Their author
looks upon life with that steadiness and clearness of gaze which is
only possible to one who wishes to see things as a whole, and as
they are.
looks upon life with that steadiness and clearness of gaze which is
only possible to one who wishes to see things as a whole, and as
they are.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v27 - Wat to Zor
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With an impatient gesture he folded his arms round his head,
so as more completely to shield his face, and spoke hoarsely from
beneath them: “You confounded rascal, I thought you knew bet-
ter! Go-go-go, I say! ”
The last words were spoken with increasing vehemence.
Esther, who had often been awe-struck before him, did not fear
him now. He was suffering, how or why she knew not; and
without her reverence for him being in any way impaired, he
awoke her instinctive feeling of responsibility towards all suffer-
ing creatures. The first shock over, she was comparatively calm
again, only thinking with painful intensity what she had better
do. So for a minute or two they both remained in the same
position, till he burst out again with greater violence than before:
"Knave! Beast! Idiot! Go, go! ”
Then she touched his hand. "It is Hess,” she said.
He lifted his head slowly, and turned his face towards her,
as though with reluctance. It was pale with the livid pallor of
a dark skin no longer young, and the firm lines of mouth and
cheek were slackened and hollowed. He looked a ghost; but
hardly the ghost of himself. In a minute, as he realized Esther's
presence, the life and individuality began to return to his face,
but in no amiable form.
“So, madam,” he said after a pause, with a grimace that did
duty for a smile, “ you are here! Ha! Charming! Pray, to what
am I indebted, et cætera ? »
Esther was too much shocked at his appearance to consider
how he received her.
“I have brought the paper you lost,” she returned hastily.
«'Tis here. But no matter — you are ill. You must let me find
your drops for you, and send for Dr. Arbuthnot. ”
He sat upright, and clutching the edge of the stool on which
he sat with both hands,—“I am not ill,” he said with harsh
impatience. Leave me. ”
«
“You are either ill or in some great trouble,” she replied:
«in either case not fit to be alone. If you will not have my
company, you must let me send you some other friend; though
a truer one it cannot be. Patrick will only come home to sleep
off his wine. ”
“Friend! ” he cried, friend! ”
And with a shriek of laughter he rocked himself to and fro
on the stool. Esther was standing up now; she looked at him
)
»
## p. 16160 (#506) ##########################################
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MARGARET L. WOODS
steadily, with a severity born rather of amazement than of any
conscious criticism of his conduct: but he was calm again so in-
stantaneously that she almost doubted whether it was he who had
laughed. They were silent for a minute or two, looking at each
other. He was apparently calm, but the singular blueness of his
eyes had disappeared; they glittered under the heavy black eye-
brows, each with a curious spark in it, not at all like the azure
eyes so familiar to his friends. The change in them made his
whole face look different; from having been pale, it had now
flushed a dark red.
“You talk to me of friends, child,” he resumed hoarsely, but
in a more normal tone, leaning forward and smiling at her
bitterly, both his hands still clutching the stool, “as though you
expected me to believe in 'em, or to fancy you believed in 'em.
No, no, Governor Huff has too much wit for that. Friends!
Fellows that suck your brains, suck 'em dry, dry, and pay you
with their damned promises; that when you've slaved and slaved
and made a million enemies, and when they think you're done
with, fling you out an Irish deanery, as you might fling a stick
into the sea for your dog - Hi! Swim for it, sir! He paused
a moment, moistened his dry lips, and drawing in his breath
let it out again in a low fierce exclamation. « But 'tis not I, 'tis
they who are done with,- Oxford, Bolingbroke. Puppets! Pawns
on the board! Oh, when I am gone they'll know themselves,
and whistle me back when 'tis too late. And I shall come, ay,
blundering fool that I am, I shall come. The moths,- do you
remember at Kensington, Hess ? — they come back to frizzle
where they frizzled before, don't they ? ”
He laughed again the same sudden shrieking laugh. The
perpendicular line was defining itself on Esther's white brow;
a line which looked severe, but really indicated only anxiety or
bewilderment.
"I esteem your political friends as little as you do," she
replied, mentioning them disdainfully, and thought I esteemed
'em less.
have others - better ones Mr. Gay, Mr.
Pope-
"Mr. Addison - Mr. Steele,” — he broke in with a mincing
accent meant to imitate her feminine voice. « Was that what
you was going to say, miss? Ha, ha, ha! Warm-hearted, generous
Joseph! Steele, true as-thyself! Gay, now — Gay's a charming
fellow when one feels charmingly. As to Pope,”— at that name
But you
>>
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MARGARET L. WOODS
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(
he dropped his sneer and spoke with sombre earnestness — “as to
Pope, never talk of him, Hesskin. He's a thing I believe in, I
will believe in, I tell you, Brat — so don't let's think of him
for fear for fear - Ah! Did you say he was crooked ? »
«I said nothing, sir,” she replied with dignity: "I would aim
at no man's defects of person, least of all at Mr. Pope's. But if
I cannot name a man friend but you'll mock at him, I'll bring
your women friends to your mind,- the truest, the most attached
of 'em. ” And she held her head higher. «There's Lady Betty
Germayne, my mother, Molly, and — myself. That's four. ”
Women's friendship! Women's friendship! By the powers,
she talks as though it were a thing to be calculated, — four
—
female friendships to one male. Pshaw! Weigh froth! Weigh
moonshine! They're more weighable than the parcel of vanity
and caprice called female friendship. Don't I know why Madam
Van and you were all anxiety to know Mr. Gay before I left ?
Why, to be sure, she must have a poet in her ante-chamber like
other women of quality ; for Madam Van is as mad as old New-
castle, and thinks herself a duchess. And when that poor dean
that's been so useful is gone, why, he's gone; and Hess must get
another fellow to teach her how to talk and make the wits in
love with her. Ay, I know what your female friendship's worth. ”
Esther stood upright beside him. She made no visible motion
while he spoke; but she held her head higher, the frown on her
brow deepened, and she looked down at him with eyes in which
an angry light began to burn, and cheeks flushing with an indig-
nant red. He tried to meet her gaze indifferently as he finished
speaking, but his own sank beneath it; and before she made any
answer he hung his head as one rebuked.
“You dare to say so! ” she said at last sternly. "And to me! »
Then after a pause, “Unworthy!
“Unworthy! Most unworthy! ” she ejacu-
lated.
Her words did not exactly represent her feeling. She was
more moved by horror and surprise that he should speak in a
way so unlike and so degrading to himself, than at his prepos-
terous reflections on herself and Mrs. Vanhomrigh. But what-
ever the precise proportion in which her emotions were mingled,
she stood there the very image of intense yet self-contained indig-
nation, fixing upon him a steady look of stern reproof. She who
had so often trembled before his least frown did not fear his fury
now, in this feverish sickness of his soul. He was silent, looking
XXVII-IOII
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MARGARET L. WOODS
(c
her eyes.
at the table and drumming on it like a boy, half sullen, half
ashamed. Then on a sudden, putting both hands to his head
with a contortion of pain, «Oh, my head! my head! ” he cried.
“O God! - 0 God! »
And he rolled on the table in a paroxysm of anguish, moan-
ing inarticulately either prayers or curses. Every physical pang
that he endured created its mental counterpart in her; and her
whole soul was concentrated in a passionate prayer for help for
the body and mind of him laid there in anguish and disarray.
At length the paroxysm subsided, almost as suddenly as it had
come; but for a time he seemed unable to speak. Shading his
brow with his 'hand, he looked at her from time to time with a
faint, pleading, almost timid smile. This piteous smile, so unlike
any look she had ever seen or fancied on those haughty feat-
ures, was more than Esther could bear. Her breath came quick,
a strangling sob rose in her throat, and the hot tears blinded
But he had too often, quite mistakenly, praised her
as above the female weakness of tears; and she had too often
blushed to think of those tears of hers by the river at Windsor,
and those in the Sluttery, to weep again in his company. No,
she would rather choke than do it. So she could not answer
that pleading look with a kind one, but faced him with drooped
eyelids, lips severely close, flushed cheeks, and heaving bosom.
He spoke at last in a languid, hesitating voice, but calm and like
his own; no longer with the confused articulation of the fierce
grinding tones which had shocked Esther when he was talking
to her before.
“I beg your pardon, Essie, very humbly; yours and good
Madam Van's as well. You'd grant me grace if you only knew
what a bad head I have. Oh, such a racking head, Hess! The
pains of hell gat hold upon me,' last night when I came home
from Parson's Green; and all because of the least bit of fruit
from his glass-house the mad Peterborough would have me to
eat. No, I'll not do it again: fruit always did give me a bad
head. You've forgiven me, Brat, ha'n't you ? »
But Esther could not yet answer or meet that anxious, hum-
ble look of his.
“Essie! ” he cried pleadingly, “Essie! ” and stretched out his
hand towards hers as though to touch it, yet without doing so.
