Chapter IX: Good-Bye, Max; Good-Bye

It was a cold, stormy afternoon in March. The thermometer marked six below zero, and the snow which had fallen the day before was tossed by the wind in great white clouds, which sifted through every crevice of the house at the Cedars, and beat against the window from which Maude Graham was looking anxiously out into the storm for the carriage which had been sent to meet the train in which Max Gordon was expected. He had not kept his promise to be with Grace at Christmas. An important lawsuit had detained him, and as it would be necessary for him to go to London immediately after its close, he could not tell just when he would be at the Cedars again.

All through the autumn Grace had been failing, while a cold, taken in November, had left her with a cough, which clung to her persistently. Still she kept up, looking forward to the holidays, when Max would be with her. But when she found he was not coming she lost all courage, and Maude was alarmed to see how rapidly she failed. Nearly all the day she lay upon the couch in her bedroom, while Maude read or sang to her or talked with her of the book which had actually been commenced, and in which Grace was almost as much interested as Maude herself. Grace was a careful and discriminating critic, and if Maude were ever a success she would owe much of it to the kind friend whose sympathy and advice were so invaluable. A portion of every day she wrote, and every evening read what she had written, to Grace, who smiled as she recognized Max Gordon in the hero and knew that Maude was weaving the tale mostly from her own experience. Even the Bush district and its people furnished material for the plot, and more than one boy and girl who had called Maude schoolma’am figured in its pages, while Grace was everywhere, permeating the whole with her sweetness and purity.

“I shall dedicate it to you,” Maude said to her one day, and Grace replied:

“That will be kind; but I shall not be here to see it, for before your book is published I shall be lying under the flowers in Mt. Auburn. I want you to take me there, if Max is not here to do it.”

“Oh, Miss Raynor,” Maude cried, dropping her MS. and sinking upon her knees beside the couch where Grace was lying, “you must not talk that way. You are not going to die. I can’t lose you, the dearest friend I ever had. What should I do without you, and what would Max Gordon do?”

At the mention of Max’s name a faint smile played around Grace’s white lips, and lifting her thin hand she laid it caressingly upon the girl’s brown hair as she said:

“Max will be sorry for awhile, but after a time there will be a change, and I shall be only a memory. Tell him I was willing, and that although it was hard at first it was easy at the last.”

What did she mean? Maude asked herself, while her thoughts went back to that summer afternoon in the log school-house on the hill, when Max Gordon’s eyes and voice had in them a tone and look born of more than mere friendship. Did Grace know? Had she guessed the truth? Maude wondered, as, conscience-stricken, she laid her burning cheek against the pale one upon the pillow. There was silence a moment, and when Grace spoke again she said:

“It is nearly time for Max to be starting for Europe, or I should send for him to come, I wish so much to see him once more before I die.”

“Do you think a hundred trips to Europe would keep him from you if he knew you wanted him?” Maude asked, and Grace replied:

“Perhaps not. I don’t know. I only wish he were here.”

This was the last of February, and after that Grace failed so fast, that with the hope that it might reach him before he sailed, Maude wrote to Max, telling him to come at once, if he would see Grace before she died. She knew about how long it would take her letter to reach him and how long for him to come, allowing for no delays, and on the morning of the first day when she could by any chance expect him, she sent the carriage to the Canandaigua station, and then all through the hours of the long, dreary day, she sat by Grace’s bedside, watching with a sinking heart the pallor on her lips and brow, and the look she could not mistake deepening on her face.

“What if she should die before he gets here, or what if he should not come at all?” she thought, as the hours went by.

She was more afraid of the latter, and when she saw the carriage coming up the avenue she strained her eyes through the blinding snow to see if he were in it. When he came before he had stood up and waved his hat to them, but there was no token now to tell if he were there, and she waited breathlessly until the carriage stopped before the side entrance, knowing then for sure that he had come.

“Thank God!” she cried, as she went out to meet him, bursting into tears as she said to him, “I am so glad, and so will Miss Raynor be. She does not know that I wrote you. I didn’t tell her, for fear you wouldn’t come.”

She had given him her hand and he was holding it fast as she led him into the hall. She did not ask him when or where he received her letter. She only helped him off with his coat, and made him sit down by the fire while she told him how rapidly Grace had failed and how little hope there was that she would ever recover.

“You will help her, if anything can. I am going to prepare her now,” she said, and, going out, she left him there alone.

He had been very sorry himself that he could not keep his promise at Christmas, and had tried to find a few days in which to visit the Cedars between the close of the suit and his departure for England. But he could not, and his passage was taken and his luggage on the ship, which was to sail early in the morning, when, about six o’clock in the evening, Maude’s letter was brought to him, changing his plans at once. Grace was dying,—the woman he had loved so long, and although thousands of dollars depended upon his keeping his appointment in London, he must lose it all, and go to her. Sending for his luggage, and writing a few letters of explanation, the next morning found him on his way to the Cedars, which he reached on the day when Maude expected him.

