We had first met, in childhood, at the country residence of a friend, where we were both spending the summer months. She accompanied her mother—her only surviving parent, then slowly declining in the last stage of consumption. Mary and myself, thrown continually together, without other companions, speedily became warm friends, though her pensive, irresolute disposition, had little in common with my natural impetuous animation. She had been the attendant on suffering from her earliest recollection, for her father had died after a lingering illness, during which he had desired the constant enlivenment of his only child’s society, and her mother had for years been a resigned but hopeless invalid. All who have closely observed children, are aware of the influence such things half-unconsciously exert over minds susceptible to every impression, and it was not strange that one so used to look on sorrow, should have learned at last to doubt the very existence of happiness.
Mary was a strikingly beautiful child, with dark, soul-revealing eyes, bright with the mystical fire of the burning thoughts within. I well remember their rapturous expression when she was excited by some tale of heroism—for she was full of a strange, quiet enthusiasm, that wasted itself in fruitless sympathy with the moral greatness of others, but shrank with painful distrust from reliance on its own impulsive guidance. She was quick of feeling, and easily touched by the most trivial deed of kindness, and her being was too sensitive for her ever to be thoughtlessly happy. Her look and manner were peculiarly winning in their tranquil, subdued gentleness; and when this was, occasionally, though rarely, laid aside for awhile, amid the irrepressible mirth of childish amusement, her laugh had the ringing, silvery melody which seems the musical essence of enjoyment. For two successive summers we met and were inseparably intimate, and then four years elapsed before we were again together. During this interval Mary’s mother died, and she went far from my home, to reside with a distant relation. We had, from our first parting, corresponded regularly, and her letters were, like herself, poetical and visionary. I know not wherefore, for she wrote no murmur, but they left the impression that she was not satisfied with her new home, and my heart yearned to comfort her, to remove from her lot its loneliness, from her soul its dimness. But she shrunk, with what then appeared to me morbid delicacy, from all approach to confidence on this subject, and gradually grew in all things less communicative regarding herself, as if doubting the response of sympathy. There was evidently a constraint placed on her spontaneous emotions—a quiet concealment of her deeper interests, which to me spoke mournfully, and recalled that silent, dejected consciousness of mental and spiritual solitude, which is the saddest portion and the most touching consequence of an orphan’s unshared and melancholy destiny. It was not until long afterward that I learned the domestic trials and annoyances to which she had been subjected, and the dreary, joyless routine in which she dragged on the years that should have been her brightest ones.