When one sets out to walk daily across a wood or field in a fresh
direction, starting always at the same point and arriving always at the
same, without intention one makes a path; it may be long first, but in
time the path will come. It commences at the home gate or bars and
reaches forward by degrees; it commences at the opposite goal and
lengthens backward thence: some day the ends meet and we discover with
surprise how slightly we have deviated in all those crossings and
recrossings. The mind has unconsciously marked a path long before the
feet have traced it.
When Gabriella had begun teaching, she passed daily out of the yard
into an apple orchard and thence across a large woodland pasture, in
the remote corner of which the schoolhouse was situated. Through this
woods the children had made their path: the straight instinctive path
of childhood. But Gabriella, leaving this at the woods-gate, had begun
to make one for herself. She followed her will from day to day; now led
in this direction by some better vista; now drawn aside toward a group
of finer trees; or seeing, farther on, some little nooklike place. In
time, she had out of short disjointed threads sown a continuous path;
it was made up of her loves, and she loved it. Of mornings a brisk walk
along this braced her mind for the day; in the evening it quieted
jangled nerves and revived a worn-out spirit: shedding her toil at the
schoolhouse door as a heavy suffocating garment, she stepped gratefully
out into its largeness, its woodland odors, and twilight peace.
On the night of the sleet tons of timber altogether had descended
across this by-way. When the snow fell the next night, it brought down
more. But the snow melted, leaving the ice; the ice melted, leaving the
dripping boughs and bark. In time these were warmed and dried by sun
and wind. New edges of greenness appeared running along the path. The
tree-tops above were tossing and roaring in the wild gales of March,
Under loose autumn leaves the earliest violets were dim with blue. But
Gabriella had never once been there to realize how her path had been
ruined, or to note the birth of spring.
It was perhaps a month afterward that one morning at the usual school
hour her tall lithe figure, clad in gray hood and cloak, appeared at
last walking along this path, stepping over or passing around the
fallen boughs. She was pale and thin, but the sweet warm womanliness of
her, if possible, lovelier. There was a look of religious gratitude in
the eyes, but about her mouth new happiness.
Her duties were done earlier than usual that afternoon, for not much
could be accomplished on this first day of reassembling the children.
They were gone; and she stood on the steps of the school-house, facing
toward a gray field on a distant hillside, which caught the faint
sunshine. It drew her irresistibly in heart and foot, and she set out
toward it.
The day was one of those on which the seasons meet. Strips of snow
ermined the field; but on the stumps, wandering and warbling before
Gabriella as she advanced, were bluebirds, those wings of the sky,
those breasts of earth. She reached the spot she was seeking, and
paused. There it was--the whole pitiful scene! His hemp brake; the
charred rind of a stump where he had kindled a fire to warm his hands;
the remnant of the shock fallen over and left unfinished that last
afternoon; trailing across his brake a handful of hemp partly broken
out.
She surveyed it all with wistful tenderness. Then she looked away to
the house. She could see the window of his room at which she had sat
how many days, gazing out toward this field! On his bed in that room he
was now stretched weak and white, but struggling back into health.
She came closer and gazed down at his frozen boot prints. How near his
feet had drawn to that long colder path which would have carried him
away from her. How nearly had his young life been left, like the hand
of hemp he last had handled--half broken out, not yet ready for strong
use and good service. At that moment one scene rose before her memory:
a day at Bethlehem nigh Jerusalem; a young Hebrew girl issuing from her
stricken house and hastening to meet Him who was the Resurrection and
the Life; then in her despair uttering her one cry:--"Lord, if Thou
hadst been here, my brother had not died."
The mist of tears blinded Gabriella, whose love and faith were as
Martha's. She knelt down and laid her cheek against the coarse hemp
where it had been wrapped about his wrist.
"Lord," she said, "hadst Thou not been here, hadst Thou not heard my
prayer for him, he would have died!"