holly’s eighteenth birthday was but a fortnight distant when the quiet stream of her life, which since her father’s death six years before had flowed placidly, with but few events to ripple its tranquil surface, was suddenly disturbed....
to the child of twelve years death, because of its unfamiliarity and mystery, is peculiarly terrible. at that age one has become too wise to find comfort in the vague and beautiful explanations of tearfully-smiling relatives—explanations in which heaven is pictured as a material region just out of sight beyond the zenith; too selfishly engrossed with one’s own loneliness and terror to be pacified by the contemplation of the radiant peace and beatitude attained by the departed one in that ethereal[10] and invisible suburb. and at twelve one is as yet too lacking in wisdom to realize the beneficence of death.
thus it was that when captain lamar wayne died at waynewood, in his fiftieth year, holly, left quite alone in a suddenly empty world save for her father’s sister, miss india wayne, grieved passionately and rebelliously, giving way so abjectly to her sorrow that aunt india, fearing gravely for her health, summoned the family physician.
“there is nothing physically wrong with her,” pronounced the old doctor, “nothing that i can remedy with my poisons. you must get her mind away from her sorrow, my dear miss india. i would suggest that you take her away for a time; give her new scenes; interest her in new affairs. meanwhile ... there is no harm....” the old doctor wrote a prescription with his trembling hand ... “a simple tonic ... nothing more.”
so aunt india and holly went away. at first the thought of deserting the new grave[11] in the little burying-ground within sight of the house moved holly to a renewed madness of grief. but by the time uncle randall had put their trunk and bags into the old carriage interest in the journey had begun to assuage holly’s sorrow. it was her first journey into the world. save for visits to neighboring plantations and one memorable trip to tallahassee while her father had served in the state legislature, she had never been away from corunna. and now she was actually going into another state! and not merely to georgia, which would have been a comparatively small event since the georgia line ran east[12] and west only a bare half-dozen miles up the valdosta road, but away up to kentucky, of which, since the waynes had come from there in the first part of the century, holly had heard much all her life.
as the carriage moved down the circling road holly watched with trembling lips the little brick-walled enclosure on the knoll. then came a sudden gush of tears and convulsive sobs, and when these had passed they were under the live-oaks at the depot, and the train of two cars and a rickety, asthmatic engine, which ran over the six-mile branch to the main line, was posing importantly in front of the weather-beaten station.
holly’s pulses stirred with excitement, and when, a quarter of an hour later,—for aunt india believed in being on time,—she kissed uncle ran good-bye, her eyes were quite dry.
that visit had lasted nearly three months, and for awhile holly had been surfeited with new sights and new experiences against which no grief, no matter how poignant,[13] could have been wholly proof. when, on her return to waynewood, she paid her first visit to her father’s grave, the former ecstasy of grief was absent. in its place was a tender, dim-eyed melancholy, something exaltedly sacred and almost sweet, a sentiment to be treasured and nourished in reverent devotion. and yet i think it was not so much the journey that accomplished this end as it was a realization which came to her during the first month of the visit.
in her first attempts at comforting the child, and many times since, aunt india had reminded holly that now that her father had reached heaven he and her mother were together once more, and that since they had loved each other very dearly on earth they were beyond doubt very happy in paradise. aunt india assured her that it was a beautiful thought. but it had never impressed holly as miss india thought it should. possibly she was too self-absorbed in her sorrow to consider it judicially. but one night she had a dream from which she awoke murmuring happily in the darkness. she could not remember very clearly what she had dreamed, although she strove hard to do so. but she knew that it was a beautiful dream, a dream in which her father and her mother,—the wonderful mother of whom she had no recollection,—had appeared to her hand in hand and had spoken loving, comforting words. for the first time she realized aunt india’s meaning; realized how very, very happy her father and mother must be together[15] in heaven, and how silly and selfish she had been to wish him back. all in the instant there, in the dim silence, the dull ache of loneliness which had oppressed her for months disappeared. she no longer seemed alone; somewhere,—near at hand,—was sympathy and love and heart-filling comradeship. holly lay for awhile very quiet and happy in the great four-poster bed, and stared into the darkness with wide eyes that swam in grateful tears. then she fell into a sound, calm sleep.
