AN END AND A BEGINNING
The three “Clover Leaves” will never, never forget their last year at
the little old academy. The square, white tower with its peremptory,
sweet-toned bell that dominated their waking hours and all but ruled
their dreams; the arm-in-arm saunter from school through autumn’s mellow
haze, or gay exchange of greetings on the crisp winter air; the stiff
portions of Latin and French and mathematics sweetened with girlish mirth
and nonsense; the Senior dance and the Senior play and all the new-made
dignities of that momentous year—these still haunt the charmed halls of
memory, among the sweetest ghosts of life’s phantom past.
And with it all, with all the modest ambitions and the innocent vanities,
there was mingled many a longing or an anxious thought of “what next”—of
the real problems that lay beyond that mysterious closed door.
For most of the boys the next thing was work—just plain, every-day
work on the farm or in the shop; for a few, both boys and girls, it
was college or normal, and then school-teaching or another profession.
Doris and her mother had no thought but of the dear home duties and the
small social triumphs that beckoned so plainly, when the pretty, only
daughter should have “finished her education.” But Cynthia and Stella
were of a different mold, and they passed many a happy hour in sharing
their confidences and their dreams, which ranged all the way from that
ranch in Dakota on Stella’s allotment, which they were to run together,
riding their own range triumphantly in the approved cow-girl fashion, to
the glorious vision of Stella as a famous doctor and Cynthia as a great
artist.
The modest business in herbs and simples had led its votary to pursue
her botany a little further, and make a special study of medicinal
plants. She was often discovered hidden away in a corner of Doctor
Brown’s office, eagerly comparing “Gray” with the “Materia Medica;”
and she found, too, that Grandma Brown was more than ready to impart
the neglected virtues of mullein and catnip, dock and sassafras, some
of which Stella tested by personal experiment, while the girls began
teasingly to call her the “Yarb-Doctor.”
Doctor Brown secretly believed nothing beyond the capacity of his
favorite, but he conscientiously meant not to encourage ambitions that
it might be impossible to realize.
“Those hands of Stella’s,” he impulsively remarked one day, when her
future was under discussion, letting his sage eyes rest meditatively upon
the long, supple, sensitive members—“well, they do say such hands can
only belong to a doctor or a musician.”
“Or a mother,” unexpectedly murmured his wife.
He gave her a quick, approving look, and again the warm blood glowed in
the Indian girl’s dark cheek. She suddenly remembered how Ethan had been
telling her of his plans to study medicine the next year, and how she had
listened with all her heart in her face, and at last cried out without
thinking:
“Oh, I wish, _how_ I wish I could be a doctor, too!”
She remembered vividly the peculiar look in his eyes as he gently
answered:
“I could wish it too—unless—unless you were meant for something even
better, Stella.”
And she had not understood at all.
* * * * *
Before the March sun began to melt the snow-drifts, Stella’s friends
got together privately and laid their plans to present her with her
Commencement Day outfit. She had worn all winter the trim suit and modest
hat purchased with her summer’s work in the fields, after the rows of
drying shelves in Miss Sophia’s garret had been cleared of their aromatic
burden. And oddly charming she looked in them—like a symphony in browns,
with her gleaming agate skin and the intense black of hair and eyes for
contrast. But the “weed money” was all gone, and there was no time for
extra earning that last, busy year. Surely she could not be so wickedly
proud as to reject an offering of true love.
Mr. Parker insisted upon purchasing the dress—a duplicate of Cynthia’s.
It was fine handkerchief linen, and Mrs. Brown, who made all Doris’
clothes, would make it up simply and beautifully, while Doris devoted
all her spare minutes for weeks to certain individual touches of hand
embroidery. Cynthia recklessly squandered a whole month’s pocket-money on
the long, white suede gloves, and Grandma Brown unearthed from among her
girlhood’s treasures a sandal-wood fan of delicious memory.
Doctor Brown brought home one day a small watch cased in gun-metal with
Stella’s name on it, and Miss Morrison, who had gone back to the city to
teach, sent a long, curiously wrought gun-metal chain.
But the most surprising contributions came from Uncle Si Wolcott and Miss
Sophia. Uncle Si actually “hitched up” and drove to Westwood for the
finest pair of bronze slippers and bronze silk stockings to be bought
with money. Miss Sophia had tatted a handkerchief, but being impressed at
the last minute with the apparent meanness of her offering as compared
with the others, she unlocked a certain bureau drawer and took from it
a quaint comb of carved ivory, fetched home from China by a seafaring
ancestor, which gave the crowning touch to Stella’s strange beauty, set
in the swirling masses of her blue-black hair.
