Springfield Weekly Republican

RURAL MEMORIES.
A Love Story.
BY E. H. ARR.

Not much of a story; but a simple sketch, a little romantic, but true and unpretending as the life it deals with. I found my heroine on the shore of the mill-pond one afternoon, fast asleep. She was coiled around by water-lilies. About her arms and neck and waist she had wound their pliant stems, and made with two of them a dainty fillet for her head. She was brown as a gipsy, with long, curved eye-lashes resting on her rosy cheeks, and tangled masses of wavy hair interwoven with stems of the water-lily. I looked upon her in simple wonder. She seemed to me like some beautiful fairy or kindly water-sprite, who had thrust her little head up through the neighboring bed of lilies, and had come to sun herself upon this bank, enwrapped in her mantle of blossoms. She opened her eyes, great, brown, wandering eyes, and asked gently, 'Who are you?'

'Molly, from the farm-house yonder,' said I. 'And I,' returned she, 'am a water-witch. I live in the bottom of this mill-pond, under that bed of lilies yonder'—and so she rattled on in a style of exaggeration, as pleasing to me as it was peculiar in a child of twelve.

After that I knew her as Marion West. I only saw her summers. Her home was in a distant city, whence she came yearly to rusticate with a paternal uncle. She was a wonderful child, abundant in imagery and resources. Her womanhood did not belie her early promise. Soul lighted up her face, and the weird, wild features softened into marvelous beauty. Earnest life-work found in her a noble exponent, and highest culture an apt scholar. Nor was the dear girl's portion alone of this world; religion, soft chastener of the human heart, invested her with tender charities, and she was as meek and humble as the loneliest child of poverty.

Too noble a heroine she for a so-called love story. There is little romance in true love. Red life is easily recorded. So were the history of my friend to grow plethoric with words and sentiment and passion, rest assured that out of my own brain would come their warp and woof. I shall tell you, therefore, just as simply as she and I used to hold converse by the mill-pond shore, how she, the good and beautiful, was won and wed; how she lives truthfully, and shall, I trust, die happily.

A mile beyond the red cottage, wherein dwelt the chosen of Jonathan's heart, stood a neat, brown farm-house, broad and low-roofed, with a thrifty hospitable air. One sees such houses often in the country, half buried by clambering vines, their front yards crowded with rose-bushes and lilacs, and their kitchen gardens gaudy with tiger-lilies and peonies. In this house dwelt our semi-hero, a hero by no means impossible in country life, refined and intellectual. William was strong of head and strong of heart; Marion was beautiful, gifted and good. They saw much of each other in those summerings. Contiguity and isolation magnified affinity. Marion went home one season leaving her plighted troth, and a single lily, as keepsakes for William. They were both honest and truthful; but 'How,' said the mother, 'can wealth wed with poverty, rank and lineage with house of low degree.' Pride and fashion blasted the tender episode born of idle, country hours. The faded lily was but the emblem of withered hopes. They ought both, for propriety's sake, to have pined away and died; but, though very daintily fashioned, they were of real flesh and blood, and bone and muscle, so they each lived and loved another and married, and both seemed well mated at last. O circumstance, for every blessed union brought about by thy contiguities, thou jilt'st a dozen times with the finer issues of life! Oftentimes the seemingly cruel separations of destiny are in fact but tender mercies. Manifold of these early illusions are but annealing processes, healthy for heart growth as stretch of muscle to bodily vigor. Better the sharp pang of evanescent grief than the rude awakening to weary years.

Marion wedded to honor, station and estate: he to a meek, blue-eyed, tender maiden. She ruled where she was born to shine, shunning social evils by her exalted womanhood. He dreamed in the lot wherein he was best fitted to excel. She might have made his cottage happy, but none so well as she could have adorned her luxurious home. He, inspired alone by nature, would have been ill at ease out of reach of nature's ministrations. Both lived to a purpose; but year by year they grew further apart, save in that integrity and faith which in the end converges all worthy lives.

