The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 76. James Lane Allen “I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep”

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“I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep”

 

from Two Gentlemen of Kentucky

 

“The woods are hushed, their music is no more:

The leaf is dead, the yearning passed away:

New leaf, new life – the days of frost are o’er:

New life, new love, to suit the newer day.”

 

 

The Woods Are Hushed

 

It was near the middle of the afternoon of an autumnal day, on the wide, grassy plateau of Central Kentucky. […]

[The autumnal sun] lit on the back and the wings of a crow flying heavily in the path of its rays, and made his blackness as white as the breast of a swan. In the immediate foreground, it sparkled in minute gleams along the stalks of the coarse, dead weeds that fell away from the legs and the flanks of a white horse, and slanted across the face of the rider and through the ends of his gray hair, which straggled from beneath his soft black hat.

The horse, old and patient and gentle, stood with low-stretched neck and closed eyes half asleep in the faint glow of the waning heat; and the rider, the sole human presence in all the field, sat looking across the silent autumnal landscape, sunk in reverie. Both horse and rider seemed but harmonious elements in the panorama of still life, and completed the picture of a closing scene.

To the man it was a closing scene. […] In the afternoon and the autumn of his age he was about to rend the last ties that bound him to his former life, and, like one who had survived his own destiny, turn his face towards a future that was void of everything he held significant or dear.

The Civil War had only the year before reached its ever-memorable close. […]

At last he drew near the wooden stiles and saw the large house of which he was the solitary occupant. […] And now the only thing that had the springs of life within its bosom was the great, sweet-voiced clock, whose faithful face had kept unchanged amid all the swift pageantry of changes.

"Peter,” he said, very simply, “I am going to sell the place and move to town. I can’t live here any longer.”

With these words, he passed through the yard-gate, walked slowly up the broad pavement, and entered the house.

 

 

Music No More

 

On the disappearing form of the colonel was fixed an ancient pair of eyes that looked out at him from behind a still more ancient pair of silver-rimmed spectacles with an expression of indescribable solicitude and love.

These eyes were set in the head of an old gentleman – for such he was – named Peter Cotton, who was the only one of the colonel’s former slaves that had remained inseparable from his person and his altered fortunes. In early manhood Peter had been a wood-chopper; but he had one day had his leg broken by the limb of a falling tree, and afterwards, out of consideration for his limp, had been made supervisor of the woodpile, gardener, and a sort of nondescript servitor of his master’s luxurious needs.

Nay, in larger and deeper characters must his history be writ, he having been, in days gone by, one of those ministers of the gospel whom conscientious Kentucky masters often urged to the exercise of spiritual functions in behalf of their benighted people. In course of preparation for this august work, Peter had learned to read, and had come to possess a well-chosen library of three several volumes – Webster’s Spelling-book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Bible. But even these unusual acquisitions he deemed not enough; for being touched with a spark of poetic fire from heaven, and fired by the African’s fondness for all that is conspicuous in dress, he had conceived for himself the creation of a unique garment which should symbolize in perfection the claims and consolations of his apostolic office. This was nothing less than a sacred blue-jeans coat that he had had his old mistress make him, with very long and spacious tails, whereon, at his further direction, she embroidered sundry texts of Scripture which it pleased him to regard as the fit visible annunciations of his holy calling. And inasmuch as his mistress, who had had the coat woven on her own looms from the wool of her finest sheep, was, like other gentlewomen of her time, rarely skilled in the accomplishments of the needle, and was moreover in full sympathy with the piety of his intent, she wrought of these passages a border enriched with such intricate curves, marvellous flourishes, and harmonious letterings, that Solomon never reflected the glory in which Peter was arrayed whenever he put it on. For after much prayer that the Almighty wisdom would aid his reason in the difficult task of selecting the most appropriate texts, Peter had chosen seven – one for each day in the week – with such tact, and no doubt heavenly guidance, that when braided together they did truly constitute an eloquent epitome of Christian duty, hope, and pleading.

From first to last they were as follows: “Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel;” “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh;” “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden;” “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin;” “Now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity;” “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep;” “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” This concatenation of texts Peter wished to have duly solemnized, and therefore, when the work was finished, he further requested his mistress to close the entire chain with the word "Amen," introduced in some suitable place.

