ON THE WAY
It was an October afternoon.
The first frosts had fallen, and where, a few short days before, the
goldenrod had shed its autumn glory, it now stood sere and earth-bent.
The late asters had lost their color and the wind-blown tendrils of
summer vines were but stiff spirals, clinging to the sumacs like
skeletons of their former graceful selves.
In the Concord burying-plot all was gray and brown and restful. From
the forest of oak and hickory on the one side the leaves had fallen,
and lay cradled about the grave and strewn over the grassy slope that
led to the little stream where willows held out their slender arms,
nude, save for here and there a pale and trembling leaf.
A haze hung over the distant fields which seemed to permeate the
near-by woods, giving a tint of filmy softness even to the shadows
gathering between the somber tree trunks.
There seemed no living thing about when a man, himself tall and somber
as the trees through which he walked, came to the place of graves, and
going to one of them fell beside it crying: "Ann! Ann!"
A moment he knelt, speaking the name before he threw himself
full-length with his face upon the sod. Whether he were praying there
or weeping or struggling for the grace of resignation, none might know,
for no sound came from his lips.
It was not until the sun had dropped behind the tree-top that he
arose. Yet a little time he tarried. Then he went into the edge of the
wood and stood with his sad, gray eyes turned to the little mound of
earth. As the shadows lengthened, reaching out from the forest toward
the grave as if to gather it in, they seemed to bind him in also with
the elemental things about him, things rugged, resigned, patient and
eternal.
A passing breeze stirred the dead leaves into music like the plaint
murmur of some long-forgotten sea, and back in the dusk a lone bird
piped, sending onto the stillness a message from the vague and
shoreless bounds of some eternal place.
"Out of the depths fresh strength; out of the dark, new light; and even
in the gloom we are on the way."
The somber man in the gathering shadows lifted his eyes from the low
mound to a cloud-bank rimmed with silver. The mask of sorrow seemed
suddenly to have softened. A faint smile lit his face as he said
reverently, "Soul of Ann Rutledge--yes, I _believe_."
A bird darted out of the shadows and disappeared in the gray and fading
sky.
The man turned and started on his way, like the lone bird, he knew not
whither.