Argosy, Vol. 1 (December 9, 1882) — page 130: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AN UNSETTLED ACCOUNT. 123 She was fifty, but she looked thirty still. Nothing seemed to make any difference to her placid, lovely face—not even that her son Daunt was being less and less seen at people’s houses, and was drinking more and more heavily. The last two years of her life were spent in the bitter anguish of seeing the eyes which had adored her grow cold and careless; in faint passionate efforts to win them back, and in hearing people say that it served her right, tc fall in love with a man ten years her junior. Death was a great deal easier than this, and she realized it, even at the last. ? Her cousin, who had been more than a sister to her in the early days of her spoiled girlhood, who had stood her friend through all her troubles, was the person to fill the dead hands with flowers and smooth the locks away from the quiet face. Daunt Ramsey did not come to see his mother, and they dared not send for him, lest it should be to drag him from some low barroom into her room. He disappeared, as was his wont, and was not seen until the morning of the funeral, when no one asked for him, or spoke to him about his grief. He sat still, the handsome, haggard boy, with a certain brooding fierce- ness in his look, and let his cousin do everything. So it happened that she was the one to take Chris Courtney into the dark- ened room, and open the shutter to let him look his last upon the woman he had loved. In his heart Chris was conscious of a terrible pain. She loved him so— he had been so much to blame. He was glad—oh, too glad for utterance— that he had not said to her the words which had been on his lips for the past six months! | It was the first time that his habit of procrastination had ever given him cause for rejoicing, and he could not help feeling, dimly, that this very habit was partly the cause why Mrs. Ramsey lay so still and did not move her hands over the lilies and violets. ‘“ She looks so natural, as if she were asleep,” said her friend at his side, finding a poor comfort in the reflection. Chris did not answer. He could not have agreed with her. To him, the face in the cofin—shorn of its yellow hair, its delicate bloom, and bare of that marvelous welcoming smile which had hidden so much from his eyes—was anything but natural. She looked so old, her face had so many lines on it, her mouth was so weary, the thin hair so gray on her forehead. He realized thinking how the woman’s life toward him had been a long effort of deception for love’s sake; an elaborate part, which she must so often have wearied of playing! Not till he saw her stripped of all such necessity, 2 middle aged woman, and very weary, did he understand what it must have cost her—the unfailing readiness and interest, the unstrained laughter, the sparkle of her conversa- tion. - Was that in the coffin the real woman, and not the golden haired, brown eyed, Dresden china beauty that he had known? It was a revelation that brought a lump to his throat, and a great tenderness into his heart, and for the moment his fatling love waxed ardent and strong. GOH GoOOO ‘SS COLNT