University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
THE NINTH OF AUGUST.

THE 9th of August, 18—. Many people will
remember the day as the occasion of the
angriest and most destructive thunder-shower
known, either in Atlas or in the region round
about, for several years on either side of the
date.

A few — residents of Gower, or friends of residents
in Gower — will remember the day for those
more especial reasons which induce me to bring
it into the reader's notice.

Of these, I may plainly and at once specify
Christina Purcell's marriage.

I object to closing so grave and old-fashioned
a story as this with a wedding. And if it had
not been the gravest and most old-fashioned of
weddings, I am sure I should have forbidden the
banns.

It was old-fashioned. No cards, no “reception,”

no satin nor shimmer nor shine, nor trails
nor tears, nor faints, nor fans, nor chignons, —
only Christina in white muslin, and the doctor in
white kids, and the parlor in white flowers, and
the minister and Margaret and Eunice and I
to see. Christina would n't have had so much as
the minister, if it had n't been decided best, “out
of courtesy,” to ask him. “Such a pity mother
can't marry us!” she said.

The doctor had waited a good while for her,
or she for him, or perhaps it was a little of both;
what with Margaret's ill health, and the little
doctor's slowly gained footing in his slow profession,
and planning, and considering, and waiting
till it was “quite best,” as Margaret herself
at last decided for them, they had been
“promised,” as the old folks in Gower called
it, nearly four years when their wedding-day
came.

The doctor was beginning to look old, — so
much older than Christina that only the stars in
the young wife's eyes saved Margaret at times
from some persistent, unromantic, motherly fears
for the permanency of her daughter's happiness,
from wondering, as indeed she half hinted once

to Eunice, “whether, if Christina had lived anywhere
else than in Gower, she would have loved
and married somebody who would not be an old
man before she was!”

“I suppose I cannot understand these things,”
said Eunice, with a certain reverence in her voice
which moved Margaret much; “but when I look
into Christina's face, I always feel as if nobody
in all the world, but just Dyke Burtis here,
could have made her his wife to-day; not if all
the world had shown its best and manliest side
to her, and not if all the world had tried to win
her love. Is that romantic?” she added, with a
slight smile.

Perhaps it was, but it was very sweet romance
to feel about one on one's wedding-day, and Eunice's
sweet, still face shone full of it, — as
Christina fully felt and well remembered, all day
long.

And though it was a grave little wedding, —
perhaps, indeed, could not be otherwise with
just such a face as Eunice's there, — how could
it be a sad one, with the shining face to light
it?

It was noticed, through the day, that Eunice

was somewhat more than commonly pale, and
that, though she was busy, in and out, here and
there, up and down, smiling much, that it was
she who tied the flowers, who trimmed the
rooms, who dressed and veiled and gloved and
kissed Christina, and stopped her (so Christina
says) on her way down stairs, to lead her into
the gray room, and close the door, and fold her
in her arms, and move her lips a little as if
she would have spoken; yet, speaking not a
word, unwound her arms, unlatched the door,
and led her, by the hand all the way, down
stairs, — that through all the day she was very
silent.

The doctor came upon her once suddenly, in
a corner of the piazza, where she had crept to be
out of notice, and where, though Christina was
calling her in a pretty little flurry about the
tuberoses, and though Margaret was wondering,
in the hall, who was going to cut the cake, she
sat with her back to the door, and her head
dropped in a peculiar manner, which attracted
his attention. As he drew near, he noticed that
she unclasped her hands, which had been belted
about her knees, as was her way when enduring

sharp pain, raised her bent body from over them,
and made a motion like wringing them, which she
checked when she saw him.

“You are ill — worse?” he asked her.

“It is nothing — nothing at all — no worse
than — not much, at least — I am quite well now.
Let me go. They seem to be calling me. Do
not notice me to-day. They are all so happy!
Do not!”

She sprang up with her bright, white smile,
and found the flowers, and cut the cake, and, as
before, was in and out, and up and down, and
here and there; and either the doctor did not,
in accordance with her wish, notice her again
that day, or he forgot her. I presume he forgot
her. One can pardon a man anything on his
wedding-day.

It has been well remembered that Eunice on
this day, for the first time for many years, removed
her black dress. This was done at Christina's
urgent wish. She had come into Eunice's
room one night a little while before the wedding,
after Eunice had gone to bed, and, “taking advantage
of the dark, or she never should have
dared,” she said, had whispered, —

“You 'll not wear black, dear, to marry me
in?”