But the only spot now left vacant was one of a few square inches, located just where the coat-tails hung over the end of Peter’s spine; so that when any one stood full in Peter’s rear, he could but marvel at the sight of so solemn a word emblazoned in so unusual a locality.

Panoplied in this robe of righteousness, and with a worn leathern Bible in his hand, Peter used to go around of Sundays, and during the week by night, preaching from cabin to cabin the gospel of his heavenly Master.

The angriest lightnings of the sultriest skies often played amid the darkness upon those sacred coat-tails and around that girdle of everlasting texts, as though the evil spirits of the air would fain have burned them and scattered their ashes on the roaring winds. The slow-sifting snows of winter whitened them as though to chill their spiritual fires; but winter and summer, year after year, in weariness of body, often in sore distress of mind, for miles along this lonely road and for miles across that rugged way, Peter trudged on and on, withal perhaps as meek a spirit as ever grew foot-sore in the paths of its Master. Many a poor overburdened slave took fresh heart and strength from the sight of that celestial raiment; many a stubborn, rebellious spirit, whose flesh but lately quivered under the lash, was brought low by its humble teaching; many a worn-out old frame, racked with pain in its last illness, pressed a fevered lip to its hopeful hem; and many a dying eye closed in death peacefully fixed on its immortal pledges.

When Peter started abroad, if a storm threatened, he carried an old cotton umbrella of immense size; and as the storm burst, he gathered the tails of his coat carefully up under his armpits that they might be kept dry. Or if caught by a tempest without his umbrella, he would take his coat off and roll it up inside out, leaving his body exposed to the fury of the elements. No care, however, could keep it from growing old and worn and faded ; and when the slaves were set free and he was called upon by the interposition of Providence to lay it finally aside, it was covered by many a patch and stain as proofs of its devoted usage.

One after another the colonel’s old servants, gathering their children about them, had left him, to begin their new life. He bade them all a kind good-bye, and into the palm of each silently pressed some gift that he knew would soon be needed. But no inducement could make Peter or Phillis, his wife, budge from their cabin. “Go, Peter! Go, Phillis!" the colonel had said time and again. “No one is happier that you are free than I am; and you can call on me for what you need to set you up in business.” But Peter and Phillis asked to stay with him. Then suddenly, several months before the time at which this sketch opens, Phillis had died, leaving the colonel and Peter as the only relics of that populous life which had once filled the house and the cabins. The colonel had succeeded in hiring a woman to do Phillis’s work; but her presence was a strange note of discord in the old domestic harmony, and only saddened the recollections of its vanished peace.

Peter had a short, stout figure, dark-brown skin, smooth-shaven face, eyes round, deep-set, and wide apart, and a short stub nose which dipped suddenly into his head, making it easy for him to wear the silver-rimmed spectacles left him by his old mistress. A peculiar conformation of the muscles between the eyes and the nose gave him the quizzical expression of one who is about to sneeze, and this was heightened by a twinkle in the eyes which seemed caught from the shining of an inner sun upon his tranquil heart.

Sometimes, however, his face grew sad enough. It was sad on this afternoon while he watched the colonel walk slowly up the pavement, well overgrown with weeds, and enter the house, which the setting sun touched with the last radiance of the finished day.

 

 

New Life

 

About two years after the close of the war, therefore, the colonel and Peter were to be found in Lexington, ready to turn over a new leaf in the volumes of their lives, which already had an old-fashioned binding, a somewhat musty odor, and but few unwritten leaves remaining.

After a long, dry summer you may have seen two gnarled old apple-trees, that stood with inter-locked arms on the western slope of some quiet hill-side, make a melancholy show of blooming out again in the autumn of the year and dallying with the idle buds that mock their sapless branches. Much the same was the belated, fruitless efflorescence of the colonel and Peter.

