A Guarded Shrine
BY ALICE BROWN
CONSTANCE BURTON, on her way down to Wilbraham, leaned her head against the car window and tried to clarify her problem, lest, on arriving, the solution should be at once required of her. She was a beautiful woman, judged by the canons fitted to human living. Her face had an alluring irregularity; there were complex meanings in it, veiled, some of them, by memories. Soft, loose hair drooped above her delicate brows, and her mouth had the enchanting line made by a piquant upper lip. She looked like a woman of instinctive sympathies whom life had steadily enriched. She knew the wholesome meanings of things, and she had learned them through experience. Her black clothes were plain, yet lovely; but they did not seem to be the conventional mourning. There was a plume in her soft hat, and her cloak was held by a silver clasp. She was but two months widowed, and she was going down to see her husband's mother, a stranger to her, and tell her some hard facts. How should the facts be told? To her, the wife, they brought only an exalted loyalty, an added reason for living, in that she had to complete something her husband had begun. She sat there, not letting her mind wander, but driving it relentlessly back over the six years of her married life, culling thence the portions that would fit that life as she understood it, and as his mother must be made to understand.
She had met Blaise Burton in Italy when he was studying there, and they had married after a three months' courtship. Then came his illness and the break that sent him to Davos, and the long imprisonment there with her at hand, never farther away than his voice could reach. They had been entirely happy in their snowy exile, he with but one regret: that his mother should be living out her days untended in New England. But in every letter Madam Burton begged him not to come. She would go to him, she promised, as soon as she was free. Now she had her freedom, after the death of her sister, whose illness matched his own; but at that very time had come his high-hearted rush to the valley, to be with his old chum stricken by fever, his illness there and death.
What could his wife say to illuminate those obituary notices that must have torn his mother's heart anew, adding the pang of failure to that of grief? She remembered one of the summaries from a paper that had been swift to hail him when he went into print ten years before. It was a type of all the rest. Blaise Burton was, it said, a one-book man. His earliest attempt, the Italian sketches, well spun as gossamer, made his sole title to remembrance. The work that followed later was a futile incursion into fields where giants only are strong enough to tread. He had made an unwise choice. He had belied the promise of his early days.
That concurrent testimony roused her to hot loyalty. She knew the dreams and longings out of which that work was born. She had met, hand in hand with him, the visions that stirred him to his rapt interest in the soul of things, his passion to depict it justly. While he lived, they walked, they two, amid the shows of life, oblivious of them, their eyes upon the dawn. They had forgotten, in their devotion to what shall be, their lack of recognition from the things that are. But to his mother in her New England solitude he must have been a man of fame; or rather, he had been, until these chilling estimates enlightened her. How could she be made to understand how his life transcended all he seemed to do, and that his rush toward light blew back the flame he carried? How was it possible to show her on what solid ground his name might yet be set?
Constance descended at the station in
