THE WAITING YEARS[16]

THE WAITING YEARS[16]

By KATHARINE METCALF ROOF From The Century Magazine

The shadow on the sun-dial, blue upon its white-marble surface, marked four o’clock, but its edge was broken by the irregular silhouette of an encroaching rose-bush. The sun-dial in the midst of the wide, sunny garden, the old red-brick house among the elms—these were the most sharply defined elements of Mark Faraday’s picture of home. Born in Italy, for most of his young life a sojourner in foreign lands, he yet remembered being utterly happy at “Aunt Lucretia’s” when at seven he had made his first visit to his mother’s country. That memory had never faded. He had recalled and reclaimed each detail of its serene charm at his second visit ten years later, after his mother’s death. And now in America again, he had naturally gravitated toward the old place.

The young man gave a careless friendliness to his faded little aunt, and spent long hours with his dreams, creative and subjective, in her garden. For the most part they were dreams of unheard melodies, for Mark Faraday was a composer. So little of his life had been spent in his own country that outside the garden he felt less at home in America than in Florence or Vienna. Yet place mattered little to him. An artist and a creator, his kingdom was within. Of his environment he demanded only harmony and space.

A bee buzzed into the open heart of a rose, bending it with his weight. A little breeze wafted its perfume toward him. His eyes wandered over the delicate, riotous color of the sweet-pea hedge and rested in content upon the mignonette border. A circular path of white gravel surrounded the grass plot about the dial. From it as a center curved paths wandered outward dividing the flower-beds. The flowers were planted without much regularity except for the borders of four o’clock and mignonette. It was this spot that had inspired Mark’s song cycle, “The Sun-dial.” A certain quality of youth and freshness as natural as a spring in the woods had won for it quick recognition. Mark’s artistic tendency was not exotic. Although not retrogressive, he had drunk deep at the springs of Bach, Schubert, and Mozart, and the basis of his work was sound.

Alone in the fragrant silence, he began dreaming sounds. The notes of the bee’s drone, one high, one low, combining in uneven rhythm, had given him a suggestion for an accompaniment. His mind was far away, working out his pattern of harmony, when another sound, actual, familiar, broke into his reverie—the preliminary chords of one of the songs of his “Sun-dial” cycle, “Youth and Crabbéd Age.” Then a woman began to sing. It was Stella’s voice; he recognized it at once, pleasant, sufficiently trained. Stella was a fair musician and was fond of trying over new music, but to-day she was playing in a more musicianly manner than he had believed her capable of playing. He had expected that his aunt would ask her over for tea. He enjoyed the girl’s companionship. He had not known many of his own countrywomen. Their naturalness and freedom from the personal attitude of the Continental woman interested him. It was perhaps this quality in Stella that most appealed to him. He was aware that his Aunt Lucretia hoped for a romantic conclusion to the friendship. He himself had given the matter an occasional thought. Yet somehow Stella’s definiteness left no room for the imaginative element to become active. It was difficult for him to visualize her as an established factor in his life, either as the restful center of a home or the adaptable companion of his nomadic wanderings. The precise nature of her lack he had not felt the necessity to characterize.

The concluding chords of his song vibrated into silence. With the ceasing of the actual sounds, his imagined music began to move again along its interrupted course; then a crash of Brahms broke into his creative weavings, and he frowned, not only for the interruption: Stella should not attempt Brahms. The hazardous attempt broke off as abruptly as it had begun. There was something fragmentary, or perhaps more correctly, something unfinished about Stella. She never had just fulfilled the promise of their first meeting. The bee theme drifted into his mind again, and had progressed a few measures, when the evolving harmonic pattern was again invaded by an alien presence, a soft one of dim outline and faded voice, his Aunt Lucretia.

“You are coming in for tea, Mark.” She paused, characteristically tentative, wavering, fearful of intruding, a gentle, kindly, ineffectual presence. “And Stella is here,” she added.

“I heard her.” Mark rose to his excellent height and stood an instant looking down at the little old lady shading her eyes from the sunlight. They had been large and dark once; now the filmy rim of age was visible about the iris. Her white hair lay in neat ringlets upon her brow, which was wrinkled like a fine parchment. Her skin, bleached to a bloodless whiteness, retained still some of the soft texture of youth.

