A Village Ophelia and Other Stories by Anne Reeve Aldrich

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[Transcriber's Note: Some words which appear to be typos are printed
thus in the original book. A list of these possible misprints follows:
enthuiasms
fragant
increduously
insistance
trival]

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

BY
ANNE REEVE ALDRICH

NEW YORK:
_W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_,
MDCCCXCIX.

CONTENTS

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE

A LAMENTABLE COMEDY

AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY

AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

On the East end of Long Island, from Riverhead to Greenport, a distance
of about thirty miles, two country roads run parallel.

The North road is very near the Sound and away from the villages; lonely
farm-houses are scattered at long intervals; in some places their number
increases enough to form a little desolate settlement, but there is
never a shop, nor sign of village life. That, one must seek on the South
road, with its small hamlets, to which the "North roaders," as they are
somewhat condescendingly called, drive across to church, or to make
purchases.

It was on the North road that I spent a golden August in the home of
Mrs. Libby. Her small gray house was lovingly empaled about the front
and sides by snow-ball bushes and magenta French-lilacs, that grew
tenderly close to the weather-worn shingles, and back of one sunburnt
field, as far as the eye could see, stretched the expanse of dark,
shining scrub-oaks, beyond which, one knew, was the hot, blue glitter of
the Sound.

Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of
such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge--soft
cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors.
She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the
little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some
passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched
for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head,
you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease
of her stout throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure, she was
called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon she sat and sewed by
the window of her parlor, dressed in a tight, black gown, with
immaculate cuffs about her thick wrists. The neighbors--thin, overworked
women, with numerous children--were too tired and busy to be envious.
They thought her very genteel. Her husband, before his last illness, had
kept a large grocery store in a village on the South side of the Island.
It gave her a presumptive right to the difference in her ways, to the
stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter instead of lard in her
cookery, to the extra thickness and brightness of her parlor carpet.

For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet. In the long mornings
I went down the grassy path to the beach, and lay on the yellow sands,
as lost to the world as if I were in some vast solitude. I had had a
wound in my life, and with the natural instinct of all hurt creatures, I
wanted to hide and get close to the earth until it healed. I knew that
it must heal at last, but there are certain natures in which mental
torture must have a physical outcome, and we are happier afterward if we
have called in no Greek chorus of friends to the tragedy, to witness and
sing how the body comported itself under the soul's woe. But there is no
sense of shame when deep cries are wrenched from the throat under the
free sky, with only the sea to answer. One can let the body take half
the burden of pain, and writhe on the breast of the earth without
reproach. I took this relief that nature meant for such as I, wearing
myself into the indifference of exhaustion, to which must sooner or
later ensue the indifference brought by time. Sometimes a flock of small
brown sandbirds watched me curiously from a sodden bank of sea-weed,
but that was all.

This story is not of myself, however, or of the pain which I cured in
this natural way, and which is but a memory now.

One gray morning a white mist settled heavily, and I could see but a
short distance on the dark waters for the fog. A fresh access of the
suffering which I was fighting, the wildness of my grief and struggles,
wore me out, so that I fell asleep there on the rough sand, my mouth
laid against the salty pebbles, and my hands grasping the sharp,
yielding grains, crushed as if some giant foot had trodden me into the
earth.

I was awakened by a soft speculative voice. "Another, perhaps," I
thought it said. Starting up, I saw standing beside me a thin, shrinking
figure, drenched like myself by the salt mist. From under a coarse, dark
straw hat, a small, delicate face regarded me shyly, yet calmly. It was
very pale, a little sunken, and surrounded by a cloud of light, curling
hair, blown loose by the wind; the wide sensitive lips were almost
colorless, and the peculiar eyes, greenish and great-pupiled, were
surrounded by stained, discolored rings that might have been the result
of weary vigils, or of ill-health. The woman, who was possibly thirty,
must once have been possessed of a fragile type of beauty, but it was
irretrievably lost now in the premature age that had evidently settled
upon her.

