Feminist fiction; Historical fiction; Southern States -- Fiction; Women -- Southern States -- Fiction; Women authors -- Fiction
That night Hagar could not sleep. She rose at last from the bed and
paced her moon-flooded room. All the long windows were wide; the night
air came in and brought a sighing of the trees. After a while she
stepped out upon the gallery that ran along the face of the house.
Medway's room was down stairs and away from this front; she had the
long silvered pathway to herself. She paced it slowly, up and down,
wooing calm. Each time she reached the end of the gallery, she paused a
moment and looked across the sleeping town that lay for the most part
below this house and garden, to where she could guess the roof of the
small, inexpensive, half hotel, half boarding-house where Denny bided.
When after a time she discovered that she was doing this, she shook
herself away from the action. "No, Hagar, no!"
Going to the other end of the gallery, she found there a low chair
and sat down, leaning her head against the railing. It was the middle
of the night. Something in the place and in the balm of the air
brought back to her those days and nights in Alexandria, so long ago.
There, too, she had had to make choice.... "I could love him here and
now--love him--love him in the old immemorial way.... Well, I will
not!" She put her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. "_Rose
Darragh--Rose Darragh--Rose Darragh_"--it struck through her mind,
slow and heavily vibrant, like a deep and melancholy music. She rose
and paced the gallery again, but when she came to the farther end, she
turned without pause or look over the moonlit town.
"_Rose Darragh--Rose Darragh_"--she made it rhythmic, breathing deeply
and quietly, saying the name inwardly, deeply, but without passion now,
saying it like a comrade's name. "_Rose Darragh--Rose Darragh--Rose
Darragh--_"
Calm came at last, repose of mind, victory. She sat down again, leaned
her arms upon the railing, and followed with her eyes the lonely,
silver moon. Work was in the world, the all-friend Work; and Beauty was
in the world, the all-friend Beauty; and one good put out of reach,
mind and spirit must make another and were equal to the task. "Rose
Darragh--Rose Darragh!--not if I could would I hurt you," said Hagar;
and took her attention from that matter and put it first upon the
stars, and then upon some lines of Shelley's that she loved, and then
upon the story she had in hand. It was not well to go to bed thinking
of a story, and when at last she left the gallery and laid herself
straight upon the cool linen, she stilled the waves of the mind-stuff
and let the barque of attention drift whither it would. At last she
seemed in a deep forest long ago and far away, and there she went to
sleep with a feeling of violets under her hand.
Five days, and Denny left Nassau. "It's not saying good-bye. In May,
when you come to New York--"
"Yes, in May I'll see you and Rose Darragh. Until May, then--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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