The colonel had no business habits, no political ambition, no wish to grow richer. He was too old for society, and without near family ties. For some time he wandered through the streets like one lost — sick with yearning for the fields and woods, for his cattle, for familiar faces. He haunted Cheapside and the courthouse square, where the farmers always assembled when they came to town ; and if his eye lighted on one, he would button -hole him on the street -corner and lead him into a grocery and sit down for a quiet chat. Sometimes he would meet an aimless, melancholy wanderer like himself, and the two would go off and discuss over and over again their departed days; and several times he came unexpectedly upon some of his old servants who had fallen into bitter want, and who more than repaid him for the help he gave by contrasting the hardships of a life of freedom with the ease of their shackled years.

In the course of time, he could but observe that human life in the town was reshaping itself slowly and painfully, but with resolute energy. The colossal structure of slavery had fallen, scattering its ruins far and wide over the State ; but out of the very debris was being taken the material to lay the deeper foundations of the new social edifice. Men and women as old as he were beginning life over, and trying to fit themselves for it by changing the whole attitude and habit of their minds — by taking on a new heart and spirit. But when a great building falls, there is always some rubbish, and the colonel and others like him were part of this. Henceforth they possessed only an antiquarian sort of interest, like the stamped bricks of Nebuchadnezzar. […]

A sense of this weighed heavily on him at times; but it is not likely that he realized how pitifully he was undergoing a moral shrinkage in consequence of mere disuse. Actually, extinction had set in with him long prior to dissolution, and he was dead years before his heart ceased beating. The very basic virtues on which had rested his once spacious and stately character were now but the mouldy corner-stones of a crumbling ruin.

It was a subtle evidence of deterioration in manliness that he had taken to dress. When he had lived in the country, he had never dressed up unless he came to town. When he had moved to town, he thought he must remain dressed up all the time; and this fact first fixed his attention on a matter which afterwards began to be loved for its own sake. Usually he wore a Derby hat, a black diagonal coat, gray trousers, and a white necktie. But the article of attire in which he took chief pleasure was hose ; and the better to show the gay colors of these, he wore low-cut shoes of the finest calf -skin, turned up at the toes. Thus his feet kept pace with the present, however far his head may have lagged in the past ; and it may be that this stream of fresh fashions, flowing perennially over his lower extremities like water about the roots of a tree, kept him from drying up altogether.

Peter always polished his shoes with too much blacking, perhaps thinking that the more the blacking the greater the proof of love. He wore his clothes about a season and a half — having several suits — and then passed them on to Peter, who, foreseeing the joy of such in inheritance, bought no new ones. In the act of transferring them the colonel made no comment until he came to the hose, from which he seemed unable to part without a final tribute of esteem, as: “These are fine, Peter;” or, “Peter, these are nearly as good as new.” Thus Peter, too, was dragged through the whims of fashion. To have seen the colonel walking about his grounds and garden followed by Peter, just a year and a half behind in dress and a yard and a half behind in space, one might well have taken the rear figure for the colonel’s double, slightly the worse for wear, somewhat shrunken, and cast into a heavy shadow.

Time hung so heavily on his hands at night that with a happy inspiration he added a dress-suit to his wardrobe, and accepted the first invitation to an evening party.

He grew excited as the hour approached, and dressed in a great fidget for fear he should be too late.

“How do I look, Peter?” he inquired at length, surprised at his own appearance.

“Splendid, Marse Rom,” replied Peter, bringing in the shoes with more blacking on them than ever before.

“I think,” said the colonel, apologetically – “I think I’d look better if I’d put a little powder on. I don’t know what makes me so red in the face.”

But his heart began to sink before he reached his hostess’s, and he had a fearful sense of being the observed of all observers as he slipped through the hall and passed rapidly up to the gentlemen’s room. He stayed there after the others had gone down, bewildered and lonely, dreading to go down himself. By-and-by the musicians struck up a waltz, and with a little cracked laugh at his own performance he cut a few shines of an unremembered pattern; but his ankles snapped audibly, and he suddenly stopped with the thought of what Peter would say if he should catch him at these antics. Then he boldly went down-stairs.

