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Updated: June 22, 2025
Nature seemed to be breathing from a deeper chest shaking her free locks in a wilder, keener air to a long-silent music from the quickened river below. Lucy almost ran down the hill, so great was the physical relief of the rain and the cloudy morning. She needed it. Her spirits, too, had been uneven, her cheek paler of late.
She gazed at the king with a mingled expression of happiness and pain. The king still heard nothing. Suddenly he was aroused by a low sigh; it seemed to him that a soft, sweet, long-silent voice whispered his name. He rose hastily and turned; Barbarina was kneeling at the door; it was that door before which, five years ago, she had kneeled bathed in tears and wild with despair.
The long-silent corridors began to resound with joyous laughter, as the merry party rambled through the old rooms, wishing to identify each place with historical recollections, founded on their mother's and Uncle Walter's stories. And was that really the tree that Uncle Walter made believe to be the rigging of a ship, and one day fell from one of its highest boughs?
The poor, worn-down, brutalized creatures, at first, could scarce comprehend this; but, when it was continued week after week, and month after month, it began to awaken long-silent chords in their benumbed hearts.
Why invoke those long-silent spectres, white as well as black, when all active boorishness is of the past? Civilisation has almost fulfilled its inexorable law; but four out of a considerable population remain, and they remember naught of the bad old times when the humanising processes, or rather the results of them, began to be felt.
Now the old Roman was gone, and John Burnham looked with sad eyes at the last stronghold of him and his kind the rambling old house stuccoed with aged brown and covered with ancient vines, knotted and gnarled like an old man's hand; the walls three feet thick and built as for a fort, as was doubtless the intent in pioneer days; the big yard of unmown blue-grass and filled with cedars and forest trees; the numerous servants' quarters, the spacious hen- house, the stables with gables and long sloping roofs and the arched gateway to them for the thoroughbreds, under which no hybrid mule or lowly work-horse was ever allowed to pass; the spring-house with its dripping green walls, the long-silent blacksmith-shop; the still windmill; and over all the atmosphere of careless, magnificent luxury and slow decay; the stucco peeled off in great patches, the stable roofs sagging, the windmill wheelless, the fences following the line of a drunken man's walk, the trees storm-torn, and the mournful cedars harping with every passing wind a requiem for the glory that was gone.
But her last song had been by the bedside of her dying child, and those who heard her say there was not a faltering note. And now her voice was released again, and her unchained soul, aflame with its long-silent love for the courts of Zion, found in that voice its highway up to God. No psalm-book, no note of music made by hand, no human thought repressed her or trammelled her exultant wing.
But without discussing this side issue, it is enough to say that Michel lightly taking up what proved to be the resolute work of half a lifetime then and there vowed himself to the task of restoring and reanimating that ruined and long-silent stage.
When her picture was finished, and its price received, Olive, with a joyful heart, enclosed the sum to their long-silent creditor. "His name does not look quite so fearful now," she said, smiling, when she was addressing the letter. "I can positively write it without trembling, and perhaps I may not have to write it many times.
"Bart is agreeable to that, if Harry and mistress don't want him," said the person just named, rousing up from the long-silent reverie in which he had been sitting before the fire apparently inattentive to the conversation of the others, which had been carried on in a low tone, at the opposite side of the room.
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