It was a splendid spring morning. There had been a shower overnight, and
the whole mountain world was aglitter. The dancing, rustling leaves of
the cottonwoods gleamed, the sparse grass of the parade ground was
shining like tiny bayonets, the flag threw out its bright stripes to the
breeze, and when the sun rays struck the visor of some forage cap, they
glinted off as though it had been a mirror. All the post chickens were
cackling and singing their droning monotonous song of contentment, the
tiny ones cheeped and twittered, and in among the vines of the porch
Felipa's mocking-bird whistled exultantly.
The sound shrilled sweetly through the house, through all the empty
rooms, and through the thick silence of that one which was not empty,
but where a flag was spread over a rough box of boards, and Ellton sat
by the window with a little black prayer-book in his hand. He was going
over the service for the burial of the dead, because there was no
chaplain, and it fell to him to read it. Now and then one of the
officers came in alone or with his wife and stood about aimlessly, then
went away again. But for the rest, the house was quite forsaken.
Felipa was not there. At the earliest, she could not return for a couple
of days, and by then Landor's body would be laid in the dreary little
graveyard, with its wooden headboards and crosses, and its neglected
graves among the coyote and snake holes. The life of the service would
be going on just as usual, after the little passing excitement was at an
end. For it was an excitement. No one in the garrison would have had it
end like this, but since what will be will be, and the right theory of
life is to make the most of what offers and to hasten--as the
philosopher has said--to laugh at all things for fear we may have cause
to weep, there was a certain expectation, decently kept down, in the
air.
It rose to a subdued pitch as there came the gradual rattling of wheels
and the slow tramp of many feet. A buckboard, from which the seats had
been removed, came up the line, and behind it marched the troops and
companies, Landor's own troop in advance. They halted in front of his
quarters, and four officers came down the steps with the long box
between them. The mocking-bird's trill died away to a questioning
twitter.
The box was laid in the buckboard, and covered with the flag once more.
Then the mules started, with a rattle of traces and of the wheels, and
the tramp of feet began again. The drums thrummed regularly and slowly,
the heart beats of the service, and the fifes took up the dead march in
a weird, shrill Banshee wail. They went down the line, the commandant
with the surgeon and the officers first, and after them the buckboard,
with its bright-draped burden. Then Landor's horse, covered with black
cloths, the empty saddle upon its back. It nosed at the pockets of the
man who led it. It had been taught to find sugar in pockets. And then
the troops, the cavalry with the yellow plumes of their helmets
drooping, and the infantry with the spikes glinting, marching with eyes
cast down and muskets reversed. A gap, then the soldiers' urchins from
the laundress row, in for anything that might be doing.
The roll of the drums and the whistle of the fifes died away in the
distance. There was a long silence, followed by three volleys of
musketry, the salute over the open grave. And then taps was pealed in
notes of brass up to the blue sky, a long farewell, a challenge
aforetime to the trumpet of the Last Day. They turned and came marching
back. The drums and fifes played "Yankee Doodle" in sarcastic relief.
The men walked briskly with their guns at carry arms, the black-draped
horse curved its neck and pranced until the empty stirrups danced. The
incident was over--closed. The post picked up its life and went on. Two
afternoons later the ambulance which had been sent for Felipa came into
the post. She stepped out from it in front of the Elltons' quarters so
majestic and awe-inspiring in her black garments that Mrs. Ellton was
fairly subdued. She felt real grief. It showed in her white face and the
nervous quiver of her lips. "I am going out to the graveyard," she told
Mrs. Ellton almost at once. Mrs. Ellton prepared to accompany her, but
she insisted that she was going alone, and did so, to the universal
consternation.
In the late afternoon the lonely dark figure crossed the open and
dropped down on the new grave, not in an agony of tears, but as if there
was some comfort to be gotten out of contact with the mere soil. The old
feeling of loneliness, which had always tinged her character with a
covert defiance, was overwhelming her. She belonged to no one now. She
had no people. She was an outcast from two races, feared of each because
of the other's blood. The most forsaken man or woman may claim at least
the kinship of his kind, but she had no kind. She crouched on the mound
and looked at the sunset as she had looked that evening years before,
but her eyes were not fearless now. As a trapped animal of the plains
might watch a prairie fire licking nearer and nearer, making its slow
way up to him in spurts of flame and in dull, thick clouds of smoke that
must stifle him before long, so she watched the dreary future rolling in
about her. But gradually the look changed to one farther away, and
alight with hope. She had realized that there was, after all, some one
to whom she belonged, some one to whom she could go and, for the first
time in her life, be loved and allowed to love.
It had not occurred to her for some hours after Mrs. Campbell had told
her of Landor's death that she was free now to give herself to Cairness.
