Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/463

Rh to some noble company." The glorious dead! the mighty, the immortal dead! And then I find myself whispering that majestic line,

What is it, dear? Morbid? Bless your heart, no! I might be morbid over some weakling who had died,—not a big, splendid fellow like your uncle Tom. Why, he laughed all his life, and he went smiling out of it. I must be as robust as he. I must act nobly in my grief. I'm an old woman, but, bless you! we old folks can be more gallant than you children, with all your hot blood to back you. Well! well! run away, dear, now. I'm going to be busy. There is one last bundle of letters to burn. Then we shall be in order, ready to fight out our life without him. No! no! I can't put it off. I've done that too long already. Dear heart, I'm strong enough. I wish I wasn't. I wish I could start to-day on the road Tom went. It wouldn't be even lonesome. I should find his footprints in it. I don't know where it leads; but I don't care. Tom Huntington's there, and that's enough for me. No, I mustn't put it off. If I did, it never would be done at all. Why, dear, I had that lesson when I was a child of ten. My father died. It was sweet spring weather. We sat on the door-stone in the dark, my brother and I, and the whippoorwill called in the orchard. We wondered why mother cried and why everybody was so good to us, so pitiful in a still, strange way. They said father had "gone." But we were children, and we knew that he would come back.

In spite of that mysterious room with the closed blinds, in spite of mother's crying, we knew he'd come. In a week I found mother putting away his clothes,—father's clothes. I cried. I almost fought her. I loved my father.

"But he'll need them," I kept saying. "He'll need them when he comes."

Mother took both my hands and drew me close. She made me sit down on a little stool in front of her, and she looked into my eyes.

"Listen," said she. "Father is not coming back. We shall go to him, but he will not return to us."