There was a sunny old grave-yard half a mile from the town, where the
people of Bowersville laid their dead under the long grass and tangle
of wild-creeping vines, and the whole country-side gathered there when
they lowered the old man into his place at his wife's side. His
neighbors sang his funeral hymn and performed the last offices for him
with kindly hands, and when they turned away and left him there was not
a man or woman of them who did not feel that they had lost a friend.
They were very good to Louisiana. Aunt 'Nervy and Aunt Ca'line
deserted their families that they might stay with her until all was
over, doing their best to give her comfort. It was Aunt 'Nervy who
first thought of sending for the girl cousin to whom the trunkful of
clothes had been given.
"Le's send for Leander's Jenny, Ca'line," she said. "Mebbe it'd help
her some to hev a gal nigh her. Gals kinder onderstands each other,
an' Jenny was allus powerful fond o' Lowizyanny."
So Jenny was sent for and came. From her lowly position as one of the
fifteen in an "onfort'nit" family she had adored and looked up to
Louisiana all her life. All the brightest days in her experience had
been spent at Uncle Elbert's with her favorite cousin. But there was
no brightness about the house now. When she arrived and was sent
upstairs to the pretty new room Louisiana occupied she found the girl
lying upon the bed. She looked white and slender in her black dress;
her hands were folded palm to palm under her check, and her eyes were
wide open.
Jenny ran to her and knelt at her side. She kissed her and began to
cry.
"Oh!" she sobbed, "somehow I didn't ever think I should come here and
not find Uncle Elbert. It don't seem right--it makes it like a strange
place."
Then Louisiana broke into sobs, too.
"It is a strange place!" she cried--"a strange place--a strange place!
Oh, if one old room was left--just one that I could go into and not
feel so lonely!"
But she had no sooner said it than she checked herself.
"Oh, I oughtn't to say that!" she cried. "I wont say it. He did it
all for _me_, and I didn't deserve it."
"Yes, you did," said Jenny, fondling her. "He was always saying what a
good child you had been--and that you had never given him any trouble."
"That was because he was so good," said Louisiana. "No one else in the
whole world was so good. And now he is gone, and I can never make him
know how grateful I was and how I loved him."
"He did know," said Jenny.
"No," returned Louisiana. "It would have taken a long, long life to
make him know all I felt, and now when I look back it seems as if we
had been together such a little while. Oh! I thought the last night
we talked that there was a long life before us--that I should be old
before he left me, and we should have had all those years together."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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