Three Old Sisters and the Old Beau by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Books at their time by calming anxiety, the three-old sisters and old bow by Mary E. Wilkins.

The three-year-old sisters, Rachel, Nancy and Camilla, lived in the house in which they had all been born. They were very old in years. The youngest was nearly 70, but they were, after all, the most youthful maidens in the village. Not a child dragging her doll carriage past their windows, not a young girl scrolling by in the twilight of her lover's arms, was as young as they.

But the youth in them had actually triumphed over age and gained, as it were, a species of immortality in this world. But not Camilla and Nancy, the two younger, really play a grace-hoop sometimes of an evening. The fantastic old shadows, with sliver, rheumatic gestures, aping for free motions of youth, and the flying hoops have been plainly seen on the window curtains after the candles were lighted. The hoops themselves, wound with faded ribbons, the relics of a graceful sport of their graceful girlhood, hung conspicuously over the mahogany table in their front hall.

In this same front hall, large and square, hung with old greenish landscape paper, with a spiral stair winding slowly upward from its mist. The three old sisters were want to sit in front of the cool of summer afternoons. At five o'clock, the front door, topped with bull's eyes of dull green glass, was thrown open, and the three appeared, sitting in state with their embroidery work. They still embroidered, bending their spectacle eyes painfully over scallops and sprigs and eyelet homes.

They had never outgrown the occupations of their youth, as they had scarcely outgrown its amusements. It did not seem impossible that Camilla, the youngest, sometimes nursed her ain't drawn doll in her withered pusson. However, the strongest evidence of the youth which still survived in their hearts and answered to their conceptions of themselves and one another was in their costumes. The three old sisters, Rachel, Nancy and Camilla, sat in their front hall, arraigned in bygone silks and muslins, made after the fashions of their gold-hud days, with no alterations.

Scanty ruffle skirts, clinging to their wasted limbs, the three war, and low bodices and elbow sleeves, displaying pitilessly their withered necks and arms, from which all the sweet curves of youth had departed. Their grey and scanty locks were arranged in ringlets and garnished with shell combs and sometimes a wreath of faded artificial flowers. It was inconceivable how one surveying the others as they sat there in their gay array could not have seen in their faces if not in their looking glass the loss of her youth, but if she did, she made no sign. Not one of them seemed to have suspicion that these old costumes did not become them as barely as ever, and nobody knew if their illusions ever failed them at the sight of one another's parchment skins and the hollows between their poor old bones.

Always on a pleasant summer afternoon as they sat there in their front hall, the old bow came stepping across the way from his old home, half hidden behind a little grove of pine trees. He was as old as the elder sister, but not at all feeble. He carried his handsome white head proudly above his old fashioned highstock and had military set back to his shoulders. The old bow, while looking in his morning attire, not so very different from a modern man, was hung always to his old costumes of state.

When he crossed the road to the sisters of an afternoon, he wore always his silk bell hat and blue swallow tailcoat. It had bright past buttons and swung with a fine courtly flourish at the past, an ancient ivory-headed cane. The one knew which of the sisters possessed the warmest affections of his baseball old heart. He had stepped across the road to visit them ever since people could remember.

He had never had any other sweetheart and they had never had any other bow. One and then the other of the sisters had been supposed to devote her virgin heart to him and been pining over his long courtship. Nancy, the middle sister, was the one popularly considered to have especially favoured him. There were vague whispers of more particular attentions paid her in years gone by.

Moreover, she had been the beauty of the family. The poor and willowian figure with long brown curls drooping over rose leaf cheeks, but with gentle blue eyes. That had been Nancy in her youth. It seemed probable that she had crept the closest to the heart of the old bow, but no one rarely knew.

He was a close man and quite a student. He lived in his old library, walled in with musty books and wrote with his quill pen pages of fine crab letters which no one ever read nor knew what their subject was. His one outside diversion was his afternoon call upon the three sisters and then seated in summertime in a carved armchair in their front hall and in the winter in their parlor with a dumbass napkin over his thin knees. He par took a tea in a blue china cup and a pound cake in a blue china plate.

The sisters made servant always passed around a tea tray in the afternoon, an old and gentle custom which prevailed nowhere else in the village. Nancy, the middle sister, she died first of old age, the town record said although that seemed impossible and the other sisters insisted that it was of a cold upon their lungs. Consumption is in the mother's family and Nancy was always delicate. I never expected she would live to be old, Rachel told the minister when he called.

After Nancy's death, the old bow drank tea with the other sisters for another sump and then Rachel passed and there was only Camilla left. He did not make his call every afternoon after that. He was understood that she had doubts about the strict proprietary of such solitary visits and had prohibited them. Then it was that the old boy manifested symptoms of uneasiness.

At the hour when he had been accustomed to call upon his friends, he strolled aimlessly about the roads, switching the way side weeds with his cane. People thought that he was aging fast. About three months after Rachel's passing, one mid-Samasunday, the old bow and Camilla walked down the road together to meeting and it was said that they had gone to the ministers that morning and been married. The bridegroom wore his old dress-crossed gym of bellhat and blue swallow tailcoat and held up his handsome white head like a prince in his high stock and the bride meant gently at his side in an ample bridal array of a long past fashion and cut.

A white bride bonnet, white veiled and crowned with white plumes adorned the old bride.

And she wore a lustrous white satin gown with a low bodice and white cantoned crepe shorn and white satin shoes. That bridal costume had beyond out been prepared years and years gone by for one of the sisters, in anticipation of youthful love and wedded bliss, but for which no one ever knew.

Some indeed fancied that the white satin breaths were over long for Camilla and would rather better have suited Nancy, but would be taller but who could say was certainty since Camilla stooped with age and must have lost somewhat of a youthful stature. The old bride passed up the aisle with her old bridegroom and a smile of youth that triumphant over age and memory shorn on an old face through her white veil and no one ever knew whether she wore her own or her sister's wedding gown or had wedded her own or her sister's old bow.