A Modern Chronicle — Complete. Winston Churchill
your little New Testament at the bottom. And your lunch is arranged in three packages. And don't forget to ask Cousin Eleanor about the walking shoes, and to give her my note.”
Cries reverberated under the great glass dome, and trains pulled out with deafening roars. Honora had a strange feeling, as of pressure from within, that caused her to take deep breaths of the smoky air. She but half heard what was being said to her: she wished that the train would go, and at the same time she had a sudden, surprising, and fierce longing to stay. She had been able to eat scarcely a mouthful of that festal dinner which Bridget had spent the afternoon in preparing, comprised wholly of forbidden dishes of her childhood, for which Bridget and Aunt Mary were justly famed. Such is the irony of life. Visions of one of Aunt Mary's rare lunch-parties and of a small girl peeping covetously through a crack in the dining-room door, and of the gold china set, rose before her. But she could not eat.
“Bread and jam and tea at Miss Turner's,” Uncle Tom had said, and she had tried to smile at him.
And now they were standing on the platform, and the train might start at any moment.
“I trust you won't get like the New Yorkers, Honora,” said Aunt Mary. “Do you remember how stiff they were, Tom?” She was still in the habit of referring to that memorable trip when they had brought Honora home. “And they say now that they hold their heads higher than ever.”
“That,” said Uncle Tom, gravely, “is a local disease, and comes from staring at the tall buildings.”
“Uncle Tom!”
Peter presented the parcel under his arm. It was a box of candy, and very heavy, on which much thought had been spent.
“They are some of the things you like,” he said, when he had returned from putting it in the berth.
“How good of you, Peter! I shall never be able to eat all that.”
“I hope there is a doctor on the train,” said Uncle Tom.
“Yassah,” answered the black porter, who had been listening with evident relish, “right good doctah—Doctah Lov'ring.”
Even Aunt Mary laughed.
“Peter,” asked Honora, “can't you get Judge Brice to send you on to New York this winter on law business? Then you could come up to Sutcliffe to see me.”
“I'm afraid of Miss Turner,” declared Peter.
“Oh, she wouldn't mind you,” exclaimed Honora. “I could say you were an uncle. It would be almost true. And perhaps she would let you take me down to New York for a matinee.”
“And how about my ready-made clothes?” he said, looking down at her. He had never forgotten that.
Honora laughed.
“You don't seem a bit sorry that I'm going,” she replied, a little breathlessly. “You know I'd be glad to see you, if you were in rags.”
“All aboard!” cried the porter, grinning sympathetically.
Honora threw her arms around Aunt Mary and clung to her. How small and frail she was! Somehow Honora had never realized it in all her life before.
“Good-by, darling, and remember to put on your thick clothes on the cool days, and write when you get to New York.”
Then it was Uncle Tom's turn. He gave her his usual vigorous hug and kiss.
“It won't be long until Christmas,” he whispered, and was gone, helping Aunt Mary off the train, which had begun to move.
Peter remained a moment.
“Good-by, Honora. I'll write to you often and let you know how they are. And perhaps—you'll send me a letter once in a while.”
“Oh, Peter, I will,” she cried. “I can't bear to leave you—I didn't think it would be so hard—”
He held out his hand, but she ignored it. Before he realized what had happened to him she had drawn his face to hers, kissed it, and was pushing him off the train. Then she watched from the platform the three receding figures in the yellow smoky light until the car slipped out from under the roof into the blackness of the night. Some faint, premonitory divination of what they represented of immutable love in a changing, heedless, selfish world came to her; rocks to which one might cling, successful or failing, happy or unhappy. For unconsciously she thought of them, all three, as one, a human trinity in which her faith had never been betrayed. She felt a warm moisture on her cheeks, and realized that she was crying with the first real sorrow of her life.
She was leaving them—for what? Honora did not know. There had been nothing imperative in Cousin Eleanor's letter. She need not have gone if she had not wished. Something within herself, she felt, was impelling her. And it is curious to relate that, in her mind, going to school had little or nothing to do with her journey. She had the feeling of faring forth into the world, and she had known all along that it was destined she should. What was the cause of this longing to break the fetters and fly away? fetters of love, they seemed to her now—and were. And the world which she had seen afar, filled with sunlit palaces, seemed very dark and dreary to her to-night.
“The lady's asking for you, Miss,” said the porter.
She made a heroic attempt to talk to Mrs. Stanley. But at the sight of Peter's candy, when she opened it, she was blinded once more. Dear Peter! That box was eloquent with the care with which he had studied her slightest desires and caprices. Marrons glaces, and Langtrys, and certain chocolates which had received the stamp of her approval—and she could not so much as eat one! The porter made the berths. And there had been a time when she had asked nothing more of fate than to travel in a sleeping-car! Far into the night she lay wide awake, dry-eyed, watching the lamp-lit streets of the little towns they passed, or staring at the cornfields and pastures in the darkness; thinking of the home she had left, perhaps forever, and wondering whether they were sleeping there; picturing them to-morrow at breakfast without her, and Uncle Tom leaving for the bank, Aunt Mary going through the silent rooms alone, and dear old Catherine haunting the little chamber where she had slept for seventeen years—almost her lifetime. A hundred vivid scenes of her childhood came back, and familiar objects oddly intruded themselves; the red and green lambrequin on the parlour mantel—a present many years ago from Cousin Eleanor; the what-not, with its funny curly legs, and the bare spot near the lock on the door of the cake closet in the dining room!
Youth, however, has its recuperative powers. The next day the excitement of the journey held her, the sight of new cities and a new countryside. But when she tried to eat the lunch Aunt Mary had so carefully put up, new memories assailed her, and she went with Mrs. Stanley into the dining car. The September dusk was made lurid by belching steel-furnaces that reddened the heavens; and later, when she went to bed, sharp air and towering contours told her of the mountains. Mountains which her great-grandfather had crossed on horse back, with that very family silver in his saddle-bags which shone on Aunt Mary's table. And then—she awoke with the light shining in her face, and barely had time to dress before the conductor was calling out “Jersey City.”
Once more the morning, and with it new and wonderful sensations that dispelled her sorrows; the ferry, the olive-green river rolling in the morning sun, alive with dodging, hurrying craft, each bent upon its destination with an energy, relentlessness, and selfishness of purpose that fascinated Honora. Each, with its shrill, protesting whistle, seemed to say: “My business is the most important. Make way for me.” And yet, through them all, towering, stately, imperturbable, a great ocean steamer glided slowly towards the bay, by very might and majesty holding her way serene and undisturbed, on a nobler errand. Honora thrilled as she gazed, as though at last her dream were coming true, and she felt within her the pulse of the world's artery. That irksome sense of spectatorship seemed to fly, and she was part and parcel now of the great, moving things, with sure pinions with which to soar. Standing rapt upon the forward deck of the ferry, she saw herself, not an atom, but one whose going and coming was a thing of consequence. It seemed but a simple step to the deck of