“And Allison Clyde,” she finished her announcement: “but you won’t mind her,” she added, recalling the restiveness of the present generation under boredom.

“Allison Clyde?” he repeated. He remembered the name vaguely as one of some old friend of the family. “An old lady.” He had not reckoned his indifferent label a question, but his aunt took it up.

“We never think of her as that. She is younger,” Lucretia Hall conceded, “than I am. Allison is universally admired. Mrs. Herrick”—she quoted the oracle of her circle in that last-generation manner that proclaims the accepted—“says that Allison is a personage.”

Miss Lucretia turned toward the house; her nephew followed her.

“Any relation to the historian, bane of my youth?” he asked.

“His daughter,” Lucretia gladly expounded; “and her brother, the poet, died young. Allison herself—very gifted musically.” The fragments came back to him as his aunt preceded him with her small, hesitating steps up the narrow path. The picture of an old lady playing the “Songs without Words” passed through Mark’s mind, and he began to plan flight. “But she was obliged to give up her music to care for her invalid father.”

“I heard Stella playing,” Mark commented.

His aunt rejoined after a moment:

“She doesn’t seem at all nervous. Young people aren’t in these days. At her age, if any one asked me to play, I was terrified.”

Her nephew smiled down at her, hooking her with an affectionate arm.

“What used you to play, Tante? The ‘Blue Alsatian Mountains’ and the ‘Stéphanie Gavotte’?”

Her faded smile held a faint surprise.

“How did you know?”

“I am a clairvoyant, and did you sing, ‘Then You’ll Remember Me?’”

“No, I never sang; but Mary—your mother—did.”

They reached the back porch and passed through the wide hall into the shaded spaciousness of the drawing-room. In that quiet interior light that rested softly upon the decorous portraits of his forebears, the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-à-brac of three generations, he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish grip, he heard his aunt’s voice, light, wandering, non-arresting, as if continuing some conversational thread, “And Miss Allison Clyde, Mark—my old friend.” He had been vaguely aware of some one else in the room, but when he met the smile of the older woman who held out her hand to him, he wondered that he had not realized it more promptly; for Miss Allison Clyde, although far removed from the youth of years, had about her something immediately and quietly charming—something, it occurred to him, that suggested autumnal perfumes and the warmth of late sunlight. It was a face with a certain fine austerity belonging to a generation at once more natural and more reserved than ours.

“So this is Mary’s boy,” she said. “You have her eyes.” He looked at her and unconsciously glanced at Stella. The older woman belonged to the quiet old room. Stella, despite the same inheritance, did not.

Tea was brought in by a maid grown gray in his aunt’s service, and Miss Lucretia presided. Mark’s eyes again wandered from Miss Allison Clyde to Stella with involuntary comparison.

No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully. Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness.

“Stella has promised to sing ‘Crabbéd Age’ for me again,” she announced when tea was finished.

“Shall I sing it now?” Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer was not an egoist, he shuddered.

“I am making frightful hash of it, I know,” Stella confessed, unabashed, as her fingers stumbled. “I think Miss Allison had better play it.” Mark glanced quickly at the older woman.

“Then it was you I heard a moment ago.”

“I tried it,” she admitted, with a smile. “The title had a melancholy attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I should have had stage-fright dreadfully.”

“Play something else,” Mark suggested. “It would give me so much pleasure. Something not Mark Faraday.”

Miss Allison rose decisively.

“No, I will play ‘Crabbed Age,’” she decided, “and youth shall sing it.” And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it with a musician’s sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through passably in her firm young voice.

In answer to Mark’s sincere, “Play more,” as she started to rise from the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages of “Meistersinger” in a way that showed a musician’s knowledge of the score.

“How wonderful that you can play like that still!” exclaimed Stella. The gaucherie of that “still” struck upon Mark’s artistic sensibilities, trained in Italian habits of speech. “What a resource it must be!”