"Hess! ” he cried again. "What!
. "! You can't forgive your
poor friend, that hardly knows what he says when he cries aloud
(
## p. 16163 (#509) ##########################################
MARGARET L. WOODS
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>>
-
in his misery. Can't you forgive me, little Hesskin? Do- do
now forgive me. ”.
Esther was still kneeling like one in prayer, with her cheek
leaned on her clasped hands; but now the color had ebbed from
it and left her very pale, and the resolute lines of her lips had
softened. She lifted to his her great eyes, luminous with tears
repressed and an irrepressible fire of passion, and he started as
he met them.
“Forgive you ? ” she cried in a voice whose deep vibrating
music thrilled him in spite of himself; and then the same words
again, but set to some new harmony - “Forgive you? Why,
I love you! ”
The mental shock was sufficient to have thrust him back
again into that Inferno from which he had just escaped; but it
had the opposite effect. The weak, helpless feeling in the brain,
that usually remained with him for long after such an attack,
passed suddenly almost entirely away. Yes, it was a shock, For
weeks a dim troubling something, to which he obstinately refused
to give the shape of an idea, had been stirring in the depths of
his mind; and he had kept it down there by main force. Now
it sprang up before him, full-armed, like Minerva.
"I am obliged to you, Essie,” he said. "I should have been
sorry if I had offended you past your forgiveness. But now
you talk as wildly as I did. Had we not been friends so long,
I might misunderstand your meaning. ”
“Ah! ” she cried, leaping to her feet, and tossing back her
hood with a fierce, impatient gesture, you wish to misunderstand
it! You that have plagued me, tortured me with your questions,
now you would fain not hear the answer to 'em all. You that
have told me a thousand times to show you my heart, now you
will not see it. But you know, you know what you are to me;
- and a tearless sob strangled her voice.
“Your friend, Essie,” he said gravely, flinching before this
outburst of a passion it had been beyond his power to imagine.
“Friend! ” she cried, friend! ” and laughed, not bitterly, but
with a kind of wild tenderness. « Could Adam call the God that
shaped him out of dust his friend'? No, he must worship, he
must adore him. You shaped me. I was nothing, nothing,
before you taught me how to think, how to feel, and to love
what you love and despise what you despise. I am the creature
»
»
(C
«
## p. 16164 (#510) ##########################################
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MARGARET L. WOODS
(
of your hands, you made me and I am yours. You may be
sorry for't, but 'tis too late now to help it. ”
Swift made an attempt to assume that awful air with which
he was wont to cow the boldest of his friends or foes, but he
felt the attempt to be a failure.
"Hush, Essie! ” he cried. « What you are saying is very
wrong: 'tis rank blasphemy, and I will not hear it. ”
Esther turned from him, and paced the room for a minute
or two in a silence which Swift did not break, with her head
thrown back, and biting her under lip, as was her wont. Look-
ing on the ground, not at him, who had once more shaded his
face with one hand, she began again:
“We are neither of us enthusiasts, and I cannot pick my
words. Oh, that I could find one sharp enough to cut right
through my breast and show you my heart! Once you said I
should cease to be your friend on the day when I was afraid to
pin my heart to my sleeve-ruffles — yes, those were your very
words, pin it to my sleeve-ruffles'- for your inspection. You
forget, but I remember. Now you don't love to see it, but 'tis
too late to go back. If I said I worshiped you as one worships
God, I spoke wrongly. God is a long way off, and we have
never seen him, but we know he cannot need us. But you”-
she paused before him with clasped hands, like a worshiper
before a shrine-"you are far indeed above other men, yet you
are a man, and here among us; and you have often — ah! do not
try to deny it: little, nothing as I am compared to you, you have
often, often needed me! How can I choose but worship, adore, -
love you ? ”
And as she ended, she fell on her knees once more, and bend-
ing over his hand, that still lay stretched out on the table, touched
it with a swift hot kiss, and bowed her forehead on her folded
arms.
There was a sharp tap at the door. Some one must have
mounted the stairs unheard by either of them. Quick as light-
ning Esther sprang up and pulled her hood over her face.
Swift made a dash for his peruke, which lay on a neighboring
chair; but he had not got his head well into it when the door
was flung open, and, loudly announced by an invisible some one,
Mr. Erasmus Lewis walked in.
.
## p. 16165 (#511) ##########################################
16165
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
(1848–1894)
N THE novels of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a certain subtle
element of femininity is blended with masculine vigor and
disinterestedness. She had the self-restraint to stand aside
from her creations, yet she met the necessities of her art with a
woman's intuition. For this reason her novels are among the most
charming in the whole range of American fiction; satisfactory because
they always conform to a high standard of literary excellence, having
nothing about them shabby or careless or indifferent.
Their author
looks upon life with that steadiness and clearness of gaze which is
only possible to one who wishes to see things as a whole, and as
they are. Miss Woolson might be called a realist for this reason;
yet she is also true to the unknown romance which forever haunts
the souls of men.
Although she is primarily a novelist, not a little of her power is
shown in her short stories. Of these she has written a great number,
their backgrounds being generally the scenes with which she was at
the time familiar. She was all her life a wanderer, so that she wrote
with equal freedom of New England and its people, of New York
life, of the South, of Americans and Italians in Florence and Venice
and Rome.
She was born in Claremont, New Hampshire, 1848; a great-niece of
James Fenimore Cooper, she was to give early evidence of possessing
not a small share of his literary power. As a child she was taken to
Cleveland, Ohio, where she received her primary education; going
later to a French school in New York city, a school reproduced per-
haps in her novel (Anne. ' She lived in Cleveland until the death of
her father, Charles Jarvis Woolson, in 1869. From 1873 to 1879 she
lived with her mother in Florida and in other Southern States, -a
sojourn whose fruits appear in the book of short stories of life in the
South headed by Rodman the Keeper,' and in East Angels. ' Miss
Woolson seemed capable of appreciating with equal intensity the
stern, self-sufficing, conscientious New England character, and the
sensuous, easy, lovable nature of the far South. She drew both with
equal truth, and enjoyed contrasting them by bringing them together;
as in the story (The Front Yard,' — in which a good-for-nothing
family of Italian peasants have for a stepmother a New England
woman who lives a modified New England life in Assisi, — in East
Angels,' and elsewhere. Her later short stories are nearly all of
## p. 16166 (#512) ##########################################
16166
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
Italy, or of Americans in Italy. She herself lived abroad continuously
after 1880, dying in Venice January 23d, 1894.
The scenes of her novels are laid in her own country, recalling
the associations of her childhood, —'Horace Chase, however, being
a novel of life in North Carolina. Anne,' 'Jupiter Lights,' (For the
Major,' have their setting in the North; East Angels,' in the far
South. Of these novels (Anne) is the most powerful and striking,
showing as it does Miss Woolson's ability to portray many kinds
of people — above all, her skill in the portraiture of women. She un-
derstood her own sex; her heroines are in no wise remarkable. They
may be met every day; their weakness, their strength, their love,
are found in every household. She understood men as well as an
unmarried woman can understand them, an unmarried woman with
the intuition of the artist. She understood perhaps best of all “the
common people,” especially their homely and hearty qualities. In
her novels she rarely gives way to sentiment or to feminine pathos;
the reader receives the impression that she has certain marketable
qualities in writing under curb. Her reserve force is a part of her
charm. On the whole her novels are strong, sane, and wholesomely
objective, having nothing in common with the hysteria of current
fiction. They fulfill the best purpose of a novel, to entertain without
enervating
RODMAN THE KEEPER
From Rodman the Keeper, and Other Southern Sketches. ) Published by
Harper & Brothers. Copyright 1880, by D. Appleton & Co.
“K
EEPER of what? Keeper of the dead. Well, it is easier to
keep the dead than the living; and as for the gloom of
the thing, the living among whom I have been lately
were not a hilarious set. ”
John Rodman sat in the doorway and looked out over his
domain. The little cottage behind him was empty of life save
himself alone. In one room the slender appointments provided
by government for the keeper, who being still alive must sleep
and eat, made the bareness doubly bare: in the other the desk
and the great ledgers, the ink and pens, the register, the
loud-ticking clock on the wall, and the flag folded on a shelf,
were all for the kept — whose names, in hastily written, blotted
rolls of manuscript, were waiting to be transcribed in the new
red-bound ledgers in the keeper's best handwriting day by day,
while the clock was to tell him the hour when the flag must
## p. 16167 (#513) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16167
rise over the mounds where reposed the bodies of fourteen thou-
sand United States soldiers — who had languished where once
stood the prison-pens on the opposite slopes, now fair and peace-
ful in the sunset; who had fallen by the way in long marches
to and fro under the burning sun; who had fought and died on
the many battle-fields that reddened the beautiful State, stretch-
ing from the peaks of the marble mountains in the smoky west
down to the sea islands of the ocean border. The last rim of the
sun's red ball had sunk below the horizon line, and the western
sky glowed with deep rose color, which faded away above into
pink, into the salmon tint, into shades of that far-away heavenly
emerald which the brush of the earthly artist can never repro-
duce, but which is found sometimes in the iridescent heart of
the opal. The small town, a mile distant, stood turning its back
on the cemetery: but the keeper could see the pleasant, rambling
old mansions, each with its rose-garden and neglected outlying
fields, the empty negro quarters falling into ruin, and everything
just as it stood when on that April morning the first gun was
fired on Sumter; apparently not a nail added, not a brushful
of paint applied, not a fallen brick replaced, or latch or lock
repaired.
