Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/443

 suggestive of pure blood, budding lips full of sensibility, a chin and brow that showed intellect as well as lineage, and cheeks touched with the young rose's tint--was as a beautiful _debutante_, the flower of rich drawing-rooms, in her first season: one white moss-rosebud in her smoothly-braided hair; her dimpled, round, white shoulders left to their own adornment; and for jewels, only one opal on her ripening bosom;--as much of her dress as was shown was the simple white bodice of pure maidenhood.

In the next, she had passed an interval of trial, for her courage, her patience, and her pride,--a very few years, perhaps, but enough to bestow that haughty, defiant glance, and fix those matchless features in an almost sneer. No longer was her fair head bowed, her eyes downcast, in shrinking diffidence; but erect and commanding, she looked some tyranny, or insolence, or malice, in the face, to look it down. Jewels encircled her brow, and a bouquet of pearls was happy on her fuller bosom.

Still a few years further on,--and how changed! "So have I seen a rose," says that Shakspeare of the pulpit, old Jeremy Taylor, when it has "bowed the head and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it has fallen into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." Alas, Farewell, and Nevermore sighed from those hollow cheeks, those woebegone eyes, those pallid lips, that willow-like long hair, and the sad vesture of the forsaken Dido.

So with the child. At first, a rosy, careless, curly-pate of three years or so,--wonder-eyed and eager, all spring and joyance, and beautiful as Love.

Then pale and pain-fretted, heavy-eyed and weary, feebly half-lying in a great chair, still,--an unheeded locket scarce held by his thin fingers, his forehead wrinkled with cruel twinges, the sweet bowed lines of his lips twisted in whimpering puckers, the curls upon his vein-traced temples unnaturally bright, as with clamminess,--a painful picture for a mother's eyes!

But not tragic, like the last; for there the boy had grown. Nine years had deepened for his clustered curls their hue of golden brown, and set a seal of anxious thought upon the cold, pale surface of his intellectual brow, and traced his mouth about with lines of a martyr's resignation, and filled his profound eyes, dim as violets, with foreboding speculation, making the lad seem a seer of his own sad fate. Here, thought I, if I mistake not, is another melancholy chapter in this San Franciscan romance. This painter learned his art of Sorrow, and pitiless Experience has bestowed his style; he shall be for my finding-out.

Home-sickness had marked me for its own one day. I sat alone in my rude little office, conning over again for the hundredth time strange chapters of a waif's experience,--reproducing auld-lang-syne, with all its thronged streets and lonely forest-paths, its old familiar faces, talks, and songs,--ingathering there, in the name of Love or Friendship, forms that were dim and voices that were echoes; and many an "alas," and "too late," and "it might have been," they brought along with them. "Let this remembrance comfort me,--that when My heart seemed bursting,--like a restless wave  That, swollen with fearful longing for the shore,  Throws its strong life on the imagined bliss  Of finding peace and undisturbed calm,--  It fell on rocks and broke in many tears.

"Else could I bear, on all days of the year,-- Not now alone, this gentle summer night,  When scythes are busy in the headed grass,  And the full moon warms me to thoughtfulness,--  This voice that haunts the desert of my soul:  'It might have been!' Alas! 'It might have been!'"

I drew from my battered, weather-beaten sea-box sad store of old letters, bethumbed and soiled,--an accusation in every one of them, and small hope of forgiveness, save what the gentle dead might render. There were pretty little portraits, too.--Ah, well! I put them back, --