SUDDENLY it dawned upon them that they loved one another. They had been talking about mind-reading, and he had looked long and steadily into her eyes when she had challenged him to read her thoughts. They realized simultaneously what had happened. She had known that she loved him, and he, that he loved her. But each had sought to keep that knowledge from the other. Now they could hide it no longer.
They remained silent for a long time, avoiding each other’s gaze. At last their eyes met.
He said, “Well?” His voice expressed nothing; in his eyes there was sorrow and—hope!
She shook her head, and he turned away his eyes; there was disappointment in them that he would not show. Then she said, very quietly, “You have read my thoughts?”
“Yes,” he said, still without looking at her; “and you—”
“I have read yours.”
Tears were in her eyes. If his, too, were wet, she could not see, for he was looking fixedly at a little pebble at her feet. At last he said, passionately, “Oh, why did I meet you! Why should I suffer so?”
“And I?” she said. “Is it not worse for me? Is not my sin greater, and therefore my punishment heavier, than yours? Oh,”—in answer to an impatient gesture of denial,—“you will meet some woman whom it will not be a sin to love, and you will—”
“You know I will not,” he interrupted.
“Yes, you will,” she said, very gently; “and then—”
He raised his head and gazed steadily at her. Then he said, challengingly, “You wish me to love another?”
She looked away from him and was silent. Gradually there crept into his eyes a look of hope; and hope was slowly turning into exultation when she spoke, so softly that he barely could hear her, “Yes.”
Then he said, altogether too calmly, in too commonplace a manner, “Oh, very well, since you wish it—”
And she said, very firmly, “I wish it!”
Slowly they returned to the house. The sun was setting, and there was gold and nacre and glowing blood in the sky. In the garden the wind stirred the leaves gently, and there was sorrow in their song.
Her husband awaited them. “Is n’t it a beautiful sunset?” he said to them from the piazza. “I suppose you’ve been looking at it. You might write a sonnet about it, my boy.”
She went up to the gray-haired man and kissed him on the lips, and leaned against him, until he wound his arm about her waist, and she rested her head on his shoulder caressingly; and then she looked defiantly at the young man, who had drawn near.
The young man’s hands closed tightly, and in his eyes there was disappointment and anger and some contempt. “Yes, John, I believe Icouldwrite a few elegies on the death of this Sun, who has shed his blood in his fight with Night, and has spattered it all over the sky, so that the angels will have to wash it off with their tears. Sunsets are my forte, anyway—”
“I have never seen any of your verses,” she said.
“Then you may congratulate yourself upon your lucky escape.”
The gray-haired man smiled good-naturedly and patted her cheek; and she held it up to be kissed, and nestled closer to him. Then she looked at the young man, and in her eyes there was still defiance, and, though she would not have shown it, some interest. She said, “I have heard so much about them that I should like to read them.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You are reckless.” And the bantering tone did not hide from her the significance that lay behind his words.
“You must show some of them to her,” said the gray-haired man to him.
“All right. I’ll hunt them up, some time, and send them to you,” said the young man to her.
“Have n’t you any here?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied; “but they are all love songs, and therefore not worth the reading.”
“Indeed!” she said. The gray-haired man patted her cheek indulgently. This time she did not upturn her face for a kiss. And in her voice there was an unnecessary indifference as she said to the young man, “Will you let me read them to-night?”
“Oh, no,” he replied, laughingly, though his eyes were serious.
“Why not?” she persisted.
“In the first place, because they are not worth anything; and then you might get an impression that I really meant what I wrote, and that I am deeply in love with some one.”
“And you are not in love?” There was a challenge in her voice. The gray-haired man smiled at her girlish, artless curiosity.
“Certainly not!” the young man said decidedly.
“But were you in love when you wrote them?”
“I really don’t know,” he answered. “Perhaps I was.”
“Well,Iam,” she said, looking at him steadily. And when his eyes had shown astonishment and had begun to shine with irrepressible hope, she continued: “Indeed I am,—with my own dearest husband, who is so good to me. Am I not, darling?” And she entwined her arms about the gray-haired man’s neck and kissed him on the lips twice. And the gray-haired man laughed and looked pleased.
The young man’s face was rigid and very pale. In the dusk they could not see that his lips were twitching. But she had grown strangely quiet.
A great stillness had fallen upon the world. The evening star was shining very brightly now, and in the east a little lone star was blinking tremulously.
Presently she said, “I am afraid,” and shivered.
The gray-haired man drew her closer to him, kissed her, and said: “Afraid of what, little coward? But come, it is time to go in, my child.”
The young man’s thoughts had been many during the brief spell of silence that had preceded her words, and now he said: “Yes,little sister, you ought to go in now.”
The gray-haired man laughed good-naturedly at this jest of his young brother’s. But she drew a quick breath and went into the house hurriedly.
The gray-haired man was nodding over his newspaper in the library. She had just ceased to hold the latest novel upside down in her hands. She hesitated for a moment; then she arose, saying: “It is so warm here; I am going on the piazza.”