Do you laugh at this simple story, with its un-piquant details? Let me cajole your fancy then by the recital of incidents, natural enough in themselves, but romantic in their coincidences. Many years after Marion had ceased to summer in the country, I happened by chance to pass a Sabbath in the vicinity of the old farm-house. I worshiped once more in the quaint old church. During service I was irresistibly attracted towards a beautiful child, who strangely recalled to my mind confused remembrances of bygone days. As I watched her more closely, fancied resemblance grew to certain likeness. That child, brown, weird, bright-eyed and attractive, peeping through the rails of the square-backed pews, just as such another child had done there twenty years before, could be none other than the daughter of Marion West. And so she was. Her mother had gone abroad; and this child, slightly fragile, had been sent there, to the same home and haunts, wherein Marion had gained vigor and muscle in her childhood. I stopped and toyed with her, until I half felt myself again a child; she was so like her mother in look and gesture, with the same archuess, the same ingenuous frankness. We were friends at once; and, half out of regard for the mother, half out of interest in the child, I tarried another day, that I might see her again, and live over the bygone through her presence.

Naturally enough, on the morrow, I strayed down to the shore of the mill-pond. My heart was made tender by the manifold reminders around me, and I sorrowed to think how lightly I had left behind me the happy days of my youth. 'Once gone they may never come again—never oh! never,' I exclaimed audibly. 'Never, oh never,' echoed a sweet voice from the mill-pond.

I started; the voice was so like one I had heard there so many years before; the sight, too, that met my eye was so very like a far-off vision. A few rods below me, on the shore sat my new found little friend, in a crazy old boat, plaiting lilies. I tried to cheat myself into the belief that the years had not been and that the elfin child, in buff and lilies, was the Marion West of more than twenty bygone years.

I went towards her. 'Stay until I have finished my wreath,' she called with mock impatience. 'So like your mother,' I exclaimed, starting to draw the boat further upon the shore. Quick as thought she caught the oars, and with a rapid stroke or two, sent herself far out of my reach.

'Be careful, child,' I called, 'the boat is old and leaky.' She laughed, shook her wreath of lilies at me and, in half wilful sport, sent her craft still farther away from the shore. I was frightened. The child had evidently been there before, for she was laden with lilies; but now she was excited, and at best but an unskillful oarsman.

'Mind the lily-pads,' I shouted. I was too late. The frail craft shot plump upon the tangled mass; and the little maiden, trying, with unused hand to disengage herself, lost her balance, and fell over into the dark, deep water. Her lilies, bright and buoyant, scattered themselves around, their pliant stems lightly trailing on the smooth water. But the maiden, as pure as they, and of infinitely greater worth, went down through the lily-pads, with their broad, glossy leaves and matted roots.

There have been to most of us moments in which we have lived years of agony. The soul has a fearful capacity for crowding into present conception a host of fearful contingencies. The moment we know that a loved one is struck with mortal disease, he is no less dead to us than when he lies shrouded in his coffin; so the dear child, when she fell from the boat into the dark mill-pond, was lost to me. I did not see the muslin frock as it came up again through the leaves of the lily-pads, nor yet heed the stout youth who rushed past me, from the field beyond, and flung himself into the greedy waters. I was blind with terror. The child was saved. But oh how like a dead thing she looked, lying in the bottom of the boat, with her little marble face, and her muslin frock dripping with water and the slime of the lily-pads.

We carried her to the nearest farm-house, the house I told you of at the beginning of my sketch; the same vine-wreathed, flower-clad home of old, hallowed by the presence of the meek, blue-eyed maiden, now the true-hearted mother of the preserver of my little friend. 'Thank God she lives,' exclaimed his father, as she opened her wondering eyes. 'How like her mother she is.' I looked at him curiously. His face was unmoved save by interest in the child. Verily, thought I, that first romance hath ended. But this second, say you, when shall that end? I wot not, but the way seemeth clear. The mother's virtues and the father's taste have descended to their son, the maiden is both fair and good; wherefore shall they not some day redeem the promise their parents broke?