He had touched the new human life around him at various points: as he now stretched out his arms towards its society, for the first time he completely realized how far removed it was from him. Here he saw a younger generation – the flowers of the new social order – sprung from the very soil of fraternal battle-fields, but blooming together as the emblems of oblivious peace. He saw fathers who had fought madly on opposite sides talking quietly in corners as they watched their children dancing, or heard them toasting their old generals and their campaigns over their champagne in the supper-room. He was glad of it ; but it made him feel, at the same time, that instead of treading the velvety floors, he ought o step up and take his place among the canvases of old-time portraits that looked down from the walls.

The dancing he had done had been not under the blinding glare of gas-light, but by the glimmer of tallow-dips and star-candles and the ruddy glow of cavernous firesides – not to the accompaniment of an orchestra of wind-instruments and strings, but to a chorus of girls’ sweet voices, as they trod simpler measures, or to the maddening sway of a gray-haired negro fiddler standing on a chair in the chimney-corner. Still, it is significant to note that his saddest thought, long after leaving, was that his shirt-bosom had not lain down smooth, but stuck out like a huge cracked eggshell; and that when, in imitation of the others, he had laid his white silk handkerchief across his bosom inside his vest, it had slipped out during the evening, and had been found by him, on confronting a mirror, flapping over his stomach like a little white masonic apron.

“Did you have a nice time, Marse Rom?” inquired Peter, as they drove home through the darkness.

“Splendid time, Peter; splendid time,” replied the colonel, nervously.

“Did you dance any, Marse Rom?”

“I didn’t dance. Oh, I could have danced if I’d wanted to; but I didn’t.”

Peter helped the colonel out of the carriage with pitying gentleness when they reached home. It was the first and only party.

Peter also had been finding out that his occupation was gone.

Soon after moving to town, he had tendered his pastoral services to one of the fashionable churches of the city – not because it was fashionable, but because it was made up of his brethren. In reply he was invited to preach a trial sermon, which he did with gracious unction.

It was a strange scene, as one calm Sunday morning he stood on the edge of the pulpit, dressed in a suit of the colonel’s old clothes, with one hand in his trousers-pocket, and his lame leg set a little forward at an angle familiar to those who know the statues of Henry Clay.

How self-possessed he seemed, yet with what a rush of memories did he pass his eyes slowly over that vast assemblage of his emancipated people! With what feelings must he have contrasted those silk hats, and walking-canes, and broadcloths; those gloves and satins, laces and feathers, jewelry and fans – that whole many -colored panorama of life – with the weary, sad, and sullen audiences that had often heard him of old under the forest trees or by the banks of some turbulent stream!

In a voice husky, but heard beyond the flirtation of the uttermost pew, he took his text: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” From this he tried to preach a new sermon, suited to the newer day. But several times the thoughts of the past were too much for him, and he broke down with emotion.

The next day a grave committee waited on him and reported that the sense of the congregation was to call a colored gentleman from Louisville. Private objections to Peter were that he had a broken leg, wore Colonel Fields’s second-hand clothes, which were too big for him, preached in the old-fashioned way, and lacked self-control and repose of manner.

Peter accepted his rebuff as sweetly as Socrates might have done. Humming the burden of an old hymn, he took his righteous coat from a nail in the wall and folded it away in a little brass-nailed deer-skin trunk, laying over it the spelling-book and the Pilgrim’s Progress, which he had ceased to read. Thenceforth his relations to his people were never intimate, and even from the other servants of the colonel’s household he stood apart. But the colonel took Peter’s rejection greatly to heart, and the next morning gave him the new silk socks he had worn at the party. In paying his servants the colonel would sometimes say, “Peter, I reckon I’d better begin to pay you a salary; that’s the style now.” But Peter would turn off, saying he didn’t “have no use fur no salary.” Thus both of them dropped more and more out of life, but as they did so drew more and more closely to each other. The colonel had bought a home on the edge of the town, with some ten acres of beautiful ground surrounding. A high osage-orange hedge shut it in, and forest trees, chiefly maples and elms, gave to the lawn and house abundant shade. Wild-grape vines, the Virginia-creeper, and the climbing-oak swung their long festoons from summit to summit, while honey-suckles, clematis, and the Mexican-vine clambered over arbors and trellises, or along the chipped stone of the low, old-fashioned house. Just outside the door of the colonel’s bedroom slept an ancient, broken sun-dial.