She had gasped, indeed, when she did remember it, and had put the
thought away, angrily and self-reproachfully. But it returned now, and
she felt that she might cling to it. She had been grateful, and she had
been faithful, too. She remembered only that Landor had been kind to
her, and forgot that for the last two years she had borne with much
harsh coldness, and with a sort of contempt which she felt in her
unanalyzing mind to have been entirely unmerited. Gradually she raised
herself until she sat quite erect by the side of the mound, the old
exultation of her half-wild girlhood shining in her face as she planned
the future, which only a few minutes before had seemed so hopeless.
And when the retreat gun boomed in the distance, she stood up, shaking
the earth and grasses from her gown, and started to carry out her plans.
A storm was blowing up again. Clouds were massing in the sky, and night
was rising rather than the sun setting. There was a cold, greenish light
above the snow peak, and darkness crept up from the earth and down from
the gray clouds that banked upon the northern horizon and spread fast
across the heavens. A bleak, whining wind rustled the leaves of the big
trees down by the creek, and caught up the dust of the roadway in little
eddies and whirls, as Felipa, with a new purpose in her step, swung
along it back to the post.
She would not be induced to go near her own house that night. When
Ellton suggested it, she turned white and horrified. It had not occurred
to him before that a woman so fearless of everything in the known world
might be in abject terror of the unknown.
"It's her nature," he told his wife. "Underneath she is an Apache, and
they burn the wigwams and all the traps of their dead; sometimes even
the whole village he lived in." Mrs. Ellton said that poor Captain
Landor had had a good deal to endure.
The two children whom Felipa had taken in charge two years before had
been left in the care of the sergeant of Landor's troop and his wife,
and they manifested no particular pleasure at seeing her again. They
were half afraid of her, so severely black and tall and quiet. They had
been playing with the soldier's children, and were anxious to be away
again. The young of the human race are short of memory, and their
gratefulness does not endure for long. There is no caress so sweet, so
hard to win, as the touch of a child's soft hand, and none that has
behind it less of nearly all that we prize in affection. It is sincere
while it lasts, and no longer, and it must be bought either with a price
or with a wealth of love. You may lavish the best that is within you to
obtain a kiss from baby lips, and if they rest warm and moist upon your
cheek for a moment, the next they are more eager for a sweetmeat than
for all your adoration.
"Yes," whispered the little girl, squirming in Felipa's arms, "I am dlad
you's come. Let me doe."
"Kiss me," said Felipa.
The child brushed at her cheek and struggled away. "Come, Billy," she
called to the brother who had saved her life; and that small,
freckle-faced hero, whose nose was badly skinned from a fall, flung his
arms around his benefactress's neck perfunctorily and escaped,
rejoicing.
The Elltons' pretty child was like its mother, gentler and more
caressing. It lay placidly in her arms and patted her lips when she
tried to talk, with the tips of its rosy fingers. She caught them
between her teeth and mumbled them, and the child chuckled gleefully.
But by and by it was taken away to bed, and then Felipa was alone with
its father and mother. Through the tiresome evening she felt oppressed
and angrily nervous. The Elltons had always affected her so.
She asked for the full particulars of her husband's death, and when
Ellton had told her, sat looking straight before her at the wall. "It
was very like Jack," she said finally, in a low voice, "his whole life
was like that." And then she turned squarely to the lieutenant. "Where
is Mr. Cairness? Where did they take him?" She was surprised at herself
that she had not thought of that before.
He told her that he had gone on to Arizona, to Tombstone, he believed.
"By the way," he added, "did you hear that Brewster has married a rich
Jewish widow down in Tucson?"
"Yes, I heard it," she said indifferently. "Was Mr. Cairness really much
hurt?"
"Very much," said Ellton; "it was a sharp cut on the forehead--went
through the bone, and he was unconscious, off and on, for two or three
days. He seemed to take it hard. He went off yesterday, and he wasn't
fit to travel either, but he would do it for some reason. I think he was
worse cut up about Landor than anything, though he wasn't able to go to
the funeral. I like Cairness. He's an all-round decent fellow; but
after all, his life was bought too dear."
Felipa did not answer.
He did not try to discuss her plans for the future with her that night;
but two days afterward, when she had disposed of all her household goods
and had packed the few things that remained, they sat upon two boxes in
the bare hallway, resting; and he broached it.
"I am going to ask the quartermaster to store my things for the present,
and of course the first sergeant's wife will look out for the children,"
she said.
But that was not exactly what he wanted to know, and he insisted. "But
what is going to become of you? Are you going back to the Campbells?" He
had asked her to stay with his wife and himself as long as she would,
but she had refused.