The keeper had noted these things as he strolled through
the town, but not with surprise; for he had seen the South in
its first estate, when, fresh, strong, and fired with enthusiasm, he
too had marched away from his village home with the colors
flying above and the girls waving their handkerchiefs behind, as
the regiment, a thousand strong, filed down the dusty road.
That regiment, a weak, scarred two hundred, came back a year
later with lagging step and colors tattered and scorched, and
the girls could not wave their handkerchiefs, wet and sodden
with tears. But the keeper, his wound healed, had gone again;
and he had seen with his New England eyes the magnificence
and the carelessness of the South, her splendor and negligence,
her wealth and thriftlessness, as through Virginia and the fair
Carolinas, across Georgia and into sunny Florida, he had marched
month by month, first a lieutenant, then captain, and finally ma-
jor and colonel, as death mowed down those above him, and he
and his good conduct were left. Everywhere magnificence went
hand in hand with neglect, and he had said so as chance now
and then threw a conversation in his path.
“We have no such shiftless ways,” he would remark, after
he had furtively supplied a prisoner with hard-tack and coffee.
(
## p. 16168 (#514) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
»
"And no such grand ones, either,” Johnny Reb would reply,
if he was a man of spirit; and generally he was.
The Yankee, forced to acknowledge the truth of this state-
ment, qualified it by observing that he would rather have more
thrift with a little less grandeur; whereupon the other answered
that he would not: and there the conversation rested. So now
ex-Colonel Rodman, keeper of the national cemetery, viewed the
little town in its second estate with philosophic eyes. « It is
part of a great problem now working itself out; I am not here
to tend the living but the dead,” he said.
Whereupon, as he walked among the long mounds, a voice
seemed to rise from the still ranks below: “While ye have time,
do good to men,” it said. Behold, we are beyond your care. ”
But the keeper did not heed.
This still evening in early February he looked out over the
level waste. The little town stood in the lowlands: there were
no hills from whence cometh help-calm heights that lift the
soul above earth and its cares; no river to lead the aspirations
of the children outward toward the great sea. Everything was
monotonous; and the only spirit that rose above the waste was
a bitterness for the gained and sorrow for the lost cause. The
keeper was the only man whose presence personated the for-
mer in their sight, and upon him therefore, as representative,
the bitterness fell; not in words, but in averted looks, in sudden
silences when he approached, in withdrawals and avoidance, until
he lived and moved in a vacuum: wherever he went there was
presently no one save himself; the very shop-keeper who sold him
sugar seemed turned into a man of wood, and took his money
reluctantly, although the shilling gained stood perhaps for that
day's dinner.
So Rodman withdrew himself, and came and went among
them no more: the broad acres of his domain gave him as much
exercise as his shattered ankle could bear; he ordered his few
supplies by the quantity, and began the life of a solitary, his
island marked out by the massive granite wall with which the
United States government has carefully surrounded those sad
Southern cemeteries of hers — sad, not so much from the number
of the mounds representing youth and strength cut off in their
bloom,- for that is but the fortune of war,- as for the complete
isolation which marks them. “Strangers in a strange land” is
the thought of all who, coming and going to and from Florida,
turn aside here and there to stand for a moment among the
## p. 16169 (#515) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16169
closely ranged graves which seem already a part of the past –
that near past which in our hurrying American life is even now
so far away.
The government work was completed before the
keeper came: the lines of the trenches were defined by low
granite copings, and the comparatively few single mounds were
headed by trim little white boards bearing generally the word
“Unknown,” but here and there a name and an age,- in most
cases a boy from some far-away Northern State; "twenty-one,”
"twenty-two," said the inscriptions; the dates were those dark
years among the sixties, measured now more than by anything
else in the number of maidens widowed in heart, and women
widowed indeed, who sit still and remember while the world
rushes by. At sunrise the keeper ran up the Stars and Stripes;
and so precise were his ideas of the accessories belonging to the
place, that from his own small store of money he had taken
enough, by stinting himself, to buy a second flag for stormy
weather, so that, rain or not, the colors should float over the
dead. This was not patriotism so called or rather miscalled, it
was not sentimental fancy, it was not zeal or triumph: it was
simply a sense of the fitness of things, a conscientiousness which
had in it nothing of religion, unless indeed a man's endeavor
to live up to his own ideal of his duty be a religion. The
same feeling led the keeper to spend hours in copying the rolls.
"John Andrew Warren, Company G, Eighth New Hampshire
Infantry,” he repeated, as he slowly wrote the name, giving
"John Andrew” clear, bold capitals and a lettering impossible
to mistake; died August 15, 1863, aged twenty-two years. ”_"He
came from the prison-pen yonder, and lies somewhere in those
trenches, I suppose. Now then, John Andrew, don't fancy I am
I
sorrowing for you; no doubt you are better off than I am at this
very moment. But none the less, John Andrew, shall pen, ink,
and hand do their duty to you. For that I am here. ”
Infinite pains and labor went into these records of the dead;
one hair's-breadth error and the whole page was replaced by a
new one. The same spirit kept the grass carefully away from
the low coping of the trenches, kept the graveled paths smooth
and the mounds green, and the bare little cottage neat as a man-
of-war. When the keeper cooked his dinner, the door toward
the east, where the dead lay, was scrupulously closed; nor was
it opened until everything was in perfect order again. At sunset
the flag was lowered; and then it was the keeper's habit to
walk slowly up and down the path until the shadows veiled the
## p. 16170 (#516) ##########################################
16170
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
»
mounds on each side, and there was nothing save the peaceful
green of earth.
«So time will efface our little lives and sorrows,”
he mused, “and we shall be as nothing in the indistinguishable
past. ” Yet none the less did he fulfill the duties of every day
and hour with exactness. "At least they shall not say that I was
lacking,” he murmured to himself as he thought vaguely of the
future beyond these graves. Who they were, it would have
troubled him to formulate, since he was one of the many sons
whom New England in this generation sends forth with a belief
composed entirely of negatives. As the season advanced, he
worked all day in the sunshine. “My garden looks well,” he
said. . « I like this cemetery, because it is the original resting-
place of the dead who lie beneath. They were not brought here
from distant places, gathered up by contract, numbered, and de-
scribed, like so much merchandise; their first repose has not been
broken, their peace has been undisturbed. Hasty burials the
prison authorities gave them: the thin bodies were tumbled into
the trenches by men almost as thin; for the whole State went
hungry in those dark days. There were not many prayers, no
tears, as the dead-carts went the rounds. But the prayers had
been said, and the tears had fallen, while the poor fellows were
still alive in the pens yonder; and when at last death came, it
was like a release. They suffered long; and I for one believe
that therefore shall their rest be long,- long and sweet. ”
After a time began the rain,—the soft, persistent, gray rain
of the Southern lowlands,- and he stayed within and copied an-
other thousand names into the ledger. He would not allow him-
self the companionship of a dog, lest the creature should bark
at night and disturb the quiet. There was no one to hear save
himself, and it would have been a friendly sound as he lay awake
on his narrow iron bed; but it seemed to him against the spirit
of the place. He would not smoke, although he had the soldier's
fondness for a pipe. Many a dreary evening, beneath a hastily
built shelter of boughs, when the rain poured down and every-
thing was comfortless, he had found solace in the curling smoke;
but now it seemed to him that it would be incongruous, and at
times he almost felt as if it would be selfish too. “They cannot
smoke, you know, down there under the wet grass,” he thought,
as standing at the window he looked toward the ranks of the
mounds stretching across the eastern end from side to side — “my
parade-ground,” he called it. And then he would smile at his
own fancies, draw the curtain, shut out the rain and the night,
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## p. 16171 (#517) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
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light his lamp, and go to work on the ledgers again. Some of
the names lingered in his memory; he felt as if he had known
the men who bore them, as if they had been boys together, and
were friends even now although separated for a time. "James
Marvin, Company B, Fifth Maine. The Fifth Maine was in the
seven days' battle. I say, do you remember that retreat down
the Quaker church road, and the way Phil Kearny held the
rear-guard firm ? ” And over the whole seven days he wandered
with his mute friend, who remembered everything and everybody
in the most satisfactory way. One of the little head-boards in
the parade-ground attracted him peculiarly because the name
inscribed was his own:
Rodman, Company A, One Hun-
dred and Sixth New York. ”
“I remember that regiment: it came from the extreme north-
ern part of the State. Blank Rodman must have melted down
here, coming as he did from the half-arctic region along the St.