The place seemed always in half-shadow, with hedgerows of box, clumps of dark holly, darker firs half a century old, and aged crape-like cedars. It was in the seclusion of this retreat, which looked almost like a wild bit of country set down on the edge of the town, that the colonel and Peter spent more of their time as they fell farther in the rear of onward events. There were no such flower-gardens in the city, and pretty much the whole town went thither for its flowers, preferring them to those that were to be had for a price at the nurseries.

There was, perhaps, a suggestion of pathetic humor in the fact that it should have called on the colonel and Peter, themselves so nearly defunct, to furnish the flowers for so many funerals; but, it is certain, almost weekly the two old gentlemen received this chastening admonition of their all-but-spent mortality. The colonel cultivated the rarest fruits also, and had under glass varieties that were not friendly to the climate; so that by means of the fruits and flowers there was established a pleasant social bond with many who otherwise would never have sought them out.

But others came for better reasons. To a few deep-seeing eyes the colonel and Peter were ruined landmarks on a fading historic landscape, and their devoted friendship was the last steady burning-down of that pure flame of love which can never again shine out in the future of the two races. Hence a softened charm invested the drowsy quietude of that shadowy paradise in which the old master without a slave and the old slave without a master still kept up a brave pantomime of their obsolete relations. No one ever saw in their intercourse ought but the finest courtesy, the most delicate consideration. The very tones of their

voices in addressing each other were as good as sermons on gentleness, their antiquated playfulness as melodious as the babble of distant water. To be near them was to be exorcised of evil passions.

The sun of their day had indeed long since set; but like twin clouds lifted high and motionless into some far quarter of the gray twilight skies, they were still radiant with the glow of the invisible orb. […] He was always glad to get home again to Peter, his true yoke-fellow. For just as two old oxen – one white and one black – that have long toiled under the same yoke will, when turned out to graze at last in the widest pasture, come and put themselves horn to horn and flank to flank, so the colonel and Peter were never so happy as when ruminating side by side.

 

 

New Love

 

In their eventless life the slightest incident acquired the importance of a history. Thus, one day in June, Peter discovered a young couple love-making in the shrubbery, and with the deepest agitation reported the fact to the colonel.

Never before, probably, had the fluttering of the dear god’s wings brought more dismay than to these ancient involuntary guardsmen of his hiding-place. The colonel was at first for breaking up what he considered a piece of underhand proceedings, but Peter reasoned stoutly that if the pair were driven out they would simply go to some other retreat; and without getting the approval of his conscience to this view, the colonel contented himself with merely repeating that they ought to go straight and tell the girl’s parents. Those parents lived just across the street outside his grounds. The young lady he knew very well himself, having a few years before given her the privilege of making herself at home among his flowers. It certainly looked hard to drive her out now, just when she was making the best possible use of his kindness and her opportunity. Moreover, Peter walked down street and ascertained that the young fellow was an energetic farmer living a few miles from town, and son of one of the colonel’s former friends; on both of which accounts the latter’s heart went out to him. So when, a few days later, the colonel, followed by Peter, crept up breathlessly and peeped through the bushes at the pair strolling along the shady perfumed walks, and so plainly happy in that happiness which comes but once in a lifetime, they not only abandoned the idea of betraying the secret, but afterwards kept away from that part of the grounds, lest they should be an interruption.

“Peter,” stammered the colonel, who had been trying to get the words out for three days, “do you suppose he has already – asked her?”

“Some’s pow’ful quick on the trigger, and some’s mighty slow,” replied Peter, neutrally. “And some,” he added, exhaustively, “don’t use the trigger ‘t all!”

“I always thought there had to be asking done by somebody,” remarked the colonel, a little vaguely.

“I never axed Phillis!” exclaimed Peter, with a certain air of triumph.

"Did Phillis ask you, Peter?” inquired the colonel, blushing and confidential.

“No, no, Marse Rom! I couldn’t have stood dat from no woman!” replied Peter, laughing and shaking his head.

