Penelope's Postscripts

I cannot help thinking that she would still be Miss Peabody, of Salem, Massachusetts, had it not been for my generous and helpful offices, and those of Francesca!  Never were two lovers, parted in youth in America and miraculously reunited in middle age in Ireland, more recalcitrant in declaring their mutual affection than Dr. La Touche and Salemina!  Nothing in the world divided them but imaginary barriers.  He was not rich, but he had a comfortable salary and a dignified and honourable position among men.  He had two children, but they were charming, and therefore so much to the good.  Salemina was absolutely “foot loose” and tied down to no duties in America, so no one could blame her for marrying an Irishman.  She had never loved any one else, and Dr. La Touche might have had that information for the asking; but he was such a bat for blindness, adder for deafness, and lamb for meekness that because she refused him once, when she was the only comfort of an aged mother and father, he concluded that she would refuse him again, though she was now alone in the world.  His late wife, a poor, flighty, frivolous invalid, the kind of woman who always entangles a sad, vague, absent-minded scholar, had died six years before, and never were there two children so in need of a mother as Jackeen and Broona, a couple of affectionate, hot-headed, bewitching, ragged, tousled Irish darlings.  I would cheerfully have married Dr. Gerald myself, just for the sake of his neglected babies, but I dislike changes and I had already espoused Himself.

However, a summer in Ireland, undertaken with no such great stakes in mind as Salemina’s marriage, made possible a chance meeting of the two old friends.  This was followed by several others, devised by us with incendiary motives, and without Salemina’s knowledge.  There was also the unconscious plea of the children working a daily spell; there was the past, with its memories, tugging at both their hearts; and above all there was a steady, dogged, copious stream of mental suggestion emanating from Francesca and me, so that, in course of time, our middle-aged couple did succeed in confessing to each other that a separate future was impossible for them.

They never would have encountered each other had it not been for us; never, never would have become engaged; and as for the wedding, we forcibly led them to the altar, saying that we must leave Ireland and the ceremony could not be delayed.

Not that we are the recipients of any gratitude for all this!  Rather the reverse!  They constantly allude to their marriage as made in Heaven, although there probably never was another union where creatures of earth so toiled and slaved to assist the celestial powers.

I wonder why middle-aged and elderly lovers make such an appeal to me!  Is it because I have lived much in New England, where “ladies-in-waiting” are all too common,—where the wistful bride-groom has an invalid mother to support, or a barren farm out of which he cannot wring a living, or a malignant father who cherishes a bitter grudge against his son’s chosen bride and all her kindred,—where the woman herself is compassed about with obstacles, dragging out a pinched and colourless existence year after year?

And when at length the two waiting ones succeed in triumphing over circumstances, they often come together wearily, soberly, with half the joy pressed out of life.  Young lovers have no fears!  That the future holds any terrors, difficulties, bugbears of any sort they never seem to imagine, and so they are delightful and amusing to watch in their gay and sometimes irresponsible and selfish courtships; but they never tug at my heart-strings as their elders do, when the great, the long-delayed moment comes.

Francesca and I, in common with Salemina’s other friends, thought that she would never marry.  She had been asked often enough in her youth, but she was not the sort of woman who falls in love at forty.  What we did not know was that she had fallen in love with Gerald La Touche at five-and-twenty and had never fallen out,—keeping her feelings to herself during the years that he was espoused to another, very unsuitable lady.  Our own sentimental experiences, however, had sharpened our eyes, and we divined at once that Dr. La Touche, a scholar of fifty, shy, reserved, self-distrustful, and oh! so in need of anchor and harbour,—that he was the only husband in the world for Salemina; and that he, after giving all that he had and was to an unappreciative woman, would be unspeakably blessed in the wife of our choosing.

I remember so well something that he said to me once as we sat at twilight on the bank of the lake near Devorgilla.  The others were rowing toward us bringing the baskets for a tea picnic, and we, who had come in the first boat, were talking quietly together about intimate things.  He told me that a frail old scholar, a brother professor, used to go back from the college to his house every night bowed down with weariness and pain and care, and that he used to say to his wife as he sank into his seat by the fire: “Oh! praise me, my wife, praise me!”

My eyes filled and I turned away to hide the tears when Dr. Gerald continued absently: “As for me, Mistress Beresford, when I go home at night I take my only companion from the mantelshelf and leaning back in my old armchair say, ‘Praise me, my pipe, praise me!’”

And Salemina Peabody was in the boat coming toward us, looking as serenely lovely in a grey tweed and broad white hat as any good sweet woman of forty could look, while he gazed at her “through a glass darkly” as if she were practically non-existent, or had nothing whatever to do with the case.

I concealed rebellious opinions of blind bats, deaf adders, meek lambs, and obstinate pigs, but said very gently and impersonally: “I hope you won’t always allow your pipe to be your only companion;—you, with your children, your name and position, your home and yourself to give—to somebody!”

But he only answered: “You exaggerate, my dear madam; there is not enough left in me or of me to offer to any woman!”

And I could do nothing but make his tea graciously and hand it to him, wondering that he was able to see the cup or the bread-and-butter sandwich that I put into his modest, ungrateful hand.

However, it is all a thing of the past, that dim, sweet, grey romance that had its rightful background in a country of subdued colourings, of pensive sweetness, of gentle greenery, where there is an eternal wistfulness in the face of the natural world, speaking of the springs of hidden tears.

