dream. Together he remembered they had borne the icy body the distance
of a hundred yards, when, wearied from their recent wounds, he and the
duc had come perforce to a sudden stop. It was then he had left the
duc and Lescarbot with their burden, and, running to the fort, brought
Imbert, yawning, to their aid. After that the journey was easy, for
Imbert poised Madame Manette’s body on his giant shoulders, easily as a
mother might raise her child, and mile after mile bore it on through the
waving forest. Port Royal, its bastion and palisades swimming in yellow
moonlight, was left behind; the forest closed over them, dark and
sullen, and still they pressed on. The duc went first, leading the way
without hesitation, for the path was well marked, though in shadow, and
even to a stranger impossible to miss. And by this the others knew they
were going to the ancient sepulchre of the Indian chiefs--a place of
mysteries, where strange influences had their hiding-places.
The gray light of dawn was filtering coldly into the rocky well of
sepulchre when they arrived. On all sides were niches in the walls,
each niche a grave; and, drowning all voices in a hoarse clamor, a tiny
stream fell thirty feet adown the rock into a murky pool below, whence a
chasm in the cliff led it downward to the sea.
It was here they buried Madame Manette, erstwhile Duchesse de
Montpelier, the duc praying long and fervently. And that none might look
upon her face again, Imbert, going higher up the stream, changed its
course by means of massive rocks, so that now and forever that brawling
stream flows down across her grave. And here, with the vagrant spray
falling thickly upon their faces, did the duc bind them by a fearful
oath to guard his secret well from all save Poutrincourt.
Then, while the sun rose, they went slowly back to Port Royal through
the lightening forest. The duc staggered weakly; his eyes were sunken;
there was a grayness upon his face much like the grayness of the dead
face he had looked at so long. Nor did he speak until the great gate of
the fort loomed in sight, when, rousing himself as if from slumber, he
said musingly, “It is the ending of--a ballad, Monsieur Lescarbot.”
ON THE BRINK
By Edwin Lefevre
I
SUDDENLY it dawned upon them that they loved one another. They had been
talking about mind-reading, and he had looked long and steadily into
her eyes when she had challenged him to read her thoughts. They realized
simultaneously what had happened. She had known that she loved him, and
he, that he loved her. But each had sought to keep that knowledge from
the other. Now they could hide it no longer.
They remained silent for a long time, avoiding each other’s gaze. At
last their eyes met.
He said, “Well?” His voice expressed nothing; in his eyes there was
sorrow and--hope!
She shook her head, and he turned away his eyes; there was
disappointment in them that he would not show. Then she said, very
quietly, “You have read my thoughts?”
“Yes,” he said, still without looking at her; “and you--”
“I have read yours.”
Tears were in her eyes. If his, too, were wet, she could not see, for
he was looking fixedly at a little pebble at her feet. At last he said,
passionately, “Oh, why did I meet you! Why should I suffer so?”
“And I?” she said. “Is it not worse for me? Is not my sin greater,
and therefore my punishment heavier, than yours? Oh,”--in answer to an
impatient gesture of denial,--“you will meet some woman whom it will not
be a sin to love, and you will--”
“You know I will not,” he interrupted.
“Yes, you will,” she said, very gently; “and then--”
He raised his head and gazed steadily at her. Then he said,
challengingly, “You wish me to love another?”
She looked away from him and was silent. Gradually there crept into his
eyes a look of hope; and hope was slowly turning into exultation when
she spoke, so softly that he barely could hear her, “Yes.”
Then he said, altogether too calmly, in too commonplace a manner, “Oh,
very well, since you wish it--”
And she said, very firmly, “I wish it!”
Slowly they returned to the house. The sun was setting, and there was
gold and nacre and glowing blood in the sky. In the garden the wind
stirred the leaves gently, and there was sorrow in their song.
Her husband awaited them. “Is n’t it a beautiful sunset?” he said to
them from the piazza. “I suppose you’ve been looking at it. You might
write a sonnet about it, my boy.”
She went up to the gray-haired man and kissed him on the lips, and
leaned against him, until he wound his arm about her waist, and she
rested her head on his shoulder caressingly; and then she looked
defiantly at the young man, who had drawn near.
The young man’s hands closed tightly, and in his eyes there was
disappointment and anger and some contempt. “Yes, John, I believe I
_could_ write a few elegies on the death of this Sun, who has shed his
blood in his fight with Night, and has spattered it all over the sky, so
that the angels will have to wash it off with their tears. Sunsets are
my forte, anyway--”
“I have never seen any of your verses,” she said.
