Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/490

448 but Sarah did not trouble herself in the least. She continued to sit bent over like a lily limp with the heat, and she stared with her two great blue eyes in her cameo face forth at the wonders of the summer night, and she had apparently very little consciousness of the people around her. Her loose white gown fell loosely around her; her white elbows were quite visible from the position in which she held her arms. Her lovely hair hung in soft loops over her ears. She was the only one who paid the slightest attention to the beauty of the night. She was filling her whole soul with it.

It was a wonderful night, and Adams was a village in which to see a wonderful night. It was flanked by a river, upon the opposite bank of which rose a gentle mountain. Above the mountain the moon was appearing with the beauty of revelation, and the tall trees made superb shadow effects. The night also was not without its voices and its fragrances. Katydids were shrilling from every thicket, and over somewhere near the river a whippoorwill was persistently calling. As for the fragrances, they were those of the dark, damp skirts and wings of the night, the evidences as loud as voices of green shrubs and flowers blooming in low wet places; but dominant above all was the scent of the lilies. The whole night was redolent with lilies. One breathed in lilies to that extent that one's thought seemed fairly scented with them. It was easy enough, by looking toward the left, to see where the fragrance came from. There was evident, on the other side of a low hedge, a pale florescence of the flowers. Beyond them rose, pale likewise, the great Ware house, the largest in the village, and the oldest. Hyacinthus Ware was the sole representative of the old family known to be living. Presently the group on the Lynn door-step began to talk about him, leading up to the subject from the fragrance of the lilies.

"Them lilies is so sweet they are sickish," said the old grandmother.

"Yes, they be dreadful sickish," said Mrs. Lynn. Mrs. Wilford Biggs and Mr. Mangam, as usual, said nothing.

"Hyacinthus is home, I see," said Mrs. Lynn.

"Yes, I see him on the street t'other day," said the old woman, in her thick dialect. She sat straighter than ever as she gazed across at the garden of lilies and the great Ware house, and the cold step-stone seemed to pierce her old spinal column like a rod of steel; but she never flinched.

Mrs. Wilford Biggs and Mr. John Mangam said nothing.

"He is the handsomest man I ever saw," said Sarah Lynn, unexpectedly, in an odd, shamed, almost awed voice, as if she were speaking of a divinity.

Then for the first time Mr. John Mangam gave evidence of life. He did not speak, but he made an inarticulate noise between a grunt and a sniff.

"Well, if you call that man good-lookin'," said Mrs. Lynn, "you don't see the way I do, that's all." She looked straight at Mr. John Mangam as she spoke.

"I don't call him good-looking at all," said the old woman; "dreadful white-livered."

Sarah said nothing at all, but the face of the man, Hyacinthus Ware, was before her eyes still, as beautiful and grand as the face of a god.

"Never heerd such a name, either," said the old woman. "His mother was dreadful flowery. She had some outlandish blood. I don't know whether she was Eyetalian or Dutch."

"Her mother was Greek, I always heard," said Mrs. Lynn. "I dun'no' as I ever heard of any other Greek round these parts. I guess they don't emigrate much."

"I guess it was Greek, now you speak of it," said the old woman. "I knew she was outlandish on one side, anyhow. An' as fur callin' him good-lookin'—" She looked aggressively at her great-granddaughter, whose beautiful face was turned toward the moonlit night.

It was a long time that they sat there. It had been a very hot day, and the cool was grateful. Hardly a remark was made, except one from Mrs. Lynn that it was a blessing there were so few mosquitoes and they could sit outdoors such a night.

"I ain't heerd but one all the time I've been settin' here," said the old woman, "and I ketched him."

Sarah, the girl, continued to drink, to eat, to imbibe, to assimilate, toward her