And in a closet she had hidden a surprise for me—a thing I have often
wished I owned: a noble big globe. I couldn’t see it for the tears. She
will never know the pride I take in it, and the pleasure. Today the
mails are full of loving remembrances for her: full of those old, old
kind words she loved so well, “Merry Christmas to Jean!” If she could
only have lived one day longer!
At last she ran out of money, and would not use mine. So she sent to
one of those New York homes for poor girls all the clothes she could
spare—and more, most likely.
CHRISTMAS NIGHT.—This afternoon they took her away from her room. As
soon as I might, I went down to the library, and there she lay, in her
coffin, dressed in exactly the same clothes she wore when she stood at
the other end of the same room on the 6th of October last, as Clara’s
chief bridesmaid. Her face was radiant with happy excitement then; it
was the same face now, with the dignity of death and the peace of God
upon it.
They told me the first mourner to come was the dog. He came uninvited,
and stood up on his hind legs and rested his fore paws upon the
trestle, and took a last long look at the face that was so dear to him,
then went his way as silently as he had come. _He knows._
At mid-afternoon it began to snow. The pity of it—that Jean could not
see it! She so loved the snow.
The snow continued to fall. At six o’clock the hearse drew up to the
door to bear away its pathetic burden. As they lifted the casket, Paine
began playing on the orchestrelle Schubert’s “Impromptu,” which was
Jean’s favorite. Then he played the Intermezzo; that was for Susy; then
he played the Largo; that was for their mother. He did this at my
request. Elsewhere in my Autobiography I have told how the Intermezzo
and the Largo came to be associated in my heart with Susy and Livy in
their last hours in this life.
From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road
and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and
presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come
back any more. Jervis, the cousin she had played with when they were
babies together—he and her beloved old Katy—were conducting her to her
distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother’s side once
more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.
DECEMBER 26TH. The dog came to see me at eight o’clock this morning. He
was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters
hereafter.
The storm raged all night. It has raged all the morning. The snow
drives across the landscape in vast clouds, superb, sublime—and Jean
not here to see.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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