The Choir Invisible

"Yes"," she had said, "I shall go softly all my years."

The plants she had brought that summer from Virginia had long since become

old bushes. The Virginia Creeper had climbed to the tops of the trees. The

garden, though in the same spot, was another place now, with vine-heavy

arbours and sodden walks running between borders of flowers and

vegetables--daffodils and thyme--in the quaint Virginia fashion. There was a

lawn covered as the ancestral one had been with the feathery grass of

England. There was a park where the deer remained at home in their

wilderness.

Crowning this landscape of comfort and good taste, stood the house. Often of

nights when its roof lay deep under snow and the eaves were bearded with

hoary icicles, there were candles twinkling at every window and the sounds

of music and dancing in the parlours. Once a year there was a great venison

supper in the dining-room, draped with holly and mistletoe. On Christmas eve

man a child's sock or stocking was hung--no one knew when or by whom--around

the shadowy chimney-seat of her room; and every Christmas morning the little

negros from the cabins knew to whom each of these belonged. In spring,

parties of young girls and youths came out from town for fishing parties and

picknicked in the lawn amid the dandelions and under the song of the

blackbird; during the summer, for days at a time, other gay company filled

the house; of autumns there were nutting parties in the russet woods. Other

guests also, not young, not gay. Aaron Burr was entertained there; there met

for counsel the foremost Western leaders in his magnificent conspiracy. More

than one great man of his day, middle-aged, unmarried, began his visits,

returned oftener for awhile--always alone--and one day drove away

disappointed.

Through seasons and changes she had gone softly: never retreating from life

but drawing about her as closely as she could its ties, its sympathies, it

duties: in all things a character of the finest equipois, the truest

moderation.

But these are women of the world--some of us men may have discerned one of

them in the sweep of our experiences--to whom the joy and the sorrow come

alike with quietness. For them there is neither the cry of sudden delight

nor the cry of sudden anguish. Gazing deep into their eyes, we are reminded

of the light of dim churches; hearing their voices, we dream of some

minstrel whose murmurs reach us imperfectly through his fortress wall;

beholding the sweetness of their faces, we are touched as by the appeal of

the mute flowers; merely meeting them in the street, we recall the

long-vanished image of the Divine Goodess. They are the women who have

missed happiness and who know it, but having failed of affection, give

themselves to duty. And so life never rises high and close about them as

about one who stands waist-deep in a wheat-field, gathering at will either

its poppies or its sheaves; it flows forever away as from one who pauses

waist-deep in a stream and hearkens rather to the rush of all things toward

the eternal deeps. It was into the company of theses quieter pilgrims that

she had passed: she had missed happiness twice.