Lawrence. I wonder what he thought of the first hot day, say
in South Carolina, along those simmering rice-fields ? ” He grew
into the habit of pausing for a moment by the side of this grave
every morning and evening. «Blank Rodman.
« Blank Rodman. It might easily
have been John. And then where should I be ? ”
But Blank Rodman remained silent; and the keeper, after
pulling up a weed or two and trimming the grass over his rela-
tive, went off to his duties again. “I am convinced that Blank
is a relative,” he said to himself; distant perhaps, but still a
kinsman. ”
One April day the heat was almost insupportable; but the sun's
rays were not those brazen beams that sometimes in North-
ern cities burn the air and scorch the pavements to a white
heat, - rather were they soft and still; the moist earth exhaled
her richness, not a leaf stirred, and the whole level country
seemed sitting in a hot vapor bath. In the early dawn the
keeper had performed his outdoor tasks; but all day he remained
almost without stirring in his chair between two windows, striv-
ing to exist. At high noon out came a little black, bringing his
supplies from the town, whistling and shuffling along, gay as a
lark. The keeper watched him coming slowly down the white
road, loitering by the way in the hot blaze, stopping to turn a
somersault or two, to dangle over a bridge rail, to execute various
impromptu capers all by himself. He reached the gate at last,
entered, and having come all the way up the path in a hornpipe
step, he set down his basket at the door to indulge in one long
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## p. 16172 (#518) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
(
(
and final double-shuffle before knocking. "Stop that! ” said the
keeper through the closed blinds. The little darkey darted back;
but as nothing further came out of the window-a boot, for
instance, or some other stray missile — he took courage, showed
his ivories, and drew near again. “Do you suppose I am going
to have you stirring up the heat in that way? ” demanded the
keeper.
The little black grinned, but made no reply, unless smoothing
the hot white sand with his black toes could be construed as
such; he now removed his rimless hat and made a bow.
“Is it or is it not warm ? ” asked the keeper, as a naturalist
might inquire of a salamander, not referring to his own so much
as to the salamander's ideas on the subject.
"Dunno, mars',” replied the little black.
« How do
you
feel ? »
"'Spects I feel all right, mars'. ”
The keeper gave up the investigation, and presented to the
salamander a nickel cent. "I suppose there is no such thing as
a cool spring in all this melting country,” he said.
But the salamander indicated with his thumb a clump of trees
on the green plain north of the cemetery. “Ole Mars' Ward's
place — cole spring dah. ” He then departed, breaking into a run
after he had passed the gate, his ample mouth watering at the
thought of a certain chunk of taffy at the mercantile establish-
ment kept by Aunt Dinah in a corner of her one-roomed cabin.
At sunset the keeper went thirstily out with a tin pail on his
arm, in search of the cold spring. "If it could only be like the
spring down under the rocks where I used to drink when I was
a boy! ” he thought. He had never walked in that direction
before. Indeed, now that he had abandoned the town, he seldom
went beyond the walls of the cemetery. An old road led across
to the clump of trees, through fields run to waste, and following
it he came to the place,-a deserted house with tumble-down
fences and overgrown garden, the out-buildings indicating that
once upon a time there were many servants and a prosperous
master. The house was of wood, large on the ground, with
encircling piazzas; across the front door rough bars had been
nailed, and the closed blinds were protected in the same manner;
from long want of paint the clapboards were gray and mossy, and
the floor of the piazza had fallen in here and there from decay.
The keeper decided that his cemetery as a much
nore cheer-
ful place than this, and then he looked around for the spring.
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## p. 16173 (#519) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16173
Behind the house the ground sloped down; it must be there.
He went around and came suddenly upon a man lying on an
old rug outside of a back door.
« Excuse me.
I thought nobody
lived here,” he said.
“Nobody does,” replied the man: "I am not much of a body,
am I?
His left arm was gone, and his face was thin and worn with
long illness; he closed his eyes after speaking, as though the few
words had exhausted him.
“I came for water from a cold spring you have here, some-
where,” pursued the keeper, contemplating the wreck before him
with the interest of one who has himself been severely wounded,
and knows the long, weary pain. The man waved his hand
toward the slope without unclosing his eyes, and Rodman went
off with his pail, and found a little shady hollow, once curbed
and paved with white pebbles, but now neglected, like all the
place. The water was cold, however - deliciously cold. He filled
his pail, and thought that perhaps after all he would exert him-
self to make coffee, now that the sun was down: it would taste
better made of this cold water. When he came up the slope
the man's eyes were open.
“Have some water ? » asked Rodman.
“Yes: there's a gourd inside. ”
The keeper entered, and found himself in a large, bare room:
in one corner was some straw covered with an old counterpane,
in another a table and chair; a kettle hung in the deep fireplace,
and a few dishes stood on a shelf: by the door on a nail hung
a gourd; he filled it and gave it to the host of this desolate
abode. The man drank with eagerness.
Pomp has gone to town,” he said, and I could not get
down to the spring to-day, I have had so much pain. ”
“And when will Pomp return? ”
“He should be here now; he is very late to-night. ”
"Can I get you anything ? ”
“No, thank you: he will soon be here. ”
The keeper looked out over the waste; there was
in sight. He was not a man of any especial kindliness,- he had
himself been too hardly treated in life for that, but he could
not find it in his heart to leave this helpless creature all alone
with night so near. So he sat down on the door-step. “I will
rest awhile,” he said, not asking but announcing it.
The man
had turned away and closed his eyes again, and they both
»
(C
((
no
one
## p. 16174 (#520) ##########################################
16174
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
(
(
remained silent, busy with their own thoughts; for each had
recognized the ex-soldier, Northern and Southern, in portions of
the old uniforms, and in the accent. The war and its memories
were still very near to the maimed, poverty-stricken Confederate;
and the other knew that they were, and did not obtrude himself.
Twilight fell, and no one came.
"Let me get you something,” said Rodman; for the face
looked ghastly as the fever abated. The other refused. Dark-
ness came; still no one.
« Look here,” said Rodman, rising, "I have been wounded
myself, was in hospital for months: I know how you feel. You
must have food — a cup of tea, now, and a slice of toast, brown
and thin. ”
“I have not tasted tea or wheaten bread for weeks,” answered
the man; his voice died off into a wail, as though feebleness and
pain had drawn the cry from him in spite of himself. Rodman
lighted a match: there was no candle, only a piece of pitch-pine
stuck in an iron socket on the wall; he set fire to this primitive
torch and looked around.
« There is nothing there,” said the man outside, making an
effort to speak carelessly: “my servant went to town for sup-
plies. Do not trouble yourself to wait; he will come presently,
and- and I want nothing. ”
But Rodman saw through proud poverty's lie: he knew that
irregular quavering of the voice, and that trembling of the
hand; the poor fellow had but one to tremble. He continued
his search; but the bare room gave back nothing, not a crumb.
“Well, if you are not hungry,” he said briskly, “I am -hun-
gry as a bear; and I'll tell you what I am going to do. I live
not far from here, and I live all alone, too: I haven't a servant
as you have.
Let me
take
supper here with you just for a
change; and if your servant comes, so much the better,
he can
wait upon us.
I'll run over and bring back the things. ”
He was gone without waiting for a reply: the shattered ankle
made good time over the waste, and soon returned, limping a
little, but bravely hasting, while on a tray came the keeper's best
supplies,— Irish potatoes, corned beef, wheaten bread, butter, and
coffee; for he would not eat the hot biscuits, the corn-cake, the
bacon and hominy of the country, and constantly made little
New England meals for himself in his prejudiced little kitchen.
The pine-torch flared in the doorway; a breeze had come down
from the far mountains and cooled the air. Rodman kindled a
>>
## p. 16175 (#521) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16175
»
fire on the cavernous hearth, filled the kettle, found a saucepan,
and commenced operations, while the other lay outside and
watched every movement in the lighted room.
A11 ready: let me help you in. Here we are now-fried
potatoes, cold beef, mustard, toast, butter, and tea.
Eat, man;
and the next time I am laid up, you shall come over and cook
for me. ”
Hunger conquered; and the other ate – ate as he had not
eaten for months. As he was finishing a second cup of tea, a
slow step came around the house; it was the missing Pomp, an
old negro, bent and shriveled, who carried a bag of meal and
some bacon in his basket. “That is what they live on,” thought
the keeper.
He took leave without more words. “I suppose now I can
be allowed to go home in peace,” he grumbled to conscience.
The negro followed him across what was once the lawn. “Fin'
Mars' Ward mighty low,” he said apologetically, as he swung
open the gate which still hung between its posts, although the
fence was down, “but I hurred and hurred as fas' as I could:
it's mighty furto de town. Proud to see you, sah; hope you'll
come again. Fine fambly, de Wards, sah, befo' de war. ”
How long has he been in this state ?