Struggling to a sitting posture, I saw that the thick white fog had
closed densely, and that the woodland back of us was barely
distinguishable. We too seemed shut in, as in a room. "You live at Mrs.
Libby's," said the young woman, after a moment's hesitation. "I am Agnes
Rayne. I hope I did not frighten you."

"No," I replied, brushing the sand from my damp clothing as I rose. "I
am afraid if you had not come by fortunately, I should have had a
thorough wetting. Can we get home before the storm begins?"

"You would not have taken cold down here on the beach," she remarked,
turning and looking out to sea. It seemed strangely to me as if those
odd eyes of hers could pierce the blinding mist. "I will not go back
with you. I have just come."

Whatever she did or said that might have seemed rude or brusque in
another, was sweet and courteous from her manner. "Very well," I said.
Then I paused,--my desire to meet her again was absurdly keen. Stepping
closer to her side, I extended my hand. "Will you come to see me, Miss
Rayne? I am very lonely, and I should be so--grateful."

She touched my fingers lightly with a chilly little hand, yet she never
looked at me as she replied, "Yes, some day."

As I plodded heavily through the wet sand, I was irresistibly impelled
to turn my head. She was merely standing exactly as I left her, thin
and straight, in the black gown that clung closely to her slender limbs,
with the mass of light hair about her shoulders.

Drenched as I was, when I reached home, with the large warm drops of the
storm's beginning, I stopped in the sitting-room a moment before going
to my room. The smell of ironing scented the house, but Mrs. Libby was
resting placidly in the rocking-chair, her feet on a cushioned stool.
She was eating some peaches, tearing them apart from the stone with
strong, juice-dropping fingers, and dipping them in a saucer of coarse
sugar before she devoured them.

"Mrs. Libby, who is Agnes Rayne?" I asked.

"She is old Martin Rayne's daughter, up to the corner. Seen her down to
the beach, I expect. Speak to you? Did? Well, she's as queer as Dick's
hat-band, as folks say 'round here. Some say she's crazy--love-cracked,
I guess she is." Mrs. Libby paused to kill a fly that ventured too near
her saucer on the table at her side, with a quick blow of the fleshy
hand. I used to turn away when Mrs. Libby killed flies. "Oh! _I_ d'know!
She's just queer. Don't commess with anybody, nor ever go to meetin'.
The minister called there once; he ain't ever been again, nor told how
he was treated, that's sure. They live queer, too. She don't ever make
pies, ner p'serves, ner any kind of sauce. 'N' old Martin, he's childish
now. He always was as close-mouthed as a mussel. Nobody ever knew
whether he liked such goin's on or not."

I went up the high, narrow stairs, thoughtfully to my small room under
the eaves, dark with the storm, and smelling of must and dampness. I
smiled a little. It was more than probable that these people would count
slight eccentricity in a lady--and this was undoubtedly a lady, whatever
her birth and surroundings--as madness. After dinner I stood by the
window a long time. Through the network of apple-boughs, I could see
the road. Mrs. Libby, coming heavily into the sitting-room, divined my
thoughts.

"If you're wondering how Agnes gets home, she goes cross-lots, right
through the scrub-oak 'n' poison ivy 'n black-b'ries, 'f she's in a
hurry. She ain't afraid o' rain; like's not, she stays down to the shore
the whole 'durin' day."

"I suppose the people here talk about her."

"Most of 'em have too much to do to talk," replied Mrs. Libby, smoothing
down her shining bands of hair before the hanging glass, and regarding
her reflected large, white face and set smile, with dull satisfaction
and vanity. "They're used to her now."

One glaring afternoon within the week, I sat out on the tiny porch, idly
watching a fat spider throw his ropes from the box-bush to the step. I
had been sitting there for three hours, and only one creaking farm-wagon
had passed, and two dirty brown-legged children. The air was breathless
and spicy, and in the rough clearing opposite, the leaves seemed to
curve visibly in the intense heat. Did anything ever happen here? It
seemed to me as much out of the range of possible happenings as the
grave.

"There's Agnes coming," said Mrs. Libby, inarticulately. She held
between her lips some ravellings and bits of thread, and she was sitting
by the open window, laboriously pushing her needle through a piece of
heavy unbleached cloth.

