After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 | Page 7

overhead lullabies have touched me inexpressibly. They beat upon my ear like the musical reveries of future mother hood--they betoken in Georgiana's maidenhood the dreaming unrest of the maternal.
One morning not long ago, with a sort of pitiful gayety, her song ran in the wise of saying how we should gather our rose-buds while we may. The warning could not have been addressed to me; I shall gather mine while I may--the unrifled rose of Georgiana's life, body and spirit.
Naturally she and I have avoided the subject of the Cardinal. But to the tragedy of his death was joined one circumstance of such coarse and brutal unconcern that it had left me not only remorseful but resentful. As we sat together the other evening, after one of those silences that fall unregarded between us, I could no longer forbear to face an understanding.
"Georgiana," I said, "do you know what became of the redbird?"
Unwittingly the color of reproach must have lain upon my words, for she answered quickly with yet more in hers,
"I had it buried!"
It was my turn to be surprised.
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure. I told them where to bury it; I showed them the very spot--under the cedar. They told me they had. Why?"
I thought it better that she should learn the truth.
"You know we can't trust our negroes. They disobeyed you. They lied to you; they never buried it. They threw it on the ash-pile. The pigs tore it to pieces; I saw them; they were rooting at it and tearing it to pieces."
She had clasped her hands, and turned towards me in acute distress. After a while, with her face aside, she said, slowly,
"And you have believed that I knew of this--that I permitted it?"
"I have believed nothing. I have waited to understand."
A few minutes later she said, as if to herself,
"Many a person would have been only too glad to believe it, and to blame me." Then folding her hands over one of mine, she said, with tears in her eyes:
"Promise me--promise me, Adam, until we are married, and--yes, after we are married--as long as I live, that you will never believe anything of me until you know that it is true!"
"I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!" I cried, trying to draw her to me, but she would not permit it. "And you?"
"I shall never misunderstand," she replied, as with a flash of white inward light. "I know that you can never do anything that will make me think the less of you."
Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I have paid little heed to the birds. The subject has been a sore one. Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and nearer and nearer to my own kind.
When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on the outskirts of the town and of humanity. On the side of them lay the sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as the sweet deep ocean of my poetry. I called my neighbors my manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose passages. The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume. There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there was and there is Mrs. Walters--may she last to the age of the eagle. In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality: an old preacher who was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and sweet-peas. Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery, noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.
But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it. I have become less a woodsman, more a civilian. Unless she relents, it may end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the Legislature. Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.
It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making; and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are exerting themselves to marry. I am more like a badger than like one of them; and indeed