“Then you may congratulate yourself upon your lucky escape.”
The gray-haired man smiled good-naturedly and patted her cheek; and she
held it up to be kissed, and nestled closer to him. Then she looked at
the young man, and in her eyes there was still defiance, and, though she
would not have shown it, some interest. She said, “I have heard so much
about them that I should like to read them.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You are reckless.” And the bantering tone did not hide from her the
significance that lay behind his words.
“You must show some of them to her,” said the gray-haired man to him.
“All right. I’ll hunt them up, some time, and send them to you,” said
the young man to her.
“Have n’t you any here?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied; “but they are all love songs, and therefore not worth
the reading.”
“Indeed!” she said. The gray-haired man patted her cheek indulgently.
This time she did not upturn her face for a kiss. And in her voice there
was an unnecessary indifference as she said to the young man, “Will you
let me read them to-night?”
“Oh, no,” he replied, laughingly, though his eyes were serious.
“Why not?” she persisted.
“In the first place, because they are not worth anything; and then you
might get an impression that I really meant what I wrote, and that I am
deeply in love with some one.”
“And you are not in love?” There was a challenge in her voice. The
gray-haired man smiled at her girlish, artless curiosity.
“Certainly not!” the young man said decidedly.
“But were you in love when you wrote them?”
“I really don’t know,” he answered. “Perhaps I was.”
“Well, _I_ am,” she said, looking at him steadily. And when his eyes had
shown astonishment and had begun to shine with irrepressible hope, she
continued: “Indeed I am,--with my own dearest husband, who is so good to
me. Am I not, darling?” And she entwined her arms about the gray-haired
man’s neck and kissed him on the lips twice. And the gray-haired man
laughed and looked pleased.
The young man’s face was rigid and very pale. In the dusk they could not
see that his lips were twitching. But she had grown strangely quiet.
A great stillness had fallen upon the world. The evening star was
shining very brightly now, and in the east a little lone star was
blinking tremulously.
Presently she said, “I am afraid,” and shivered.
The gray-haired man drew her closer to him, kissed her, and said:
“Afraid of what, little coward? But come, it is time to go in, my
child.”
The young man’s thoughts had been many during the brief spell of silence
that had preceded her words, and now he said: “Yes, _little sister_, you
ought to go in now.”
The gray-haired man laughed good-naturedly at this jest of his
young brother’s. But she drew a quick breath and went into the house
hurriedly.
II
The gray-haired man was nodding over his newspaper in the library. She
had just ceased to hold the latest novel upside down in her hands. She
hesitated for a moment; then she arose, saying: “It is so warm here; I
am going on the piazza.”
The gray-haired man started. “What ‘s that, my dear?” he asked,
shamefacedly. He feared that she might think he had been asleep. They
had been married but four months.
“I am going to sit on the piazza; it’s cooler,” she said.
“Is Dick there?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. But don’t stay too long; the night air is not good for
you.” It certainly was not good for him, so he remained in the library
nodding over his newspaper.
She went to the piazza. Sitting on the veranda-rail, the young man was
smoking. At the sound of her steps he started up eagerly; but when she
was near him, his eyes showed nothing, his face was calm.
“A beautiful night, is n’t it?” said she.
“Yes,” he acquiesced. He stifled a yawn ostentatiously. Then, as though
the thought had just struck him, “Shall I fetch you a chair?”
“Oh, no, thanks; I am going upstairs shortly,” she said, with
indifference.
“Shall I fetch you a chair?” This in another tone.
“Yes,” she answered.
He did so, and then resumed his seat on the veranda and smoked in
silence.
Overhead, the sky was as molten sapphire and the stars seemed more
numerous than ever before, and brighter and nearer to the earth.
“Lovely, is n’t it?” she said at last.
“What is?”
“The sky, of course.”
“Yes.”
After a silence she said: “I’ve never seen so many stars before; have
you?”
“Yes,” he said, slowly, “there was one more last night,--mine!”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
There was another pause,--a long one. She was looking at a little star
that was shining very faintly low in the sky. Finally she said, softly,
“Show me your verses.”
“I cannot,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“Why not?” She avoided his gaze.
“You know very well,” he answered.
“But if I ask you as a great favor--”
“I should still refuse,” he said, wearily.
“You are very rude.”
“And you are very cruel,” he returned, monotonously.