“What should I wear?” asked Eunice, after
a pause. “Is it not proper?”

“Not,” said Christina, with decision, “unless
you will agree to wear white kids at my funeral.”

Eunice smiled, but Christina, through the dark,
could see how faintly.

“Well,” she said, patiently, — “the day is
yours. Anything you want, I suppose, if you
won't ask —”

“White, Eunice. That is just what I must
ask. I must see you, for once in my life, and for
this once, in a white dress.”

“All white?”

“All white, from head to foot, — as white as
your face this minute looks through the dark.”

Which was very white indeed.

“What will your mother say?” asked Eunice,
after a pause.

“Mother? She proposed it! Mother?”

“Once I asked her — years ago — if I might
wear a little white jacket like yours. She said
no. But do not tell her that I remembered it.”

Christina never did.

Eunice chose and wore a solid, soft, snowy
merino, close at the throat and wrists, and hanging
heavily to the floor; an odd dress for a wedding,
“but as perfect as the tea-roses,” said Margaret.

I can remember well, that when she came down
stairs, and slowly in among us, where we stood
chattering and rehearsing, that there was not
one of us who could speak; that Margaret tried
and failed; that Christina tried, but only kissed
her; that Eunice ran her eye quickly from one
to another, over us all, in doubt, or dread, or
hesitation of some kind, which must have abated
with the lifting of an eyelid; but I cannot recall
the features of her face, or their expression.
Something about her dazzled me.

Christina was married in the afternoon, took
tea with the rest of us at home, tied on her hat
and walked off to the doctor's house a little after
the setting of the sun. We made the plainest,
homeliest, heartiest day of it that ever was made
of a wedding-day. And we had the heartiest,
sunniest kind of a day, — alight and warm to
the very tips of the trembling leaves, and serene

to the brown lips of the earth. There was nothing
at all — unless, perhaps, a little low haze in
the west — that could have indicated or intimated
the coming tempest. Though certain of
the weather-wise were heard, indeed, when the
storm had passed, to say that the sun set in an
ill fashion, the like of which old experienced eyes
had not witnessed for years.

However that may be, it was in a gorgeous
fashion; and we sat on the piazza, after tea, to
watch it, chatting and hushing as the moods took
us, and as the flush and frown of the sky allowed,
— Christina and the doctor, like two children,
at Margaret's feet; Eunice, a little apart
and alone, upon the piazza steps.

She sat quite in the light. The little hop-vine
shadows tripped about her, peered over her shoulder,
peeped into her eyes, stood on tiptoe over
her soft hair, but held up their gray fingers and
motioned each other back, and left not so much
as a footmark on her.

“They don't dare,” whispered Christina, “that
dress shines so! Why, see! — the color; where
does the color come from?”

As Christina spoke, the creamy surface of Eunice's

dress changed from white to gold, to pallid
pink, to rose, to red, and, looking up, we
saw that all the world lay bathed in redness.
White lilies in the garden held up their faces
for it. The purple hill, with its crown of graves,
laid its cheek solemnly against it. The town,
the church, the distance, took the tint, and all
our little hop-shadows blushed. The low purple
haze, grown solid and slaty, had just caught the
ball of the sun, and there was something singular
in the effect of such a mass of color of which we
could not touch or see the source.

“It is like a prison on fire!” said the doctor.

“It makes me think of the calyx of a great
flower,” mused Christina.

“It is more like a drought than either,” laughed
Margaret.

“I don't altogether like it,” continued Christina,
shaking her head. “It is as solemn as the
Book of Isaiah, and I don't understand it any
better. It makes me feel as if I had been buried
rather than married. Eunice! — look at Eunice;
how still she sits!”

She sat indeed still, with her eyes turned away
to the burning hills, so that we could not see them.

“Eunice, think aloud for us! Come! What
do you make of such a sky as that, to come to-day,
of all days in the year!”

“It is like,” said Eunice, without turning her
head, — “it is like the blood of Jesus Christ,
which cleanseth from all sin.”

She spoke under her breath, as one very much
awed; and when Christina's chatter broke, and
no one answered her, — perhaps because no one
of us felt, just then, worthy, — she rose and
walked away from us, through the tall ranks of
garden lilies, through the gap in the little broken
fence beyond, up the purple hill, and into the
crown of graves, — drenched, as she went, in the
redness: —

At the top of the hill, where she stopped, she
seemed to plunge into it, and she stood, or
seemed to stand, quite still, until the scarlet sea
rippled in paling waves away, and the dusk
set in, and we could see her white dress only,
very dimly, through the gloom of the brooding
storm.