The gray-haired man started. “What ‘s that, my dear?” he asked, shamefacedly. He feared that she might think he had been asleep. They had been married but four months.
“I am going to sit on the piazza; it’s cooler,” she said.
“Is Dick there?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. But don’t stay too long; the night air is not good for you.” It certainly was not good for him, so he remained in the library nodding over his newspaper.
She went to the piazza. Sitting on the veranda-rail, the young man was smoking. At the sound of her steps he started up eagerly; but when she was near him, his eyes showed nothing, his face was calm.
“A beautiful night, is n’t it?” said she.
“Yes,” he acquiesced. He stifled a yawn ostentatiously. Then, as though the thought had just struck him, “Shall I fetch you a chair?”
“Oh, no, thanks; I am going upstairs shortly,” she said, with indifference.
“Shall I fetch you a chair?” This in another tone.
“Yes,” she answered.
He did so, and then resumed his seat on the veranda and smoked in silence.
Overhead, the sky was as molten sapphire and the stars seemed more numerous than ever before, and brighter and nearer to the earth.
“Lovely, is n’t it?” she said at last.
“What is?”
“The sky, of course.”
“Yes.”
After a silence she said: “I’ve never seen so many stars before; have you?”
“Yes,” he said, slowly, “there was one more last night,—mine!”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
There was another pause,—a long one. She was looking at a little star that was shining very faintly low in the sky. Finally she said, softly, “Show me your verses.”
“I cannot,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“Why not?” She avoided his gaze.
“You know very well,” he answered.
“But if I ask you as a great favor—”
“I should still refuse,” he said, wearily.
“You are very rude.”
“And you are very cruel,” he returned, monotonously.
“But not so cruel as you,—to arouse a woman’s curiosity, and then to refuse, absolutely, to gratify it!”
“Oh, so it is merely curiosity?” His voice trembled slightly.
She hesitated; her foot was tapping on the ground nervously. Then, as if she had weighed the consequences, she said: “Of course, merely curiosity.”
“Then you lied this afternoon, and you are only a coquette? I might have known it!” He spoke with difficulty for his teeth were clinched tightly.
“How dare you speak to me so?” she said, angrily.
And then he answered in a low voice, as if fearful of being overheard: “And how dare you forget that you are my brother’s wife?”
She gave a half-smothered cry of pain, as though he had struck her. Then she buried her head in her hands and sobbed softly.
“Don’t!—Please don’t—Oh, don’t—Gladys—” he said. It was the first time he had called her thus, by name, and she said, between her sobs: “Oh, I am so unhappy, so unhappy!”
She raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were filled with tears. He went toward her hesitatingly. By her side he paused; his hands were clinched and held close to his face. He said hoarsely: “Don’t. Don’t make—me—forget—” He drew nearer; she held up her arms as if to ward off a blow, and then the gray-haired man’s voice called out sleepily from a window on the other side of the cottage: “Gladys! Dick!”
“Yes?” said the young man.
“You had better come in now.”
“Yes. Coming.”
At breakfast the next morning the young man said: “I am going back to the city this morning, John.”
“Are you? When will you return?” said the gray-haired man. He did not think his honeymoon had waned yet; but it never shines very brightly on three people at once, and—
“I don’t know,” answered the young man. “I shall go to Jack Livingston’s first; I promised to spend a week or two with him. And then I think I’ll go to Maine. I am told the fishing is exceptionally good this season.”
She said nothing. The gray-haired man began to talk about the anxious cares of a floriculturist.
After breakfast she disappeared. The gray-haired man said good-bye to his younger brother, to whom he had been as a father, and went out to consult with his head gardener about a new variety of orchids which he had just received from the Isthmus of Panama.
All that morning the young man wondered if she would not bid him farewell. At last the groom came to tell him that the cart awaited him.
He was in the hallway, deliberating whether he should seek her, when she came down the stairs slowly. Her face wore a look it had never known before. Occasionally it is seen on some women when they wear the widow’s garb for the first time,—a blending of sorrow and yearning, and, withal, resignation. She halted at the foot of the stairs, her hand resting upon the carved post. “So you are going?” she said, monotonously.
“Yes.” His voice was low.
“For a long time?”
“Yes.” He dared not look at her.
“It is for the best,” she said. He answered nothing.
The groom came to the door and said: “I beg your pardon, sir, but the train is due now, sir.”
“Very well, I’m coming.”
She gave two sharp little indrawn gasps. Then, speaking very quickly, she said: “Wear this. My mother gave it to me when I was confirmed. When she died I took it off because it reminded me of her and it made me cry. It is sacred to me. It is all I can give you. I am sure she would not blame me—” She paused and looked at him questioningly.
“No,” he answered, reverently.
“Take it!” She held a little ring, a plain gold band, toward him, and he took it and with some difficulty placed it on his little finger.
“Good-bye!” she said.
He looked at her imploringly. His lips dared not utter what his eyes told so plainly. It was a request, nothing more, but she shook her head.
“Good-bye,” she repeated, extending her hand.
