A Novel
By
Mary E. Wilkins
Author of “A Humble Romance”
“Jane Field” etc.
New York
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1896
Love is the crown, and the
crucifixion, of life,
and proves thereby its own divinity.
There was a new snow over the village. Indeed,
it had ceased to fall only at sunset, and it was now
eight o’clock. It was heaped apparently
with the lightness of foam on the windward sides of
the roads, over the fences and the stone walls, and
on the village roofs. Its weight was evident
only on the branches of the evergreen-trees, which
were bent low in their white shagginess, and lost their
upward spring.
There were evergreens—Norway pines, spruces,
and hemlocks—bordering the road along which
Burr Gordon was coming. Now and then he jostled
a low-hanging bough and shook off its load of snow
upon his shoulders. Then he walked nearer the
middle of the street, tramping steadily through the
new snow. This was an old road, but little used
of late years, and the forest seemed to be moving upon
it with the unnoted swiftness of a procession endless
from the beginning of the world. In places the
branches of the opposite pines stretched to each other
like white-draped arms across the road, and slender,
snow-laden saplings stood out in young crowds well
in advance of the old trees. At times the road
was no more than a cart-path through the forest; but
it was a short-cut to the Hautville place, and that
was why Burr Gordon went that way.
Everything was very still. The new-fallen snow
seemed to muffle silence itself, and do away with
that wide susceptibility to sound which affects one
as forcibly as the crashing of cannon.
There was no whisper of life from the village, which
lay a half-mile back; no roll of wheels, or shout,
or peal of bell. Burr Gordon kept on in utter
silence until he came near the Hautville house.
Then he began to hear music: the soaring sweetness
of a soprano voice, the rich undertone of a bass,
and the twang of stringed instruments.
When he came close to the house the low structure
itself, overlaid with snow, and with snow clinging
to its gray-shingled sides like shreds of wool, seemed
to vibrate and pulse and shake, and wax fairly sonorous
with music, like an organ.
Burr Gordon stood still in the road and listened.
The constituents of the concert resolved themselves
to his ear. There was a wonderful soprano, a
tenor, a bass, one sweet boy’s voice, a bass-viol,
and a violin. They were practising a fugue.
The soprano rang out like the invitation of an angel,
“Come, my beloved, haste away,
Cut short the hours of thy delay,”
above all the others—even the shrill boy-treble.
Then it followed, with noblest and sweetest order,
the bass in—
