She stood at her low window with its uneven, wavering glass, and looked
out across the prairie. A little snow had fallen, not much, only enough
to add a sense of desolation to the boundless plain, the infinite plain
outside the four cramped walls of her log hut. The log hut was like a
tiny boat moored in some vast, tideless, impassable sea. The immensity
of the prairie had crushed her in the earlier years of her married life;
but gradually she had become accustomed to it, then reconciled to it, at
last almost a part of it. The grey had come early to her thick hair, a
certain fixity to the quiet courage of her eyes. Her calm, steadfast
face showed that she was not given to depression, but nevertheless this
evening, as she stood watching for her husband's return, for the first
distant speck of him where the cart-rut vanished into the plain, a sense
of impending misfortune enfolded her with the dusk. Was it because the
first snow had fallen? Ah me! how much it meant. It was as significant
for her as the grey pallor that falls on a sick man's face. It meant the
endless winter, the greater isolation instead of the lesser, the
powerlessness to move hand or foot in that all-enveloping shroud; the
struggle, not for existence--with him beside her that was assured--not
for luxury, she had ceased to care for it, though he had not ceased to
care for her sake, but for life in any but its narrowest sense. Books,
letters, human speech, through the long months these would be almost
entirely denied her. The sudden remembrance of the larger needs of life
flooded her soul, touching to momentary semblance of movement many
things long cherished, but long since dead, like delicate sea-plants
beyond high-water mark, that cannot exist between the long droughts when
the spring tide does not come. She had known what she was doing when,
against the wishes of her family, she of the South had married him of
the North, when she left the busy city life she knew, and clave to her
husband, following him over the rim of the world, as women will follow
while they have feet to follow with. She was his superior in birth,
cultivation, refinement, but she had never regretted what she had done.
The regrets were his for her, for the poverty to which he had brought
her, and to which she had not been accustomed. She had only one regret,
if such a thin strip of a word as regret can be used to describe her
passionate, controlled desolation, immense as the prairie, because she
had no child. Perhaps if they had had children the walls of the log hut
in the waste might have closed in on them less rigidly. It might have
become more of a home.
Her mind had taken its old mechanical bent, the trend of long habit, as
she looked out from that low window. How often she had stood there and
thought "If only we might have had a child!" And now, by sheer force of
habit, she thought it yet again. And then a slow rapture took possession
of her whole being, mounted, mounted till she leaned against the window
still faint with joy. She was to have a child after all. She had hardly
dared believe it at first; but as time had gone on a vague hope quickly
suppressed as unbearable had turned to suspense, suspense had alternated
with the fierce despair that precedes certainty. Certainty had come at
last, clear and calm and exquisite as dawn. She would have a child in
the spring. What was the winter to her now! Nothing but a step towards
joy. The world was all broken up and made new. The prairie, its great
loneliness, its death-like solitude, were gone out of her life. She was
to have a child in the spring. She had not dared to tell her husband
till she was sure. But she would tell him this evening, when they were
sitting together over the fire.
She stood motionless in the deepening dusk, trying to be calm. And at
last in the far distance she saw a speck arise as it were out of a
crease in the level earth. Her husband on his horse. How many hundreds
of times she had seen him appear over the rim of the world, just as he
was appearing now. She lit the lamp and put it in the window. She blew
the log fire to a blaze. The firelight danced on the wooden walls,
crowded with cheap pictures, and on the few precious daguerreotypes that
reminded her she too had brothers and sisters and kin of her own, far
away in one of those southern cities where the war was still smouldering
grimly on.
Her husband took his horse round and stalled him. Presently he came in.
They stood a moment together in silence as their custom was, and she
leaned her forehead against his shoulder. Then she busied herself with
his supper, and he sat down heavily at the little table.
"Had you any difficulty this time in getting the money together?" she
asked.
Her husband was a tax collector.
"None," he said abstractedly; "at least--yes--a little. But I have it
all, and the arrears as well. It makes a large sum."
He was evidently thinking of something else. She did not speak again.
She saw something was troubling him.
"I heard news to-day at Philip's," he said at last, "which I don't like.
If I had heard in time, and if I could have borrowed a fresh horse, I
would have ridden straight on to ----. But it was too late in the day
to be safe, and you would have been anxious what had become of me if I
had been out all night with all this money on me. I shall go to-morrow
as soon as it is light."
They discussed the business which took him to the nearest town thirty
miles away, where their small savings were invested, somewhat
precariously, as it turned out. What was safe, who was safe, while the
invisible war between North and South smouldered on and on? It had not
come near them, but as an earthquake which is engulfing cities in one
part of Europe will rattle a tea-cup without oversetting it on a cottage
shelf half a continent away, so the civil war had reached them at last.
"I take a hopeful view," he said, but his face was overcast. "I don't
see why we should lose the little we have. It has been hard enough to
scrape it together, God knows. Promptitude and joint action with
Reynolds will probably save it. But I must be prompt." He still spoke
abstractedly, as if even now he were thinking of something else.
He began to take out of the leathern satchel various bags of money.
"Shall I help you to count it?"
She often did so.
They counted the flimsy dirty paper-money together, and put it all back
into the various labelled bags.
"It comes right," he said.
Suddenly she said, "But you can't pay it into the bank to-morrow if you
go to ----."
"I know," he said looking at her; "that is what I have been thinking of
ever since I heard Philip's news. I don't like leaving you with all this
money in the house; but I must."
