The Choir Invisible | Page 4

she had not been able to bear the thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded, mud-stained riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting against the saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze morocco shoes. On her hands she had drawn white half-hand mittens of home-knit; and on her head she wore an enormous white scoop-bonnet, lined with pink and tied under her chin in a huge muslin bow. Her face, hidden away under the pink-and-white shadow, showed such hints of pearl and rose that it seemed carved from the inner surface of a sea-shell. Her eyes were gray, almond shaped, rather wide apart, with an expression changeful and playful, but withal rather shrewd and hard; her light brown hair, as fine as unspun silk, was parted over her brow and drawn simply back behind her ears; and the lips of her little mouth curved against each other, fresh, velvet-like, smiling.
On she rode down the avenue of the primeval woods; and Nature seemed arranged to salute her as some imperial presence; with the waving of a hundred green boughs above on each side; with a hundred floating odours; with the swift play of nimble forms up and down the boles of trees; and all the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies.
Then one of those trifles happened that contain the history of our lives, as a drop of dew draws into itself the majesty and solemnity of the heavens.
>From the pommel of the side-saddle there dangled a heavy roll of home-spun linen, which she was taking to town to her aunt's merchant as barter for queen's-ware pitchers; and behind this roll of linen, fastened to a ring under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied up in a large blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever she fidgeted in the saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often did because he was clumsy and because the road was obstructed by stumps and roots, the string by which this bundle was tied slipped a little through the lossening knot and the bundle hung a little lower down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into the broader public road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the travelling began to be really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet against the loop of a root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle slipped noiselessly from the saddle to the earth.
She did not see it. She indignantly gathered the reins more tightly in her hand, pushed back her bonnet, which now hung down over her eyes like the bill of a pelican, and applied her little switch of wild cherry to the horse's flank with such vehemence that a fly which was about to alight on that spot went to the other side. The old horse himself--he bore the peaceable name of William Penn--merely gave one of the comforting switches of his bob-tail with which he brushed away the thought of any small annoyance, and stopped a moment to nibble at the wayside cane mixed with purple blossoming peavine.
Out of the lengthening shadows of the woods the girl and the horse passed on toward the little town; and far behind them in the public road lay the lost bundle.
II
IN the open square on Cheapside in Lexington there is now a bronze statue of John Breckinridge. Not far from where it stands the pioneers a hundred years ago had built the first log school-house of the town.
Poor old school-house, long since become scattered ashes! Poor little backwoods academicians, driven in about sunrise, driven out toward dusk! Poor little tired backs with nothing to lean against! Poor little bare feet that could never reach the floor! Poor little droop-headed figures, so sleepy in the long summer days, so afraid to fall asleep! Long, long since, little children of the past, your backs have become straight enough, measured on the same cool bed; sooner or later your feet, wherever wandering, have found their resting-places in the soft earth; and all your drooping heads have gone to sleep on the same dreamless pillow and there are sleeping. And the young schoolmaster, who seemed exempt from frailty while he guarded like a sentinel that lone outpost of the alphabet--he too has long since joined the choir invisible of the immortal dead. But there is something left of him though more than a century has passed away: something that has wandered far down the course of time to us like the faint summer fragrance of a young tree long since fallen dead in its wintered forest--like a dim radiance yet travelling onward into space from an orb turned black and cold--like an old melody, surviving on and on in the air without any instrument, without any strings.
John Gray, the school-master. At four