And in a closet she had hidden a surprise for me--a thing Ihave often wished I owned: a noble big globe.I couldn't see it for the tears.She will never know the pride I take in it, and the pleasure.Today the mails are full of loving remembrances for her: full of those old, old kind words she loved so well, "Merry Christmas to Jean!" If she could only have lived one day longer!
At last she ran out of money, and would not use mine.So she sent to one of those New York homes for poor girls all the clothes she could spare--and more, most likely.
CHRISTMAS NIGHT.--This afternoon they took her away from her room.As soon as I might, I went down to the library, and there she lay, in her coffin, dressed in exactly the same clothes she wore when she stood at the other end of the same room on the 6th of October last, as Clara's chief bridesmaid.Her face was radiant with happy excitement then; it was the same face now, with the dignity of death and the peace of God upon it.
They told me the first mourner to come was the dog.He came uninvited, and stood up on his hind legs and rested his fore paws upon the trestle, and took a last long look at the face that was so dear to him, then went his way as silently as he had come.
HE KNOWS.
At mid-afternoon it began to snow.The pity of it--that Jean could not see it! She so loved the snow.
The snow continued to fall.At six o'clock the hearse drew up to the door to bear away its pathetic burden.As they lifted the casket, Paine began playing on the orchestrelle Schubert's "Impromptu," which was Jean's favorite.Then he played the Intermezzo; that was for Susy; then he played the Largo; that was for their mother.He did this at my request.Elsewhere in my Autobiography I have told how the Intermezzo and the Largo came to be associated in my heart with Susy and Livy in their last hours in this life.
From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear.Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more.Jervis, the cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old Katy--were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.
DECEMBER 26TH.The dog came to see me at eight o'clock this morning.He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters hereafter.
The storm raged all night.It has raged all the morning.
The snow drives across the landscape in vast clouds, superb, sublime--and Jean not here to see.
2:30 P.M.--It is the time appointed.The funeral has begun.
Four hundred miles away, but I can see it all, just as if I were there.The scene is the library in the Langdon homestead.
Jean's coffin stands where her mother and I stood, forty years ago, and were married; and where Susy's coffin stood thirteen years ago; where her mother's stood five years and a half ago;and where mine will stand after a little time.
FIVE O'CLOCK.--It is all over.
When Clara went away two weeks ago to live in Europe, it was hard, but I could bear it, for I had Jean left.I said WE would be a family.We said we would be close comrades and happy--just we two.That fair dream was in my mind when Jean met me at the steamer last Monday; it was in my mind when she received me at the door last Tuesday evening.We were together; WE WERE AFAMILY! the dream had come true--oh, precisely true, contentedly, true, satisfyingly true! and remained true two whole days.
And now? Now Jean is in her grave!
In the grave--if I can believe it.God rest her sweet spirit!
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1.Katy Leary, who had been in the service of the Clemens family for twenty-nine years.
2.Mr.Gabrilowitsch had been operated on for appendicitis.
THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE
I
If I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to write upon the above text.It means the change in my life's course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most IMPORTANT condition of my career.But it also implies--without intention, perhaps--that that turning-point ITSELF was the creator of the new condition.This gives it too much distinction, too much prominence, too much credit.It is only the LAST link in a very long chain of turning-points commissioned to produce the cardinal result; it is not any more important than the humblest of its ten thousand predecessors.Each of the ten thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in forwarding the scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought about SOME OTHER result.It know we have a fashion of saying "such and such an event was the turning-point in my life," but we shouldn't say it.We should merely grant that its place as LASTlink in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.
Perhaps the most celebrated turning-point recorded in history was the crossing of the Rubicon.Suetonius says:
Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, he halted for a while, and, revolving in his mind the importance of the step he was on the point of taking, he turned to those about him and said, "We may still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge, nothing is left for us but to fight it out in arms."This was a stupendously important moment.And all the incidents, big and little, of Caesar's previous life had been leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link.This was the LAST link--merely the last one, and no bigger than the others;but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune.
You, the reader, have a PERSONAL interest in that link, and so have I; so has the rest of the human race.It was one of the links in your life-chain, and it was one of the links in mine.
We may wait, now, with baited breath, while Caesar reflects.
Your fate and mine are involved in his decision.