A LONG NIGHT.
"Oh, isn't it awful!" exclaimed the Little Colonel, in a shocked tone,
and with such a look of horror in her face that Eugenia leaned forward
to listen. Lloyd was speaking to Joyce on the porch just outside of the
library window, where Eugenia sat reading.
"What is awful?" asked Eugenia, her curiosity aroused by the expression
of the girls' faces.
"Sh!" whispered Lloyd, warningly, as she tiptoed to the window and sat
down on the broad, low sill. "I am afraid Betty will hear us talking
about her. The doctor has just been here, and he says--oh, Eugenia, it
is too terrible to tell--he says he is afraid that Betty is going
_blind_!"
The tears stood in the Little Colonel's eyes. "You know that people do
lose their sight sometimes when they have the measles, and her eyes have
been the worst part of it from the start. The night before the measles
broke out on her she read till nearly morning by candle-light, because
she was restless and couldn't go to sleep. Of course that made them
worse."
"_Blind!_" echoed Eugenia, closing her own eyes a moment on the bright
summer world without, and feeling a chill run over her, as she realised
what black dungeon walls those five letters could build around a life.
"Was the doctor sure, Lloyd? Can't something be done?"
"Of co'se he wasn't _suah_. I heard him tell mothah that he wouldn't
give up fighting for her sight as long as there was a shadow of a chance
to save it, but he advised her to send for an oculist to consult with
him, and she's just now telephoned to the city for one."
"Does Betty know it?"
"She knows that there is dangah of her losing her sight, and is tryin'
so hahd to be quiet and patient."
Eugenia laid down her book, feeling faint and sick. For a long time
after Lloyd and Joyce had left her she sat idly playing with the curtain
cord, thinking over what they had told her. Presently she tiptoed
up-stairs to her room. She stood a moment outside Betty's door,
listening, for Betty was talking to Eliot, and she wanted to hear what a
person with such a prospect staring her in the face would have to say.
"There are lots of beautiful things in the world to think about, Eliot,"
Betty was saying bravely, in her sweet, cheery little voice.
"'Specially when you've lived in the country and have all the big
outdoors to remember. Now while I'm so hot I love to count up all the
cool things I can remember. I like to pretend that I'm down in the
orchard, way early in the morning, with a fresh breeze blowing through
the apple-blossoms and the dewdrops shining on every blade of grass. Oh,
it smells so fresh and sweet and delicious! Now I'm in the corn-fields
and the tall green corn is rustling in the wind, and the morning-glories
climb up every stalk and shake the dew out of their purple bells. Now I
can hear the bucket splash down in the well, and come up cold and
dripping. And now I'm dabbling my fingers in the spring down in the old
stone spring house, and standing on the cold, wet rocks in my bare feet.
And there's the winter mornings, Eliot, when the trees are covered with
sleet till every twig twinkles like a diamond. And the frost on the
window-panes--oh, if I could only lay my face against the cold glass
now, how good it would feel!"
Eugenia could bear no more. She turned away from the door, and, meeting
Mrs. Sherman on the threshold of her room, threw herself into her arms,
sobbing: "Oh, Cousin Elizabeth, I can't stand it. If Betty goes blind
it will be all my fault! She never would have had the measles if it
hadn't been for me. But I would go, and I made the others go, too. And
when Betty refused I was so mean and hateful to her! Oh, Cousin
Elizabeth, what can I do?"
Mrs. Sherman drew Eugenia into her room and comforted her the best she
could, but her own heart was heavy. She knew that Doctor Fuller had
little hope of saving Betty's sight.
That knowledge threw a shadow over the entire household. The great
oculist came, and gravely shook his head over the case. "There is one
chance that she may see again," he said, "one in a hundred. That is all.
Now if she could have a trained nurse who could watch her eyes
constantly and follow directions to the letter--"
"She shall have anything!" interrupted Mrs. Sherman. "Everything that
would help in the smallest degree."
"And it would be best not to let the child know," he continued. "It
would probably excite her, and, above all things, that must be guarded
against."
But Betty, lying with bandaged eyes, caught a whisper, felt the
suppressed sympathy in the atmosphere, as one feels the tingle of
electricity in the air before a storm, and began to guess the truth.
When the trained nurse came and gave such careful attention to the
treatment of her eyes, she was sure of it. But she said nothing of her
suspicions, and they thought she had none.