MARGARET L. WOODS
16159
With an impatient gesture he folded his arms round his head,
so as more completely to shield his face, and spoke hoarsely from
beneath them: “You confounded rascal, I thought you knew bet-
ter! Go-go-go, I say! ”
The last words were spoken with increasing vehemence.
Esther, who had often been awe-struck before him, did not fear
him now. He was suffering, how or why she knew not; and
without her reverence for him being in any way impaired, he
awoke her instinctive feeling of responsibility towards all suffer-
ing creatures. The first shock over, she was comparatively calm
again, only thinking with painful intensity what she had better
do. So for a minute or two they both remained in the same
position, till he burst out again with greater violence than before:
"Knave! Beast! Idiot! Go, go! ”
Then she touched his hand. "It is Hess,” she said.
He lifted his head slowly, and turned his face towards her,
as though with reluctance. It was pale with the livid pallor of
a dark skin no longer young, and the firm lines of mouth and
cheek were slackened and hollowed. He looked a ghost; but
hardly the ghost of himself. In a minute, as he realized Esther's
presence, the life and individuality began to return to his face,
but in no amiable form.
“So, madam,” he said after a pause, with a grimace that did
duty for a smile, “ you are here! Ha! Charming! Pray, to what
am I indebted, et cætera ? »
Esther was too much shocked at his appearance to consider
how he received her.
“I have brought the paper you lost,” she returned hastily.
«'Tis here. But no matter — you are ill. You must let me find
your drops for you, and send for Dr. Arbuthnot. ”
He sat upright, and clutching the edge of the stool on which
he sat with both hands,—“I am not ill,” he said with harsh
impatience. Leave me. ”
«
“You are either ill or in some great trouble,” she replied:
«in either case not fit to be alone. If you will not have my
company, you must let me send you some other friend; though
a truer one it cannot be. Patrick will only come home to sleep
off his wine. ”
“Friend! ” he cried, friend! ”
And with a shriek of laughter he rocked himself to and fro
on the stool. Esther was standing up now; she looked at him
)
»
## p. 16160 (#506) ##########################################
16160
MARGARET L. WOODS
steadily, with a severity born rather of amazement than of any
conscious criticism of his conduct: but he was calm again so in-
stantaneously that she almost doubted whether it was he who had
laughed. They were silent for a minute or two, looking at each
other. He was apparently calm, but the singular blueness of his
eyes had disappeared; they glittered under the heavy black eye-
brows, each with a curious spark in it, not at all like the azure
eyes so familiar to his friends. The change in them made his
whole face look different; from having been pale, it had now
flushed a dark red.
“You talk to me of friends, child,” he resumed hoarsely, but
in a more normal tone, leaning forward and smiling at her
bitterly, both his hands still clutching the stool, “as though you
expected me to believe in 'em, or to fancy you believed in 'em.
No, no, Governor Huff has too much wit for that. Friends!
Fellows that suck your brains, suck 'em dry, dry, and pay you
with their damned promises; that when you've slaved and slaved
and made a million enemies, and when they think you're done
with, fling you out an Irish deanery, as you might fling a stick
into the sea for your dog - Hi! Swim for it, sir! He paused
a moment, moistened his dry lips, and drawing in his breath
let it out again in a low fierce exclamation. « But 'tis not I, 'tis
they who are done with,- Oxford, Bolingbroke. Puppets! Pawns
on the board! Oh, when I am gone they'll know themselves,
and whistle me back when 'tis too late. And I shall come, ay,
blundering fool that I am, I shall come. The moths,- do you
remember at Kensington, Hess ? — they come back to frizzle
where they frizzled before, don't they ? ”
He laughed again the same sudden shrieking laugh. The
perpendicular line was defining itself on Esther's white brow;
a line which looked severe, but really indicated only anxiety or
bewilderment.
"I esteem your political friends as little as you do," she
replied, mentioning them disdainfully, and thought I esteemed
'em less.
have others - better ones Mr. Gay, Mr.
Pope-
"Mr. Addison - Mr. Steele,” — he broke in with a mincing
accent meant to imitate her feminine voice. « Was that what
you was going to say, miss? Ha, ha, ha! Warm-hearted, generous
Joseph! Steele, true as-thyself! Gay, now — Gay's a charming
fellow when one feels charmingly. As to Pope,”— at that name
But you
>>
## p. 16161 (#507) ##########################################
MARGARET L. WOODS
16161
(
he dropped his sneer and spoke with sombre earnestness — “as to
Pope, never talk of him, Hesskin. He's a thing I believe in, I
will believe in, I tell you, Brat — so don't let's think of him
for fear for fear - Ah! Did you say he was crooked ? »
«I said nothing, sir,” she replied with dignity: "I would aim
at no man's defects of person, least of all at Mr. Pope's. But if
I cannot name a man friend but you'll mock at him, I'll bring
your women friends to your mind,- the truest, the most attached
of 'em. ” And she held her head higher. «There's Lady Betty
Germayne, my mother, Molly, and — myself. That's four. ”
Women's friendship! Women's friendship! By the powers,
she talks as though it were a thing to be calculated, — four
—
female friendships to one male. Pshaw! Weigh froth! Weigh
moonshine! They're more weighable than the parcel of vanity
and caprice called female friendship. Don't I know why Madam
Van and you were all anxiety to know Mr. Gay before I left ?
Why, to be sure, she must have a poet in her ante-chamber like
other women of quality ; for Madam Van is as mad as old New-
castle, and thinks herself a duchess. And when that poor dean
that's been so useful is gone, why, he's gone; and Hess must get
another fellow to teach her how to talk and make the wits in
love with her. Ay, I know what your female friendship's worth. ”
Esther stood upright beside him. She made no visible motion
while he spoke; but she held her head higher, the frown on her
brow deepened, and she looked down at him with eyes in which
an angry light began to burn, and cheeks flushing with an indig-
nant red. He tried to meet her gaze indifferently as he finished
speaking, but his own sank beneath it; and before she made any
answer he hung his head as one rebuked.
“You dare to say so! ” she said at last sternly. "And to me! »
Then after a pause, “Unworthy!
“Unworthy! Most unworthy! ” she ejacu-
lated.
Her words did not exactly represent her feeling. She was
more moved by horror and surprise that he should speak in a
way so unlike and so degrading to himself, than at his prepos-
terous reflections on herself and Mrs. Vanhomrigh. But what-
ever the precise proportion in which her emotions were mingled,
she stood there the very image of intense yet self-contained indig-
nation, fixing upon him a steady look of stern reproof. She who
had so often trembled before his least frown did not fear his fury
now, in this feverish sickness of his soul. He was silent, looking
XXVII-IOII
## p. 16162 (#508) ##########################################
16162
MARGARET L. WOODS
(c
her eyes.
at the table and drumming on it like a boy, half sullen, half
ashamed. Then on a sudden, putting both hands to his head
with a contortion of pain, «Oh, my head! my head! ” he cried.
“O God! - 0 God! »
And he rolled on the table in a paroxysm of anguish, moan-
ing inarticulately either prayers or curses. Every physical pang
that he endured created its mental counterpart in her; and her
whole soul was concentrated in a passionate prayer for help for
the body and mind of him laid there in anguish and disarray.
At length the paroxysm subsided, almost as suddenly as it had
come; but for a time he seemed unable to speak. Shading his
brow with his 'hand, he looked at her from time to time with a
faint, pleading, almost timid smile. This piteous smile, so unlike
any look she had ever seen or fancied on those haughty feat-
ures, was more than Esther could bear. Her breath came quick,
a strangling sob rose in her throat, and the hot tears blinded
But he had too often, quite mistakenly, praised her
as above the female weakness of tears; and she had too often
blushed to think of those tears of hers by the river at Windsor,
and those in the Sluttery, to weep again in his company. No,
she would rather choke than do it. So she could not answer
that pleading look with a kind one, but faced him with drooped
eyelids, lips severely close, flushed cheeks, and heaving bosom.
He spoke at last in a languid, hesitating voice, but calm and like
his own; no longer with the confused articulation of the fierce
grinding tones which had shocked Esther when he was talking
to her before.
“I beg your pardon, Essie, very humbly; yours and good
Madam Van's as well. You'd grant me grace if you only knew
what a bad head I have. Oh, such a racking head, Hess! The
pains of hell gat hold upon me,' last night when I came home
from Parson's Green; and all because of the least bit of fruit
from his glass-house the mad Peterborough would have me to
eat. No, I'll not do it again: fruit always did give me a bad
head. You've forgiven me, Brat, ha'n't you ? »
But Esther could not yet answer or meet that anxious, hum-
ble look of his.
“Essie! ” he cried pleadingly, “Essie! ” and stretched out his
hand towards hers as though to touch it, yet without doing so.
"Hess! ” he cried again. "What!
