CHAPTER XXXI.

SHADOWS ACROSS THE SUNSHINE.

Pages  298-301

[Page 298]              

     The later years in the Claverack parsonage held both tragedy and romance.  Annamaria, the last of the Dominie's children, was little older than the grandchildren who had come to make the parsonage their home.  The charm of her fair young womanhood appealed greatly to her nephews and nieces, and they seem to have looked upon her with wide-eyed admiration.  Her engagement in her seventeenth year to John Bay, a rising young lawyer of the village, wove around her a romantic interest in the eyes of the younger members of the family.

     When she started one fair spring day for Hudson to buy her wedding dress, with the consciousness that her wealth for the purpose lay in a veritable gold piece safely stowed away until she had reached her destination, it is probable that the fancies of the young, which in the spring time "lightly turn to thoughts of love," [page 299] were hers in a large measure, and that they wove threads of gold through the dreams of flowered silks and silvery satins, which formed the goal toward which she traveled.  Already she could see the salesmen in the shops of Hudson, gathering breadths of silk in their hands, as they threw out the folds of soft sheeny material, descanting on the relative beauty and merit, of trailing green vines or rose-bud figures, while Annamaria told herself that there never had been such a beauty before, as she would select for her wedding gown.

     The birds sang love-songs among the blossoms, or built new nests in the tree tops, wind flowers along the roadside bent their delicate heads to the gentle breeze, and the slender green branches of the willows mirrored themselves in the clear waters of Claverack creek.  Everything in nature spoke of renewal in the spring of 1816, but no part of it all exceeded the joy that sang its own song in the young girl's heart as she drove to Hudson to buy her wedding dress.

     Where or how it happened no one knows to-day, or who in the long after time, found a tiny gold mine in some clump of cow-slips, or just under the edge of some sheltering rock, or among the pebbles in the purling brook beside the road, but Annamaria lost her gold piece that fair spring day, and the wedding dress waiting for her, was never cut from the piece.

     Her grief came down in the annals of the boy who helped build the church steeple, and the deep pity of his childish heart, led him to his grandfather to plead that his Aunt Annamaria be given another gold piece for the wedding dress.  That gold pieces of considerable value were not plentiful in a country parsonage, where the fatherless and motherless were also being cared for, was not discernible to the child, only the sad look of the old man as he gently said, "Go way, child.  Go away, child," remained in his memory.

     Whether the mother's Philadelphia wedding dress of long ago, with its soft stain stripes, and hair lines of green on the corn-colored background, was substituted for the gown that was to have been chosen by the young bride herself, or whether the disappointment brought on a decline, history is silent, but before the next springtime had brought birds and flowers and apple blossoms, Annamaria had died of "a consumption," aged seventeen years and seven months.

     In the days when the joys of earth were slipping away, she copied in her own hand and signed with her own initials, in the family Bible, that record book of vital events of the past, "The Bride's Farewell," a tender and touching good-bye to the loved members of her family.  In the rhythmical measures, we are led to believe it was originally intended as a farewell to her girlhood's home form a bride about to leave it for the home of her husband, but it was at this time used as a last farewell.  In such lines as--

     the poetess, all unconsciously, had inserted lines of double meaning, fitting them to this unforeseen use.