He took it and held it tightly.
“Good-bye,” he said. Her hand remained in his. She could not withdraw it and there were tears in her eyes as she said, gently, for the last time: “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” he said again. He bent over to kiss her hand, but she drew it back quickly. Then she went up the stairs slowly.
He had resolved not to look back, but before the little cart had gone two hundred yards he turned his head. There was no one on the piazza, and her windows being curtained he could not tell whether she was looking at him from her room. He gazed long towards the little cottage. Then, as he heard the whistle of the approaching train, he turned his eyes to the front, and his face took on a calm, resolute look.
HE is dead!”
“Oh! Miss ‘Lizbeth! and you alone with him?”
“Yes, I was alone with him.”
She said this in a manner which seemed to imply that there was nothing strange in the fact that she was alone with him. She was always alone with him, was she not? Was it necessary that she open the doors and call them all in because he was dying?
They passed from the narrow hall into the front room with its green-paper window-shades, its worn carpet and meagre furniture. His bed had been moved down from the floor above when his last illness had seized him, and here it had remained, a black walnut bedstead, with towering head-board, which shut out the light from one of the two windows in the room. This bedstead had been one of his few, his very few, extravagances in years gone by, and in its dark shadow he lay now rigid. He had been a stern, grizzled man in life, but the sternness then had been as very softness compared with the hard, cold outline of the lace now upon the pillow in the green light of the lowered window-shade.
They moved about the room on tip-toe, speaking in the hissing whispers considered appropriate by them in the presence of death.
“When did it happen?” some one asked.
“Half-hour ago.”
“Had n’t I better call the doctor or the minister?”
“I don’t see what good they’d be.”
Another woman crept in silently, a shawl huddled about her head.
“I jest heard,” she whispered.
They waited in silence for her to go on. She was the woman of the village who always officiated at the “laying out” of their dead. The reason for this no one had ever sought. Possibly the right was hers because she so enjoyed the grewsome privilege. At least she clung to it tenaciously.
“Now, Miss ‘Lizbeth, you jest go upstairs and I’ll tend to things,” she said, while the other women awaited her commands, half resenting her cool assumption of control, but with a full consciousness of her capability in “tending” to such “things.”
The bare little church, with its white walls and staring windows, its stiff pine pulpit painted a dingy yellow, with the minister’s green upholstered chair behind it, was well-filled the day of the funeral. A “burying” was not a thing to miss without grave cause. There were old men and old women in the congregation who had not missed a funeral within ten miles of them for fifty years. They sat solemnly waiting for the minister to begin the services, taking close notice of the coffin and calculating its cost. Not a difficult problem for them with their long experience. They also noted closely the appearance of the one mourner who sat directly in front of the pulpit, alone save for the presence in her pew of the woman who had come to her huddled under a shawl. This strange woman always sat with the mourners as though she felt a claim upon the bodies of the dead until their final surrender to mother earth. But the dead man’s daughter sat away from her companion quite at the farthest end of the seat, as if she would be as much apart from them all in her present loneliness as she had been before. It was fifteen years since she had sat with them in the church, and they looked at her now with curiosity. A slight little woman, with tired eyes and dull brown hair streaked with gray!
The minister arose and folded upon the open Bible his lean hands with their great veins and yellow joints. He prayed long and laboriously, his voice rising from a doleful sing-song drawl into a shout and then sinking into a whisper. They wagged their heads knowingly in the pews and whispered to one another that it was a “pow’ful effort.” Toward the close of his prayer many eyes were turned expectantly toward the woman who sat alone. The minister was calling loudly for “the lost sheep who is not with us safe in the shelta’ of Zion’s walls. O Lord!” he wailed, “make yoh wahnin’ plain to her onseein’ eyes that she may seek safety from the wrath to come.” If the woman heard or understood his words no acknowledgment of that fact touched her thin face. She sat with folded hands, her eyes upon the narrow front of the box like pulpit. Then the minister began his sermon. From the earliest dawn of the dead man’s life, through his childhood, youth, and manhood unto the last moment of his old age the speaker journeyed, going unctuously over the dreary details of the meagre, common history. They all knew it well enough, but they listened greedily, jealously fearful that the speaker might overlook a single incident in the man’s dull story. When he had exhausted every period of his subject’s life, the minister began the apotheosis of the man. His goodness, his charity, his uprightness, and, above all, his “tireless labors in the vineyard of the Lord” were dwelt upon. He had in truth been cruel and hard and mean. They all knew this, but he had lived and died “a member in good standing,” and any other treatment of his character by the preacher would have been a scandalous thing, unheard of and not to be forgiven. At the close of his discourse the minister turned his colorless eyes upon the woman who sat apart. “There was,” he said, his voice falling into a slow and solemn drawl, “there was one cross which our Lord and Master seen fit to bind upon the shoulders of the brother who has jest gone befoh us into the glory of the Heavenly Kingdum. A cross hard to bear, a cross whose liftin’ he had wrestled for with the Lord Jesus often and mightily in prayer. But which Divine Providence seen fit to allow to remain upon the shoulders of his faithful son. It was, my brothers and sisters, the refusal of the only one of his kin to accept the Lord, to wash herself in the blood of the Lamb, to join with those who journey onward safe in the arms of Jesus into the glory of everlastin, life.” His voice had risen into a shout. “The night is comin’, the day is almost done. Oh! let us pray for them who falters and will not turn from the wrath of God befoh it is too late.” His voice sank suddenly into a whisper, and the words “too late” went hissing out over the heads of the people who sat with craning necks and knowing faces cruelly turned toward the woman, whose eyes for a single instant had not left the front of the dingy yellow pulpit.
