Twilight had three times descended on the drear land. Three times
Gabriella, standing at her windows and looking out upon the snow and
ice, had seen everything disappear. How softly white were the
snow-covered trees; how soft the black that thickened about them till
they were effaced. Gabriella thought of them as still perfectly white
out there in the darkness. Three evenings with her face against the
pane she had watched for a familiar figure to stalk towering up the
yard path, and no familiar figure had come. Three evenings she had
returned to her firelight, and sat before it with an ear on guard for
the sound of a familiar step on the porch below; but no step had been
heard.
On the first night she had all but hoped that he would not seek her;
the avowal of their love for each other had well-nigh left it an
unendurable joy. But the second night she had begun to expect him
confidently; and when the hour had passed and he had not come,
Gabriella sat long before her fire with a new wound--she who had felt
so many. By the third day she had reviewed all that she had ever heard
of him or known of him: gathered it all afresh as a beautiful thing for
receiving him with when he should come to her that night. Going early
to her room she had taken her chair to the window and with her face
close to the pane had watched again--watched that white yard; and again
nothing moved in that white yard but the darkness.
She sprang up and began to walk to and fro.
"If he does not come to-night, something has happened. I know, I know,
I know! Something is wrong. My heart is not mistaken. Oh, if anything
were to happen to HIM! I must not think of it! I have borne many
things; but THAT! I must not think of it!"
She sank into her chair with her ear strained toward the porch below.
For a long time there was no sound. Then she heard the noise of heavy
boots--a tapping of the toes against the pillars, to knock off the
snow, and then the slow creaking of soles across the frozen boards. She
started up. "It is some one else," she cried, wringing her hands.
"Something has happened to him."
She stopped still in the middle of the room, her arms dropped at her
sides, her eyes stretched wide.
The house girl's steps were heard running upstairs. Gabriella jerked
the door open in her face.
"What is the matter?" she cried.
A negro man had come with a message for her. The girl looked frightened.
Gabriella ran past her down into the hall. "What is the matter?" she
asked.
His Marse David had sent for her and wanted her to come at once. He had
brought a horse for her.
"Is he ill--seriously ill?" He had had a bad cold and was worse.
"The doctor--has he sent for the doctor?"
The negro said that he was to take her back first and then go for the
doctor.
"Go at once."
It was very dark, he urged, and slippery.
"Go on for the doctor! Where have you left the horse?"
The horse was at the stiles. The negro insisted that it would be better
for him to go back with her.
"Don't lose time," she said, "and don't keep me waiting. Go! as quickly
as you can!"
The negro cautioned her to dismount at the frozen creek.
When Gabriella, perhaps an hour later, knocked at the side door of
David's home,--his father's and mother's room,--there was no summons to
enter. She turned the knob and walked in. The room was empty; the fire
had burned low; a cat lay on the hearthstones. It raised its head
halfway and looked at her through the narrow slits of its yellow eyes
and curled the tip of its tail--the cat which is never inconvenienced,
which shares all comforts and no troubles. She sat down in a chair,
overcome with excitement and hesitating what to do. In a moment she
noticed that the door opening on the foot of the staircase stood ajar.
It led to his room. Not a sound reached her from above. She summoned
all her self-control, mounted the stairway, and entered.
The two negro women were standing inside with their backs to the door.
On one side of the bed sat David's mother, on the other his father.
Both were looking at David. He lay in the middle of the bed, his eyes
fixed restlessly on the door. As soon as he saw her, he lifted himself
with an effort and stretched out his arms and shook them at her with
hoarse little cries. "Oh! oh! oh! oh!"
The next moment he locked his arms about her.
"Oh, it has been so long!" he said, drawing her close, "so long!"
"Ah, why did you not send for me? I have waited and waited."
He released her and fell back upon the pillows; then with a slight
gesture he said to his father and mother:--
"Will you leave us alone?"
When they had gone out, he took one of her hands and pressed it against
his cheek and lay looking at her piteously.