“But not so cruel as you,--to arouse a woman’s curiosity, and then to
refuse, absolutely, to gratify it!”
“Oh, so it is merely curiosity?” His voice trembled slightly.
She hesitated; her foot was tapping on the ground nervously. Then, as
if she had weighed the consequences, she said: “Of course, merely
curiosity.”
“Then you lied this afternoon, and you are only a coquette? I might have
known it!” He spoke with difficulty for his teeth were clinched tightly.
“How dare you speak to me so?” she said, angrily.
And then he answered in a low voice, as if fearful of being overheard:
“And how dare you forget that you are my brother’s wife?”
She gave a half-smothered cry of pain, as though he had struck her. Then
she buried her head in her hands and sobbed softly.
“Don’t!--Please don’t--Oh, don’t--Gladys--” he said. It was the first
time he had called her thus, by name, and she said, between her sobs:
“Oh, I am so unhappy, so unhappy!”
She raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were filled with tears.
He went toward her hesitatingly. By her side he paused; his hands were
clinched and held close to his face. He said hoarsely: “Don’t. Don’t
make--me--forget--” He drew nearer; she held up her arms as if to ward
off a blow, and then the gray-haired man’s voice called out sleepily
from a window on the other side of the cottage: “Gladys! Dick!”
“Yes?” said the young man.
“You had better come in now.”
“Yes. Coming.”
III
At breakfast the next morning the young man said: “I am going back to
the city this morning, John.”
“Are you? When will you return?” said the gray-haired man. He did not
think his honeymoon had waned yet; but it never shines very brightly on
three people at once, and--
“I don’t know,” answered the young man. “I shall go to Jack Livingston’s
first; I promised to spend a week or two with him. And then I think I’ll
go to Maine. I am told the fishing is exceptionally good this season.”
She said nothing. The gray-haired man began to talk about the anxious
cares of a floriculturist.
After breakfast she disappeared. The gray-haired man said good-bye to
his younger brother, to whom he had been as a father, and went out to
consult with his head gardener about a new variety of orchids which he
had just received from the Isthmus of Panama.
All that morning the young man wondered if she would not bid him
farewell. At last the groom came to tell him that the cart awaited him.
He was in the hallway, deliberating whether he should seek her, when
she came down the stairs slowly. Her face wore a look it had never known
before. Occasionally it is seen on some women when they wear the widow’s
garb for the first time,--a blending of sorrow and yearning, and,
withal, resignation. She halted at the foot of the stairs, her
hand resting upon the carved post. “So you are going?” she said,
monotonously.
“Yes.” His voice was low.
“For a long time?”
“Yes.” He dared not look at her.
“It is for the best,” she said. He answered nothing.
The groom came to the door and said: “I beg your pardon, sir, but the
train is due now, sir.”
“Very well, I’m coming.”
She gave two sharp little indrawn gasps. Then, speaking very quickly,
she said: “Wear this. My mother gave it to me when I was confirmed. When
she died I took it off because it reminded me of her and it made me cry.
It is sacred to me. It is all I can give you. I am sure she would not
blame me--” She paused and looked at him questioningly.
“No,” he answered, reverently.
“Take it!” She held a little ring, a plain gold band, toward him, and he
took it and with some difficulty placed it on his little finger.
“Good-bye!” she said.
He looked at her imploringly. His lips dared not utter what his eyes
told so plainly. It was a request, nothing more, but she shook her head.
“Good-bye,” she repeated, extending her hand.
He took it and held it tightly.
“Good-bye,” he said. Her hand remained in his. She could not withdraw it
and there were tears in her eyes as she said, gently, for the last time:
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” he said again. He bent over to kiss her hand, but she drew
it back quickly. Then she went up the stairs slowly.
He had resolved not to look back, but before the little cart had gone
two hundred yards he turned his head. There was no one on the piazza,
and her windows being curtained he could not tell whether she was
looking at him from her room. He gazed long towards the little cottage.
Then, as he heard the whistle of the approaching train, he turned his
eyes to the front, and his face took on a calm, resolute look.
A WOMAN’S LIFE
By Anthony Leland
HE is dead!”
“Oh! Miss ‘Lizbeth! and you alone with him?”
“Yes, I was alone with him.”
She said this in a manner which seemed to imply that there was nothing
strange in the fact that she was alone with him. She was always alone
with him, was she not? Was it necessary that she open the doors and call
them all in because he was dying?