The hearse, with the one closed carriage of which the village boasted, moved slowly away from the church along the muddy road, followed by a straggling line of wagons. The majority of the people lingered about the church door watching the woman who sat stiffly erect in the carriage, the minister facing her, at her side the woman who seemed to have so strange a love for the dead. This woman sat with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes as if she must needs make amends for the other’s stony composure.
The road, after leaving the village in the bottom lands along the river, wound up the side of the bluff upon which the burying ground was situated. It was an autumn day, and the golden haze of that most glorious of seasons in the Missouri valley bathed the wide stretch of country upon which the cemetery looked down. A sky of marvellous blue spread its canopy above them, while the bright glow of the western sun brought out in pitiless detail the dreary little home of the dead with its crude tiptilted monuments and scattered, sunken graves, its rays enfolding with no mellowing touch the group of sallow-faced men and women in rusty and shapeless garb who clustered about the newly made grave. They lifted their voices and sang quaveringly amid the strangely death-like stillness of the declining day. It was a dismal tune in plaintive minors, and as they dragged it out in unmusical and uncertain tones it seemed a fitting symbol of their narrow, unlovely lives. When the last clod of reddish clay had fallen upon the oblong mound, they turned and walked away to leave their dead unnoticed until another of the living should pass from the grimness of life into the—to them—greater grimness of death.
As the procession crawled along the heavy road toward the cluster of houses upon the river’s bank, the minister, his great hands resting upon his knees, his pale eyes blinking solemnly, began:—
“E-eliz’beth, you are left alone now.” She nodded her head in affirmation. “You haven’t much of this world’s goods.”
“I’ve kept two of us from starvin’ for five years. I reckon I can keep myself,” she replied stiffly.
“Yoh father was well-fixed once, but the Lord seen fit to deprive him of his earthly treasures that he might lay more store by them gifts which is above earthly price.”
“He was a graspin’ man and over-reached himself.”
The woman beside her sniffed reproachfully and glanced at the minister with sorrowful air. The man stirred uneasily and lifted a hand in expostulation.
“A daughter shouldn’t jedge. If you was enlightened by the spirit you would n’t be so lackin’ in Christian charity.”
She had endured much that long afternoon, and she raised her eyes now defiantly.
“I’ve done my duty by him—I’ve done my duty for twenty years without complainin’.”
“The pride of the onregenerate must be humbled,” returned the minister.
She vouchsafed no reply, and they went on in silence, the setting sun touching with softened light her worn face and tired eyes.
The sun was low in the western sky when the two women reached the small house, once white but now a dirty gray, with great yellow streaks following the lines of the overlapping clapboards. The black waters of the swiftly flowing river were flecked with red and gold under the level rays of the sun, the rounded hills on the other side of the stream were softly blue, toward the east a white fog was rising. A flock of wild geese high in the gray-blue sky was flying swiftly southward, spread out in a great straggling V. The mournful cry of their leader reached the two women faintly, the flight of the wild geese was an unfailing sign of approaching winter, and they watched the black lines of the flying fowls until they vanished in the southern sky, their weird cry growing fainter and sadder and finally dying away, leaving the swish of the river against its muddy bank the only sound which troubled the quiet of the autumn twilight. Two women with hushed voices and funereal faces waited inside the dingy front room of the house.
“It was a right smart gathering,” said one of them.
“I never see a finer,” said the other.
“And the minister was mighty pow’ful,” ventured the third in mournful tone.
They looked at the dead man’s daughter expectantly. Common decency surely required some expression of gratified approval of the congregation and the sermon. But she was folding her shawl carefully, laying it upon the bed alongside her rusty bonnet. She seemed not to have heard their voices. Then she sat stiffly by the window looking out at the mud-clogged road.
“I hope you feel reconciled, Miss ‘Lizbeth,” one of the women began.
“I reckon I am. He’s been awful hard to take care of,” she replied with her hard honesty. She turned her eyes away from the window and looked wearily at her visitors.
“It’s supper time. There ain’t any use of your stayin’ with me.”
The three women arose, angry at their dismissal.
“I ‘lowed you’d want some one to stay with you the first night,” said one of them with a lugubrious sniff.
“I ‘ve got all the nights of my life to stay alone in. I ‘bout as well begin now.”
