Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches. Woolson Constance Fenimore
replied Doro, clasping his hands fervently. "She asked me if I liked the song, and I said, 'Lady, it is of the angels.' Then she smiled, and asked my name, and I told her,'Doro' – "
"You should have said, 'Theodore,'" interrupted Miss Elisabetha; "do I not always call you so?"
"And she said it was a lovely name; and could I sing? I took her guitar, and sang to her – "
"And she praised your method, I doubt not?"
"She said, 'Oh, what a lovely voice!' and she touched my hair with her little hands, and I – I thought I should die, aunt, but I only fell at her feet."
"And where – where is this person now?" said the perplexed maiden, catching at something definite.
"She has gone – gone! I stood and watched the little flag on the mast until I could see it no more. She has gone! Pity me, aunt, dear aunt. What shall I do? How shall I live?"
The boy broke into sobs, and would say no more. Miss Elisabetha was strangely stirred; here was a case beyond her rules; what should she do? Having no precedent to guide her, she fell back into her old beliefs gained from studies of the Daarg family, as developed in boys. Doro was excused from lessons, and the hours were made pleasant to him. She spent many a morning reading aloud to him; and old Viny stood amazed at the variety and extravagance of the dishes ordered for him.
"What! chickens ebery day, Miss 'Lisabeet? 'Pears like Mass' Doro hab eberyting now!"
"Theodore is ill, Lavinia," replied the mistress; and she really thought so.
Music, however, there was none; the old charmed afternoons and evenings were silent.
"I can not bear it," the boy had said, with trembling lips.
But one evening he did not return: the dinner waited for him in vain; the orange after-glow faded away over the pine-barrens; and in the pale green of the evening sky arose the star of the twilight; still he came not.
Miss Elisabetha could eat nothing.
"Keep up the fire, Lavinia," she said, rising from the table at last.
"Keep up de fire, Miss 'Lisabeet! Till when?"
"Till Theodore comes!" replied the mistress shortly.
"De worl' mus' be coming to de end," soliloquized the old black woman, carrying out the dishes; "sticks of wood no account!"
Late in the evening a light footstep sounded over the white path, and the strained, watching eyes under the stone arches saw at last the face of the missing one.
"O aunt, I have seen her – I have seen her! I thought her gone for ever. O aunt – dear, dear aunt, she has sung for me again!" said the boy, flinging himself down on the stones, and laying his flushed face on her knee. "This time it was over by the old lighthouse, aunt. I was sailing up and down in the very worst breakers I could find, half hoping they would swamp the boat, for I thought perhaps I could forget her down there under the water – when I saw figures moving over on the island-beach. Something in the outlines of one made me tremble; and I sailed over like the wind, the little boat tilted on its side within a hair's-breadth of the water, cutting it like a knife as it flew. It was she, aunt, and she smiled! 'What, my young Southern nightingale,' she said, 'is it you?' And she gave me her hand – her soft little hand."
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