The young woman who came swaying delicately along the path, with
something of the motion of a tall stalk of grass in the wind, wore a
scanty white gown, which defined almost cruelly the slenderness of form,
that seemed to have returned to the meagre uncertainty of young
childhood. To-day, her light hair was strained back from her wide
forehead, and knotted neatly under the brim of her rough straw hat. She
looked much older as she stood before me in the golden light.

"Will you come home with me this afternoon?" she asked directly. "It is
not far; perhaps it might amuse you."

I consented gladly. As we walked along the narrow paths that skirted the
roadside together, she turned to me, a sudden flush burning on her thin
face. "I am afraid you think I am very cruel to bring you out this hot
afternoon, but it is so long since I have talked to any one--so long! I
have read your books, and then I said last night to myself: 'If I do not
go over it all to some one--tell it aloud, from beginning to end--put it
into words, I shall go mad. She is a woman who could understand.' Yes,
when I saw your hands on the beach that day, all bruised inside, and on
one a little cut, where you had wrenched at the sand and stone before
you slept, I knew you were my escape. I am abject, but think of the
years I have been dying, here, if you despise me."

"No," I said, "it is not abject. Sometimes in one's life comes a crisis,
when one must snatch at some remedy, or else die, or go mad. If there
is not then something in us that makes us believe in a future, we, of
course, die; but I could never think it a cure myself, merely to be free
of the body, because I believe in the soul's immortality, and the body
is such a diversion! Once rid of it, with all its imperious clamor to be
fed and warmed--nothing but utter freedom to think--the grave has never
appealed to me as an escape. Madness is a shade better, perhaps; but
then that depends on the form of the illusion. For me the body has got
to work out the soul's agony. For you, words may bring relief. Try--try
anything that suggests itself."

"Do not think you will hear anything new. It will bore you. Are you
willing to listen?"

"I am indeed," I replied. We had come to a lonely farm-house, its roofs
moss-grown and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a
sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a
pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything
wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness.

My companion lifted the gray gate's rusty latch. The grass was crushed
enough to form a path to the front door, which stood open. She led the
way into a large, low room off the little hall. The floor was bare.
There was a large table in the centre, heaped with books, and some
withering flowers stood in a glass. A couple of common chairs, a
mattress, on which was thrown an antique curtain of faded blue as a
drapery; on the white-washed wall, a tiny and coquetish slipper of
yellowish silk, nailed through the sole. This was all the furnishing.

She stood looking around at the barrenness curiously, trying perhaps to
see it with the eyes of a stranger. "This is my room," she said, "and
the very walls and floor are saturated with my sufferings." She went
restlessly to the window, and threw open the broken blind. As the
radiance of the afternoon flooded the place with light, I seemed to see
it and its wasting occupant, here in this horrible desolation, in the
changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and
white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of
autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the
cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing
of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a
place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one
of the marvels of the brain's endurance, with which nature sometimes
surprises us. It seemed to me that this might be the hour of partial
deliverance to the poor soul who had evidently lived and died so much.

"Why have you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair
fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I
had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she
were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body,
as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal
about the wreck.

"What difference could it make?" she asked in her slightly husky voice,
with faint surprise. "It is only the old love-story of a village girl
you will hear. My mother was different from these people, but I had
never known anything beside this life, except books. Of course you can
understand how much else than love the man brought me. I was quite
beautiful then. Does it not seem strange that it could have been true! I
burst into real blossom for him--like Aaron's rod, was it not? And now
you see, I am only the bare rod."

She dropped her lids and looked down at herself calmly. The warmth had
curled the short hairs into a light halo around her forehead, the little
neck was bent, she had folded her hands in her lap. The piteous
child-like chest and limbs revealed by the tight white gown, brought
tears to my eyes. There was something solemn, terrible, in this virginal
decay.