She watched them as they went away through the deepening gloom, their heads together nodding wisely. They were talking about her, of course. She knew well enough what they said. She knew how hard and strange and unfeeling they were calling her. And as she sat alone by the window she wondered whether she was all these. The bed in its dark corner brought to her mind the picture of the man who had first quit it for his narrow bed upon the hillside. She fancied that she saw his hard, thin, yellow face upon the pillow now; that she heard his querulous voice demanding her attention, upbraiding her for some fancied forgetfulness, fiercely denouncing her for her lack of “religion.” How hard he had been! As the woman’s thoughts travelled back along the years she could not recall one kind word, one touch of thankfulness for her unremitting care, for her absolute immolation of life, hope, love upon the altar of “duty.” Twenty years! what a long time it seemed!
She passed into the back room and pressed close to the little square looking-glass which hung against its wall. The daylight was well-nigh gone, but she could yet discern the reflection of her face against the background of gray twilight. How old she looked! How sallow she had grown! There were great lines about her mouth and deep furrows between her eyes. And her hair,—how dingy it was with its streaks of yellowish gray! Twenty years ago she had been proud of her hair. It had been bright and soft. She was twenty years old then, and there were roses in her cheeks, and her eyes, so pale and tired now, had been blue and fresh then. She wondered if she had wept their color and their brightness away. Perhaps that was the reason no tears were left for her father. She had shed them all long ago for the man whom she had loved and given up.
She did not return to the front room where the great bed loomed so weirdly in the gloom, but sat by the one window in the little back room, half kitchen, half dining-room, looking out upon the river growing blacker and colder in the falling night as it flowed from out of the west where a rapidly diminishing, dull red streak marked the track of the vanished sun.
Twenty years since her mother died and her sister, selfish in her new life as a wife, had said that ‘Lizbeth’s duty lay in their father’s house. He might marry again or die in a few years. Surely it was not so hard for a young girl to wait. So she had waited, her lover fretting as lovers will, until one day she had awakened to the fact that a man’s patience is not like a woman’s. There had been one awful night which she remembered after all these years with a shudder. A night when, for the first and only time in her hard life, she had turned hotly upon the stern old man and told him of her love and of her wrecked girlhood, praying wildly for some help, for some sympathy. She caught her breath sharply now as she recalled her father’s bitter words. That same night her lover left. Fifteen years had come and gone since then. The great world had taken him, and whether he lived or had been claimed again by mother earth the woman who sat and dreamed of the past alone in the dusk knew naught of him. She had practised a woman’s faithfulness; she had reaped a woman’s hard reward. Afterwards her sister died and left to her care a blue-eyed babe. How she had poured out upon that baby boy the pent up mother-love within her. But the gods in their wisdom had taken him too. In this still night as she lived over again the years which were gone, she seemed to feel the clasp of those baby arms about her neck and to hear the crooning of that soft baby voice.
And then came the long years of her father’s illness when she knew no moment of rest or peace. It had been a long struggle between a loveless woman on one side and gaunt starvation upon the other without one word of gratitude to strengthen her. And they called her hard because she could not weep! She looked at her hands, holding them up close to her face. How misshapen and ugly from toil they were!
It was quite dark now and the river murmured strangely under the wind which was creeping down from the north. Her hands fell back into her lap and two great tears coursed slowly down her worn face—not for the man who lay under the stars in the little cemetery on the hill, but for her own vanished youth and love and hope.
SHE slunk along in the shadows listlessly, staring with unheeding eyes at the shuffling crowds upon the sidewalks, at the fly-blown, tawdry splendors of the shop windows, and at the yellow gloom of the pawn-shop. The autumn wind swept sharply up from the river, and she drew her old plaid shawl about her tightly with one hand, while with the other she covered her swollen and discolored cheek. The sidewalks and roadway were covered with a thin, slippery coating of mingled filth and mud. An autumn mist, heavy with smoke, pressed itself tightly down upon the street, deadening the light of the electric lamps at the corners into mere splotches of a dully-luminous gray. Frowsy, palefaced girls hung about dark doorways where they bandied mirthless jests with lounging men and boys. In front of a bar-room, whence came the fangling notes of a piano and the scream of a high-pitched soprano voice, a man stood and urged the passers-by to go in and witness “the dizziest ‘vawdyville’ in the city.” The woman in the old plaid shawl passed him without heeding his blatant voice. She had heard his sing-song shout many times; the “dizzy vawdyville” was nothing new. There never was anything new in Myrtle Street; it was ever the same ugly, sordid, joyless place day and night, week in and week out. It was always crowded with people, but it was always strangely sullen and mirthless. You never heard any one laugh there. At times when some one slipped and fell upon the slime of the pavement, or when one of the white-faced girls hurled shrill defiance at a man or at her companions, a hoarse human bark rent the air, but it was not a laugh. Even the children, who scrambled in the gutters and crept in and out of the dark alleys, forgot to laugh.
The woman with swollen and discolored cheek, who was crawling along in the shadows, halted in front of a dram-shop on a corner, and gazed doubtfully, longingly, at its swinging door. She was wondering if perchance Red Mike would trust her for a drink. She felt keenly the chill air from the river. She was strangely weary and down-hearted, too.
