The Choir Invisible

When, this afternoon, he had asked her what she was thinking of when he

surprised her with his visit, she had not replied: she could not have avowed

even to herself that she was thinking of such things as these: that having,

for some years, drawn out a hard, dull life in that settlement of

pathfinders, trappers, woodchoppers, hunters, Indian fighters, surveyors;

having afterwards, with little interest, watched them, one by one, as the

earliest types of civilization followed,--the merchant, the lawyer, the

priest, the preacher of the Gospel, the soldiers and officers of the

Revolution,--at last, through all the wilderness, as it now fondly seemed to

her, she saw shining the white light of his long absent figure, bringing a

new melody to the woods, a new meaning to her life, and putting an end to

all her desire ever to return to the old society beyond the mountains.

His figure passed out of sight, and she turned and walked sorrowfully to the

cabin, from the low rugged chimney of which a pale blue smoke now rose into

the twilight air. She chid herself that she had confronted the declaration

of his purpose to marry her niece with so little spirit, such faulty tact.

She had long known that he would ask this; she had long gotten ready what

she would say; but in the struggle between their wills, she had been

unaccountably embarrassed, she had blundered, and he had left rather

strengthened than weakened in his determination.

But she must prevent the marriage; her mind was more resolute than ever as

to that.

Slowly she reached the doorstep of the cabin, a roughly hewn log, and

turning, stood there with her bonnet in her hand, her white figure outlined

before the doorway, slender and still.

The sun had set. Night was rushing on over the awful land. The wolf-dog, in

his kennel behind the house, rose, shook himself at his chain, and uttered a

long howl that reached away to the dark woods--the darker for the vast

pulsing yellow light that waved behind them in the west like a gorgeous soft

aerial fan. As the echoes died out from the peach orchard came the song of a

robin, calling for love and rest.

Then from another direction across the clearing another sound reached her:

the careless whistle of the major, returning from his day's work in the

field. When she heard that, her face took on the expression that a woman

sometimes comes to wear when she has accepted what life has brought her

although it has brought her nothing for which she cares; and her lips opened

with an unconscious sigh of weariness--the weariness that has been gathering

weariness for years and that runs on in weariness through the future.