. "! You can't forgive your
poor friend, that hardly knows what he says when he cries aloud
(
## p. 16163 (#509) ##########################################
MARGARET L. WOODS
16163
>>
-
in his misery. Can't you forgive me, little Hesskin? Do- do
now forgive me. ”.
Esther was still kneeling like one in prayer, with her cheek
leaned on her clasped hands; but now the color had ebbed from
it and left her very pale, and the resolute lines of her lips had
softened. She lifted to his her great eyes, luminous with tears
repressed and an irrepressible fire of passion, and he started as
he met them.
“Forgive you ? ” she cried in a voice whose deep vibrating
music thrilled him in spite of himself; and then the same words
again, but set to some new harmony - “Forgive you? Why,
I love you! ”
The mental shock was sufficient to have thrust him back
again into that Inferno from which he had just escaped; but it
had the opposite effect. The weak, helpless feeling in the brain,
that usually remained with him for long after such an attack,
passed suddenly almost entirely away. Yes, it was a shock, For
weeks a dim troubling something, to which he obstinately refused
to give the shape of an idea, had been stirring in the depths of
his mind; and he had kept it down there by main force. Now
it sprang up before him, full-armed, like Minerva.
"I am obliged to you, Essie,” he said. "I should have been
sorry if I had offended you past your forgiveness. But now
you talk as wildly as I did. Had we not been friends so long,
I might misunderstand your meaning. ”
“Ah! ” she cried, leaping to her feet, and tossing back her
hood with a fierce, impatient gesture, you wish to misunderstand
it! You that have plagued me, tortured me with your questions,
now you would fain not hear the answer to 'em all. You that
have told me a thousand times to show you my heart, now you
will not see it. But you know, you know what you are to me;
- and a tearless sob strangled her voice.
“Your friend, Essie,” he said gravely, flinching before this
outburst of a passion it had been beyond his power to imagine.
“Friend! ” she cried, friend! ” and laughed, not bitterly, but
with a kind of wild tenderness. « Could Adam call the God that
shaped him out of dust his friend'? No, he must worship, he
must adore him. You shaped me. I was nothing, nothing,
before you taught me how to think, how to feel, and to love
what you love and despise what you despise. I am the creature
»
»
(C
«
## p. 16164 (#510) ##########################################
16164
MARGARET L. WOODS
(
of your hands, you made me and I am yours. You may be
sorry for't, but 'tis too late now to help it. ”
Swift made an attempt to assume that awful air with which
he was wont to cow the boldest of his friends or foes, but he
felt the attempt to be a failure.
"Hush, Essie! ” he cried. « What you are saying is very
wrong: 'tis rank blasphemy, and I will not hear it. ”
Esther turned from him, and paced the room for a minute
or two in a silence which Swift did not break, with her head
thrown back, and biting her under lip, as was her wont. Look-
ing on the ground, not at him, who had once more shaded his
face with one hand, she began again:
“We are neither of us enthusiasts, and I cannot pick my
words. Oh, that I could find one sharp enough to cut right
through my breast and show you my heart! Once you said I
should cease to be your friend on the day when I was afraid to
pin my heart to my sleeve-ruffles — yes, those were your very
words, pin it to my sleeve-ruffles'- for your inspection. You
forget, but I remember. Now you don't love to see it, but 'tis
too late to go back. If I said I worshiped you as one worships
God, I spoke wrongly. God is a long way off, and we have
never seen him, but we know he cannot need us. But you”-
she paused before him with clasped hands, like a worshiper
before a shrine-"you are far indeed above other men, yet you
are a man, and here among us; and you have often — ah! do not
try to deny it: little, nothing as I am compared to you, you have
often, often needed me! How can I choose but worship, adore, -
love you ? ”
And as she ended, she fell on her knees once more, and bend-
ing over his hand, that still lay stretched out on the table, touched
it with a swift hot kiss, and bowed her forehead on her folded
arms.
There was a sharp tap at the door. Some one must have
mounted the stairs unheard by either of them. Quick as light-
ning Esther sprang up and pulled her hood over her face.
Swift made a dash for his peruke, which lay on a neighboring
chair; but he had not got his head well into it when the door
was flung open, and, loudly announced by an invisible some one,
Mr. Erasmus Lewis walked in.
.
## p. 16165 (#511) ##########################################
16165
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
(1848–1894)
N THE novels of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a certain subtle
element of femininity is blended with masculine vigor and
disinterestedness. She had the self-restraint to stand aside
from her creations, yet she met the necessities of her art with a
woman's intuition. For this reason her novels are among the most
charming in the whole range of American fiction; satisfactory because
they always conform to a high standard of literary excellence, having
nothing about them shabby or careless or indifferent.
Their author
looks upon life with that steadiness and clearness of gaze which is
only possible to one who wishes to see things as a whole, and as
they are. Miss Woolson might be called a realist for this reason;
yet she is also true to the unknown romance which forever haunts
the souls of men.
Although she is primarily a novelist, not a little of her power is
shown in her short stories. Of these she has written a great number,
their backgrounds being generally the scenes with which she was at
the time familiar. She was all her life a wanderer, so that she wrote
with equal freedom of New England and its people, of New York
life, of the South, of Americans and Italians in Florence and Venice
and Rome.
She was born in Claremont, New Hampshire, 1848; a great-niece of
James Fenimore Cooper, she was to give early evidence of possessing
not a small share of his literary power. As a child she was taken to
Cleveland, Ohio, where she received her primary education; going
later to a French school in New York city, a school reproduced per-
haps in her novel (Anne. ' She lived in Cleveland until the death of
her father, Charles Jarvis Woolson, in 1869. From 1873 to 1879 she
lived with her mother in Florida and in other Southern States, -a
sojourn whose fruits appear in the book of short stories of life in the
South headed by Rodman the Keeper,' and in East Angels. ' Miss
Woolson seemed capable of appreciating with equal intensity the
stern, self-sufficing, conscientious New England character, and the
sensuous, easy, lovable nature of the far South. She drew both with
equal truth, and enjoyed contrasting them by bringing them together;
as in the story (The Front Yard,' — in which a good-for-nothing
family of Italian peasants have for a stepmother a New England
woman who lives a modified New England life in Assisi, — in East
Angels,' and elsewhere. Her later short stories are nearly all of
## p. 16166 (#512) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
Italy, or of Americans in Italy. She herself lived abroad continuously
after 1880, dying in Venice January 23d, 1894.
The scenes of her novels are laid in her own country, recalling
the associations of her childhood, —'Horace Chase, however, being
a novel of life in North Carolina. Anne,' 'Jupiter Lights,' (For the
Major,' have their setting in the North; East Angels,' in the far
South. Of these novels (Anne) is the most powerful and striking,
showing as it does Miss Woolson's ability to portray many kinds
of people — above all, her skill in the portraiture of women. She un-
derstood her own sex; her heroines are in no wise remarkable. They
may be met every day; their weakness, their strength, their love,
are found in every household. She understood men as well as an
unmarried woman can understand them, an unmarried woman with
the intuition of the artist. She understood perhaps best of all “the
common people,” especially their homely and hearty qualities. In
her novels she rarely gives way to sentiment or to feminine pathos;
the reader receives the impression that she has certain marketable
qualities in writing under curb. Her reserve force is a part of her
charm. On the whole her novels are strong, sane, and wholesomely
objective, having nothing in common with the hysteria of current
fiction. They fulfill the best purpose of a novel, to entertain without
enervating
RODMAN THE KEEPER
From Rodman the Keeper, and Other Southern Sketches. ) Published by
Harper & Brothers. Copyright 1880, by D. Appleton & Co.
“K
EEPER of what? Keeper of the dead. Well, it is easier to
keep the dead than the living; and as for the gloom of
the thing, the living among whom I have been lately
were not a hilarious set. ”
John Rodman sat in the doorway and looked out over his
domain. The little cottage behind him was empty of life save
himself alone. In one room the slender appointments provided
by government for the keeper, who being still alive must sleep
and eat, made the bareness doubly bare: in the other the desk
and the great ledgers, the ink and pens, the register, the
loud-ticking clock on the wall, and the flag folded on a shelf,
were all for the kept — whose names, in hastily written, blotted
rolls of manuscript, were waiting to be transcribed in the new
red-bound ledgers in the keeper's best handwriting day by day,
while the clock was to tell him the hour when the flag must
## p. 16167 (#513) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16167
rise over the mounds where reposed the bodies of fourteen thou-
sand United States soldiers — who had languished where once
stood the prison-pens on the opposite slopes, now fair and peace-
ful in the sunset; who had fallen by the way in long marches
to and fro under the burning sun; who had fought and died on
the many battle-fields that reddened the beautiful State, stretch-
ing from the peaks of the marble mountains in the smoky west
down to the sea islands of the ocean border. The last rim of the
sun's red ball had sunk below the horizon line, and the western
sky glowed with deep rose color, which faded away above into
pink, into the salmon tint, into shades of that far-away heavenly
emerald which the brush of the earthly artist can never repro-
duce, but which is found sometimes in the iridescent heart of
the opal. The small town, a mile distant, stood turning its back
on the cemetery: but the keeper could see the pleasant, rambling
old mansions, each with its rose-garden and neglected outlying
fields, the empty negro quarters falling into ruin, and everything
just as it stood when on that April morning the first gun was
fired on Sumter; apparently not a nail added, not a brushful
of paint applied, not a fallen brick replaced, or latch or lock
repaired.
