Holly: The Romance of a Southern Girl — Context and Discussion

he 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.

In her first attempts at comforting the child, and many times since, Aunt India had reminded Holly that now that her father had reached Heaven he and her mother were together once more, and that since they had loved each other very dearly on earth they were beyond doubt very happy in Paradise. Aunt India assured her that it was a beautiful thought. But it had never impressed Holly as Miss India thought it should. Possibly she was too self-absorbed in her sorrow to consider it judicially. But one night she had a dream from which she awoke murmuring happily in the darkness. She could not remember very clearly what she had dreamed, although she strove hard to do so. But she knew that it was a beautiful dream, a dream in which her father and her mother,――the wonderful mother of whom she had no recollection,――had appeared to her hand in hand and had spoken loving, comforting words. For the first time she realized Aunt India’s meaning; realized how very, very happy her father and mother must be together in Heaven, and how silly and selfish she had been to wish him back. All in the instant there, in the dim silence, the dull ache of loneliness which had oppressed her for months disappeared. She no longer seemed alone; somewhere,――near at hand,――was sympathy and love and heart-filling comradeship. Holly lay for awhile very quiet and happy in the great four-poster bed, and stared into the darkness with wide eyes that swam in grateful tears. Then she fell into a sound, calm sleep.

She did not tell Aunt India of her dream; not because there was any lack of sympathy between them, but because to have shared it would have robbed it of half its dearness. For a long, long time it was the most precious of her possessions, and she hugged it to her and smiled over it as a mother over her child. And so I think it was the dream that accomplished what the Old Doctor could not,――the dream that brought, as dreams so often do, Heaven very close to earth. Dreams are blessed things, be they day-dreams or dreams of the night; and even the ugly ones are beneficent, since at waking they make by contrast reality more endurable.

If Aunt India never learned the cause she was at least quick to note the result. Holly’s thin little cheeks borrowed tints from the Duchess roses in the garden, and Aunt India graciously gave the credit to Kentucky air, even as she drew her white silk shawl more closely about her slender shoulders and shivered in the unaccustomed chill of a Kentucky autumn.