Margaret waited for her upon the piazza after
the rest of us had gone away; and Eunice,
coming wearily up the steps, crept in her old
way to her feet, and laid her head upon her
lap.

“So they have left us,” said Margaret, gently
stroking her hair, “all to ourselves, to finish life,
Eunice.”

“To finish life,” repeated Eunice. “Yes. I
wish —”

“What do you wish?”

“An old fancy. You talked me out of it at
the time. I suppose it is impossible. But I
suppose I shall always want to go back.”

“You mean the Thicket Street plan?”

This was a “fancy” which Margaret had with
difficulty “talked her out of” at the time when
poor Moll Manners dared the risk of finding
God's folks upon the other side of her clean
white death-bed at the Home.

“Yes. I could not go without you. We could
not, I suppose, either of us, have gone without
Christina. But now that she is in her own home
with her own work, and now that you and I have
none —”

“What would you do in Thicket Street?”
asked Margaret, thoughtfully.

“Save souls!” said Eunice.

Over this blunt, old-fashioned, orthodox answer,
Margaret mused a little in silence.

“There would be peculiar difficulties, peculiar
annoyances for you in ever so successful a missionary
life in Thicket Street. Have you considered
that?”

“O yes! quite considered all of that.”

“You would find it no obstacle?”

“No obstacle. Perhaps altogether the reverse
of an obstacle. I should like to pass along into
some other hands, before I die, a little part of all
that I have borrowed from you, — the long-suffering
and the patience, the trust and tenderness;
the doing what no other woman that I ever knew
would do; the courage and the watching and
the praying and persistence which,” said Eunice,
with much emotion, “would save the world if the
world were Thicket Street!”

“Hush, dear!” Margaret kissed the words off
from her lips, and, feeling how cold they were,
and how they trembled with the excitement of
the day, bade her talk no longer, and said that

they would consider what she had been saying at
another time.

She watched Eunice climb the stairs with her
little lamp in her hand, thinking how feebly she
walked, and following the slip and bend of her
thin fingers upon the balusters. On the landing
she stopped, and, shading her eyes a little with
her hand, looked smiling down, started, Margaret
afterwards thought, to speak, but said nothing,
and, still smiling, shut the gray-room door.
A fold of her heavy white dress fell out and
caught in the latching. She opened the door,
drew it in, and shut the door again.

The great tempest of the 9th, perhaps, had
been slowly building the sky over with black bulwarks
for several hours, but it sprang fire upon
Gower with great suddenness a little before midnight.
Half the signs in the town went down.
A steeple fell, and another tottered. Railings,
roofings, fences, door-posts, showered all the air,
and the stoutest trees in the old town fell, before
Gower had time to take off its nightcap and look
out of the window. All of this any “old inhabitant”
will tell you as well as I.

Most of this Margaret and I, roused by a fearful
crash and yet more fearful glare in our very
ears and eyes, confusedly saw or felt, while we
were more particularly conscious that the huge
elm in front of the house had fallen, and lay —
scathed, smoking, torn — prone across the gardenful
of white lilies, and hard by the windows
of the gray room.

“I don't know but we are all going to perish
here! This is horrible!” cried Margaret, groping
for her matches. “Do let us die in the light,
at least, and together. Eunice! How dark it
grows! Eunice, Eunice! She does not hear.
We must get to her, or she to us. Hear that!”

As she spoke, such a shock struck the house
as made her stagger where she stood in the
middle of the room, and the match in her hand
went out. She struck another, — it flashed and
darkened; another, every match in the room, —
every match in the room went out; and it was
as blue and ghostly and ugly a sight as ever I
saw.

Margaret threw down her match-box, and
groped her way, with an exclamation of horror,
through the dark to the gray room.

“Eunice —” she pushed open the door; but
when Eunice made no answer, she stopped and
called me, and we went both of us in together.

When the storm was over, and the stars out,
and the lighted house grown still, we could see
how quietly she lay, — not struck by the storm,
as we had thought, but sunk in her soft white
dress, as she had fallen hours ago, at the foot
of the great wooden cross, and with her arms
around it.