Told in a French Garden, Mildred Aldrich [children's ebooks online TXT] 📗

that I last saw Dillon act.

She had made a great success that winter, yet, in the middle of the season, she had suddenly disappeared.

There were all kinds of newspaper explanations.

Then she was forgotten by the public that had enthusiastically applauded her, and which only sighed sadly, a year later, on hearing of her death, in a far off Italian town, sighed, talked a little, and forgot again.

It chanced that a few years later I was in Italy, and being not many miles from the town where I heard that she was buried, and a trifle overstrung by a few months delicious, aimless life in that wonderful country, I was taken with a sentimental fancy to visit her grave.

It was a sort of pilgrimage for me, for I had given to Dillon my first boyish devotion.

I thought of her, and to remember her was to recall her rare charm, her beauty, her success, after a long struggle, and the unexpected, inexplicable manner in which she had abandoned it. It was to recall, too, the delightful evenings I had spent under her influence, the pleasure I had had in the passion of her "Juliet," the poetic charm of her "Viola"; the graceful witchery of her "Rosalind"; how I had smiled with her "Portia"; laughed with her "Beatrice"; wept with her "Camille"; in fact how I had yielded myself up to her magnetism with that ecstatic pleasure in which one gets the best joys of every passion, because one does not drain the dregs of any.

I well remembered her last night, how she had disappeared, how she had gone to Europe, how she had died abroad, all mere facts known in their bareness only to the public.

It was hard to find the place where she was buried. But at last I succeeded.

It was in a humble churchyard. The grave was noticeable because it was well kept, and utterly devoid of the tawdry ornamentation inseparable from such places in Italy. It was marked by a monument distinctly unique in a European country. It was a huge unpolished boulder, over which creeping green vines were growing.

On its rough surface a cross was cut, and underneath were the words:

"Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare,
To morrow's Silence, Triumph or Despair."

Below that I read with stupefaction,

"Margaret Dillon and child,"

and the dates

"January, 1843" "July 25, 1882."

In spite of the doubts and fancies this put into my mind, I no sooner stood beside the spot where the earth had claimed her, than all my old interest in her returned. I lingered about the place, full of romantic fancies, decorating her tomb with flowers, as I had once decorated her triumphs, absorbed in a dreamy adoration of her memory, and singing her praise in verse.

It was then that I learned the true story of her disappearance, guessed at that of her death, as I did at the identity of the young Dominican priest, who sometimes came to her grave, and who finally told me such of the facts as I know. I can best tell the story by picturing two nights in the life of Margaret Dillon, the two following her last appearance on the stage.

The play had been "Much Ado."

Never had she acted with finer humor, or greater gaiety. Yet all the evening she had felt a strange sadness.

When it was all over, and friends had trooped round to the stage to praise her, and trooped away, laughing and happy, she felt a strange, sad, unused reluctance to see them go.

Then she sat down to her dressing table, hurriedly removed her make up, and allowed herself to be stripped of her stage finery. Her fine spirits seemed to strip off with her character. She shivered occasionally with nervousness, or superstition, and she was strangely silent.

All day she had, for some inexplicable reason, been thinking of her girlhood, of what her life might have been if, at a critical moment, she had chosen a woman's ordinary lot instead of work, or if, at a later day, she had yielded to, instead of resisted, a great temptation. All day, as on many days lately, she had wondered if she regretted it, or if, the days of her great triumph having passed, as pass they must, she should regret it later if she did not yet.

It was probably because, early in the season as it was she was tired, and the October night oppressed her with the heat of Indian Summer.

Silently she had allowed herself to be undressed, and redressed in great haste. But before she left the theatre she bade every one "good night" with more than her usual kindliness, not because she did not expect to see them all on Monday, it was a Saturday night, but because, in her inexplicably sad humour, she felt an irresistible desire to be at peace with the world, and a still deeper desire to feel herself beloved by those about her.

Then she entered her carriage and drove hurriedly home to the tiny apartment where she lived quite alone.

On the supper table lay a note.

She shivered as she took it up. It was a handwriting she had been accustomed to see once a year only, in one simple word of greeting, always the same word, which every year in eighteen had come to her on New Year's wherever she was.

But this was October.

She sat perfectly still for some minutes, and then resolutely opened the letter, and read:

"Madge: I am so afraid that my voice coming to you, not
only across so many years, but from another world, may shock
you, that I am strongly tempted not to keep my word to you,
yet, judging you by myself, I feel that perhaps this will be
less painful than the thought that I had passed forgetful of
you, or changed toward you. You were a mere girl when we
mutually promised, that though it was Fate that our paths
should not be the same, and honorable that we should keep
apart, we would not pass out of life, whatever came, without
a farewell word, a second saying 'good bye.'"

"It is my fate to say it. It is now God's will. Before it
was yours. It is eighteen years since you chose my honor to
your happiness and mine. To day you are a famous woman. That
is the consolation I have found in your decision. I
sometimes wonder if Fame will always make up to you for the
rest. A woman's way is peculiar and right, I suppose. I
have never changed. My son has been a second consolation,
and that, too, in spite of the fact that, had he never been
born, your decision might have been so different. He is a
young man now, strangely like what I was, when as a child,
you first knew me, and he has always been my confidant. In
those first days of my banishment from you I kept from
crying my agony from the housetops by whispering it to him.
His uncomprehending ears were my sole confessional. His
mother cared little for his companionship, and her
invalidism threw him continually into my care. I do not know
when he began to understand, but from the hour he could
speak he whispered your name in his prayers. But it was only
lately that, of himself, he discovered your identity. The
love I felt for you in my early days has grown with me. It
has survived in my heart when all other passions, all
prides, all ambitions, long ago died. I leave you, I hope, a
good memory of me a man who loved you more than he loved
himself, who for eighteen years has loved you silently, yet
never ceased to grieve for you. But I fear that I have
bequeathed to my son, with the name and estate of his
father, my hopeless love for you. If, by chance, what I fear
be true, if, when bereft of me, he seeks you out, as be
sure he will, deal gently with him for his father's sake.

"There was an old compact between us, dear. I mention it now
only in the hope that you may not have forgotten indeed,
in the certainty that you have not. I know you so well.
Remember it, I beg of you, only to ignore it. It was made,
you know, when one of us expected to watch the passing of
the other. This is different. If this reminds you of it, it
reminds you only to warn you that Time cancels all such
compacts. It is my voice that assures you of it.

"FELIX R."

Underneath, written in letters, like, yet so unlike, were the words, "My father died this morning. F. R." and an uncertain mark as though he had begun to add "Jr." to the signature, and realized that there was no need.

The letter fell from her hands.

For a long time she sat silent.

Dead! She had never felt that he could die while she lived. A knowledge that he was living, loving her, adoring her hopelessly was necessary to her life. She felt that she could not go on without it. For eighteen years she had compared all other men, all other emotions to him and his love, to find them all wanting.

And he had died.

She looked at the date of the letter. He would be resting in that tomb she remembered so well, before she could reach the place; that spot before which they had often talked of Death, which had no terrors for either of them.

She rose. She pushed away her untouched supper, hurriedly drank a glass of wine, and, crossing the hall to her bedroom, opened a tiny box that stood locked upon her dressing table. She took from it a picture a miniature. It was of a young man not over twenty five. The face was strong and full of virile suggestion, even in a picture. The eyes were