The colonel was sitting on the stone steps in front of the house, and Peter stood below, leaning against a Corinthian column, hat in hand. […]

As Peter […] scraped the gravel with the toe of his boot, his head dropped forward. Then he added, huskily:

“Phillis been dead heap o’ years now;” and turned [to walk] away.

This recalling of the scenes of a time long gone by may have awakened in the breast of the colonel some gentle memory ; for after Peter was gone he continued to sit a while in silent musing. Then, getting up, he walked in the falling twilight across the yard and through the gardens until he came to a secluded spot in the most distant corner. There he stooped, or rather knelt, down and passed his hands, as though with mute benediction, over a little bed of old-fashioned China pinks. When he had moved in from the country he had brought nothing away from his mother’s garden but these, and in all the years since no one had ever pulled them, as Peter well knew; for one day the colonel had said, with his face turned away:

“Let them have all the flowers they want; but leave the pinks.”

He continued kneeling over them now, touching them softly with his fingers, as though they were the fragrant, never-changing symbols of voiceless communion with his past. Still, it may have been only the early dew of the evening that glistened on them when he rose and slowly walked away, leaving the pale moonbeams to haunt the spot.

Certainly after this day he showed increasing concern in the young lovers who were holding clandestine meetings in his grounds.

“Peter,” he would say, “why, if they love each other, don’t they get married? Something may happen.”

“I’ve been suspecting some’n to happen fur some time, as they’ve been quarreling right smart lately,” replied Peter, laughing.

Whether or not he was justified in this prediction, before the end of another week the colonel read a notice of their elopement and marriage; and several days later he came up from down-town and told Peter that everything had been forgiven the young pair, who had gone to house -keeping in the country. It gave him pleasure to think he had helped to perpetuate the race of blue-grass farmers.

 

 

The Yearning Passed Away

 

It was in the twilight of a late autumn day in the same year that nature gave the colonel the first direct intimation to prepare for the last summons. They had been passing along the garden walks, where a few pale flowers were trying to flourish up to the very winter’s edge, and where the dry leaves had gathered upswept and rustled beneath their feet. All at once the colonel turned to Peter, who was a yard and a half behind, as usual, and said:

“Give me your arm, Peter, I feel tired;” and thus the two, for the first time in all their lifetime walking abreast, passed slowly on.

“Peter,” said the colonel, gravely, a minute or two later, “we are like two dried-up stalks of fodder. I wonder the Lord lets us live any longer.”

“I reckon He’s managing to use us some way, or we wouldn’t’ be here,” said Peter.

“Well, all I have to say is that, if He’s using me, He can’t be in much of a hurry for his work,” replied the colonel.

“He uses snails, and I know we ain’t as slow as dem,” argued Peter, composedly.

“I don’t know. I think a snail must have made more progress since the war than I have.”

The idea of his uselessness seemed to weigh on him, for a little later he remarked, with a sort of mortified smile:

“Do you think, Peter, that we would pass for what they call representative men of the New South?”

“We done had our day, Marse Rom,” replied Peter. “We got to pass fur what we was. Maybe the Lord’s got more use fur us yet than people has,” he added, after a pause.

From this time on the colonel’s strength gradually failed him; but it was not until the following spring that the end came.

A night or two before his death his mind wandered backward, after the familiar manner of the dying, and his delirious dreams showed the shifting, faded pictures that renewed themselves for the last time on his wasting memory. […]

Once during the night a sweet smile played over his features as he repeated a few words that were part of an old rustic song and dance. Arranged, not as they came broken and incoherent from his lips, but as he once had sung them, they were as follows:

 

“O Sister Phoebe! How merry were we

When we sat under the juniper-tree,

The juniper-tree, heigh-ho!

Put this hat on your head! Keep your head warm;

Take a sweet kiss! It will do you no harm,

Do you no harm, I know!"

 

After this he sank into a quieter sleep, but soon stirred with a look of intense pain.

“Helen! Helen!” he murmured. “Will you break your promise? Have you changed in your feelings towards me? I have brought you the pinks. Won’t you take the pinks, Helen?”

