heard, or rather felt, a sound, as of a gentle wind. A white arm, thinly
covered with a filmy, lustrous lace, stole gently around my neck, and
mother glided down beside me into the chair. Her eyes were as blue as the
heavens and as bright as the morning star.
“I wasn’t the least bit surprised or startled. I did not care to speak,
nor did I expect her to utter a word. I did not want the heavenly silence
broken. I pressed her hand, which was as soft as down, and pink and
white, like a sea-shell. She put her finger to her lips, as if in token
of silence.
“Suddenly a light, different from any I had yet seen, surrounded us. We
looked upward, and a form like unto the Son of Man stood before us. He
was transparent, and as radiant as the sun. We lost ourselves in the
light of His presence, as the stars lose themselves in the light of the
sun. He did not speak an audible word; but as He outspread His hands
above our heads, I turned to gaze at mother, whose raiment was as sheer
as the finest gauze. It was all edged with luminous lace; and the sheen
on her hair was like spun gold, glistening in the sunshine.”
“Didn’t she say anything, Jean?”
This man, who had all his life refused to listen to any story which could
not be verified by physical law, had lost himself in the strange recital.
Jean looked as one transfigured. She resumed her story.
“Mother said: ‘You must go back to your duties, Jean.’ Her arms were
about my neck, and her shining draperies floated around us like a mist
with the sun shining on it. ‘You have a long and weary road before you,
Jean,’ she said, speaking silently, but in words that could be felt. ‘The
experiences you will encounter will all be good for your development,
my dear,’ she added, still inaudibly. ‘The time will come when you
will realize, no matter what befalls you, that every lesson in life is
necessary for your development. You are in the arms of the Infinite One,
whose kingdom is within you, and who doeth all things well. Go back to
your dear father, Jean. Tell him I am not dead. Tell Mary, Marjorie,
Harry, and all the rest—’ Just then I felt a sudden sensation, as of
floating downward, toward the earth.
“A cow lowed as I stirred myself in the wagon, and I remembered that you
had tied Flossie to a wheel to keep her from straying from camp. Bells
tinkled on the hillsides, the wind whistled in the trees, and I sat up,
wide awake. I heard you moaning, daddie, and my heart went out to you
with a longing that I cannot describe. I could not rest till I had told
you all. What do you suppose it means?”
“I can only say, like one of old, ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for
me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.’ Leave me now, daughter. You are
weary and must sleep.”
XVII
_FATHER AND DAUGHTER_
Jean passed out silently into the night, and pausing a moment, looked up
to the silent stars, and whispered: “‘The heavens declare the glory of
God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork.’”
How long she stood meditating she never realized. The tethered cow lowed
again,—a plaintive, beseeching wail, that seemed almost human. She was
mourning for her slain calf, poor thing,—a calf left by the roadside at
its birth. It had been mercifully killed by Captain Ranger’s order, that
it might escape the hardships of a sure but lingering death in following
its ill-fated mother.
The cow’s udder was distended and feverish. Jean, as mindful of the
practical affairs of life as of its mysteries, knelt upon the ground,
and, with the skill of much practice in the art of milking, relieved the
poor bereft mother of her pain.
“Poor Flossie!” she said, as the patient animal drew a sigh of relief.
“Poor Flossie! It seemed cruel to deprive you of your baby. And they did
it, too, before your very eyes! You must be thirsty, Flossie; you’re so
feverish,” she said, as she brought the grateful animal a pail of clear,
cold water.
Jean crept shivering into bed between her sleeping sisters, where she
tried in vain to lie awake, to live over again the vivid experiences of
her dream.
“Was it a dream?” she asked herself as she cuddled close among the
blankets. “Who knows what dreams are, anyhow? And is there anybody on the
earth who can understand, define, or fathom the mystery of sleep?” In a
few minutes she was fast asleep, and when she awoke it was morning.
“There are, there must be, other senses finer and more acute than our
five physical ones,” she thought, as she crept from her bed, refreshed
and wide awake.
The stars had paled, and the clear gray of the early dawn lit up the
crests of the abounding hills.
* * * * *
The simple preparations for the funeral rites were made in silence. Men
and women moved mechanically about the camp. The very cattle seemed to
understand.