Earlier in the evening she and her man had quarrelled. He was drunk, as usual, and had struck her, but for some unaccountable reason she had not screeched and struck back and tried to claw his face. She had simply grabbed her old shawl and escaped into the street, where she had wandered about for an hour. It was very odd that she had acted thus, and now she was shamefaced about asking Red Mike for a drink of whiskey! He got all their meagre earnings, anyway, did Red Mike, and he was usually easy enough about donating a dram or two when they were down in their luck, and heretofore she had n’t minded asking him. And if he chanced to refuse, she eased her mind by a good mouthful of curses, which she spat at him like a cat. But tonight she was foolishly squeamish about asking him; she feared the loafers about the bar would jeer at her if he refused; her face pained her where Con’s blow had fallen, and she was cold and shivering, and—well, she was losing her nerve. So she turned away from the hot glow of the bar-room door and passed on into the mists of the street.
As she crawled along there came to her ears a quick thud of a drum-beat and the sound of men and women’s voices singing. Marching through the gloom they came, a flapping banner above their heads, the red shirts of the men and the blue, scarlet-banded bonnets of the women lending for a moment a patch of color to the dim dinginess of the street. Suddenly they paused and fell upon their knees in the road, while a man’s voice wailed out a prayer. Time was when Myrtle Street gibed at the Salvationists and threw rocks at them and hustled them about. But that was when the red shirts and the flapping banner were something new. The newness was gone now, and Myrtle Street merely shuffled indifferently past, and the beat of the big drum, the strident voices of the exhorters were quite as much a part of the night sounds of the place as the bawling of the showman or the chatter of the frowsy girls. The woman, shivering under her shawl and fondling her bruised cheek, glanced apathetically at the kneeling men and women, when quickly her eyes became fixed upon the face of one of them whom she knew. It was Maggie, the girl who once occupied a dark little hole of a room next her own in the big tenement house where she yet lived. Maggie! a forlorn, starving thing of whom she had lost track entirely—in truth, she had not thought of her since the day when the poor, sniveling, pale-faced creature had been turned into the street for not paying her rent. Myrtle Street does not waste much time in tracing the whereabouts of unfortunate acquaintances, nor in thinking of them after they drift out of sight under the ever-mounting wave of disaster which laps hungrily thereabout. But Maggie in a big bonnet, with her eyes closed and kneeling in the mud, was enough to arouse Myrtle Street’s benumbed curiosity. So the bedraggled woman on the sidewalk pressed quite close to the curb and stared at her, wondering vaguely at the transformation. The man ended his prayer, and his companions, rising to their feet, began to sing again. The woman on the curb took no heed of the words which they sang. She was not for some moments vividly conscious of the song at all; she was conscious only of being tired and cold. Her curiosity regarding Maggie was dying, and she loitered with the little group which huddled upon the curb, simply because she had nowhere else to go. But as she stood there in the mist with her sunken eyes staring vacantly into the night, the music which touched her ears began to affect her oddly. It was a curious, wailing melody, with a barbaric accompaniment of jingling tambourines, and as its monotonous, insistent swing beat the air a strange feeling of awakening began to stir her dull veins. She weaved to and fro a little in unison with the measure of the song. She closed her eyes and felt a tightening in her throat. She clutched her shawl. She felt a wild desire to cry out or sob. Suddenly they ceased to sing, and she opened her eyes with a start. Maggie stepped into the little semi-circle of men and women, and in high, hard tones began to speak.
“Oh! Those is great, great words, my friends, which we have just sung,” she said; “awful words! Terrifyin’ words! Did you hear ‘em? Did you understand ‘em? Did they come home to you?
“‘When the King comes in,
Like lightning’s flash will that instant show
Things hidden long from friend and foe.
Just what he is will each one know,
When the King comes in.’
“Think of it! Think of it! Like a flash will it be, and you will know and I will know—everybody will know just what we are. Oh! It is awful! Like lightning’s flash will that coming be—remember that! Don’t try to believe it is far off. It isn’t. It may be to-night. It may be within an hour—a minute—a second, for you and me. But be it near or far, it’s coming, coming, coming!” Her voice shrilled piercingly, and the woman, listening so intently upon the curb, felt a thrill of excitement at the sound. It was not clear to her what it all meant, but she had a queer feeling of awe as she looked at Maggie’s drawn face and listened to her strained, sharp voice. “My God!” the girl continued, “think of it! Think if He comes to-night and finds you in all your sin and wickedness and filth. Think, think and be afraid. Think, and before it’s too late, get saved! I am saved, and I thank God to-night for it!”
A low chorus of “Glory to God!”
“I believe!”
“I believe!” came from her companions.
“I am glad to-night to stand here to tell you that I am saved and happy—oh! so happy! Why do you wait? Some of you know me—I was sinful and tired and afraid once, but not now, thank God! not now. I’m saved, saved, saved!”
