Miss Theodora/Chapter 13
XIII.
One Sunday afternoon in the early May of his freshman year, after the service at Trinity, Ernest took his way toward the Digbys' house. Since midwinter many things had tended to make him regard life less hopefully than before. Just as his own shortcomings at college were growing so evident that he could not conceal them either from himself or his aunt, the death of Stuart Digby cast a cloud over him which made other shadows dwindle. For he had been very fond of his cousin, and he sympathized to the full with Kate in her grief.
"Cut off in his prime!" said all the friends of Stuart Digby. "So much to live for!" "His life hardly half finished!" But, after all, death is as inscrutable a mystery as life itself. Stuart Digby had had his chance. He knew long before he died that his life, even if rounded out to the full three score and ten, could never be full and complete. He knew, as nobody else could, how far short he fell of the standard which he had once set for himself. He knew, with a knowledge that cut him to the quick, that, poor slave of habit that he had become, no length of life would place him again in the ranks of those whose faces ever look upward. He had had his chance. Why had he let it slip away from him? His life, so far as life means progress, was finished long before. He had not even accomplished the few definite tasks which he had set for himself. Among these was the making of some provision for Ernest. He had meant to give the boy a few thousands to smooth his path after graduating, or to leave him something by will. But death came so suddenly that this, like many other good intentions, was unfulfilled. Ernest, knowing nothing of these unfulfilled intentions, felt only a deep sense of personal loss in the death of his cousin.
A decorator had lately done over in the latest French style the room where Kate received Ernest. The high white wainscoting, the satiny sheen of the large-patterned yellow paper, the slender-legged gilded chairs, with here and there a lounging chair covered in pale green brocade, harmonized well with the sunshine that streamed in. Kate, in her black gown, seated at the old-fashioned inlaid desk in the bay window, but for her fair hair and glowing color, would have been the one discordant note in the room. The solemn man-servant had hardly announced Ernest when Kate rushed forward to meet him.
"Why, Ernest, I am delighted to see you. We were speaking of you to-day. Mamma was saying that it seemed a long time since you had been here. She is out now, and will be sorry to miss you."
"Well, it is longer than I meant to be; but you know that I've really been very busy, especially since the mid-year. I've been trying to decide several difficult questions."
"Oh, yes, I know. How times have changed, Ernest, since you used to play hop-scotch with the Fetchum children, while I sat, a mournful umpire, at Cousin Theodora's door! You used to say that I was the best possible judge; and I thought that you were always going to let me help you decide difficult questions."
"It's just the same now, Kate. I'd be only too glad to have you help me out of a good many things, if——"
"If what?"
Now, however, Ernest dropped his serious tone. "If we were younger. Tell me, Kate, can you remember how you felt when you first realized that you weren't a child any more? I was thinking about myself the other day, and wondering why I feel so much older now than I did a year or two ago."
"Oh, it's going into college that is chiefly to answer for it. But I do think it's strange sometimes all in an instant we realize that we are older or different from what we were before. I really can't account for it."
"Yes,—I understand what you mean. You know those stone buildings that we pass on our way to the Nahant boat. Well, they used to seem to me mountain high, not only when I looked up at them, but when I thought about them. But one summer, years ago, I looked up and saw that they were not very high, nor very imposing. They were small buildings, compared with a good many up town; and then I felt that I must have changed."
Kate smiled. "Yes, I've been through just such things myself." And the conversation of the two cousins drifted on for a time, with reminiscences of the past.
"Ernest," at length said Kate somewhat abruptly to the young man, "after all you are more or less of a disappointment to me."
So far as appearances went, it was hard to see wherein Ernest fell short of the ideal of even so rigid a critic as Kate. Yet this well-formed, muscular youth, with his clear gray eye, seemed at this particular moment a little restless and uneasy as he fingered an ivory paper-knife.
"How do I disappoint you, Kate?" he asked.
"Oh, in many ways. I used to think that you would be an inventor, or—something. But now—"
"I am nothing but a Harvard freshman," he broke in laughing.
"Yes, that is just it. You don't seem to be ambitious; you aren't trying to work off your entrance conditions; and you didn't do well at the mid-years. You spend very little time with Cousin Theodora. I'm sure I ought to feel complimented that you've come here to-day." As Ernest did not reply, she continued: "Your aunt has always made such sacrifices for you that you ought to try to do your best. Cousin Richard says—"
There she stopped.
"Well, what does Cousin Richard say?" asked Ernest impatiently. But Kate, remembering that Richard Somerset might object to being quoted, was silent.
"Go to him yourself," she said at length. "He will tell you." Then their conversation passed to less personal things, until it was time for Ernest to go.
Ernest, taking what Kate had said in good part, pondered over it as he walked homeward. The afternoon was drawing to a close. Long afterward he recalled that walk among the flower-beds, glowing with tulips and hyacinths, with the last rays of the sun reflected from the little fountain, while the chimes from the church on the corner above rang out "Old Hundred." As he left the Garden and entered Charles Street all this cheerfulness was at an end. The houses cast shadows so heavy in the narrow street that he felt as if in another world. Somewhat depressed, he went up the hill to his aunt's house. From the parlor came the unwonted sound of music. Some one was playing on the old piano. There sat Miss Theodora. He saw her through a half-opened door, playing with a fervor that he could not have believed possible had he not seen it for himself. For a moment he watched her, and although he was not a learned young man, he thought at once of St. Cecilia. There was, indeed, more than a mere suggestion of saintliness in Miss Theodora, with her pale face, with her black hair smoothly brushed away and gathered in a coil behind, and her patient expression.
"Why, Aunt Teddy," at length exclaimed Ernest, entering the room, "I didn't know that you were such a performer. I knew you could play, but I didn't know you could play like that."
"Thank you, Ernest," replied his aunt. "I don't play well now, but when your grandfather was living I had the very best instruction; but my style is so old-fashioned that I never play to any one now."
In truth, Miss Theodora had played well in her day, and it was one of the sorrows of her later life that she could not profit by the fine teachers and the concerts of music-loving Boston. Diantha, whose thirty years' devotion to the family gave her privileges, would sometimes come to her as she sat alone by the front window, in the twilight, and say:
"Why don't you never play no music now, Miss Theodora? I ain't forgot how you used to practice all the time; and Mr. John and Mr. William would come into the parlor in the evenings and listen to you, and you used to look so pretty sitting at that very piano that you won't never touch now."
Yet Ernest, although he had often heard Diantha thus remonstrate with his aunt, now first realized perhaps that there was undue self-denial in his aunt's life. What Kate had said about "sacrifices" became significant to him. With as little delay as possible he would talk with Richard Somerset.