One day Lloyd came into the room with a newspaper in her hand. Eugenia
and Joyce followed softly. Lloyd tried to speak calmly, but there was a
suppressed excitement in her voice as she exclaimed, "Betty, I've got
the loveliest thing to show you. Mothah said I might be the one to tell,
'cause I'm so glad and proud, I don't know what to do. You know that
little poem that you gave to mothah, called 'Night?' Well, she sent it
away to an editah, and he has published it in this papah with yo' name
at the bottom,--Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis! Now aren't you stuck up? We are
all so proud of you we don't know what to do."
Betty stretched out one trembling hand for the paper, and involuntarily
the other went up to her eyes to push away the bandages. "Let me see
it," she cried, eagerly, but the thrill of gladness in her voice died in
a pitiful little note of despair as she whispered, brokenly, "Oh, I
forgot! I can't see!"
But the next instant her hand was groping for the paper again. "Where
is it?" she asked. "Let me feel it, anyway. Oh, to think that something
I have written has really been published! Where is it, Lloyd? Put my
hand on the spot, please. You don't know how glad I am, how glad and
thankful. I have always wanted to write--always hoped that some day,
after I had tried years and years, I might be able to do something good
enough to be published, but to have it come now while I am a little
girl,"--her voice sunk almost to a whisper,--"oh, Lloyd you don't know
how wonderful it seems to me!"
She was trembling so that the paper shook in her hands. "Where is it?"
she asked again, feeling blindly over the page.
"There," said Lloyd, placing the little groping finger on a spot at the
head of a column. "There is the word _NIGHT_, and heah," guiding her
fingers down the page, "heah is yo' name. If I were you I'd be so stuck
up I wouldn't speak to common people that can't have verses published in
the papah."
"But--oh--if you couldn't--_see_--it!" Betty's words came in choking
little gasps. She paused a moment and turned her face away, swallowing
hard. Then she went on more calmly.
"Wasn't it queer that I should have written about Night, just before
mine begun? That the only thing I shall ever have published should be
called that? My long, long night! But there are no stars in this night.
Lloyd, it's awful to think you'll always be in the dark!"
Lloyd turned with a startled glance to the other girls.
"I--I don't know what you mean," she stammered.
"Yes, you do," insisted Betty. "What you've been trying to keep from me,
all of you, that I am always going to be--_blind_!"
She ended the sentence with a little shiver, and, choking with sobs,
turned her face to the wall. At a sign from the nurse, Lloyd slipped
away and ran to her mother's room. She found Eugenia already there, with
her head buried in Mrs. Sherman's lap.
"Oh, it almost broke my heart!" she was saying. "To see those poor
little fingers groping over the paper feeling for the poem that she
couldn't see. And she said so pitifully, 'My long, long night! There are
no stars in this night!' And to think it's all my fault! Oh, it is just
killing me! I could hardly sleep last night for thinking of it, and when
I did I had a dreadful nightmare.
"I dreamed that I was in a great market-place going from stall to stall,
trying to buy something, but I had forgotten what it was I wanted. A
horrid grinning little dwarf, with great fangs in his jaw, like a boar's
tusks, followed me everywhere, carrying my purse. I'd stand awhile in
front of every stall, trying to remember what it was I'd come for, and
when I'd thought awhile I'd cry out, 'Now I know what I want, give me my
own way. It is my own way that I want.' Everybody in the market would
stop to listen, and the man behind the counter would say, 'Not unless
you can pay the price.'
"Then that horrible dwarf would step up, grinning, his old tusks showing
all hideous and yellow, and say, 'Here is the price! Give her her own
way. Here is the price. Let the whole world see the price that she has
paid for her own way,--Betty's eyes is the price. Betty's beautiful
brown eyes!' And then he would hold them out in his ugly knotted hand,
and they would look up at me so reproachfully, that I would scream and
tear my hair. I don't know how many times I had to go through that scene
in my sleep, but when I got up this morning I was as tired as if I had
been running all night, and every place I turn I can see that hideous
old hand thrust out at me with Betty's brown eyes in it. I'll never
insist on having my own way again."
There was no time for Mrs. Sherman to comfort Eugenia then, for Betty
needed her, and in answer to the nurse's summons she hurried away to
soothe the child, sorely distressed by this turn that the house party
had taken.
"Go out on the ponies for awhile," she said, as she left the three girls
sitting disconsolately on the floor. "Go out and get some of this summer
sunshine into your faces and voices so that you can bring it back to
Elizabeth. She will need all that you can bring her, poor child; so,
instead of brooding over your own feelings, think of something that you
can do to cheer her up."