Louder and wilder grew the girl’s cry. She waved her arms violently, and paced rapidly to and fro. The listening woman shifted her position from the sidewalk to the gutter. Her hands loosened their clutch upon her shawl; she wrung them constantly as she looked with wondering eyes at Maggie—Maggie who was n’t tired nor afraid any more, and was happy, and all because she was “saved”! What did it all mean? How had it happened?
The girl stopped abruptly in her walk, and, as though answering her thought, cried, “It is so easy to get saved, too. All you have to do is to throw yourself on your knees and call on Jesus, and give yourself up to Him, and all your sins and fears and troubles and burdens are gone, and you’ll be happy and glad and free and saved forever!”
Without a pause her voice shot into the song which they had sung before; but now its measure was changed to a clear, quick chant, with which she kept time by a soft patting with her hands. Clearer and higher grew her tones, and her companions, sinking to their knees, moaned in hushed voices a weird accompaniment, while the gently shaken tambourines lent again their strange barbaric rhythm, marked from time to time by the great drum’s muffled beat.
Nearer and nearer to the semi-circle of kneeling figures stole the listening woman. Tears were streaming from her eyes, her blue lips quivered, a great sob tore itself from her tight throat. At length she stood quite within the lines of the singers, and then, with a strange, wild cry, she, too, fell upon her knees in the slime of the street. Her old shawl fell from her head, her arms rested upon the drum, her swollen face was buried in them. A great shout of “Glory to God!” went up about her, and some one on the curb cried amazedly, “Why, it’s old Kit!” But she heard only that monotonous wailing voice chanting stridently “When the King Comes In.” Afterwards there came a knowledge of some one’s arm across her shoulders, of whispered words and urgent voices, a sensation of being lifted to her feet and helped along the street, and then a confusing blur of yellow light from oil lamps in a dingy hall. And at length full consciousness, dull fatigue, and an overwhelming desire for sleep.
Maggie and one of the brothers in red jersey and jaunty cap walked home with her, pouring into her ears encouraging advice in strange, cant words, which she but half understood. At the doorway of the human hive where she and Con slept and fought and starved the man looked sharply at Maggie.
“You are sure!” he whispered.
“Yes—they’re married,” replied the girl.
“You will come to the barracks early to-morrow morning?” he asked, turning to Kit.
She promised to do so, and, passing into the dark hall, climbed upward to where Con lay in drunken stupor.
The following morning Kit stepped into a new world—a world of friendly words and close companionship. The squalidly poor know nothing of that luxury called friendship. They are huddled together in vast crowds, squeezed and packed by scores within narrow limits, jostled and elbowed by their kind at every turn. They are suffocated by close association. But of fellowship, of interest in one another’s aims, of sympathy with one another’s hardships, they know nothing. Like starving dogs over a bone, they growl and snarl and fly straight at throats. So, when Kit crept half sullenly into the barracks and was greeted by a loud chorus of interested questions and by unstinted praise, the unfamiliar warmth of friendly words thawed into life her sluggish sensibilities. And, too, an entirely new view of herself and the world was suddenly opened to her bewildered gaze,—for the first time in her hard life she was looked upon as a human being of some importance. They told her that she was suddenly become different from her kind, she was better than they, she was “saved.” Not only that, but she must “save” others. She must quit the old life, and work for the common good. Her new friends were as uncouth and as poor and as hard pressed as herself. In their attitude there was none of that maddening condescension, none of that supercilious casting of surplus comforts at her feet, as one would toss a half-eaten orange toward a hungry-eyed beggar brat, which was the only sort of charity Kit had known of hitherto. The friendship of the Salvationists was the frank comradeship of plain men and women; their charity was the outcome of a crude, but living, religious idea. And their wild enthusiasm caught her dull soul in its sweep and lifted it a little above the fetid mists of her world. Some latent spark of womanly ambition was stirred into life, and with halting, dogged feet she tried to climb out of the dank valley of her past.
It was a wearisome task, but the exhilarating sense of friendly interest in her success sustained her. The old appetite for strong drink stung her, but the excitement of the new life helped to dull the craving. She tramped the streets with her companions, her cracked voice shouting quaveringly with them as they sang. She stepped sometimes into the little semicircle at the street corners to tell excitedly “how glad she was that she was saved.” She knelt with the others and prayed aloud for those who were not as she. She was one of a great, enthusiastic army, held up and aided by the superficial strength which comes of close fellowship and common aims. But with that growth of strength in one quarter there came a strange weakness in another. She was growing childishly afraid of Con, and with the growth of that fear there started into life and waxed strong a new loathing and hatred for his rum-soaked person. She would have fled from him, only that her new masters told her she must stick to him. It was her duty to cling to him and to “save” him. Their first injunction she obeyed meekly; but to their second command she turned a deaf ear. She knew what Con was; they did not. Every human creature in the wide world might be saved—except her husband. He was beyond the pale of humanity. So long as she did not bother him, he paid little attention to her goings and comings. Only once she ventured to protest when he had spent a week’s earnings for drink (Con had a “pull” with the ward “boss,” and when there were no other means of getting money for drink he found employment with the street-cleaners), and he had knocked her down for her temerity, and after that she held her peace and wished dumbly that he might die.