“For crabbed age,” Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison continued, “The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation for lost youth, I fear.” She said it without sentimentality, but, as she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the “Golden Apples” that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark’s comprehension and smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his “Sun-dial,” noting the titles—Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon, Evening, Night. “‘Youth and Crabbed Age’ is Evening, I see,” she commented. “Then what is this?” She held up a separate sheet loosely set in the book, reading the title, “Too Late for Love and Loving.”

“That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor of Shakespeare,” Mark explained. “I am not a poet. They are just words for music.”

She read them over:

She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth—autumn pools shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster, yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss Allison’s single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would seem, had not deprived her.

It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness, and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes.

Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an autumnal beauty of its own.

That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong friend, Miss Augusta Penfield:

I met Lucretia’s nephew, Mary’s boy, to-day. He is you know, a composer already on the road to fame. You remember that he was born abroad. There is for all his undiluted American ancestry a foreign touch about him, a something warm and ardent caught under the Italian skies that even our children seem to take on when born there. He is indeed a beautiful boy, a dreamer, yet manly. A boy I call him, yet he is twenty-nine. My dear father had four sons and a daughter at his age. Still he is a boy. It is strange in this generation, Augusta, that though in many ways they seem so advanced, so beyond us, in others they are further away from life’s responsibilities than we were at their age. There is a suggestion of his Uncle William about Mark, but he is somehow stronger, more imperative. I was drawn to him at once because of his music. And he has the charming manner, the almost excessive chivalry, toward our sex that we see so little of any more, or at least seldom encounter at our age. Lucretia had asked Stella in for tea. She is a dear child and quite alarmingly composed, but not altogether musical, despite her excellent musical opportunities. She played one of the boy’s songs, a delicious thing, rather dreadfully. I felt sorry for him. Lucretia insisted upon my playing his “Youth and Crabbed Age,” which every one has been singing, although he seems delightfully unaware of that fact. He was so courteous about insisting that I should play more, I ran through a bit of “Meistersinger,”—he seemed so truly a young Walther,—and then discovered another little song that he has not published, “Too Late for Love and Loving,” full of a kind of pathos that it seems impossible youth could understand. But I suppose that is where genius comes in.

The rest of the letter was made of messages and the mild, small daily occurrences that are of moment to such as Miss Augusta Penfield.

That night, searching in an old secretary in his room for some missing notes, Mark came upon a little daguerreotype in a drawer. It was of a young girl, taken apparently in the late sixties or early seventies. Something in the face, clear-eyed, warm-lipped, trusting, caught and held his attention. He turned it over to see if the girl’s name was on the back, but the only inscription was a date in his Uncle William’s writing, June, 1863. Poor Uncle William, who had been so full of promise, they said, but who had died from a bullet wound, a sacrifice to his country two years after the war!

Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man’s face, dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in uniform always on his mother’s dressing-table, rose before his mind’s eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him to the war. The date must have been just about the time that he had enlisted and marched away. He had gone without telling her perhaps; she could have been little more than a child. Perhaps he had never told. Or they might have had their brief tragic happiness upon the edge of death, they two “embracing under death’s spread hand.”

He stared at the picture. It would have been easy to love a girl with those eyes, that mouth. A fancy came upon him to put Uncle William’s picture beside the girl’s, and impulsively he went back to the darkened drawing-room, groped for the framed picture that stood upon the mantel, found it, and carried it up to his room. Then side by side he studied the two faces.

His imagination began to reconstruct their story. He wished that he might learn more. He went back to the old desk. It might have been his uncle’s. He opened a drawer; it was empty. A second and a third; the last contained some valueless miscellany, an old glass knob a faded bit of worsted fringe, some papers. Poking under them, he actually found a package of letters. He picked it up, and with a little thrill of realization recognized his uncle’s writing. The paper was old and yellowed with time. It had no address, but was sealed with red wax. Scarcely expecting fulfillment of his romantic hope, he broke the seal and opened the package. There was no address on the first envelope. Some business memorandum, no doubt; yet nothing surely that at this late day he might not in honor examine. He drew out the closely written sheet and turned it over. After all the years his eyes were surely the first to read it. There was no name in the inscription. Uncle William’s fine writing was very legible.