She had left Grace asleep when she went to meet Max, but on re-entering her room found her awake and leaning on her elbow in the attitude of intense listening.

“Oh, Maude,” she said, “was it a dream, or did I hear Max speaking to you in the hall? Tell me is he here?”

“Yes, he is here. I sent for him and he came,” Maude replied, while Grace fell back upon her pillow, whispering faintly:

“Bring him at once.”

“Come,” Maude said to Max, who followed her to the sick-room, where she left him alone with Grace.

He stayed by her all that night and the day following, in order to give Maude the rest she needed, but when the second night came they kept the watch together, he on one side of the bed, and she upon the other, with their eyes fixed upon the white, pinched face where the shadow of death was settling. For several hours Grace slept quietly. Then, just as the gray daylight was beginning to show itself in the corners of the room, she awoke and asked:

“Where is Max?”

“Here, darling,” was his response, as he bent over her and kissed her lips.

“I think it has grown cold and dark, for I can’t see you,” she said, groping for his hand, which she held tightly between her own as she went on: “I have been dreaming, Max,—such a pleasant dream, for I was young again,—young as Maude, and wore my bridal dress, just as I did that day when you said I was so pretty. Do you remember it? That was years ago,—oh! so many,—and I am getting old; we both are growing old. You said so in your letter. But Maude is young, and in my dream she wore the bridal dress at the last, and I saw my own grave, with you beside it and Maude, and both so sorry because I was dead. But it is better so, and I am glad to die and be at rest. If I could be what I once was, oh! how I should cling to life! For I love you so much! Oh, Max, do you know, can you guess how I have loved you all these years, and what it has cost me to give you up?”

Max’s only answer was the hot tears he dropped upon her face as she went on: “You will not forget me, that I know; but some time,—yes, some time,—and when it comes, remember I was willing. I told Maude so. Where is she?”

“Here!” and Maude knelt, sobbing, by the dying woman, who went on: “She has been everything to me, Max, and I love her next to you. God bless you both! And if, in the Heaven I am going to, I can watch over you, I will do it, and be often, often with you, when you think I’m far away. Who was it said that? I read it long ago. But things are going from me, and Heaven is very near, and the Saviour is with me,—closer, nearer than you are, Max; and the other world is just in sight, where I soon shall be, free from pain, with my poor, crippled feet all strong and well, like Maude’s. Dear Maude! tell her how I loved her; tell her——”

Here her voice grew indistinct, and for a few moments she seemed to be sleeping; then, suddenly, opening her eyes wide, she exclaimed, as an expression of joy broke over her face: “It is here,—the glory which shineth as the noonday. In another moment I shall be walking the golden streets. Good-bye, Max; good-bye.”

Grace was dead, and Maude made her ready for the coffin, her tears falling like rain upon the shrivelled feet and on the waxen hands which she folded over the pulseless bosom, placing in them the flowers her mistress had loved best in life. She was to be buried in Mt. Auburn, and Maude went with the remains to Boston, as Grace had requested her to do, caring nothing because Mrs. Marshall-More hinted broadly at the impropriety of the act, wondering how she could have done it.

“She did it at Grace’s request, and to please me,” Max said; and that silenced the lady, who was afraid of her brother, and a little afraid of Maude, who did not seem quite the girl she had last seen in Merrivale.

“What will you do now? Go back to your teaching?” she asked, after the funeral was over.

“I shall go home to mother,” Maude replied, and that afternoon she took the train for Merrivale, accompanied by Max, who was going on to New York, and thence to keep his appointment in London.

Few were the words spoken between them during the journey, and those mostly of the dead woman lying under the snow at Mt. Auburn; but when Merrivale was reached, Max took the girl’s hands and pressed them hard as he called her a second time by her name.

“God bless you, Maude, for all you were to Grace. When I can I will write to you. Good-bye.”

Only for a moment the train stopped at the station, and then it moved swiftly on, leaving Maude standing upon the platform with her mother and John, while Max resumed his seat, and pulling his hat over his eyes, never spoke again until New York was reached. A week later and a ship of the Cunard line was plowing the ocean to the eastward, and Max Gordon was among the passengers, silent and abstracted, with a bitter sense of loneliness and pain in his heart as he thought of the living and the dead he was leaving behind,—Grace, who was to have been his bride, dead in all her sweetness and beauty, and Maude, who was nothing to him but a delicious memory, alive in all her freshness and youthful bloom. He could hardly tell of which he thought the more, Grace or Maude. Both seemed ever present with him, and it was many a day before he could rid himself of the fancy that two faces were close against his own, one cold and dead, as he had seen it last, with the snowy hair about the brow and a smile of perfect peace upon the lips which had never said aught but words of love to him,—the other glowing with life and girlish beauty, as it had looked at him in the gathering darkness when he stood upon the car step and waved it his good-bye.