At length there came a proud day when Kit, after unwonted labor over her wash-tub, was the possessor of a decent black gown and of the long-coveted poke bonnet. It was the eve of a great rally at the barracks, when some officer of high degree from “headquarters” was to review the ranks of his army. At the close of day, when the long shadows were beginning to steal across the bare little room, with its musty bed, its one chair, and its rickety table pushed into a corner, Kit crouched upon the floor close up under the gray light of her window, intent upon her work. There were but a few stitches needed to complete her gown, and her stiff fingers fumbled eagerly with the unfamiliar needle. Her thoughts were busy with the glories of the morrow, and she crooned one of the Salvationist hymns as she sewed. And to her singing in the twilight there came the sound of shuffling footsteps outside her door. She looked up apprehensively as the door flew open to admit her husband. He was drunk, sullenly, brutally drunk.
“Where’s my supper?” he demanded, falling heavily into the chair. “Where’s my supper, I say?” he repeated, fixing an evil eye upon her.
“I’ll get it now, Con. I was busy workin’ on my dress, an’ I clean forgot your supper,” she explained, humbly.
“Yer dress?” he asked. “What right’s a measly fool like you with dresses? Le’s see it.” He stretched forth his hand. She caught the black garment sharply away from him.
“No, you’ll spoil it!” she cried, tossing the dress into a corner behind the bed. “You just set still there, an’ I’ll get you somethin’ to eat.”
“Eatin’ be damned!” he replied, surlily. “I want somethin’ to drink. Here! you take the can an’ get somethin’ from Mike’s. ‘F you can buy clothes, you can buy drinks.”
“No, no, Con, not now. Wait till I get supper.”
“I don’t want no supper! You rush de can, I tell you!”
“I won’t!”
“The hell you won’t!”
He started from his chair and went towards her, but something in her eyes made even his sodden senses recoil. He looked at her dubiously a moment, and then stumbled out of the room, muttering thickly.
As the door closed behind him, the woman sprang for her gown, and, dragging it from the corner, slipped it on. A few more stitches were needed in it, but she dared not wait to take them. A great terror filled her soul. She felt that her husband would return quickly, uglier and wilder by a few drams. With shaking fingers she pinned her gown together as best she might. She smoothed her scanty, dry, dead hair with her hands, and then she lifted her bonnet from the bed. She held it a moment admiringly, drawing her fingers softly over its trimmings of dark-blue silk, and along its narrow band of scarlet ribbon, where the bright gilt letters shone. She put it on her head and tied the soft strings carefully under her chin. She glanced hesitatingly at the old plaid shawl, wishing that she had a better one, but the night was cold, and she drew it about her shoulders. With a little sigh of relief she turned to leave the room. As her hand touched the door-latch she heard Con’s heavy tread upon the stairs. She noted that he staggered a little, and with a quick indrawing of her breath she drew herself flat against the wall in the shadows. The man threw the door open fiercely, steadying himself against the jamb as he peered into the dim room.
“Where are you, you she-devil?” he called.
The woman made no sound, and he stepped inside the room, with his broad back towards her. Inch by inch she crept along against the wall towards the door, as he stood turning from side to side in his maudlin search for her, and as her feet touched the threshold he turned and saw her. He rushed forward and grabbed her arms.
“Givin’ me the dirty sneak, are you?” he growled, shoving her inside the room and closing the door. “What d’ yer mean? Eh?”
Kit made no answer. She backed off, her face gleaming white inside her big bonnet.
“Yer a nice one, ain’t you?” he continued. “Won’t get me nothin’ to eat or drink, an’ spendin’ yer money fur clothes, an’ then tryin’ to make a sneak! Oh! I was onto you all the time! You white-faced fool! What d’ yer mean? Eh? Damn you, what d’ yer mean?”
“Stop, Con! Don’t hit me!”
He stumbled forward deliberately and struck her upturned face. She staggered into the corner by the table, and faced him again. A tiny stream of something red trickled down her cheek. Her eyes were suddenly ablaze.
“Let me go!” she shrieked. “Let me go!”
“Yer’ll go an’ get de can filled, that’s where yer’ll go!”
“I won’t—never!”
A spasm of hate and rage and terror writhed in her face. With the quickness of desperation she caught a knife from the table and waited for him.
He lunged towards her with uplifted arm. Before his blow fell she gave one swift thrust, and his arm came down simply upon her shoulder. For a moment he stood strangely still. He clenched his fist; his teeth were tight; he breathed hard through his nose.
“Damn you——” Then he reeled and fell.
And as the woman stood there in the gathering gloom, with his blood crawling towards her on the floor, she heard the beat of a drum, and the sound of voices singing shrilly, far down the street. On they came, nearer and louder, until her listening ears heard the thrum of the tambourines. Under her window they passed, and away into the night, until at last their sound was lost in the ceaseless, sullen tumult of Myrtle Street.