The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 53, March, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 53, March, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Lois did like to see it; sat up, her face quite flushed to see how
nicely it fitted, and stroked back Jenny's soft hair under the veil. And
Jenny, being a warm-hearted little thing, broke into a sobbing fit,
saying that it spoiled it all to have Lois gone.
"Don't muss your veil, child," said Mrs. Polston.
But Jenny cried on, hiding her face in Lois's skinny hand, until Sam
Polston came in, when she grew quiet and shy. The poor deformed girl lay
watching them, as they talked. Very pretty Jenny looked, with her blue
eyes and damp pink cheeks; and it was a manly, grave love in Sam's face,
when it turned to her. A different love from any she had known: better,
she thought. It could not be helped; but it was better.
After they were gone, she lay a long time quiet, with her hand over her
eyes. Forgive her! she, too, was a woman. Ah, it may be there are more
wrongs that shall be righted yonder in the To-Morrow than are set down
in your theology!
And so it was, that, as she drew nearer to this To-Morrow, the brain of
the girl grew clearer,--struggling, one would think, to shake off
whatever weight had been put on it by blood or vice or poverty, and
become itself again. Perhaps, even in her cheerful, patient life, there
had been hours when she had known the wrongs that had been done her,
known how cruelly the world had thwarted her; her very keen insight into
whatever was beautiful or helpful may have made her see her own
mischance, the blank she had drawn in life, more bitterly. She did not
see it bitterly now. Death is honest; all things grew clear to her,
going down into the valley of the shadow; so, wakening to the
consciousness of stifled powers and ungiven happiness, she saw that the
fault was not hers, nor His who had appointed her lot; He had helped her
to bear it,--bearing worse himself. She did not say once, "I might have
been," but day by day, more surely, "I shall be." There was not a tear
in the homely faces turning from her bed, not a tint of color in the
flowers they brought her, not a shiver of light in the ashy sky, that
did not make her more sure of that which was to come. More loving she
grew, as she went away from them, the touch of her hand more pitiful,
her voice more tender, if such a thing could be,--with a look in her
eyes never seen there before. Old Yare pointed it out to Mrs. Polston
one day.
"My girl's far off frum us," he said, sobbing in the kitchen,--"my
girl's far off now."
It was the last night of the year that she died. She was so much better
that they all were quite cheerful. Kitts went away as it grew dark, and
she bade him wrap up his throat with such a motherly dogmatism that they
all laughed at her; she, too, with the rest.
"I'll make you a New-Year's call," he said, going out; and she called
out that she should be sure to expect him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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