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ONLY AN OLD MAID.
No, no, nothing but that! She has never derived any additional
importance from linking her name with yours, imperial
man! — never grown angelized by a wife's thrice-drugged potion
of care and sorrow. She lives alone, in a little, lonely house, —
alone, with her black cat, and her memories of the past!
For even she has past memories; you can't deprive her of
those. Sitting in her quiet room, with the black cat purring at
her feet, voices steal to her from the olden time, — dreams and
loves, vague, and dim, and distant, from the lost paradise of
Life!
Sunshine streams again over the broad green meadows of her
child-life; sunshine lies on the tufts of fresh red strawberries,
and browns the small fingers that clasp her own. She wanders
over hill, and dell, and woodland, with young, happy hearts
beating at her side, opening such golden leaves in her book of
destiny as make her eye brighten with the twin lights of youth
and hope!
And then the pale shadow-hands of spirits lift the curtain
from before a veiled picture.
The old maid gazes once more into “bonny wells of eyes,”
brushes back long, fair curls, and holds her breath while a low
voice breathes her name!
Dead or false! — which was he? Who shall tell? It was a
proud ship's deck, and waved his hand in fond farewell. What
years she hoped, and waited! — but he never came again. Did he
hold some Eastern beauty to his heart, or was the sea-sand draggling
in his long, bright curls? Who shall say? Only the
voice of the recording angel, in that day when the sea gives up
its dead!
But she hoped and waited, and she is an old maid now, — a
lonely, loveless old maid. Young misses, who are just out of
school, and into market, sneer at her, pursing up their dainty
little lips.
Young men, who exult in long, silky moustaches, and bandit-looking
whiskers, look at her patronizingly, and call her “the
old girl.” Married ladies, who quarrel with their lords half the
twenty-four hours, and gossip about their neighbors the other
half, condescend to pity her, and she, — O, she gropes along
graveward, and does n't mind!
True, those eyes grow dim with tears sometimes, as she looks
on shapes from the spectre-land of the past; but she chokes them
all back again. Tears are romantic in the eyes of beauty, but,
reddening the old maid's peaked nose, they are stuff and nonsense!
Ridiculous of her it is, you say, to wear those stiff, short curls.
You forget it may be because he liked them.
You call her a winter-rose, dried and withered, when you see
her in her bright shawl; but it was his last gift.
To me there is something beautiful in the eternality of a love
which triumphs over time and death; but, alas! I can't make
the old maid a heroine in any eyes but my own.
This is merely because I cannot make her young and beautiful;
because she will train those winter curls like tendrils of
the spring; because, with her love and hope in heaven, she is in
the world, and not of the world.
She must live on alone; drink her tea out of her little, old-fashioned
tea-pot; eat her marmalade out of her little, old-fashioned
dessert-plates, and, by and by, lay her down to die, and be
followed to her grave only by her black cat, and —
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