“It will all turn out”

“It will all turn out” is a recurring reassurance whose meaning darkens as it passes from an uncanny encounter into the memory of Mattie’s death. Augustus Landor hears it from a woman who then vanishes; later, Mattie says the same words before throwing herself into the river. The phrase offers hope in sound, but its returns leave Landor confronting loss rather than resolution.

The First Utterance

In an encounter with a woman whose features have just come back to life, Landor hears her whisper, “Never fear,” followed by the assurance that everything will turn out. He is so struck by her words that he fails to ask who the “he” is whom she invokes. The unanswered question makes the reassurance feel less like an explanation than a message whose source remains beyond his grasp.

After the woman disappears, Landor searches among the shrubs and trees and follows the gravel walk past Battery Knox, the Lantern Battery, and the Chain Battery. He even looks down the escarpment to see whether she has made another attempt. She is nowhere to be found; her voice is all that remains, calling to him as he turns. In that absence, he recognizes the phrase as the very thing his daughter had said.

Mattie’s Last Reassurance

The phrase returns in Landor’s account of a picnic with Mattie. Hoping to draw her out of her reveries, he takes her to a bluff overlooking the river. They eat ham, oysters, hasty pudding, peaches, and raspberries; for a time, the specters seem to recede. Mattie carefully puts the plates and silverware back into the basket, pulls her father to his feet, and embraces him. Too surprised, he does not embrace her back.

Mattie looks north, east, and south, then turns to Landor with a free and smiling face. She says, “Everything will be all right. It will all turn out.” Immediately afterward, she raises her arms and arches backward like a diver, keeping her eyes on him as she flings herself over the bluff. The river sweeps away her body. The phrase’s second appearance thus places reassurance at the threshold of a death Landor cannot prevent.

Recurrence and Irony

The two utterances connect the vanished woman’s words with Mattie’s final moments without resolving who first spoke them or how the woman knew them. Landor’s recognition establishes the echo, while his unanswered question preserves its mystery. The phrase travels across an encounter and a remembered family tragedy, gathering force through repetition rather than explanation.

Its promise that events will turn out well stands against the outcome Landor recounts: Mattie dies, and he later tells the neighbors that she ran off with another man. The reassurance therefore does not certify a happy resolution. It remains with Landor as a voice and a repeated sentence, bound to the loved person who is gone and to the truth his public lie conceals.