Their union is a perfect success, and I echo the Boots of the inn at Devorgilla when he said: “An’ sure it’s the doctor that’s the satisfied man an’ the luck is on him as well as on e’er a man alive!  As for her ladyship, she’s one o’ the blessings o’ the wurruld an’ ’t would be an o’jus pity to spile two houses wid ’em.”

    July 12, 19–.

We were all out in the orchard sunning ourselves on the little haycocks that the “hired man” had piled up here and there under the trees.

“It is not really so beautiful as Italy,” I said to Himself, gazing up at the newly set fruit on the apple boughs and then across the close-cut hay field to the level pasture, with its rocks and cow paths, its blueberry bushes and sweet fern, its clumps of young sumachs, till my eyes fell upon the deep green of the distant pines.  “I can’t bear to say it, because it seems disloyal, but I almost believe I think so.”

“It is not as picturesque,” Himself agreed grudgingly, his eye following mine from point to point; “and why do we love it so?”

“There is nothing delicious and luxuriant about it,” I went on critically, “yet it has a delicate, ethereal, austere, straight-forward Puritanical loveliness of its own; but, no, it is not as beautiful as Italy or Ireland, and it isn’t as tidy as England.  If you keep away from the big manufacturing towns and their outskirts you may go by motor or railway through shire after shire in England and never see anything unkempt, down-at-the-heel, out-at-elbows, or ill-cared-for; no broken-down fences or stone walls; no heaps of rubbish or felled trees by the wayside; no unpainted or tottering buildings—”

“You see plenty of ruins,” interrupted Himself in a tone that promised argument.

“Yes, but ruins are different; they are finished; they are not tottering, they have tottered!  Our country is too big, I suppose, to be ‘tidy,’ but how I should like to take just one of the United States and clear it up, back yards and all, from border line to border line!”

“You are talking like a housewife now, not like an artist,” said Himself reprovingly.

“Well, I am both, I hope, and I don’t intend that any one shall know where the one begins or the other leaves off, either!  And if any foreigner should remark that America is unfinished or untidy I shall deny it!”

“Fie!  Penelope!  You who used to be a citizen of the world!”

“So I am still, so far as a roving foot and a knowledge of three languages can make me; but you remember that the soul ‘retains the characteristic of its race and the heart is true to its own country, even to its own parish.’”

“When shall we be going to the other countries, mother?” asked Billy.  “When shall we see our aunt in Scotland and our aunt in Ireland?”  (Poor lambs!  Since the death of their Grandmother Beresford they do not possess a real relation in the world!)

“It will not be very long, Billy,” I said.  “We don’t want to go until we can leave the perambulator behind.  The Sally-baby toddles now, but she must be able to walk on the English downs and the Highland heather.”

“And the Irish bogs,” interpolated Billy, who has a fancy for detail.

“Well, the Irish bogs are not always easy travelling,” I answered, “but the Sally-baby will soon be old enough to feel the spring of the Irish turf under her feet.”

“What will the chickens and ducklings and pigeons do while we are gone?” asked Francie.

“An’ the lammies?” piped the Sally-baby, who has all the qualities of Mary in the immortal lyric.

“Oh! we won’t leave home until the spring has come and all the young things are born.  The grass will be green, the dandelions will have their puff-balls on, the apple blossoms will be over, and Daddy will get a kind man to take care of everything for us.  It will be May time and we will sail in a big ship over to the aunts and uncles in Scotland and Ireland and I shall show them my children—”

“And we shall play ‘hide-and-go-coop’ with their children,” interrupted Francie joyously.

“They will never have heard of that game, but you will all play together!”  And here I leaned back on the warm haycock and blinked my eyes a bit in moist anticipation of happiness to come.  “There will be eight-year-old Ronald MacDonald to climb and ride and sail with our Billy; and there will be little Penelope who is named for me, and will be Francie’s playmate; and the new little boy baby—”

“Proba’ly Aunt Francie’s new boy baby will grow up and marry our girl one,” suggested Billy.

“He has my consent to the alliance in advance,” said Himself, “but I dare say your mother has arranged it all in her own mind and my advice will not be needed.”

“I have not arranged anything,” I retorted; “or if I have it was nothing more than a thought of young Ronald or Jack La Touche in—another quarter,”—this with discreetly veiled emphasis.

“What is another quarter, mother?” inquired Francie, whose mental agility is somewhat embarrassing.

“Oh, why,—well,—it is any other place than the one you are talking about.  Do you see?”

“Not so very well, but p’r’aps I will in a minute.”

“Hope springs eternal!” quoted Francie’s father.

“And then, as I was saying before being interrupted by the entire family, we will go and visit the Irish cousins, Jackeen and Broona, who belong to Aunt Salemina and Uncle Gerald, and the Sally-baby will be the centre of attraction because she is her Aunt Salemina’s godchild—”

“But we are all God’s children,” insisted Billy.

“Of course we are.”

“What’s the difference between a god-child and a God’s child?”

“The bottle of chloroform is in the medicine closet, my poor dear; shall I run and get it?” murmured Himself sotto voce.

“Every child is a child of God,” I began helplessly, “and when she is somebody’s godchild she—oh! lend me your handkerchief, Billy!”

“Is it the nose-bleed, mother?” he asked, bending over me solicitously.

“No, oh, no! it’s nothing at all, dear.  Perhaps the hay was going to make me sneeze.  What was I saying?”