May I ask your patience while I introduce myself – the writer of the following chapters? I am sitting before the looking-glass at the end of my room as I write, I not from any vanity, you will readily perceive that as you read on – but so that I may try and reflect with my ink the picture that I wish to present to you of a rather sad – I only say rather, for, upon the whole, I am very cheerful, – thin, pale, careworn-looking woman, with hair that has long been scant and grey – whiter, perhaps, than that of many people at eight-and-forty.
Eight-and-forty! What a great age that seems to the young; and yet how few the years, save in one period of my life, have appeared to me! At times I can hardly realise that I am decidedly elderly, so busy has been my life, so swiftly has it glided away, thinking so much as I have of other people and their lives as well as of my own.
I never knew how it was, but, somehow, those with whom I came in contact always seemed to look upon me, because I had had trouble, as one in whom they could confide. I never sought their confidence, but when some weary wayfarer in life’s journey has held out a hand to me, asking help or advice, it has grown into my pleasure to try and aid or counsel as far as in me lay. And it is strange how relieved some have been, what a quiet solace it has seemed, to pour out into my sympathetic ear the salient passages of their troubled lives. “You have suffered, so you can feel,” has always seemed to be the thought, expressed or unexpressed, of their hearts, and hence, without being inquisitive, I have been made the storehouse, so to speak, of that which I without any breach of confidence propose to tell.
I should first, though, tell you of myself, for why should I lay bare the sorrows of others without prefacing them with my own?
A strangely quiet, uneventful life mine has been; its incidents simple, its troubles many, and its pleasures – I was about to say few, but that would be false, for its pleasures have been great. They have not been the boisterous joys that fall to the lot of some; but, feeling, as I do most thoroughly now, that the greatest delights, the purest and most unalloyed are those which are unselfish, I can think and believe that my pleasures have been many.
I will, then, tell you my own little history first, slight as it is, and you may, in reading, find that it is the key-note to the simple chords that I afterwards strike in passing, and perhaps it will explain why others have come to me to tell me what they knew.
It is a tale of early sorrow, but you shall hear, and you will bear with me when I tell you that the wound has never healed, and if I put my hand above it, the place still throbs, even as it will beat and ache till kindly nature says to me, “Sleep, poor weary one, and rest.” And then peacefully, trustingly, and with a simple hope of forgiveness, may I sleep that long sleep which they say so flippantly has no end; but which has a waking, as every lesson which we learn in life persists in teaching.
You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you that I was once what people call pretty – that this pale, lined face was once plump and rosy, these sad eyes bright, and this grey scant hair golden-brown, long, and flowing. But why should I think you would smile? Do I not know that you must have seen the gay young plant putting out its tender leaves in spring, growing green and luxuriant of foliage in summer, ripe and ruddy in autumn, and grey, bent, and withered in age? And should I be pitied because I have but followed in the way of nature? Surely not. It is not for that I ask your sympathy, but for the blight that fell upon the young plant, and seared and scathed it so that it seemed for months as if it would die; but it lived, as I have lived to tell you this.
Do you know that wondrous feeling which comes in the early year, and that strange sense of keen delight, that elasticity of spirit, when, full of youth and hope, the very tears of joyous sensibility start to the eyes as you wander amidst the trees and flowers in spring? I remember how I felt, oh! so well, even though it is now thirty years ago, and I was but eighteen.
Jack and I were engaged. It was all such a simple, homely affair. We had known one another for years – the children of neighbouring farmers. Jack – I still call him by the simple old pet name of those days – Jack had been away at a good school, and being bright, and shrewd, and clever, he had won his way on, taking to engineering instead of his father’s farm life; and now it had come to this, that he had been staying at home for a month, previous to going out to a good appointment in Melbourne.
That month in spring, how it passed! We had met again and again, and in his honest, manly way he had asked me to be his wife.
“You know, Grace, that I have always loved you,” he said; “and now I have hopes and prospects, it cannot be wrong to ask you for your promise.”
We were walking by the river-side as he said this, and how well I can picture it all – the soft gliding water mirroring the trees on the opposite bank, the young green buds just breaking from their cases, and, above all, the soft tender blue of the spring sky – the blue, he had told me, that was like my eyes.