"All that I was to be, was forced into growth at once. He made me a new
self; he was in a sense creator, teacher, parent, friend, idol, lover.
He was the world I have not known; he taught me that I could myself
write, create. I was nearer madness in those days than now, for when he
threw himself here--" She rose and pointed to the floor near the
table--"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his
love, to be his wife--I, his wife!--it was as strange, as unreal as a
vision.--I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but
the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face
was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one great
month of life. Even you cannot have had more in all your years of the
world than I in my month! And then he returned to his work again. He
was very busy, you understand, a great man, even then, in the world of
letters. He could not come to see me, could not leave; but he wrote
every day. He will never put into his book such words as he wrote me; he
gave me more than he has ever given the world. It may have his books. I
have read them, but I have his very soul in these letters!

"I told you he made me believe that I could write. 'What was I, what was
I,' I used to ask myself, 'to be lifted from this to his height?' And
then I had a secret, which began in that thought. I wrote a novel. It is
eight years back now. I never mentioned it in my letters. I knew it was
good, as good as his own work. He would be so proud! He talked of
publishing-houses, books, authors. I had not forgotten one word. I sent
it to a house, one of the largest and best, and it was accepted. It is
strange, but I was not at all surprised. Somehow I had never doubted it
would be accepted. And then I went to the city alone for a day. I had
only a little time; it seemed to me the greatest act of my life to be
there, where he was, yet not to see him! But you see I had planned it
all in those long nights when the autumn storms would not let me sleep.
The rain would dash against this window, and half awake, I would see
myself when he should come, with my head against his arm, saying, 'I
have been making something for you. Guess.' And then he would laugh and
say, 'Perhaps--is it a cake for my tea, home-darling? Is it--is it a
cover for my writing-table? No, you do not sew. Tell me.' And then I
should say proudly. 'It is nothing of that kind. It is a book, and the
people whom you think such good judges say it must be a success!' I saw
it again as I was coming down the stairs from the publisher's office.
They had praised my work until the blood seemed all in my head and made
me dizzy, and the sounds of Broadway confused my country ears.

"At home that dusk my letter stood against the mantel as I came in
here. I laughed when I saw the post-mark, to think I had been there. I
laid it against my cheek softly where his hand had touched it, writing
my name. It so prolonged the pleasure--you know--you are a woman like
that. And at last I read it here." She posed herself unconsciously by
the table. "It said, 'Have I loved you? I do not know. Curse me, and
forget me. I am to be married to-day.'"

A pin from my hair fell to the bare floor and broke the silence with its
frivolous click. The tears were raining down my cheeks. She did not look
at me now. She stood grasping the table with one tense hand, her white
face thrown a little back. Just as she had stood, I knew, eight
purgatorial years ago.

The story was done. She sank into the chair.

"And the book?" I asked at length.

She roused from her reverie. "Oh! yes, the book. It had no purpose to
live for, you see. I sent for it, cancelled the agreement. They wrote to
me twice about it, but I was firm; there was no reason why I should
trouble. I have everything I want," and again her voice trailed into
silence.

I looked about the strange, bare room, at the strange, slender figure,
and I rose and folded her about with my arms; but she struggled in my
embrace. "No, no, do not touch me!" she cried sharply, in a tone of
suffering. My hands fell from her, and I knelt abashed at her side. "Oh!
please forgive me. I cannot be touched. I hate it. You have been so
good," she said, with compunction, regarding me with a certain remorse.
I was not aggrieved at being repulsed. As I resumed my seat, I said,
"You have only one life to live; snatch at least what you can out of the
years. Take my wisdom. You have the book yet? Good. Come back with me;
we will get it published. Open your heart, make one effort at living:
you can but fail. Come away from the sound of the waves and the wind
through the scrub-oaks; from this room and its memories. Be what you
might have been."

For the first time she faintly smiled. She shook her head. "I told you I
was like Aaron's rod. See for yourself. The power of thought or interest
in everything else has withered and wasted like my face and body. My
days are almost as irresponsible as a child's now. I have gone back to
the carelessness of a little girl about the conditions of life. It was
once, and once only for me. But you have given me relief, or rather I
have given myself relief this afternoon. And now, will you leave me? I
am so glad to have said it all over, and yet, since I have done it, I
cannot bear to see you."