she did not tell aunt india of her dream; not because there was any lack of sympathy between them, but because to have shared it would have robbed it of half its dearness. for a long, long time it was the most precious of her possessions, and she hugged it to her and smiled over it as a mother over her child. and so i think it was the dream that accomplished what the old doctor could not,—the dream that brought, as dreams so often do, heaven very close to earth. dreams are blessed things, be they day-dreams or dreams of the night; and[16] even the ugly ones are beneficent, since at waking they make by contrast reality more endurable.
if aunt india never learned the cause she was at least quick to note the result. holly’s thin little cheeks borrowed tints from the duchess roses in the garden, and aunt india graciously gave the credit to kentucky air, even as she drew her white silk shawl more closely about her slender shoulders and shivered in the unaccustomed chill of a kentucky autumn.
then followed six tranquil years in which holly grew from a small, long-legged, angular child to a very charming maiden of eighteen, dainty with the fragrant daintiness of a southern rosebud; small of stature, as her mother had been before her, yet possessed of a gracious dignity that added mythical inches to her height; no longer angular but gracefully symmetrical with the soft curves of womanhood; with a fair skin like the inner petal of a la france rose; with eyes warmly, deeply brown, darkened by large irises; a low, broad forehead[17] under a wealth of hair just failing of being black; a small, mobile mouth, with lips as freshly red as the blossoms of the pomegranate tree in the corner of the yard, and little firm hands and little arched feet as true to beauty as the needle to the pole. god sometimes fashions a perfect body, and when he does can any praise be too extravagant?
for the rest, holly wayne at eighteen—or, to be exact, a fortnight before—was perhaps as contradictory as most girls of her age. warm-hearted and tender, she could be tyrannical if she chose; dignified at times, there were moments when she became a breath-taking madcap of a girl,—moments of which aunt india strongly but patiently disapproved; affectionate and generous, she was capable of showing a very pretty temper which, like mingled flash of lightning and roar of thunder, was severe but brief; tractable, she was not pliant, and from her father she had inherited settled convictions on certain subjects, such for instance as secession and emancipation,[18] and an accompanying dash of contumacy for the protection of them.
she was fond of books, and had read every sombre-covered volume of the british poets from fly-leaf to fly-leaf. she preferred poetry to prose, but when the first was wanting she put up cheerfully with the latter. the contents of her father’s modest library had been devoured with a fine catholicity before she was sixteen. recent books were few at corunna, and had holly been asked to name her favorite volume of fiction she would have been forced to divide the honor between certain volumes of the spectator, st. elmo, and the wide, wide world. she was intensely fond of being out of doors; even in her crawling days her negro mammy had found it a difficult task to keep her within walls; and so her reading had ever been al fresco. her favorite place was under the gnarled old fig-tree at the end of the porch, where, perched in a comfortable crotch of trunk and branch, or asway in a hammock, she spent many of her waking hours. when the weather kept[19] her indoors, she never thought of books at all. those stood with her for filtered sunlight, green-leaf shadows, and the perfume-laden breezes.
her education, begun lovingly and sternly by her father, had ended with a four-years’ course at a neighboring academy, supplying her with as much knowledge as captain wayne would have considered proper for her. he had held to old-fashioned ideas in such matters, and had considered the ability to quote aptly from pope or dryden of more appropriate value to a young woman than a knowledge of herbert spencer’s absurdities or a bowing acquaintance with differential calculus. so holly graduated very proudly from the academy, looking her sweetest in white muslin and lavender ribbons, and was quite, quite satisfied with her erudition and contentedly ignorant of many of the things that fit into that puzzle which we are pleased to call life.
and now, in the first week of november in the year 1898, the tranquil stream of her[20] existence was about to be disturbed. although she could have no knowledge of it, as yet, fate was already poising the stone which, once dropped into that stream, was destined to cause disquieting ripples, perplexing eddies, distracting swirls and, in the end, the formation of a new channel. and even now the messenger of fate was limping along with the aid of his stout cane, coming nearer and nearer down the road from the village under the shade of the water-oaks, a limp and a tap for every beat of holly’s unsuspecting heart.