No casket was procurable, but every man in camp was ready to do all in
his power to supply the need. Junipers of goodly size abounded in the
neighboring woods. From two of these, felled for the purpose, thick
puncheons were hewn to form a crude but stanch enclosure for the good
woman’s final home. A grave was made, with hard labor, in the abounding
sandstone, and the women lined its vault and edges with flattened boughs
of evergreen, thus making an ideal resting-place for the still, white
form, as beautiful in death as it had been in youth.
There was no prayer or sermon. The simple rites were about to close when
Mary whispered to her father: “I have heard mother say she wanted us
all to sing when they should be laying her away.” And the three eldest
daughters of the peaceful dead and the storm-rent living sang with
tremulous but not unmusical tones:—
“Oh, heaven is nearer than mortals think,
When they look with trembling dread
At the misty future that stretches on
From the silent home of the dead.
“’Tis no lone isle in a boundless main;
No brilliant but distant shore,
Where the loving ones who are called away
Must go to return no more.
“No, heaven is near us; the mighty veil
Of mortality blinds the eye,
That we see not the glorious angel bands,
On the shores of eternity.
“I know, when the silver cord is loosed,
When the veil is rent away,
Not long and dark shall the passage be
To the realms of endless day.”
John Ranger looked upward with bared brow and streaming eyes, and in his
heart a flickering hope was born.
The Reverend Thomas Rogers, with all his fervent eloquence and well
grounded belief in the very orthodox scheme of salvation which he had so
constantly preached, had never shaken his doubts as did the plaintive
promises of that simple, impressive hymn.
His devoted wife, strong in her faith in the efficacy of prayer, had long
ceased to speak to him of her religious convictions, for which his ready
logic and quaint ridicule suggested no answer. At such times, consoling
herself with the command of her Master, she would enter into her closet,
shut the door, and pray for him and their children in secret, with never
a doubt that sometime, someway, her prayers would be answered openly. And
who shall say that her faith was not at last rewarded, in a way she least
expected, through that plaintive song, through which, being dead, she had
yet spoken?
After the burial, the remainder of the day was spent in the silent
performance of the many accumulated duties of the camp. There was no time
for the luxury of grief. The women and girls washed, ironed, cooked, did
the dishes, mended wearing apparel, sewed up rents in wagon-covers and
tents, and gathered heaps of wild flowers, with which they adorned the
fresh mound of earth that none of them expected ever to see again.
* * * * *
The men were not idle. A broken ox-yoke needed mending. Wagon-tires were
reset. Such heavy articles as could be dispensed with were discarded.
Jamie’s cradle, for which Mrs. Ranger had begged a place in their
effects, and her grandmother’s spinning-wheel, which she had stored in
one of the wagons, were among the articles ordered to be thrown away.
“Your mother will not miss them now,” said Captain Ranger, huskily.
“It is a shame to disregard our dear mother’s wishes, now that she cannot
speak for herself,” said Mary, in a whisper, aside to Jean.
“I know it; and I’ve already made a bargain with Mrs. McAlpin to store
them in one of her wagons. Daddie will thank us for it sometime.”
Sadly and silently the work went on; for the living had to be cared for,
and nothing more could be done for the dead.
When evening came Jean sought her journal, climbed to the rim of the
little natural amphitheatre overlooking the sparkling spring of icy water
near her mother’s last resting-place, and read in the last space she had
left blank, in her father’s bold chirography, some lines of a poem which
he had quoted from memory:—
“’Twas midnight, and he sat alone,
The husband of the dead.
That day the dark dust had been thrown
Above her buried head.
“Her orphaned children round him slept,
But in their sleep would moan;
In bitterness of soul he wept.
He was alone—alone.
“The world is full of life and light,
But, ah, no light for me!
My little world, once warm and bright,
Is cheerless as the sea.
“Where is her sweet and kindly face?
Where is her cordial tone?
I gaze upon her resting-place
And feel that I’m alone.
“The lovely wife, maternal care,
The self-denying zeal,
The smile of hope that chased despair,
And promised future weal;
“The clean, bright hearth, nice table spread,
The charm o’er all things thrown,
The sweetness in whate’er she said,—
All gone! I am alone.
“I slept last night, and then I dreamed;
Perchance her spirit woke;
A soft light o’er my pillow gleamed,
A voice in music spoke:
“‘Forgot, forgiven, all neglect,
Thy love recalled, alone;
The babes I loved, O love, protect,
I still am all thine own.’”