The keeper had noted these things as he strolled through
the town, but not with surprise; for he had seen the South in
its first estate, when, fresh, strong, and fired with enthusiasm, he
too had marched away from his village home with the colors
flying above and the girls waving their handkerchiefs behind, as
the regiment, a thousand strong, filed down the dusty road.
That regiment, a weak, scarred two hundred, came back a year
later with lagging step and colors tattered and scorched, and
the girls could not wave their handkerchiefs, wet and sodden
with tears. But the keeper, his wound healed, had gone again;
and he had seen with his New England eyes the magnificence
and the carelessness of the South, her splendor and negligence,
her wealth and thriftlessness, as through Virginia and the fair
Carolinas, across Georgia and into sunny Florida, he had marched
month by month, first a lieutenant, then captain, and finally ma-
jor and colonel, as death mowed down those above him, and he
and his good conduct were left. Everywhere magnificence went
hand in hand with neglect, and he had said so as chance now
and then threw a conversation in his path.
“We have no such shiftless ways,” he would remark, after
he had furtively supplied a prisoner with hard-tack and coffee.
(
## p. 16168 (#514) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
»
"And no such grand ones, either,” Johnny Reb would reply,
if he was a man of spirit; and generally he was.
The Yankee, forced to acknowledge the truth of this state-
ment, qualified it by observing that he would rather have more
thrift with a little less grandeur; whereupon the other answered
that he would not: and there the conversation rested. So now
ex-Colonel Rodman, keeper of the national cemetery, viewed the
little town in its second estate with philosophic eyes. « It is
part of a great problem now working itself out; I am not here
to tend the living but the dead,” he said.
Whereupon, as he walked among the long mounds, a voice
seemed to rise from the still ranks below: “While ye have time,
do good to men,” it said. Behold, we are beyond your care. ”
But the keeper did not heed.
This still evening in early February he looked out over the
level waste. The little town stood in the lowlands: there were
no hills from whence cometh help-calm heights that lift the
soul above earth and its cares; no river to lead the aspirations
of the children outward toward the great sea. Everything was
monotonous; and the only spirit that rose above the waste was
a bitterness for the gained and sorrow for the lost cause. The
keeper was the only man whose presence personated the for-
mer in their sight, and upon him therefore, as representative,
the bitterness fell; not in words, but in averted looks, in sudden
silences when he approached, in withdrawals and avoidance, until
he lived and moved in a vacuum: wherever he went there was
presently no one save himself; the very shop-keeper who sold him
sugar seemed turned into a man of wood, and took his money
reluctantly, although the shilling gained stood perhaps for that
day's dinner.
So Rodman withdrew himself, and came and went among
them no more: the broad acres of his domain gave him as much
exercise as his shattered ankle could bear; he ordered his few
supplies by the quantity, and began the life of a solitary, his
island marked out by the massive granite wall with which the
United States government has carefully surrounded those sad
Southern cemeteries of hers — sad, not so much from the number
of the mounds representing youth and strength cut off in their
bloom,- for that is but the fortune of war,- as for the complete
isolation which marks them. “Strangers in a strange land” is
the thought of all who, coming and going to and from Florida,
turn aside here and there to stand for a moment among the
## p. 16169 (#515) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16169
closely ranged graves which seem already a part of the past –
that near past which in our hurrying American life is even now
so far away.
The government work was completed before the
keeper came: the lines of the trenches were defined by low
granite copings, and the comparatively few single mounds were
headed by trim little white boards bearing generally the word
“Unknown,” but here and there a name and an age,- in most
cases a boy from some far-away Northern State; "twenty-one,”
"twenty-two," said the inscriptions; the dates were those dark
years among the sixties, measured now more than by anything
else in the number of maidens widowed in heart, and women
widowed indeed, who sit still and remember while the world
rushes by. At sunrise the keeper ran up the Stars and Stripes;
and so precise were his ideas of the accessories belonging to the
place, that from his own small store of money he had taken
enough, by stinting himself, to buy a second flag for stormy
weather, so that, rain or not, the colors should float over the
dead. This was not patriotism so called or rather miscalled, it
was not sentimental fancy, it was not zeal or triumph: it was
simply a sense of the fitness of things, a conscientiousness which
had in it nothing of religion, unless indeed a man's endeavor
to live up to his own ideal of his duty be a religion. The
same feeling led the keeper to spend hours in copying the rolls.
"John Andrew Warren, Company G, Eighth New Hampshire
Infantry,” he repeated, as he slowly wrote the name, giving
"John Andrew” clear, bold capitals and a lettering impossible
to mistake; died August 15, 1863, aged twenty-two years. ”_"He
came from the prison-pen yonder, and lies somewhere in those
trenches, I suppose. Now then, John Andrew, don't fancy I am
I
sorrowing for you; no doubt you are better off than I am at this
very moment. But none the less, John Andrew, shall pen, ink,
and hand do their duty to you. For that I am here. ”
Infinite pains and labor went into these records of the dead;
one hair's-breadth error and the whole page was replaced by a
new one. The same spirit kept the grass carefully away from
the low coping of the trenches, kept the graveled paths smooth
and the mounds green, and the bare little cottage neat as a man-
of-war. When the keeper cooked his dinner, the door toward
the east, where the dead lay, was scrupulously closed; nor was
it opened until everything was in perfect order again. At sunset
the flag was lowered; and then it was the keeper's habit to
walk slowly up and down the path until the shadows veiled the
## p. 16170 (#516) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
»
mounds on each side, and there was nothing save the peaceful
green of earth.
«So time will efface our little lives and sorrows,”
he mused, “and we shall be as nothing in the indistinguishable
past. ” Yet none the less did he fulfill the duties of every day
and hour with exactness. "At least they shall not say that I was
lacking,” he murmured to himself as he thought vaguely of the
future beyond these graves. Who they were, it would have
troubled him to formulate, since he was one of the many sons
whom New England in this generation sends forth with a belief
composed entirely of negatives. As the season advanced, he
worked all day in the sunshine. “My garden looks well,” he
said. . « I like this cemetery, because it is the original resting-
place of the dead who lie beneath. They were not brought here
from distant places, gathered up by contract, numbered, and de-
scribed, like so much merchandise; their first repose has not been
broken, their peace has been undisturbed. Hasty burials the
prison authorities gave them: the thin bodies were tumbled into
the trenches by men almost as thin; for the whole State went
hungry in those dark days. There were not many prayers, no
tears, as the dead-carts went the rounds. But the prayers had
been said, and the tears had fallen, while the poor fellows were
still alive in the pens yonder; and when at last death came, it
was like a release. They suffered long; and I for one believe
that therefore shall their rest be long,- long and sweet. ”
After a time began the rain,—the soft, persistent, gray rain
of the Southern lowlands,- and he stayed within and copied an-
other thousand names into the ledger. He would not allow him-
self the companionship of a dog, lest the creature should bark
at night and disturb the quiet. There was no one to hear save
himself, and it would have been a friendly sound as he lay awake
on his narrow iron bed; but it seemed to him against the spirit
of the place. He would not smoke, although he had the soldier's
fondness for a pipe. Many a dreary evening, beneath a hastily
built shelter of boughs, when the rain poured down and every-
thing was comfortless, he had found solace in the curling smoke;
but now it seemed to him that it would be incongruous, and at
times he almost felt as if it would be selfish too. “They cannot
smoke, you know, down there under the wet grass,” he thought,
as standing at the window he looked toward the ranks of the
mounds stretching across the eastern end from side to side — “my
parade-ground,” he called it. And then he would smile at his
own fancies, draw the curtain, shut out the rain and the night,
-
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16171
C
light his lamp, and go to work on the ledgers again. Some of
the names lingered in his memory; he felt as if he had known
the men who bore them, as if they had been boys together, and
were friends even now although separated for a time. "James
Marvin, Company B, Fifth Maine. The Fifth Maine was in the
seven days' battle. I say, do you remember that retreat down
the Quaker church road, and the way Phil Kearny held the
rear-guard firm ? ” And over the whole seven days he wandered
with his mute friend, who remembered everything and everybody
in the most satisfactory way. One of the little head-boards in
the parade-ground attracted him peculiarly because the name
inscribed was his own:
Rodman, Company A, One Hun-
dred and Sixth New York. ”
“I remember that regiment: it came from the extreme north-
ern part of the State. Blank Rodman must have melted down
here, coming as he did from the half-arctic region along the St.
