Their Wedding Journey | Page 8

busy affair of life. It was not a
particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that
lay not only in the distance, but also in the future--to which no line of
road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full
of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a
ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that
all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?
In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last an old woman, so very
infirm that she had to be upheld on either hand by her husband and the
hackman who had brought them, while a young girl went before with
shawls and pillows which she arranged upon the seat. There the invalid
lay down, and turned towards the crowd a white, suffering face, which
was yet so heavenly meek and peaceful that it comforted whoever
looked at it.
In spirit our happy friends bowed themselves before it and owned that
there was something better than happiness in it.
"What is it like, Isabel?"
"O, I don't know, darling," she said; but she thought, "Perhaps it is like
some blessed sorrow that takes us out of this prison of a world, and sets
us free of our every-day hates and desires, our aims, our fears.
ourselves. Maybe a long and mortal sickness might come to wear such
a face in one of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret the
poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had fallen away."
She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whose face beamed a
tender smile, as Isabel spoke to her. A chord thrilled in two lives

hitherto unknown to each other; but what was said Basil would not ask
when the invalid had taken Isabel's hand between her own, as for adieu,
and she came back to his side with swimming eyes. Perhaps his wife
could have given no good reason for her emotion, if he had asked it.
But it made her very sweet and dear to him; and I suppose that when a
tolerably unselfish man is once secure of a woman's love, he is
ordinarily more affected by her compassion and tenderness for other
objects than by her feelings towards himself. He likes well enough to
think, "She loves me," but still better, "How kind and good she is!"
They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of getting places on the cars,
and they never saw her again. The man at the wicket-gate leading to the
train had thrown it up, and the people were pressing furiously through
as if their lives hung upon the chance of instant passage. Basil had
secured his ticket for the sleeping-car, and so he and Isabel stood aside
and watched the tumult. When the rash was over they passed through,
and as they walked up and down the platform beside the train, "I was
thinking," said Isabel, "after I spoke to that poor old lady, of what Clara
Williams says: that she wonders the happiest women in the world can
look each other in the face without bursting into tears, their happiness
is so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged about with misery.
She declares that there's nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a
young mother, or a little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her
heart. She wonders they can live through it."
"Clara is very much of a reformer, and would make an end of all of us
men, I suppose,--except her father, who supports her in the leisure that
enables her to do her deep thinking. She little knows what we poor
fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours,
and sob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the
same strain?"
"O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a
blessed life. Perhaps it was that made me shed those few small tears.
She seemed a very religious person."
"Yes," said Basil, "it is almost a pity that religion is going out. But then
you are to have the franchise."
"All aboard!"
This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy he might have been
about to utter; and presently the train carried them out into the

gas-sprinkled darkness, with an ever-growing speed that soon left the
city lamps far behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone
prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the
night-express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it,
traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which
hang so many