The peculiarity of her voice and manner, of which I have spoken, that
made all her words sweet and gentle, however unconventional they might
be, left me unoffended.

"Perhaps you are right;" I said, "yet I wish you would try my way." She
did not make any reply, and I left her standing with downcast eyes by
the door.

Mrs. Libby still sat sewing by the window when I returned. "Have a
pleasant time?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity in her cold eyes. "Seems
to me you didn't stay long."

"No, not very long."

"See that queer room of hers? Folks ain't asked into it much. They said
she took the minister right in there when he called. Kitchen table piled
up with books, 'n papers, books 'round on the floor, 'n' a mattress
a-layin' in a corner. Some of the boys peeked in one day when she was
down to the beach, 'n' told all 'round how it looked. And a white shoe
onto the wall. I expect it must be one o' hers she used to wear. It was
before I moved over from South side, but Mrs. Hikes says she had the
flightiest clothes when he was courtin' her. Her mother left her some
money, I guess, any way, 'n' there wasn't anything too rich, ner too
good, ner too foreign for her to wear. 'N' look at her now! Well, it's
'long toward tea-time. You look tired."

I was indeed very tired. I could not assimilate the strange impressions
I had received. That night the moon-light streamed broadly into my
window through the apple-boughs that showed black shadows on the floor.
About midnight I opened my eyes suddenly. Mrs. Libby in a much-frilled
night-dress was shaking my shoulder vigorously.

"You'll have to get up. Agnes Rayne's dyin', 'n' she's took a notion to
see you. They've sent Hikeses' boy after you; bleedin' at the lungs is
all I can get out of him. The Hikeses are all dumb as a stick of
cord-wood."

She sat down heavily on my bed, and put a pillow comfortably to her back
while I dressed. Hikeses' boy sat waiting for me in the porch whistling
under his breath. He was the tallest and lankiest of them all, and like
some ghostly cicerone, he never spoke, but led the way through the dewy
grass into the white, glorious moonlight, and kept a few yards ahead of
me in the dusty road until we reached the Rayne farmhouse.

Through the windows I saw a dim light, and figures moving. I pushed open
the door without knocking. A doctor, young and alert, had been summoned
from the village, and the dull light from a kerosene lamp, set hastily
on the table, touched his curly red hair as he knelt by the mattress. An
old white-bearded man sat huddled in one of the shadowy corners, weeping
the tears of senility, and a tall, dust-colored woman, whom I rightly
took to be Mrs. Hikes, stood stolidly watching the doctor. Outside the
crickets were singing cheerily in the wet grass.

"Oh, yes, so glad you've come," murmured the doctor as he rose.

Then I stepped closer to the little figure lying in the old blue
curtain, that was stiffened now with blood. The parted lips were gray;
the whole face, except the vivid eyes, was dead. The night-dress was
thrown back from the poor throat and chest, stained here and there with
spots of crimson on the white skin, that seemed stretched over the small
bones. I stooped beside her, in answer to an appealing look. She could
not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled,
the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The
hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at
the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The
whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ear to her
cold lips.

"His letters ... the letters ... and ... my book ... I told you of, take
them. Here, in the closet ... by ... the chimney...."

I could hardly distinguish the faint whispers. I raised my hand
impatiently, and the old man stopped moaning. Mrs. Hikes and the doctor
ceased speaking in low undertones. Only a great moth, that had fluttered
inside the lamp chimney thudded heavily from side to side.

"Yes, yes. What shall I do with them?"

She did not speak, and seeing her agonized eyes trying to tell mine, I
cried aloud, "Give her brandy--something. She wants to speak. Oh, give
her a chance to speak!"

The doctor stepped to my side. He lifted the wrist, let it fall, and
shook his head. "Don't you see?" he said. I looked at the eyes, and saw.

Some days later I went to the lonely house. The old man was sitting in a
loose, disconsolate heap in his seat by the apple-tree. The tears rolled
down the wrinkles into his beard, when I spoke of his daughter.

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