“Dear bereaved and sorrowing daddie!” sighed Jean, as she closed the
book. “I cannot write a word to-night. Sacred to him and his be the page
on which he has inscribed these echoes of his heart. But let nobody say,
after this, that daddie has no sentiment in his make-up. The trouble is
that he is too busy a man to give rein to his feelings, except under
extraordinary pressure. I wish he hadn’t tried to throw away those
heirlooms of mother’s, though. The oxen wouldn’t have felt the difference
in the load. It was an act that he’ll be ashamed of some day.”
Weeks after, when the memory-hallowed relics came to light, Captain
Ranger bowed his head upon his hands and gave way to such a convulsion of
grief as had not shaken him, even at the time of her transition. Jean had
good cause to recall the stanzas he had inscribed to her mother’s memory
in her battered journal, as she said to herself: “I knew all the time
that daddie’s heart was right. It is only necessary to touch it in the
proper place to show that it is tender.” Once more she closed the book
without having written a word.
But we must not anticipate.
On the 22d of June another entry is recorded,—Jean’s last memorandum of
their journey in the Black Hills: “The prickly pears still give us much
annoyance. The roads are heavy with sand, and the rocks over which our
wagons must bump and bound are terribly rough and jagged.
“Across the Platte, and away to the southward many miles, though they
seem much nearer, owing to the rarity of the air, are quaint and curious
formations in the rocky cliffs, worn by the winds of ages into rude
images of men and animals that stare at us with sunken eyes, their broken
noses, grinning skulls, and disfigured bodies reminding us of unhappy
phantoms risen from the under world.
“Sometimes the semblance of a great mosque or cathedral rears its domes
and minarets in the clear blue of the heavens; and sometimes what seems
a great embattled fortification is seen rising with realistic majesty
from a vast sage plain that looks, with a little aid of the imagination,
like the dried-up bed of a big moat. Of course, ‘’tis distance lends
enchantment to the view,’ as no doubt the images we see so distinctly
would resolve themselves into shapeless masses if we could see them at
close range.
“The grass we so much need for the stock has again disappeared, and
daddie says we shall return to-morrow to the main travelled road. Wild
flowers are blooming in profusion all around our camp, smiling at us as
if in mockery of the prevailing desolation. Wood is scarce again, and we
find few buffalo chips.
“We seldom see any more deer or antelope, and the buffalo have all
escaped to the distant hills; that is, all but the hapless multitudes
that have been cruelly and needlessly slaughtered by the unthinking and
greedy hunters of the plains.
“We passed half-a-dozen newly made graves again to-day, and it is evident
that we are getting back into the dreaded cholera belt. The day has been
extremely hot, but the evening is chilly and blustering. Daddie says the
most of the victims of the epidemic are women. I wonder if such sorrow as
ours pervades every family into whose ranks the Silent Messenger comes
unbidden and steals away its hope.
“The Indians seem to have all been scared away by the cholera. What must
they think of us, who claim to be civilized and even enlightened, who
have come to bring them our religion, and with it starvation, pestilence,
and death?
“Our world isn’t yet fit for the abode of anything but beasts of prey,
of which poorly civilized man is chief. No wonder the Indians fear and
hate us. We destroy their range, we scare away their game, we scatter
disease and death among them; and as rapidly as possible we seize and
possess their lands. ‘No quarter for man or beast’ should be written upon
our foreheads in letters of fire. But maybe we are merely fulfilling our
destiny. I cannot tell; it’s all a mystery.” She closed the book with a
sigh.
XVIII
_THE LITTLE DOCTOR_
After leaving the Black Hills and descending again into the valley of the
Platte, the Ranger company found travelling still more difficult than
before they had left the main travelled road. The cattle, from burning
their hoofs in the alkali pools, through which they were often compelled
to wade for hours at a stretch, became afflicted with a serious foot-ail.
“A more dangerous epidemic than the cholera menaces us now,” said Mrs.
McAlpin, as she watched the poor brutes limping along the road, many of
them bellowing with pain and writhing under the cruel lashes of the
drivers’ whips, as they hobbled wearily on toward the setting sun.
“Yes,” replied Captain Ranger, as he blanched with apprehension. “Our
very lives depend upon the cattle; we have no other means of getting out
of the wilderness. We must do something heroic to heal their feet, or
we’ll all be left to die together.”