She was silent. She was not frightened for herself, but it was State
money, not their own. She was not nervous as he was, but she had always
shared with him a certain dread of those bulging bags, and had always
been thankful to see him return safe--he never went twice by the same
track--after paying the money in. In those wild days, when men went
armed, with their lives in their hands, it was not well to be known to
have large sums about you.
He looked at the bags, frowning.
"I am not afraid," she said.
"There is no real need to be," he said after a moment. "When I leave
to-morrow morning, it will be thought I have gone to pay it in.
Still----"
He did not finish his sentence, but she knew what was in his mind: the
great loneliness of the prairie. Out in the white night came the short,
sharp yap of a wolf.
"I am not afraid," she said again.
"I shall be gone only one night," he said.
"I have often been a night alone."
"I know," he said; "but somehow it's worse leaving you with so much
money in the house."
"No one knows it will be there."
"That is true, except that every one knows I have been collecting large
sums."
"They will think you have gone to pay it in as usual."
"Yes," he said with an effort.
Then he got up, and went to his tool-box. She watched him open it,
seeing him in a new light which encompassed him with even greater love.
"If I tell him to-night," she thought, "it will make him still more
anxious about leaving me. Perhaps he would refuse to go, and he must go.
I will not tell him till he comes back."
The resolution not to speak was like taking hold of a piece of iron in
frost. She had not known it would hurt so much. A new tremulousness,
sweet and strange, passed over her--not cowardice, not fear, not of the
heart nor of the mind, but a sort of emotion of the whole being.
"I will not tell him," she said again.
Her husband got out his tools, took up a plank from the floor, and put
the money into a hole beneath it, beside their small valuables, such as
they were, in a biscuit tin. Then he replaced the plank, screwed it
down, and she drew back a small fur mat over the place. He put away the
tools and then came and stood in front of her. He was not conscious of
her transfiguration, and she dropped her eyes for fear of showing it.
"I shall start early," he said, "as soon as it is light, and I shall be
back before sundown the day after to-morrow. I know it is unreasonable,
but I shall go easier in my mind if you will promise me one thing."
"What is it?"
"Not to go out of the house, or to let any one else come in on any
pretence whatever, while I am away," he said. "Bar everything, and stay
inside."
"I shan't want to go out."
He made an impatient movement.
"Promise me that, come what will, you will let no one in during my
absence," he said.
"I promise."
"Swear it."
She hesitated.
"Swear it, to please me," he said.
"I swear that I will let no one into the house, on any pretext whatever,
until you come back," she said, smiling at him.
He sighed and relapsed into his chair, and gave way to the great fatigue
that possessed him.
The next morning he started soon after daybreak, but not until he had
brought her in sufficient fuel to last several days. There had been more
snow in the night, fine snow like salt, but not enough to make
travelling difficult. She watched him ride away, and silenced the voice
within her which always said as she saw him go, "You will never see him
again; you have heard his voice for the last time." Perhaps, after all,
the difference between the brave and the cowardly lies in how they deal
with that voice. Both hear it. She silenced it instantly. It spoke
again, more insistently, "You have heard his voice, felt his kiss, for
the last time. He will never see the face of his child." She silenced it
again, and went about her work.
The day passed as countless other days had passed. She was accustomed to
be much alone. She had work to do, enough and to spare, within the
little home which was to become a real home, please God, in the spring.
The evening fell almost before she expected it. She locked and barred
the doors, and closed the shutters of the windows. She made all secure,
as she had done many a time before.
And then, putting aside her work, she took down the newest of her
well-worn books, lately sent her from New Orleans, and began to read.
Oui, sans doute, tout meurt: ce monde est un grand reve,
Et le peu de bonheur qui nous vient en chemin,
Nous n'avons pas plus tot ce roseau dans la main,
Que le vent nous l'enleve.
"Que le vent nous l'enleve." She repeated the last words to herself. Ah
no! the wind could not take her happiness out of her hand.
A wandering wind had risen at nightfall, and it came softly across the
snow, and tried the doors and windows as with a furtive hand. She could
hear it coming as from an immense distance, passing with a sigh,
returning plaintive, homeless, forlorn, to whisper round the house.
J'ai vu sous le soleil tomber bien d'autres choses
Que les feuilles des bois, et l'ecume des eaux,
Bien d'autres s'en aller que le parfum des roses
Et le chant des oiseaux.
That wind meant more snow. Involuntarily she laid down her book and
listened to it.
How like the sound of the wind was to wandering footsteps, slowly
drawing near, creeping round the house. She could almost have fancied
that a hand touched the shutters, was even now trying to raise the latch
of the door.
A moment of intense silence, in which the wind seemed to hold its breath
and listen without, while she listened within. And then a low, distinct
knock upon the door.
She did not move.
"It is the wind," she said to herself; but she knew it was not.
The knock came again, low, urgent, not to be denied.
She had become very cold. She had supposed fear was an emotion of the
mind. She had not reckoned for this slow paralysis of the body.
She managed to creep to the window and unbar the shutter an inch or two.
By pressing her face against the extreme corner of the pane she could
just discern in the snowlight part of a man's figure, wrapped in a long
cloak.
She barred the window once more. She was not surprised. She knew now
that she had known it always. She had pretended to herself that the
thief would not come; but she was expecting him when he knocked. And he
stood there, outside. Presently he would be inside.
He knocked yet again, this time more loudly. What need was there for
silence when for miles and miles round there was no ear to hear save
that of a chance prairie dog?
She laid hold upon her courage, seeing that it was her only refuge, and
went to the door.
"Who is there?" she said through a chink.