The Choir Invisible

Her beauty had never failed. Nature had fought hard in her for all things;

and to the last youth of her womanhood it burned like an autumn rose which

some morning we may have found on the lawn under a dew that is turning to

ice. But when youth was gone, in the following years her face began to

reflect the freshness of Easter lilies. For prayer will in time make the

human countenance its own divinest alter; years upon years of true thoughts,

like ceaseless music shut up within, will vibrate along the nerves of

expression until the lines of the living instrument are drawn into

correspondence, and the harmony of visible form matches the unheard

harmonies of the mind. It was about this time also that there fell upon her

hair the earliest rays of the light which is the dawn of Eternal Morning.

She had never ceased to watch his career as part of her very life. Time was

powerless to remove him farther from her than destiny had removed him long

before: it was always yesterday; the whole past with him seemed caught upon

the clearest mirror just at her back. Once or twice a year she received a

letter, books, papers, something; she had been kept informed of the birth of

his children. From other sources--his letters to the parson, traders between

Philadelphia and the West--she knew other things: he had risen in the world,

was a judge, often leading counsel in great cases, was almost a great man.

She planted her pride, her gratitude, her happiness, on this new soil: they

were the few seed that a woman in the final years will sow in a window-box

and cover the window-pane and watch and water and wake and think of in the

night--she who was used once to range the fields.

But never from the first to last had she received a letter from him that was

transparent; the mystery stayed unlifted; she had to accept the constancy of

his friendship without its confidence. Question or chiding of course there

never was from her; inborn refinement alone would have kept her from

curiosity or prying; but she could not put away the conviction that the

concealment which he steadily adhered to was either delicately connected

with his marriage or registered but too plainly some downward change in

himself. Which was it, or was it both? Had he too missed happiness? Missed

it as she had--by a union with a perfectly commonplace, plodding,

unimaginative, unsympathetic, unrefined nature? And was it a mercy to be

able to remember him, not to know him?

These thoughts filled her so often, so often! For into the busiest life--the

life that toils to shut out thought--the inevitable leisure will come; and

with the leisure will return the dreaded emptiness, the loneliness, the

never stifled need of sympathy, affection, companionship--for that world of

two outside of which every other human being is a stranger. And it was he

who entered into all these hours of hers as by a right that she had neither

the heart nor the strength to question.