Scotty, whose serious accident had been overshadowed by the death and
burial of Mrs. Ranger, and who had grown weary of receiving only such
attention as could be bestowed upon an invalid not considered dangerously
afflicted, began to demand the careful nursing he at first pretended to
disdain. The jolting of the wagon, in which he still lay upon a sort
of swinging stretcher, though it alleviated the roughness of constant
rebounds from the rocky roads, aggravated the inflammation of his wound;
and the pain grew more intolerable as the bones began to knit. His
ravings of discontent were often hard for Mrs. Benson to endure. But she
adhered resolutely to her purpose as her daughter’s chaperon to prevent
too frequent visits between the twain, and often kept Mrs. McAlpin away
from his side for many hours together.
“Scotty has managed somehow to disarrange his bandages, Little Doctor,”
said Captain Ranger; “and badly as our cattle need attention, you will be
obliged to look after his case this evening. I know how punctilious your
mother is over what she is pleased to call the proprieties, but you must
attend the fellow professionally, whether she consents or not.
“I do not want any more disagreeable encounters with my mother, Captain.”
“Damn it! I beg your pardon, ma’am! But I’m sure God swore in His wrath
under less provocation,—if there is any truth in Holy Writ. These are no
times for conventional hair-splittings. You are in duty bound to visit
Scotty as his physician. I will accompany you if it will help you out.”
“I shall be glad indeed of your company, Captain. But women are not
supposed to be doctors. We’ve always been taught to look upon the
profession as one beyond our comprehension.”
“And indeed it is beyond your comprehension. Men do not comprehend it any
more than you do. If they did, it would long ago have been developed into
a science, instead of what it is,—empiricism. I’m afraid I’ll swear again
if I hear any more nonsense about the things women are not supposed to
know because they are women.”
“Are you ready to accompany me now, Captain?”
“I’ll have to be. But our lunch is ready; and, by my beans and bacon, I
must have something to eat first! There! I didn’t mean to swear. It was a
sort of slip of the tongue.”
“I am free to admit that it isn’t polite to swear, Captain. But you
didn’t take the name of God in vain; so you are forgiven. You will grant
that swearing, even by beans and bacon, is a bad habit, though. Don’t set
a bad example before the children, to say nothing of the rest of us,” she
added, laughing.
They found the patient in a high fever.
“It is his impatience that does it,” said Mrs. Benson. “He fumes like a
madman sometimes.”
Mrs. McAlpin deftly unbound, dressed, and rebandaged the unfortunate limb.
“We’re doing nicely,” she said, when her work was finished. “You mustn’t
fret yourself into a fever again. A sick man should be as serene as a May
morning.”
“How in the name o’ Melchizedek and the Twelve Apostles is a man going
to keep cool when the thermometer is raging in the nineties, and one’s
self-elected nurse is scolding like a sitting hen? If she’d ride in
the other wagon and leave you to do the nursing, I’d stand a chance to
recover.”
“Mamma is getting on famously,” laughed the Little Doctor. “You are so
amiable and sweet-tempered yourself that I can’t see why she doesn’t fall
down before your injured foot and worship you. I feel almost tempted to
try it myself. You don’t think she is enduring all this for fun, do you?”
“I suppose I haven’t been acting the angel; but it was because I wanted
the society of my doctor.”
“You allude to Mrs. McAlpin, of course,” said the Captain, smiling.
“Who else in thunder should I mean? There is but one woman doctor in the
world, so far as I know. Didn’t she find me in that infernal hole, wedged
in it like a rat in a trap? And didn’t she patch my broken bones, like a
trained physician, when there wasn’t a man in a hundred miles that could
have done it?”
“It is never wise to argue a point with a man in a fever, Mr. Burns. We
can talk it out later on. See! Mamma has brought soap, fresh water, and
towels. You couldn’t have a better nurse. You must let her bathe your
face and hands and head.”
“Won’t you take her place, Daphne?”
Captain Ranger and Mrs. Benson were not listening or looking just then;
and as for an instant their eyes met, the patient felt upon his fevered
forehead the fluttering touch of a soft, cool hand.
“Delicious!” he whispered. “I shall get well now.”
“Allow me,” said Mrs. Benson, elbowing her daughter aside; “I am head
nurse in this ward.”
The patient groaned.
“The Captain says you ought to have been a man, Daphne,” said Mrs.
Benson, as her daughter yielded her place.
“If my father had lived to see this day, he would have rejoiced that I
didn’t allow my usefulness to run to waste because of my femininity. Of
that I am as certain as that my patient is better.”