In a little while there was a clatter of ponies' hoofs down the avenue,
and Mrs. Sherman, sitting by the window in Betty's room, waved her hand
to Eugenia, Joyce, and the Little Colonel as they rode away. They were
gone all morning, and when they came back the June sunshine had done its
work. Their faces were bright and smiling, and they giggled continuously
as they bumped into each other, running up the stairs.
Betty's door was open, and to their surprise they heard a little laugh
as they stopped to peep in. She was lying back among the pillows with
bandaged eyes, but there was a smile on her lips.
"Come in, girls," she cried. "Godmother and I are making alphabet
rhymes. We started at A, and have been taking turns. She has just made a
good one: 'P is a pie-man, portly and proud, pugnaciously
prattling'--What's the rest of it, godmother? You tell them. I have
forgotten."
But Mrs. Sherman's rhyme was broken short in an astonished exclamation,
as her glance fell on the Little Colonel.
"Why, Lloyd Sherman!" she cried. "What have you been doing? Your dress
is torn to tatters, and you are so dirty and dusty that I can scarcely
believe that you are my child!"
The Little Colonel screwed herself around to look at the back of her
dress-skirt, which was torn into a dozen ragged strips, and fluttered
behind her in long fringes. There was a three-cornered tear on the
shoulder and a hole in the elbow of her sleeve.
"Reckon I must have toah it gettin' through a bobwiah fence," she
answered, cheerfully. "But, look at Eugenia! She's as much of a sight as
I am, with her hair hangin' all in her eyes, like an ole witch, and that
scratch across her face, and her stockings full of burrs."
"Joyce is nearly as bad!" cried Eugenia; "both hair ribbons gone, the
heel lost off one shoe, grass stains on her dress, and her face red as
a turkey gobbler's, from running so fast."
"Where _have_ you all been, and what have you been doing?" demanded Mrs.
Sherman so emphatically that, with much giggling and exclaiming, they
all began to talk at once.
"We met the boys ovah on the pike," began the Little Colonel, "Malcolm
and Keith and Robby, and we were all ridin' along as polite as anything,
when the boys began to tell about the good times they used to have
playin' Indian."
"But first," interrupted Joyce, "Keith told about the time they tied his
little cousin Ginger to a tree in the woods, and left her there until it
was so dark she nearly had a spasm."
"Yes," said Eugenia, "and I said what a pity it was that we were too old
to play Indian; that I had had the blues all day, and felt that nothing
would do me so much good as to get out some place where nobody could
hear, and yell and carry on at the top of my voice. And Malcolm said
that, just for once, supposing we'd pretend like we were ten years old,
instead of thirteen, and pitch in and have a good ripping, tearing old
game of Indian. It was away up the pike, where there was nothing in
sight but a few farmhouses, scattered along the road, and it didn't
seem as if it would make any difference, so we said we would."
"First thing I knew," broke in Joyce, "Robby Moore gave an outlandish
war-whoop right in my ear, that nearly deafened me, and grabbed me by my
hair, yelling he was going to tomahawk me. And I saw Eugenia go sailing
up the road as fast as her horse could carry her, with Keith after her,
swinging on to those two long black braids of hers. You see Lloyd had
the advantage of us with her short hair. They couldn't scalp her so
easily; but Malcolm chased after her like all possessed."
"Maybe you think it wasn't excitin'," said the Little Colonel. "I felt
like a real suah 'nuff Indian was aftah me, and I screeched bloody
murdah till you could have heard me almost to the old mill."
"I should say she did!" giggled Joyce. "The way Tarbaby got over the
ground was something to remember, and the way Lloyd yelled would have
made a wild coyote take to its heels. Just as we got in sight of the
toll-gate, we met one of those big three-story huckster-wagons, full of
chickens and ducks and things. You know how funny they always look, with
so many bills and legs and tails sticking through the slats. Well, the
horses shied as we went dashing up to them, and first thing we knew
they had backed that wagon into a ditch at the side of the road, and one
of the coops went off the top ke-bang! into the ditch."
"You never saw anything madder than that old huckster," interrupted
Eugenia. "He jumped down off the wagon, and came up to us with a big
whip in his hands, scolding, as cross as two sticks. But he couldn't
stay angry with those boys. They were so polite, and apologised, and
said if they had done anything wrong they wanted to make it right. They
offered to pay for the coop if it was broken, and got off their horses
to help him lift it on to the wagon again. But when they took hold of it
three chickens flopped out of the broken side, and went squawking across
the fields."
