PAGE 2
The Way Of Peace
by
“Oh, my!” breathed Lucy Ann. Low as they were, the words held a fullness, of joy.
Her face had been aging through these days of grief; it had grown more and more like her mother’s. She felt as if a hand had been stretched out to her, holding a gift, and at that moment something told her how to make the gift enduring. Running over to the little table where her mother’s work-basket stood, as it had been, undisturbed, she took out a pair of scissors, and went back to the glass. There she let down her thick gray hair, parted it carefully on the sides, and cut off lock after lock about her face. She looked a caricature of her sober self. But she was well used to curling hair like this, drawing its crisp silver into shining rings; and she stood patiently before the glass and coaxed her own locks into just such fashion as had framed the older face. It was done, and Lucy Ann looked at herself with a smile all suffused by love and longing. She was not herself any more; she had gone back a generation, and chosen a warmer niche. She could have kissed her face in the glass, it was so like that other dearer one. She did finger the little curls, with a reminiscent passion, not daring to think of the darkness where the others had been shut; and, at that instant, she felt very rich. The change suggested a more faithful portraiture, and she went up into the spare room and looked through the closet where her mother’s clothes had been hanging so long, untouched. Selecting a purple thibet, with a little white sprig, she slipped off her own dress, and stepped into it. She crossed a muslin kerchief on her breast, and pinned it with the cameo her mother had been used to wear. It was impossible to look at herself in the doing; but when the deed was over, she went again to the glass and stood there, held by a wonder beyond her will. She had resurrected the creature she loved; this was an enduring portrait, perpetuating, in her own life, another life as well.
“I’ll pack away my own clo’es to-morrer,” said Lucy Ann to herself. “Them are the ones to be put aside.”
She went downstairs, hushed and tremulous, and seated herself again, her thin hands crossed upon her lap; and there she stayed, in a pleasant dream, not of the future, and not even of the past, but face to face with a recognition of wonderful possibilities. She had dreaded her loneliness with the ache that is despair; but she was not lonely any more. She had been allowed to set up a little model of the tabernacle where she had worshiped; and, having that, she ceased to be afraid. To sit there, clothed in such sweet familiarity of line and likeness, had tightened her grasp upon the things that are. She did not seem to herself altogether alive, nor was her mother dead.
They had been fused, by some wonderful alchemy; and instead of being worlds apart, they were at one. So, John Cummings, her brother, stepping briskly in, after tying his horse at the gate, came upon her unawares, and started, with a hoarse, thick cry. It was in the dusk of evening; and, seeing her outline against the window, he stepped back against the wall and leaned there a moment, grasping at the casing with one hand. “Good God!” he breathed, at last, “I thought ‘t was mother!”
Lucy Ann rose, and went forward to meet him.
“Then it’s true,” said she. “I’m so pleased. Seems as if I could git along, if I could look a little mite like her.”
John stood staring at her, frowning in his bewilderment.
“What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “Put on her clo’es?”
“Yes,” said Lucy Ann, “but that ain’t all. I guess I do resemble mother, though we ain’t any of us had much time to think about it. Well, I am pleased. I took out that daguerreotype she had, down Saltash way, though it don’t favor her as she was at the end. But if I can take a glimpse of myself in the glass, now and then, mebbe I can git along.”