave her that and my friendship most freely and sincerely, and that was all. But I began to think that even without love life might be sweetened a little, and so I said to myself that I would marry her. I did not resolve hastily. I had known her for two years before I had thought of it at all, and then it was long before the idea took a definite shape. I was traveling in the West, and one of the letters meeting me at a large town in Ohio decided the last doubt that was in my mind. I read it twice and then walked the floor all night, and lived my life over in memory and reached far into the future to plan out what it would be—what it must be if God preserved it—and then I sat down to write to Harriet. It was only natural that I should dream that night of Edna. She came to me at dawn and stood by the bedside with the child—my son, who bore my name and was so like me. And she told me that she had never died at all, but had been waiting for me all these years, and God had kept her young, and the baby was a baby yet—only he would call me “ father,” and the word was ringing in my ears when I woke. I thought of her while dressing, and I went down-stairs at last, the letter in my breast-pocket sealed and directed to Harriet, and was dreaming of a woman older and fairer than she, when into my dream stole a voice and the sound of my own name. “Is everything ready, Shirley, dear?” I looked up. There were two people at the little round table nearest mine—a lady, quietly dressed, as if for traveling, io black, without a touch of color, and a straight, broad-shouldered stripling, with a young face and eyes like hers. I knew they were mother and son before he answered her. “All ready. The train starts in an hour. You’ve got nothing at all to do, Madame Mere, but to sit and read a novel or look out of the window till I call you.” And then they laughed together. She had a girlish sac yet it was a sorrowful one, too. Her eyes were brown. I looked into them, and all my youthtime looked back again; and I saw the old house, in the old street in New Orleans, and the face in the window, and heard the baby hands patting on the panes. Only two brow eyes and a sweet voice and a man’s name spoken softly to call up all that witchery ? She arose from the table almost tha minute. “ I don’t want the strawberries, Shirley. I’m going up to my room, and, if you want to read a novel, you must run out and get me one. I’ve packed everything and I want some light reading for the cars.”

Her dress was sweeping by my chair as she spoke, and stirring my senses—fast asleep so long—-came a soft, violet scent. I was going mad, I believe. As if no woman but Edna Lecompte had ever used that faint, subtle perfume ! I started up and strode out of the din-ing-room, following those two, and saw the mother go up the stair-case—a slight, daintily-moving little figure, with a touch of girlish grace in it still—while the son passed on before me to the office of the hotel. He went and leaned over the desk and spoke to the clerk, in hischeery, fresh voice; and I stood near him, turning the leaves of the hotel register. “ Mrs. Shirley Lecompte.” “ Shirley Lecompte, New York city.” I turned and put my two hands on his shoulders. I could have taken him to my heart and kissed the child-likeness of his face, but I did not say one word for a minute, while he flashed his brown eyes on me with a half-angry little frown. “Are you Shirley Lecompte’s son? Where—where is your father?” “My father is dead. That was his name.” Looking straight into my face. And then I dropped my hands. “ I was yoUr father’s friend, my boy. I —I can see his looks in you; and your mother. Will you take me to your mother, Shirley?”

Well, I have forgiven him—the man who stole the sweetness out of life for me; he is dead and buried, and Edna Is alive. Twenty years ago a forged letter told her that she was a widow, and the old man and his wife had their daughter back again; twenty years she kept her life sacred to my memory, and loved me in her child, and waited for another world to give her into my arms again. She told it all to me that day—a long, long story; but this was the sum of it I was dead and was alive again—was lost and was found. And my life had its aim and crown, even so late; my love blossomed new, and my heart warmed, fireshed with the old dead fires—we were happy, Edna and I. Out of the baby’s grave rose my strong, manly son to carry my name in honor and pride; it will have a nobler meaning when I am gone than ever it had in the past— Rural New Yorker. Evbry writer of a newspaper article in Japan has to sign hit fall Maw to it.