Holly: The Romance of A Southern Girl
9781465676276
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Holly’s eighteenth birthday was but a fortnight distant when the quiet stream of her life, which since her father’s death six years before had flowed placidly, with but few events to ripple its tranquil surface, was suddenly disturbed.... To the child of twelve years death, because of its unfamiliarity and mystery, is peculiarly terrible. At that age one has become too wise to find comfort in the vague and beautiful explanations of tearfully-smiling relatives—explanations in which Heaven is pictured as a material region just out of sight beyond the zenith; too selfishly engrossed with one’s own loneliness and terror to be pacified by the contemplation of the radiant peace and beatitude attained by the departed one in that ethereal and invisible suburb. And at twelve one is as yet too lacking in wisdom to realize the beneficence of death. Thus it was that when Captain Lamar Wayne died at Waynewood, in his fiftieth year, Holly, left quite alone in a suddenly empty world save for her father’s sister, Miss India Wayne, grieved passionately and rebelliously, giving way so abjectly to her sorrow that Aunt India, fearing gravely for her health, summoned the family physician. “There is nothing physically wrong with her,” pronounced the Old Doctor, “nothing that I can remedy with my poisons. You must get her mind away from her sorrow, my dear Miss India. I would suggest that you take her away for a time; give her new scenes; interest her in new affairs. Meanwhile ... there is no harm....” The Old Doctor wrote a prescription with his trembling hand ... “a simple tonic ... nothing more.” So Aunt India and Holly went away. At first the thought of deserting the new grave in the little burying-ground within sight of the house moved Holly to a renewed madness of grief. But by the time Uncle Randall had put their trunk and bags into the old carriage interest in the journey had begun to assuage Holly’s sorrow. It was her first journey into the world. Save for visits to neighboring plantations and one memorable trip to Tallahassee while her father had served in the State Legislature, she had never been away from Corunna. And now she was actually going into another State! And not merely to Georgia, which would have been a comparatively small event since the Georgia line ran east and west only a bare half-dozen miles up the Valdosta road, but away up to Kentucky, of which, since the Waynes had come from there in the first part of the century, Holly had heard much all her life. As the carriage moved down the circling road Holly watched with trembling lips the little brick-walled enclosure on the knoll. Then came a sudden gush of tears and convulsive sobs, and when these had passed they were under the live-oaks at the depot, and the train of two cars and a rickety, asthmatic engine, which ran over the six-mile branch to the main line, was posing importantly in front of the weather-beaten station. Holly’s pulses stirred with excitement, and when, a quarter of an hour later,—for Aunt India believed in being on time,—she kissed Uncle Ran good-bye, her eyes were quite dry. That visit had lasted nearly three months, and for awhile Holly had been surfeited with new sights and new experiences against which no grief, no matter how poignant, could have been wholly proof. When, on her return to Waynewood, she paid her first visit to her father’s grave, the former ecstasy of grief was absent. In its place was a tender, dim-eyed melancholy, something exaltedly sacred and almost sweet, a sentiment to be treasured and nourished in reverent devotion. And yet I think it was not so much the journey that accomplished this end as it was a realization which came to her during the first month of the visit.