They passed from the narrow hall into the front room with its
green-paper window-shades, its worn carpet and meagre furniture. His
bed had been moved down from the floor above when his last illness had
seized him, and here it had remained, a black walnut bedstead, with
towering head-board, which shut out the light from one of the two
windows in the room. This bedstead had been one of his few, his very
few, extravagances in years gone by, and in its dark shadow he lay now
rigid. He had been a stern, grizzled man in life, but the sternness then
had been as very softness compared with the hard, cold outline of the
lace now upon the pillow in the green light of the lowered window-shade.
They moved about the room on tip-toe, speaking in the hissing whispers
considered appropriate by them in the presence of death.
“When did it happen?” some one asked.
“Half-hour ago.”
“Had n’t I better call the doctor or the minister?”
“I don’t see what good they’d be.”
Another woman crept in silently, a shawl huddled about her head.
“I jest heard,” she whispered.
They waited in silence for her to go on. She was the woman of the
village who always officiated at the “laying out” of their dead. The
reason for this no one had ever sought. Possibly the right was hers
because she so enjoyed the grewsome privilege. At least she clung to it
tenaciously.
“Now, Miss ‘Lizbeth, you jest go upstairs and I’ll tend to things,” she
said, while the other women awaited her commands, half resenting
her cool assumption of control, but with a full consciousness of her
capability in “tending” to such “things.”
The bare little church, with its white walls and staring windows, its
stiff pine pulpit painted a dingy yellow, with the minister’s green
upholstered chair behind it, was well-filled the day of the funeral. A
“burying” was not a thing to miss without grave cause. There were old
men and old women in the congregation who had not missed a funeral
within ten miles of them for fifty years. They sat solemnly waiting for
the minister to begin the services, taking close notice of the coffin
and calculating its cost. Not a difficult problem for them with their
long experience. They also noted closely the appearance of the one
mourner who sat directly in front of the pulpit, alone save for the
presence in her pew of the woman who had come to her huddled under a
shawl. This strange woman always sat with the mourners as though she
felt a claim upon the bodies of the dead until their final surrender to
mother earth. But the dead man’s daughter sat away from her companion
quite at the farthest end of the seat, as if she would be as much apart
from them all in her present loneliness as she had been before. It was
fifteen years since she had sat with them in the church, and they looked
at her now with curiosity. A slight little woman, with tired eyes and
dull brown hair streaked with gray!
The minister arose and folded upon the open Bible his lean hands with
their great veins and yellow joints. He prayed long and laboriously,
his voice rising from a doleful sing-song drawl into a shout and then
sinking into a whisper. They wagged their heads knowingly in the pews
and whispered to one another that it was a “pow’ful effort.” Toward the
close of his prayer many eyes were turned expectantly toward the woman
who sat alone. The minister was calling loudly for “the lost sheep who
is not with us safe in the shelta’ of Zion’s walls. O Lord!” he wailed,
“make yoh wahnin’ plain to her onseein’ eyes that she may seek safety
from the wrath to come.” If the woman heard or understood his words no
acknowledgment of that fact touched her thin face. She sat with folded
hands, her eyes upon the narrow front of the box like pulpit. Then the
minister began his sermon. From the earliest dawn of the dead man’s
life, through his childhood, youth, and manhood unto the last moment
of his old age the speaker journeyed, going unctuously over the dreary
details of the meagre, common history. They all knew it well enough,
but they listened greedily, jealously fearful that the speaker might
overlook a single incident in the man’s dull story. When he had
exhausted every period of his subject’s life, the minister began the
apotheosis of the man. His goodness, his charity, his uprightness, and,
above all, his “tireless labors in the vineyard of the Lord” were dwelt
upon. He had in truth been cruel and hard and mean. They all knew this,
but he had lived and died “a member in good standing,” and any other
treatment of his character by the preacher would have been a scandalous
thing, unheard of and not to be forgiven. At the close of his discourse
the minister turned his colorless eyes upon the woman who sat apart.
“There was,” he said, his voice falling into a slow and solemn drawl,
“there was one cross which our Lord and Master seen fit to bind upon the
shoulders of the brother who has jest gone befoh us into the glory of
the Heavenly Kingdum. A cross hard to bear, a cross whose liftin’ he had
wrestled for with the Lord Jesus often and mightily in prayer. But which
Divine Providence seen fit to allow to remain upon the shoulders of his
faithful son. It was, my brothers and sisters, the refusal of the only
one of his kin to accept the Lord, to wash herself in the blood of the
Lamb, to join with those who journey onward safe in the arms of Jesus
into the glory of everlastin, life.” His voice had risen into a shout.
