AFTER this the years were swept along.Fast came the changes in Kentucky.
The prophecy which John Gray had made to his school-children passed to its realization and reality went far beyond it.In waves of migration, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of settlers of the Anglo-Saxon race hurried into the wilderness and there jostled and shouldered each other in the race passion of soil-owning and home-building; or always farther westward they rushed, pushing the Indian back.Lexington became the chief manufacturing town of the new civilization, thronged by merchants and fur-clad traders;gathered into it were men and women making a society that would have been brilliant in the capitals of the East; at its bar were heard illustrious voices, the echoes of which are not yet dead, are past all dying; the genius of young Jouett found for itself the secret of painting canvases so luminous and true that never since in the history of the State have they been equalled; the Transylvania University arose with lecturers famous enough to be known in Europe: students of law and medicine travelled to it from all parts of the land.
John Gray's school-children grew to be men and women.For the men there were no longer battles to fight in Kentucky, but there were the wars of the Nation; and far away on the widening boundaries of the Republic they conquered or failed and fell; as volunteers with Perry in the victory on Lake Erie; in the awful massacre at the River Raisin; under Harrison at the Thames; in the mud and darkness of the Mississippi at New Orleans, repelling Pakenham's charge with Wellington's veteran, victory-flushed campaigners.
The school-master's friend, the parson, he too had known his more peaceful warfare, having married and become a manifold father.Of a truth it was feared at one period that the parson was running altogether to prayers and daughters.For it was remarked that with each birth, his petitions seemed longer and his voice to rise from behind the chancel with a fresh wail as of one who felt a growing grievance both against himself and the almighty.
Howbeit, innocently enough after the appearance of the fifth female infant, one morning he preached the words: "No man knoweth what manner of creature he is"; and was unaware that a sudden smile rippled over the faces of his hearers.But it was not until later on when mother and six were packed into one short pew at morning service, that they became known in a body as the parson's Collect for all Sundays.
Sometimes the little ones were divided and part of them sat in another pew where there was a single occupant--a woman--childless.
"Yes"," she had said, "I shall go softly all my years."The plants she had brought that summer from Virginia had long since become old bushes.The Virginia Creeper had climbed to the tops of the trees.The garden, though in the same spot, was another place now, with vine-heavy arbours and sodden walks running between borders of flowers and vegetables--daffodils and thyme--in the quaint Virginia fashion.There was a lawn covered as the ancestral one had been with the feathery grass of England.There was a park where the deer remained at home in their wilderness.
Crowning this landscape of comfort and good taste, stood the house.Often of nights when its roof lay deep under snow and the eaves were bearded with hoary icicles, there were candles twinkling at every window and the sounds of music and dancing in the parlours.Once a year there was a great venison supper in the dining-room, draped with holly and mistletoe.On Christmas eve man a child's sock or stocking was hung--no one knew when or by whom--around the shadowy chimney-seat of her room; and every Christmas morning the little negros from the cabins knew to whom each of these belonged.In spring, parties of young girls and youths came out from town for fishing parties and picknicked in the lawn amid the dandelions and under the song of the blackbird; during the summer, for days at a time, other gay company filled the house; of autumns there were nutting parties in the russet woods.Other guests also, not young, not gay.Aaron Burr was entertained there; there met for counsel the foremost Western leaders in his magnificent conspiracy.More than one great man of his day, middle-aged, unmarried, began his visits, returned oftener for awhile--always alone--and one day drove away disappointed.
Through seasons and changes she had gone softly: never retreating from life but drawing about her as closely as she could its ties, its sympathies, it duties: in all things a character of the finest equipois, the truest moderation.
But these are women of the world--some of us men may have discerned one of them in the sweep of our experiences--to whom the joy and the sorrow come alike with quietness.For them there is neither the cry of sudden delight nor the cry of sudden anguish.Gazing deep into their eyes, we are reminded of the light of dim churches; hearing their voices, we dream of some minstrel whose murmurs reach us imperfectly through his fortress wall;beholding the sweetness of their faces, we are touched as by the appeal of the mute flowers; merely meeting them in the street, we recall the long-vanished image of the Divine Goodess.They are the women who have missed happiness and who know it, but having failed of affection, give themselves to duty.And so life never rises high and close about them as about one who stands waist-deep in a wheat-field, gathering at will either its poppies or its sheaves; it flows forever away as from one who pauses waist-deep in a stream and hearkens rather to the rush of all things toward the eternal deeps.It was into the company of theses quieter pilgrims that she had passed: she had missed happiness twice.
