CHAPTER XVIII.
AN ECHO OF THE PAST.
"Ah!" exclaimed Edith, who with her mother had been rummaging the drawersof the safe as the doctor and I talked, "here are some letters, if I amnot mistaken. It seems, then, you used safes for something besidesmoney."
It was, in fact, as I noted with quite indescribable emotion, a packet ofletters and notes from Edith Bartlett, written on various occasionsduring our relation as lovers, that Edith, her great-granddaughter, heldin her hand. I took them from her, and opening one, found it to be a notedated May 30, 1887, the very day on which I parted with her forever. Init she asked me to join her family in their Decoration-day visit to thegrave at Mount Auburn where her brother lay, who had fallen in the civilwar.
"I do not expect, Julian," she had written, "that you will adopt all myrelations as your own because you marry me--that would be too much--butmy hero brother I want you to take for yours, and that is why I wouldlike you to go with us to-day."
The gold and parchments, once so priceless, now carelessly scatteredabout the chamber, had lost their value, but these tokens of love had notparted with their potency through lapse of time. As by a magic power theycalled up in a moment a mist of memories which shut me up in a world ofmy own--a world in which the present had no part. I do not know for howlong I sat thus tranced and oblivious of the silent, sympathizing grouparound me. It was by a deep involuntary sigh from my own lips that I wasat last roused from my abstraction, and returned from the dream world ofthe past to a consciousness of my present environment and its conditions.
"These are letters," I said, "from the other Edith--Edith Bartlett, yourgreat-grandmother. Perhaps you would be interested in looking them over.I don't know who has a nearer or better claim to them after myself thanyou and your mother."
Edith took the letters and began to examine them with reverent curiosity.
"They will be very interesting," said her mother, "but I am afraid,Julian, we shall have to ask you to read them for us."
My countenance no doubt expressed the surprise I felt at this confessionof illiteracy on the part of such highly cultivated persons.
"Am I to understand," I finally inquired, "that handwriting, and thereading of it, like lock-making, is a lost art?"
"I am afraid it is about so," replied the doctor, "although theexplanation here is not, as in the other case, economic equality so muchas the progress of invention. Our children are still taught to write andto read writing, but they have so little practice in after-life that theyusually forget their acquirements pretty soon after leaving school; butreally Edith ought still to be able to make out a nineteenth-centuryletter.--My dear, I am a little ashamed of you."
"Oh, I can read this, papa," she exclaimed, looking up, with brows stillcorrugated, from a page she had been studying. "Don't you remember Istudied out those old letters of Julian's to Edith Bartlett, which motherhad?--though that was years ago, and I have grown rusty since. But I haveread nearly two lines of this already. It is really quite plain. I amgoing to work it all out without any help from anybody except mother."
"Dear me, dear me!" said I, "don't you write letters any more?"
"Well, no," replied the doctor, "practically speaking, handwriting hasgone out of use. For correspondence, when we do not telephone, we sendphonographs, and use the latter, indeed, for all purposes for which youemployed handwriting. It has been so now so long that it scarcely occursto us that people ever did anything else. But surely this is an evolutionthat need surprise you little: you had the phonograph, and itspossibilities were patent enough from the first. For our importantrecords we still largely use types, of course, but the printed matter istranscribed from phonographic copy, so that really, except inemergencies, there is little use for handwriting. Curious, isn't it, whenone comes to think of it, that the riper civilization has grown, the moreperishable its records have become? The Chaldeans and Egyptians usedbricks, and the Greeks and Romans made more or less use of stone andbronze, for writing. If the race were destroyed to-day and the earthshould be visited, say, from Mars, five hundred years later or even less,our books would have perished, and the Roman Empire be accounted thelatest and highest stage of human civilization."