“The night is comin’, the day is almost done. Oh! let us pray for them
who falters and will not turn from the wrath of God befoh it is too
late.” His voice sank suddenly into a whisper, and the words “too late”
went hissing out over the heads of the people who sat with craning necks
and knowing faces cruelly turned toward the woman, whose eyes for a
single instant had not left the front of the dingy yellow pulpit.
The hearse, with the one closed carriage of which the village boasted,
moved slowly away from the church along the muddy road, followed by a
straggling line of wagons. The majority of the people lingered about the
church door watching the woman who sat stiffly erect in the carriage,
the minister facing her, at her side the woman who seemed to have
so strange a love for the dead. This woman sat with her handkerchief
pressed to her eyes as if she must needs make amends for the other’s
stony composure.
The road, after leaving the village in the bottom lands along the
river, wound up the side of the bluff upon which the burying ground
was situated. It was an autumn day, and the golden haze of that most
glorious of seasons in the Missouri valley bathed the wide stretch of
country upon which the cemetery looked down. A sky of marvellous blue
spread its canopy above them, while the bright glow of the western sun
brought out in pitiless detail the dreary little home of the dead with
its crude tiptilted monuments and scattered, sunken graves, its rays
enfolding with no mellowing touch the group of sallow-faced men and
women in rusty and shapeless garb who clustered about the newly made
grave. They lifted their voices and sang quaveringly amid the strangely
death-like stillness of the declining day. It was a dismal tune in
plaintive minors, and as they dragged it out in unmusical and uncertain
tones it seemed a fitting symbol of their narrow, unlovely lives. When
the last clod of reddish clay had fallen upon the oblong mound, they
turned and walked away to leave their dead unnoticed until another
of the living should pass from the grimness of life into the--to
them--greater grimness of death.
As the procession crawled along the heavy road toward the cluster of
houses upon the river’s bank, the minister, his great hands resting upon
his knees, his pale eyes blinking solemnly, began:--
“E-eliz’beth, you are left alone now.” She nodded her head in
affirmation. “You haven’t much of this world’s goods.”
“I’ve kept two of us from starvin’ for five years. I reckon I can keep
myself,” she replied stiffly.
“Yoh father was well-fixed once, but the Lord seen fit to deprive him of
his earthly treasures that he might lay more store by them gifts which
is above earthly price.”
“He was a graspin’ man and over-reached himself.”
The woman beside her sniffed reproachfully and glanced at the minister
with sorrowful air. The man stirred uneasily and lifted a hand in
expostulation.
“A daughter shouldn’t jedge. If you was enlightened by the spirit you
would n’t be so lackin’ in Christian charity.”
She had endured much that long afternoon, and she raised her eyes now
defiantly.
“I’ve done my duty by him--I’ve done my duty for twenty years without
complainin’.”
“The pride of the onregenerate must be humbled,” returned the minister.
She vouchsafed no reply, and they went on in silence, the setting sun
touching with softened light her worn face and tired eyes.
The sun was low in the western sky when the two women reached the
small house, once white but now a dirty gray, with great yellow streaks
following the lines of the overlapping clapboards. The black waters of
the swiftly flowing river were flecked with red and gold under the level
rays of the sun, the rounded hills on the other side of the stream were
softly blue, toward the east a white fog was rising. A flock of wild
geese high in the gray-blue sky was flying swiftly southward, spread out
in a great straggling V. The mournful cry of their leader reached the
two women faintly, the flight of the wild geese was an unfailing sign of
approaching winter, and they watched the black lines of the flying fowls
until they vanished in the southern sky, their weird cry growing fainter
and sadder and finally dying away, leaving the swish of the river
against its muddy bank the only sound which troubled the quiet of the
autumn twilight. Two women with hushed voices and funereal faces waited
inside the dingy front room of the house.
“It was a right smart gathering,” said one of them.
“I never see a finer,” said the other.
“And the minister was mighty pow’ful,” ventured the third in mournful
tone.
They looked at the dead man’s daughter expectantly. Common decency
surely required some expression of gratified approval of the
congregation and the sermon. But she was folding her shawl carefully,
laying it upon the bed alongside her rusty bonnet. She seemed not to
have heard their voices. Then she sat stiffly by the window looking out
at the mud-clogged road.
“I hope you feel reconciled, Miss ‘Lizbeth,” one of the women began.