The Choir Invisible

During these years, she, herself, had been like a lily in a lake, never

uprooted, but buried out of sight beneath the storm that tosses the waves

back and forth.

Then white and heavenly Peace again, and the liberty of the Anglo-Saxon race

in the New World. But with wounds harder to heal than those of the flesh;

with memories that were as sword-points broken off in the body; with glory

to brighten more and more, as time went on, but with starvation close at

hand. Virginia willing to pay her heroes but having naught wherewith to pay,

until the news comes from afar, that while all this has been going on in the

East, in the West the rude border-folk, the backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge

and the Alleghanies, without generals, without commands, without help or

pay, or reward of any kind, but fighting of their own free will and dyeing

every step of their advance with their blood, had entered and conquered the

great neutral game-park of the Northern and the Southern Indians, and were

holding it against all plots: in the teeth of all comers and against the

frantic Indians themselves; against England, France, Spain,--a new land as

good as the best of old England--Kentucky! Into which already thousands upon

thousands were hurrying in search of homes --a new movement of the race--its

first spreading-out over the mighty continent upon its mightier destiny.

So had come about her hasty marriage with her young officer, whom Virginia

rewarded for his service with land; so had followed the breaking of all

ties, to journey by his side into the wilderness, there to undergo hardship,

perhaps death itself after captivity and torture such that no man who has

ever loved a woman can even look another man in the face and name.

Thus ever on and on unwittingly he wove the fibres of her life about him as

his shirt of destiny: following the threads nearer, always nearer, toward

the present, until he reached the day on which he had first met her on his

in the wilderness. From that time, he no longer relied upon hearsay, but

drew from his own knowledge of her to fill out and so far to end all these

fond tapestries of his memory and imagination.

But as one who has traversed a long gallery of pictures, and, turning to

look back upon all that he has passed, sees a straight track narrowing away

into the dimming distance, and only the last few life scenes standing out

lustrous and clear, so the school-master, gazing down this long vista,

beheld at the far end of it a little girl, whom he did not know, playing on

the silvery ancestral lawns of the James; at the near end, watching by his

bedside on this rude border of the West, a woman who had become

indispensable to his friendship.