None of the Dorrances could wag a tongue against their
sister-in-law, when, at the expiration of her year of widowhood, she
wrote to them, to announce her "re-engagement" to Frederic Chilton.
She had been a faithful wife to their brother in sickness and
imbecility; a ministering angel to their parent, and there was now
no tie to bind her to their interest. They had a way of taking care
of themselves, and it was not surprising if she had learned it.
They behaved charmingly--this pair of elderly lovers--said the young
Suttons when Mr. Chilton arrived to escort his affianced back to
Albany on the day succeeding the conversation from which I have
taken the foregoing extracts, while Aunt Rachel's deaf old face was
one beam of gratification.
"All my matches turn out well in the long run!" she boasted, with
modest exultation. "I don't undertake the management of them, unless
I am very sure that they are already projected in Heaven. And when
they are, my loves, a legion of evil spirits or, what is just as
bad, of wicked men and women, cannot hinder everything from coming
right at last."
While she was relating, in the same sanguinely pious spirit, the
tales that most entrance young girls, and at which their seniors
smile in cynicism, or in tender recollection, as their own lives
have contradicted or verified her theory of love's teachings and
love's omnipotence, Frederic and Mabel, forgetting time and care,
separation and sorrow, in the calm delight of reunion, were
strolling upon the piazza in the starlight of a perfect June
evening.
They stopped talking by tacit consent, by and by, to listen to Amy
Sutton, a girl of eighteen, the vocalist of the flock, who was
testing her voice and proficiency in reading music at sight by
trying one after another of a volume of old songs which belonged to
her mother.
This was the verse that enchained the promenaders' attention: "But still thy name, thy blessed name,
My lonely bosom fills;
Like an echo that hath lost itself
Among the distant hills.
That still, with melancholy note,
Keeps faintly lingering on,
When the joyous sound that woke it first
Is gone--forever gone!"
"It is seventeen years since we heard it together, dearest!" said
Frederic, bending to kiss the tear-laden eyes. "And I can say to you
now, what I did not, while poor Rosa lived, own to myself--that, try
to hush it though I did, in all that time the lost echo was never
still."
Her answer was prompt, and the sweeter for the blent sigh and smile
which were her tribute to the Past, and greeting to the Future: "An echo no longer, but a continuous strain of of heart music!"