The girl laughed and cried when she saw them, forgetting for once all
her Indian stoicism, and stroked the lovely frock with reverent fingers,
saying softly:
“Do you know, dears, I can _love_ these clothes!”
* * * * *
There was one more gift, that came by mail on the very day of fate
itself. It was a box just long enough to hold the diploma, the
sandal-wood fan, the ivory comb, and any treasures worthy a place with
these. It was cunningly made by hand out of fragrant, warm-hearted
cedar-wood, fitted with a tiny lock and key, and decorated with a knife
in conventionalized designs, chief of which was the recurring device of
a five-pointed star. Doris and Cynthia were the only ones privileged to
admire Ethan’s gift.
Next to the bride in the affections of rural New England stands the fair
girl graduate, and that June day in Laurel was apparently quite given
over to the triumphant parade of simple-hearted youth. In many a modest
home, solicitous mothers were robing and adorning their daughters as if
for the altar itself, and that evening in the town hall it seemed as if
every soul in the village, old and young, rich and poor, must be pressing
into a seat or peering curiously in at open door or window.
And now the orchestra struck up and the platform began to fill—that
platform fluttering with banners and banked with the dark-green, glossy
leaves and rosy chalices of the mountain laurel that gave the village its
name. Pete Holley, a strapping youth of color, and star of the football
team, took his place with dignity. Mary Maloney, the washer-woman’s
daughter, more elaborately dressed than most, sat happily in the front
row next to demure Doris, whose piano solo made a pleasing variation in
the programme.
Stella, too, had a “part”—she and Rosey Bernstein led their class;
and those who saw her on that day of days will long remember the tall,
swaying figure, the gliding step, the vivid, dark face with its touch of
foreign distinction among the rosy village girls, and most of all the
tender, rhythmic tones that rang so true in her touching farewell to
school days and to the comrades of that golden time.
For Yellow Star had made her difficult decision—to go back to her own
people and do for them what she could. There had come, in the early
spring, a cry for help—another dingy scrawl in scarce legible Dakota
from the Indian camp on Cherry Creek. Blue Earth had a “bad heart;”
her husband, Young Eagle, had left her and gone across the Big Water
with the show; she had a baby girl now, and the boy was five years
old. She wanted them to “walk the white man’s road,” and she wanted
The-One-who-was-left-Alive to come and live with her, and teach her how
to teach her children. There were many women in the camp, she said, who
needed such help.
After a sleepless night with the letter under her pillow, the girl had
shown it to her friends and asked their advice. In her heart, she knew
that there was only one answer possible, and they read her decision in
her face. Of course, Doris and Cynthia cried a little, and squeezed
her hands, and begged her “not to give up her plans, darling;” while
Miss Sophia held her peace with remarkable consistency and success. But
Doctor Brown promptly hunted up Mr. Parker, and the two had an important
conference.
“I can see she means to go, and it may be the best thing to do, for a
time, at any rate,” the Doctor admitted, gruffly. “But there’s just one
thing about it; that girl is not going into an Indian camp without
position or backing. She’s too handsome, for one thing; and too young and
trusting altogether. Young as she is, Stella is competent to fill a good
place in the Government Indian Service, and that she must have!”
“I’ve been telling my wife I’d like nothing better than to send the girl
through college, if she wants to go,” demurred Mr. Parker. “I think she
could persuade my girl to go with her—there or anywhere! Say, Doc! are
you dead sure she ought to butt in amongst a lot of half-savage Sioux—a
girl who would make a place for herself in any community?”
“I don’t know much about the American Indian, but judging from our
Stella, there must be good stuff in the breed,” answered the Doctor,
stanchly. “She’d make a magnificent nurse—doctor, perhaps; but she’s too
young to begin training yet awhile. Better let her try it out west for a
year or two; she will, anyway; she’s made up her mind, and you know what
that means. What I came over to ask you is have you any wires to pull
that’ll land our little girl in the Indian Service? What?”
“Sure,” assented Mr. Parker, heartily. “There’s Senator Morton; he’ll do
anything for me—within reason, of course. We’ll fix it up in no time.”
When Stella herself was cautiously consulted, a fortnight later, she
declared that she did not know enough to teach and would rather not take
a school position. She wanted to live right in the camp, she said, close
to the people; to help the poor, ignorant women and children, like Blue
Earth and her babies.
“Then you want to be a field matron,” pronounced the Doctor, who had been
studying the subject. “Six hundred a year and the right to draw on the
agency for supplies—soap and buckets and rations for sick people and all
that. The work just what you would be doing anyway, and the whole United
States Government back of you. That’s the talk.”
And so it came about that our eighteen-year-old Indian girl delivered her
valedictory with her appointment as field matron at Cherry Creek pinned
inside her white frock, right over the loving heart that beat high with
the hope of service.