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Page 69
Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,--I was the
oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us,
instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my
years were. "Sarah, I don't understand. You think she might have lost
the train? But Alice is so punctual. Alice never lost a train. And she
said she would come." And then, a while after, "I _don't_ understand."
It was not like my mother to worry. The next day the coach lumbered up
and rattled past, and did not stop,--and the next, and the next.
"We shall have a letter," mother said, her eyes saddening every
afternoon. But we had no letter. And another day went by, and another.
"She is sick," we said; and mother wrote to her, and watched for the
lumbering coach, and grew silent day by day. But to the letter there was
no answer.
Ten days passed. Mother came to me one afternoon to ask for her pen,
which I had borrowed. Something in her face troubled me vaguely.
"What are you going to do, mother?"
"Write to your aunt's boarding-place. I can't bear this any longer." She
spoke sharply. She had already grown unlike herself.
She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of mail.
It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked for it. I came home
early from school. Mother was sewing at the parlor window, her eyes
wandering from her work, up the road. It was an ugly day. It had rained
drearily from eight o'clock till two, and closed in suffocating mist,
creeping and dense and chill. It gave me a childish fancy of long-closed
tombs and low-land graveyards, as I walked home in it.
I tried to keep the younger children quiet when we went in, mother was
so nervous. As the early, uncanny twilight fell, we grouped around her
timidly. A dull sense of awe and mystery clung to the night, and clung
to her watching face, and clung even then to that closed room upstairs
where the lilies were fading.
Mother sat leaning her head upon her hand, the outline of her face dim
in the dusk against the falling curtain. She was sitting so when we
heard the first rumble of the distant coach-wheels. At the sound, she
folded her hands in her lap and stirred a little, rose slowly from her
chair, and sat down again.
"Sarah."
I crept up to her. At the near sight of her face, I was so frightened I
could have cried.
"Sarah, you may go out and get the letter. I--I can't."
I went slowly out at the door and down the walk. At the gate I looked
back. The outline of her face was there against the window-pane, white
in the gathering gloom.
It seems to me that my older and less sensitive years have never known
such a night. The world was stifling in a deluge of gray, cold mists,
unstirred by a breath of air. A robin with feathers all ruffled, and
head hidden, sat on the gate-post, and chirped a little mournful chirp,
like a creature dying in a vacuum. The very daisy that nodded and
drooped in the grass at my feet seemed to be gasping for breath. The
neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was invisible. I
remember the sensation it gave me, as I struggled to find its outlines,
of a world washed out, like the figures I washed out on my slate. As I
trudged, half frightened, into the road, and the fog closed about me, it
seemed to my childish superstition like a horde of long-imprisoned
ghosts let loose, and angry. The distant sound of the coach, which I
could not see, added to the fancy.
The coach turned the corner presently. On a clear day I could see the
brass buttons on the driver's coat at that distance. There was nothing
visible now of the whole dark structure but the two lamps in front, like
the eyes of some evil thing, glaring and defiant, borne with swift
motion down upon me by a power utterly unseen,--it had a curious effect.
Even at this time, I confess I do not like to see a lighted carriage
driven through a fog.
I summoned all my little courage, and piped out the driver's name,
standing there in the road.
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