"It was _so_ funny!" laughed Lloyd. "There they went, legs stretching,
wings flapping, lickety split! It made me think of Papa Jack's story
about the old witch: 'she ran, she flew, she ran, she flew!' We all told
the old huckstah we'd help him catch them and that's why we got so
dirty."
[Illustration: "'BUT WE CAUGHT THE CHICKENS AND BROUGHT THEM BACK.'"]
"Oh, such a chase!" added Joyce. "Through barb-wire fences, over
ploughed fields and into blackberry briers. That is how we got so
scratched and torn. But we caught the chickens, and brought them
back, with feathers flying, and with them squawking at the tops of their
voices."
"What fun it must have been!" said Betty. "I wish I could have seen you
then, and I wish I could see you now. You must be wrecks."
"They are not pretty sights, I can assure you," said Mrs. Sherman,
laughing in spite of her disapproval. "I'm astonished that you would
make such a commotion on a public road, and I'm afraid I would have to
lecture you a little if I were not sure that you would never do it
again. Run along now and make yourselves presentable for lunch, and
first thing you do, look in your mirrors. You'll not be charmed, I'm
sure."
"One little, two little, three little Indians," sang Betty, as they
skipped out of the room, hand in hand, and Joyce whispered in the hall,
"How can she be so cheerful? She's the bravest little thing I ever saw."
They learned the secret of her cheerfulness next time they went to her
room. She turned to them with a wistful little smile, sadder, somehow,
than tears, saying, "Godmother has helped me to find some stars in my
long night, girls. She told me about Milton. I didn't know before that
he was blind when he wrote 'Paradise Lost.' And she told me about Fanny
Crosby, too, the blind hymnwriter, whose hymns have helped so many
people and are sung all over the world.
"I've made up my mind that if the doctor can't save my sight I'll do as
they did. It's like dropping the curtains on the outside darkness when
night comes on, godmother says, and turning up the lights and stirring
the fire, and making it so bright and cheerful and sweet inside that you
forget how dark it is outdoors.
"And maybe if I can do that, and think all the time about the beautiful
things I have seen and read, I can make up stories some day as they did
their poems and hymns. I will write fairy tales that the children will
love to listen to and ask to hear, over and over again. I know I can do
it, for the ones I've made for Davy he likes best of all. I'd never hope
to write stories that grown people would be interested in, and love as
they love Tusitala's, but just to be the children's 'tale-teller,' and
to write stories that they would listen to long after I am dead and
gone--why _that_ would be worth living for, even if I never saw the
light again. And godmother thinks I can do it."
"I know you can," assented Lloyd, warmly, "and we'll copy them for you,
and send them away to be put into books."
"Joyce," asked Betty, "would you mind reading that little newspaper
clipping to the girls about the Road of the Loving Heart? I want them to
know about it, too."
She did not know that they had already heard it, listening outside her
door with heavy hearts and troubled faces, and when Joyce had found it
and again read it aloud, she told them the story of the memory road that
she was trying to leave behind her.
"It will be harder to do now that I am blind," she said, at the last,
"for I can't help being a care and a trouble to everybody, everywhere I
go now. But godmother says people won't mind that much if I'll only be
pleasant and cheerful about my misfortune, and not let it cast its
shadow on other lives any more than I can help. I haven't said anything
about it yet to her, but if there is enough money in the bank that papa
left to educate me with, I want to go to a school for the blind and
learn to read those queer raised letters, and to do everything for
myself. Then I'll not be such a trouble to everybody."
"But how can you be cheerful and pleasant, and go on that way for a
whole lifetime?" asked Eugenia, with a shiver. "You may live to be an
old, old woman."
"Oh, Eugenia!" exclaimed Joyce, in a shocked undertone. "Don't remind
the poor little thing of of that."
"I know," answered Betty, her smile all gone now, and her lip trembling.
"Sometimes when I think of that, it's so awful that I can hardly stand
it. But it will be only a day at a time, and if I can manage to get
through them one by one, and keep my courage up to the end, it will be
all right afterward, you know, for there is no night _there_. The nurse
read me that yesterday out of Revelation. That's the only thing that
comforts me sometimes." She repeated it in a soft whisper, turning her
face away: "There'll be _no night there_!"