Gabriella saw the change in him: his anxious expression, his cheeks
flushed with a red spot, his restlessness, his hand burning. She could
feel the big veins throbbing too fast, too crowded. But a woman smiles
while her heart breaks.
He propped himself a little higher on the pillows and turned on his
side, clutching at his lung.
"Don't be frightened," he said, searching her face, "I've got something
to tell you. Promise."
"I promise."
"I am going to have pneumonia, or I have it now. You are not
frightened?"
Her eyes answered for her.
"I had a cold. I had taken something to throw me into a sweat--that was
the night after I saw you."
At the thought of their last interview, he took her hand again and
pressed it to his lips, looking tenderly at it.
"The dogs were killing the sheep, and I got up and went out while I was
in a perspiration. I know it's pneumonia. I have had a long, hard
chill. My head feels like it would burst, and there are other symptoms.
This lung! It's pneumonia. One of the Bible college students had it. I
helped to nurse him. Oh, he got well," he said, shaking his head at her
with a smile, "and so will I!"
"I know it," she murmured, "I'm sure of it."
"What I want to ask is, Will you stay with me?"
"Ah, nothing could take me from you."
"I don't want you to leave me. I want to feel that you are right here
by me through it all. I have to tell you something else: I may be
delirious and not know what is going on. I have sent for the doctor.
But there is a better one in Lexington. You try to get him to come. I
know that he goes wherever he is called and stays till the danger is
past or--or--till it is settled. Don't spare anything that can be done
for me. I am in danger, and I must live. I must not lose all the
greatness of life and lose you."
"Ah," she implored, seeing how ill he was. "Everything that can be done
shall be done. Now oughtn't you to be quiet and let me make you
comfortable till the doctor comes?"
"I must say something else while I can, and am sure. I might not get
over this--"
"Ah--"
"Let me say this: I MIGHT not! If I should not, have no fear about the
future; I have none; it will all be well with ME in Eternity."
He lay quiet a moment, his face turned off. She had buried hers on the
bed. The flood of tears would come. He turned over, and seeing it laid
his hand on it very lightly.
"If it be so, Gabriella, I hope all the rest of your life you will be
happy. I hope no more trouble will ever come to you."
Suddenly he sat up, lifted her head, and threw his arms around her
again. "Oh, Gabriella!" he cried, "you have been all there is to me."
"Some day," he continued a moment later, "if it turns out that way,
come over here to see my father and mother. And tell them I left word
that perhaps they had never quite understood me and so had never been
able to do me justice. Now, will you call my mother?"
"Mother," he said, taking her by the hand and placing it in
Gabriella's, "this is my wife, as I hope she will be, and your
daughter; and I have asked her to stay and help you to nurse me through
this cold."
Three twilights more and there was a scene in the little upper room of
the farmhouse: David drawn up on the bed; at one side of it, the poor
distracted mother, rocking herself and loudly weeping; for though
mothers may not greatly have loved their grown sons, when the big men
lie stricken and the mothers once more take their hands to wash them,
bathe their faces with a cloth, put a spoon to their lips, memory
brings back the days when those huge erring bodies lay across their
breasts. They weep for the infant, now an infant again and perhaps
falling into a long sleep.
On the other side of the bed sat David's father, bending over toward,
trying now, as he had so often tried, to reach his son; thinking at
swift turns of the different will he would have to make and of who
would write it; of his own harshness; and also not free from the awful
dread that this was the summons to his son to enter Eternity with his
soul unprepared. At the foot of the bed were the two doctors, watchful,
whispering to each other, one of whom led the mother out of the room;
over by the door the two negro women and the negro man. Gabriella was
not there.
Gabriella had gone once more to where she had been many times: gone to
pour out in secret the prayer of her church, and of her own soul for
the sick--with faith that her prayer would be answered.
A dark hour: a dog howling on the porch below; at the stable the cries
of hungry, neglected animals; the winter hush settling over the great
evening land.