Then he sighed as he added, “It wasn’t her fault. If she had only known—”

Who was the Helen of that far-away time? Was this the colonel’s love-story? […]

In the faint gray of the morning, Peter, who had been watching by the bedside all night, stole out of the room, and going into the garden pulled a handful of pinks – a thing he had never done before – and, reentering the colonel’s bedroom, put them in a vase near his sleeping face. Soon afterwards the colonel opened his eyes and looked around him. At the foot of the bed stood Peter, and on one side sat the physician and a friend. The nightlamp burned low, and through the folds of the curtains came the white light of early day.

“Put out the lamp and open the curtains,” he said, feebly. “It’s day.” When they had drawn the curtains aside, his eyes fell on the pinks, sweet and fresh with the dew on them. He stretched out his hand and touched them caressingly, and his eyes sought Peter’s with a look of grateful understanding.

“I want to be alone with Peter for a while,” he said, turning his face towards the others.

When they were left alone, it was some minutes before anything was said. […]

“Come up here – closer;” and putting one arm around Peter’s neck he laid the other hand softly on his head, and looked long and tenderly into his eyes. “I’ve got to leave you, Peter. Don’t you feel sorry for me?”

“Oh, Marse Rom!” cried Peter, hiding his face, his whole form shaken by sobs.

“Peter,” added the colonel with ineffable gentleness, “if I have served my Master as faithfully as you have served yours, I should not feel ashamed to stand in His presence.”

“If my Marseter is as merciful to me as you have been—”

“I have fixed things so that you will be comfortable after I am gone. When your time comes, I should like you to be laid close to me. We can take the long sleep together. Are you willing?”

“That’s where I want to be laid.”

The colonel stretched out his hand to the vase, and taking the bunch of pinks, said very calmly:

“Leave these in my hand; I’ll carry them with me.” A moment more, and he added:

"If I shouldn’t wake up any more, good-bye, Peter!”

“Good-bye, Marse Rom!”

And they shook hands a long time. After this the colonel lay back on the pillows. His soft, silvery hair contrasted strongly with his childlike, unspoiled, open face.

To the day of his death, as is apt to be true of those who have lived pure lives and never married, he had a boyish strain in him – a softness of nature, showing itself even now in the gentle expression of his mouth. His brown eyes had in them the same boyish look when, just as he was falling asleep, he scarcely opened them to say:

“Pray, Peter.”

Peter, on his knees and looking across the colonel’s face towards the open door, through which the rays of the rising sun streamed in upon his hoary head, prayed, while the colonel fell asleep, adding a few words for himself now left alone.

Several hours later, memory led the colonel back again through the dim gate-way of the past, and out of that gate-way his spirit finally took flight into the future.

Peter lingered a year. The place went to the colonel’s sister, but he was allowed to remain in his quarters. With much thinking of the past, his mind fell into a lightness and a weakness. Sometimes he would be heard crooning the burden of old hymns, or sometimes seen sitting beside the old brass -nailed trunk, fumbling with the spelling-book and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Often, too, he walked out to the cemetery on the edge of the town, and each time could hardly find the colonel’s grave amid the multitude of the dead.

One gusty day in spring, the Scotch sexton, busy with the blades of blue -grass springing from the animated mould, saw his familiar figure standing motionless beside the colonel’s resting-place. He had taken off his hat – one of the colonel’s last bequests – and laid it on the colonel’s head-stone. On his body he wore a strange coat of faded blue, patched and weather-stained, and so moth-eaten that parts of the curious tails had dropped entirely away. In one hand he held an open Bible, and on a much-soiled page he was pointing with his finger to the following words:

“I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep.”

It would seem that, impelled by love and faith, and guided by his wandering reason, he had come forth to preach his last sermon on the immortality of the soul over the dust of his dead master.

The sexton led him home, and soon afterwards, a friend, who had loved them both, laid him beside the colonel.

It was perhaps fitting that his winding-sheet should be the vestment in which, years agone, he had preached to his fellow slaves in bondage; for if it so be that the dead of this planet shall come forth from their graves clad in the trappings of mortality, then Peter should arise on the Resurrection Day wearing his old jeans coat.

—James Lane Allen,[i]

1888