Lawrence. I wonder what he thought of the first hot day, say
in South Carolina, along those simmering rice-fields ? ” He grew
into the habit of pausing for a moment by the side of this grave
every morning and evening. «Blank Rodman.
« Blank Rodman. It might easily
have been John. And then where should I be ? ”
But Blank Rodman remained silent; and the keeper, after
pulling up a weed or two and trimming the grass over his rela-
tive, went off to his duties again. “I am convinced that Blank
is a relative,” he said to himself; distant perhaps, but still a
kinsman. ”
One April day the heat was almost insupportable; but the sun's
rays were not those brazen beams that sometimes in North-
ern cities burn the air and scorch the pavements to a white
heat, - rather were they soft and still; the moist earth exhaled
her richness, not a leaf stirred, and the whole level country
seemed sitting in a hot vapor bath. In the early dawn the
keeper had performed his outdoor tasks; but all day he remained
almost without stirring in his chair between two windows, striv-
ing to exist. At high noon out came a little black, bringing his
supplies from the town, whistling and shuffling along, gay as a
lark. The keeper watched him coming slowly down the white
road, loitering by the way in the hot blaze, stopping to turn a
somersault or two, to dangle over a bridge rail, to execute various
impromptu capers all by himself. He reached the gate at last,
entered, and having come all the way up the path in a hornpipe
step, he set down his basket at the door to indulge in one long
-
## p. 16172 (#518) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
(
(
and final double-shuffle before knocking. "Stop that! ” said the
keeper through the closed blinds. The little darkey darted back;
but as nothing further came out of the window-a boot, for
instance, or some other stray missile — he took courage, showed
his ivories, and drew near again. “Do you suppose I am going
to have you stirring up the heat in that way? ” demanded the
keeper.
The little black grinned, but made no reply, unless smoothing
the hot white sand with his black toes could be construed as
such; he now removed his rimless hat and made a bow.
“Is it or is it not warm ? ” asked the keeper, as a naturalist
might inquire of a salamander, not referring to his own so much
as to the salamander's ideas on the subject.
"Dunno, mars',” replied the little black.
« How do
you
feel ? »
"'Spects I feel all right, mars'. ”
The keeper gave up the investigation, and presented to the
salamander a nickel cent. "I suppose there is no such thing as
a cool spring in all this melting country,” he said.
But the salamander indicated with his thumb a clump of trees
on the green plain north of the cemetery. “Ole Mars' Ward's
place — cole spring dah. ” He then departed, breaking into a run
after he had passed the gate, his ample mouth watering at the
thought of a certain chunk of taffy at the mercantile establish-
ment kept by Aunt Dinah in a corner of her one-roomed cabin.
At sunset the keeper went thirstily out with a tin pail on his
arm, in search of the cold spring. "If it could only be like the
spring down under the rocks where I used to drink when I was
a boy! ” he thought. He had never walked in that direction
before. Indeed, now that he had abandoned the town, he seldom
went beyond the walls of the cemetery. An old road led across
to the clump of trees, through fields run to waste, and following
it he came to the place,-a deserted house with tumble-down
fences and overgrown garden, the out-buildings indicating that
once upon a time there were many servants and a prosperous
master. The house was of wood, large on the ground, with
encircling piazzas; across the front door rough bars had been
nailed, and the closed blinds were protected in the same manner;
from long want of paint the clapboards were gray and mossy, and
the floor of the piazza had fallen in here and there from decay.
The keeper decided that his cemetery as a much
nore cheer-
ful place than this, and then he looked around for the spring.
C
## p. 16173 (#519) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16173
Behind the house the ground sloped down; it must be there.
He went around and came suddenly upon a man lying on an
old rug outside of a back door.
« Excuse me.
I thought nobody
lived here,” he said.
“Nobody does,” replied the man: "I am not much of a body,
am I?
His left arm was gone, and his face was thin and worn with
long illness; he closed his eyes after speaking, as though the few
words had exhausted him.
“I came for water from a cold spring you have here, some-
where,” pursued the keeper, contemplating the wreck before him
with the interest of one who has himself been severely wounded,
and knows the long, weary pain. The man waved his hand
toward the slope without unclosing his eyes, and Rodman went
off with his pail, and found a little shady hollow, once curbed
and paved with white pebbles, but now neglected, like all the
place. The water was cold, however - deliciously cold. He filled
his pail, and thought that perhaps after all he would exert him-
self to make coffee, now that the sun was down: it would taste
better made of this cold water. When he came up the slope
the man's eyes were open.
“Have some water ? » asked Rodman.
“Yes: there's a gourd inside. ”
The keeper entered, and found himself in a large, bare room:
in one corner was some straw covered with an old counterpane,
in another a table and chair; a kettle hung in the deep fireplace,
and a few dishes stood on a shelf: by the door on a nail hung
a gourd; he filled it and gave it to the host of this desolate
abode. The man drank with eagerness.
Pomp has gone to town,” he said, and I could not get
down to the spring to-day, I have had so much pain. ”
“And when will Pomp return? ”
“He should be here now; he is very late to-night. ”
"Can I get you anything ? ”
“No, thank you: he will soon be here. ”
The keeper looked out over the waste; there was
in sight. He was not a man of any especial kindliness,- he had
himself been too hardly treated in life for that, but he could
not find it in his heart to leave this helpless creature all alone
with night so near. So he sat down on the door-step. “I will
rest awhile,” he said, not asking but announcing it.
The man
had turned away and closed his eyes again, and they both
»
(C
((
no
one
## p. 16174 (#520) ##########################################
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CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
(
(
remained silent, busy with their own thoughts; for each had
recognized the ex-soldier, Northern and Southern, in portions of
the old uniforms, and in the accent. The war and its memories
were still very near to the maimed, poverty-stricken Confederate;
and the other knew that they were, and did not obtrude himself.
Twilight fell, and no one came.
"Let me get you something,” said Rodman; for the face
looked ghastly as the fever abated. The other refused. Dark-
ness came; still no one.
« Look here,” said Rodman, rising, "I have been wounded
myself, was in hospital for months: I know how you feel. You
must have food — a cup of tea, now, and a slice of toast, brown
and thin. ”
“I have not tasted tea or wheaten bread for weeks,” answered
the man; his voice died off into a wail, as though feebleness and
pain had drawn the cry from him in spite of himself. Rodman
lighted a match: there was no candle, only a piece of pitch-pine
stuck in an iron socket on the wall; he set fire to this primitive
torch and looked around.
« There is nothing there,” said the man outside, making an
effort to speak carelessly: “my servant went to town for sup-
plies. Do not trouble yourself to wait; he will come presently,
and- and I want nothing. ”
But Rodman saw through proud poverty's lie: he knew that
irregular quavering of the voice, and that trembling of the
hand; the poor fellow had but one to tremble. He continued
his search; but the bare room gave back nothing, not a crumb.
“Well, if you are not hungry,” he said briskly, “I am -hun-
gry as a bear; and I'll tell you what I am going to do. I live
not far from here, and I live all alone, too: I haven't a servant
as you have.
Let me
take
supper here with you just for a
change; and if your servant comes, so much the better,
he can
wait upon us.
I'll run over and bring back the things. ”
He was gone without waiting for a reply: the shattered ankle
made good time over the waste, and soon returned, limping a
little, but bravely hasting, while on a tray came the keeper's best
supplies,— Irish potatoes, corned beef, wheaten bread, butter, and
coffee; for he would not eat the hot biscuits, the corn-cake, the
bacon and hominy of the country, and constantly made little
New England meals for himself in his prejudiced little kitchen.
The pine-torch flared in the doorway; a breeze had come down
from the far mountains and cooled the air. Rodman kindled a
>>
## p. 16175 (#521) ##########################################
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
16175
»
fire on the cavernous hearth, filled the kettle, found a saucepan,
and commenced operations, while the other lay outside and
watched every movement in the lighted room.
A11 ready: let me help you in. Here we are now-fried
potatoes, cold beef, mustard, toast, butter, and tea.
Eat, man;
and the next time I am laid up, you shall come over and cook
for me. ”
Hunger conquered; and the other ate – ate as he had not
eaten for months. As he was finishing a second cup of tea, a
slow step came around the house; it was the missing Pomp, an
old negro, bent and shriveled, who carried a bag of meal and
some bacon in his basket. “That is what they live on,” thought
the keeper.
He took leave without more words. “I suppose now I can
be allowed to go home in peace,” he grumbled to conscience.
The negro followed him across what was once the lawn. “Fin'
Mars' Ward mighty low,” he said apologetically, as he swung
open the gate which still hung between its posts, although the
fence was down, “but I hurred and hurred as fas' as I could:
it's mighty furto de town. Proud to see you, sah; hope you'll
come again. Fine fambly, de Wards, sah, befo' de war. ”
How long has he been in this state ?