"No," she said, "I told the Campbells I would not go to them."
And he could get nothing definite from her beyond that. It annoyed him,
of course; Felipa had a gift for repulsing kindness and friendship. It
was because she would not lie and could not evade. Therefore, she
preserved a silence that was, to say the least of it, exasperating to
the well-intentioned.
Early in the morning of the day she was to leave she went to the
graveyard alone again. She was beginning to realize more than she had at
first that Landor was quite gone. She missed him, in a way. He had been
a strong influence in her life, and there was a lack of the pressure
now. But despite the form of religion to which she clung, she had no
hope of meeting him in any future life, and no real wish to do so.
She stood by the mound for a little while thinking of him, of how well
he had lived and died, true to his standard of duty, absolutely true,
but lacking after all that spirit of love without which our actions
profit so little and die with our death. She had a clearer realization
of it than ever before. It came to her that Charles Cairness's life,
wandering, aimless, disjointed as it was, and her own, though it fell
far below even her own not impossibly high ideals, were to more purpose,
had in them more of the vital force of creation, were less wasted, than
his had been. To have known no enthusiasms--which are but love, in one
form or another--is to have failed to give that impulse to the course of
events which every man born into the world should hold himself bound to
give, as the human debt to the Eternal.
Felipa felt something of this, and it lessened the vague burden of
self-reproach she had been carrying. She was almost cheerful when she
got back to the post. Through the last breakfast, which the Elltons took
for granted must be a sad one, and conscientiously did their best to
make so, she had some difficulty in keeping down to their depression.
It was not until they all, from the commandant down to the recruits of
Landor's troop, came to say good-by that she felt the straining and
cutting of the strong tie of the service, which never quite breaks
though it be stretched over rough and long years and almost forgotten.
The post blacksmith to whom she had been kind during an illness, the
forlorn sickly little laundress whose baby she had eased in dying, the
baker to whose motherless child she had been good--all came crowding up
the steps. They were sincerely sorry to have her go. She had been
generous and possessed of that charity which is more than faith or hope.
It was the good-bys of Landor's men that were the hardest for her. He
had been proud of his troop, and it had been devoted to him. She broke
down utterly and cried when it came to them, and tears were as hard for
her as for a man. But with the officers and their women, it rose up
between her and them that they would so shortly despise and condemn her,
that they would not touch her hands could they but know her thoughts.
Ellton was going with her to the railroad. They were to travel with a
mounted escort, as she had come, on account of the uncertain state of
the country. And they must cross, as she had done in coming also, the
road over the malpais, where Landor had fallen. As the hoofs of the
mules and the tires of the wheels began to slip and screech on the
smooth-worn lava, and the ambulance rattled and creaked up the incline,
Ellton leaned forward and pointed silently to a hollow in the gray rock
a few yards away. It was where Landor had pitched forward over the body
of the mounted chief of scouts. Felipa nodded gravely, but she did not
speak, nor yet weep. Ellton, already thrown back upon himself by her
persistent silence with regard to her intentions, recoiled even more.
He thought her hard beyond all his previous experience of women.
"I will write to you where you are to send my mail," she told him, when
the train was about to pull out. He bowed stiffly, and raising his hat
was gone. She looked after him as he went across the cinder bed to the
ambulance which was to take him back, and wondered what would have been
the look upon his nice, open face, if she had told him her plans, after
all. But she was the only one who knew them.
And Cairness himself was startled and utterly unprepared when the
Reverend Taylor opened the door of the room where he lay and let her
pass in. The little parson uttered no word, but there was a look on his
face which said that now the questions he had put with no result were
answered. It was for this that Cairness had given the best of his life.
Cairness lay white and still, looking up at her. He was very weak and
dazed, and for the instant he could only remember, absurdly enough, the
Andromaque he had seen a French actress play once in his very early
youth when he had been taken with all the children of the Lycée, where
he was then at school, to the theatre on a Thursday afternoon. The
Andromaque had been tall and dark and superb, and all in black, like
that woman in the doorway there.
And then his thoughts shot back to the present with quick pain. She
should not have come here, not so soon. He had taken a long, hard trip
that had nearly ended in his death, to avoid this very thing, this
meeting, which, just because it made him so terribly happy, seemed a
treachery, a sacrilege. Had she less delicacy of feeling than himself?
Or had she more love? It was that, he saw it in her beautiful eyes which
were growing wide and frightened at his silence. He took his hand from
under the sheets and stretched it out to her. She went to him and
dropped on her knees beside the bed, and threw her arms about him. He
moved his weak head closer to her shoulder, and pressing her fingers to
his face gave a choking sob. He was happy, so very happy. And nothing
mattered but just this.