Domestic fiction; Impostors and imposture -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction; Wills -- Fiction
“I cannot marry Sandy because I love Jack. I have wanted to do right and
cannot. I tried the charm at the well, hoping it would be Jack’s face I
saw, but it was Sandy’s which came and stood by mine in the mirror. I
saw it so plain, and I cannot marry him, and so I must die. I shall not
jump into the well. I can push the curb aside, it is so loose, and shall
slip down the stones into the water, so as not to be bruised. Tell Sandy
I am sorry and hope he will forget me and take some girl for his wife
better than I am. Tell Jack—but, no, don’t tell him anything, except
that I loved him and died for him. Good-by.”
It was Sandy who took her from the well and laid her on the soft bed of
needles under the pines, wringing the water from her dripping garments
and her long hair which clung to her face and which he put back behind
her ears, saying nothing except, “Poor little Nannie! If you had told
me, you would not have been lying here dead. Poor Nannie! I wish I had
known.”
He even tried to comfort Jack, whose grief at first was violent and
noisy, but like such grief, was easily consoled when another pretty face
caught his fancy. They buried Nannie in the McPherson lot, for Sandy
would have it so, and he bought the headstone and put upon it simply,
“Nannie, Aged 19.” Then he went about his usual business, with a pain in
his heart which time never fully healed. Naturally domestic in his
nature, he wanted a home, with wife and children in it, and after a few
years he married a Mrs. Travers, a young widow with an only son. He
seemed happy, but Nannie was never forgotten, and not an hour of his
life that he did not see her in fancy as she was when he kissed her in
the moonlight, and again when he laid her upon the pine-needles, cold
and dead, but with a look of peace on her face as if at the very last
there had been upon her lips a prayer for forgiveness which God had
heard and answered. When his wife died, which she did within two years
of his marriage, the great house was so silent and lonely that he soon
married again, and this time a cousin of Nannie’s, who, like his first
wife, was a widow, with an only child, a little daughter, so that he had
two stepchildren to whom he gave a father’s care and love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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