“You are a disobedient and ungrateful girl, Daphne.”
“You are my mamma.”
“I am not to blame for that, Daphne.”
“Am _I_?” asked the daughter, seriously. “I don’t pretend to understand,
and so of course cannot explain the cause that leads to individual being,
mamma dear. I know, though, that I am; and if the time should ever come
that I can know why I am, I shall understand why I am a woman. I cannot
now see that anybody is to be blamed on account of the fact, or accident,
of sex.”
“You are to blame for being a thankless child, Daphne.”
“I am neither a child nor thankless, mamma dear. I simply desire to
be and act myself. You know I love and honor you; but I have learned,
by sad experience, that each human being exists primarily for himself
or herself; and not one of us can live for another. If I had been
taught this truth in my childhood, we might both have been spared much
suffering. But”—turning to her patient—“we have other duties. Your fever
has fallen several degrees in the past fifteen minutes. I must go. When
you want to rail at anybody just pitch into me and let mamma have a
rest. Jean will bring you some broth. I’ll send Mrs. O’Dowd to sit with
you sometimes, to give mamma a little liberty. You two have been forced
to keep each other’s company till you are both as cross as a pair of
imprisoned cats.”
“I believe I’ve been pursuing the wrong policy,” said Mrs. Benson to the
Captain, as they walked together on the burning sand. “If Daphne had been
compelled to endure that patient’s petulance for more than a week, as I
have, she would have been as weary of the sight of him as I am.”
“I am not so sure of that,” replied the Captain, “seeing they’re not
married yet. Two cats will agree together like two doves, as long as they
have their individual freedom; but if you tie ’em together, they’ll fight
like dogs and tigers.”
“Poor little mamma! She’s all tired out, so she is!” exclaimed Mrs.
McAlpin, as she and her mother were walking out together after they
had stopped for the night. “You must change places to-morrow with Mrs.
O’Dowd. Then you can ride in Captain Ranger’s big family wagon with the
children and me, and get your much-needed rest.”
“Do you mean to say that I shall ride in that widower’s wagon, Daphne,
and his wife only just buried? What would people say?”
“Why should you think or care what anybody says, so long as you do your
duty, mamma? Captain Ranger is a gentleman. His heart is buried with his
wife. Don’t be a silly! Beg pardon, mamma. I didn’t mean to be slangy or
saucy. We’ve other troubles in store, and ought not to be quarrelling
between ourselves. Do you know that Donald McAlpin is following, or at
least shadowing, this train?”
Mrs. Benson blanched.
“Why do you think that, Daphne?”
“I’ve seen him twice since we met that colony of freighters. If he
persists in his persecutions, I’ll kill him!”
“Do not talk that way, child. People have been made innocent victims of
the scaffold for having made threats which they never meant to and never
did fulfil.”
“I have nothing to say against him as a man. But before God he is not
my husband, no matter what the law may have decreed, and I am living a
lie when I permit the outrage. He would make you an agreeable husband,
because you love him. I’ve known this for many a day. If I were dead or
divorced, you could become his wife, and then you would both be happy. We
are all miserable as it is.”
“But think of the looks of it, daughter! What would people say?” Her
eyes grew suddenly aglow with a newly awakened hope, in spite of her
demurrer, and her heart beat hard.
“Do you intend to do what you know to be right in the sight of God? or
do you mean to remain a slave all the days of your life to the idle
words of men and women who care nothing for you, and to whom you owe no
allegiance? Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the
heart. At least, I so read the Scripture, which you say is your rule of
faith and practice.”
“But we owe allegiance to the English Church and to human law, my child.”
“That is true; and I for one intend to obey the laws of man till they
are amended, although I was allowed no voice in their construction. But,
thanks to the progressive spirit of the age, we have divorce courts
established almost everywhere throughout the civilized world, so anybody
can obey the law and still ‘to his own self be true.’”
“No divorce can be had in our church, Daphne, except for a nameless
crime.”
“That ruling is a relic of barbarism. I will see that the way is opened
for both you and Donald to obey the law and be honest with yourselves
also.”
“But how about Mr. Burns? Does your rule apply to him?”
“We won’t discuss that matter, mamma. Mr. Burns fully understands that I
am not a free woman, and he has no right to discuss with me a question
that I am not at liberty to consider. Although I despise the law that
holds me in its thrall, I will obey it till it is annulled.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, child.”