Chapter 16

The men ate like hungry dogs. They gorged in silence. Nothing was heard but the clank of knives on tin plates, the drop of heavy platters of food, and the occasional muttered words of some one asking for the bread or the gravy.

As they ate they furtively looked with great curiosity and admiration up at the dainty woman. Their eyes were bright and large, and gleamed out of the obscure brown of their dimly lighted faces with savage intensity--so it seemed to Mrs. Field, and she dropped her eyes before their glare.

Her husband and Ridgeley tried to enter into conversation with those sitting near. Ridgeley seemed on good terms with them all, and ventured a joke or word, at which they laughed with terrific energy, and fell as suddenly silent again.

As Mrs. Field looked up the second time she saw the dark, strange face of Williams a few places down, and opposite her. His eyes were fixed on her husband's hands with a singular intensity. Her eyes followed his, and the beauty of her husband's hands came to her again with new force. They were perfectly shaped, supple, warm-colored, and strong. Their color and deftness stood out in vivid contrast to the heavy, brown, cracked, and calloused, paw-like hands of the workmen.

Why should Williams study her husband's hands? If he had looked at her she would not have been surprised. The other men she could read. They expressed either frank, simple admiration or furtive desire. But this man looked at her husband, and his eyes fell often upon his own hands, which trembled with fatigue. He handled his knife clumsily, and yet she could see he, too, had a fine hand--a slender, powerful hand, like that people call an artist hand--a craftsman-like hand.

He saw her looking at him, and he flashed one enigmatical glance into her eyes, and rose to go out.

"How you getting on, Williams?" Ridgeley asked.

Williams resented his question. "Oh, I'm all right," he said, sullenly.

The meal was all over in an incredibly short time. One by one, two by two, they rose heavily and lumbered out with one last, wistful look at Mrs. Field. She will never know how seraphic she seemed sitting there amid those rough surroundings--the dim, red light of the kerosene lamp falling across her clear pallor, out of which her dark eyes shone with liquid softness, made deeper and darker by her half-sorrowful tenderness for these homeless fellows.

An hour later, as they were standing at the door, just ready to take to their sleigh, they heard the scraping of a fiddle.

"Oh, some one is going to play!" Mrs. Field cried, with visions of the rollicking good times she had heard so much about, and of which she had seen nothing so far. "Can't I look in?"

Ridgeley was dubious. "I'll go and see," he said, and entered the door. "Boys, Mrs. Field wants to look in a minute. Go on with your fiddling, Sam--only I wanted to see that you weren't sitting around in dishabill."

This seemed a good joke, and they all howled and haw-hawed gleefully.

"So go right ahead with your evening prayers. All but--you understand!"

"All right, captain," said Sam, the man with the fiddle.

When Mrs. Field looked in, two men were furiously grinding axes; several were sewing on ragged garments; all were smoking; some were dressing chapped or bruised fingers. The atmosphere was horrible. The socks and shirts were steaming above the huge stove; the smoke and stench for a moment were sickening, but Ridgeley pushed them just inside the door.

"It's better out of the draught."

Sam jigged away on the violin. The men kept time with the cranks of the grindstone, and all faces turned with bashful smiles and bold grins at Mrs. Field. Most of them shrank a little from her look, like shy animals.

Ridgeley threw open the window. "In the old days," he explained to Mrs. Field, "we used a fireplace, and that kept the air better."

As her sense of smell became deadened the air seemed a little more tolerable to Mrs. Field.

"Oh, we must change all this," she said. "It is horrible."

"Play us a tune," said Sam, extending the violin to Field. He did not think Field could play. It was merely a shot in the dark on his part.

Field took it and looked at it and sounded it. On every side the men turned face in eager expectancy.

"He can play, that feller."

"I'll bet he can. He handles her as if he knew her."

"You bet your life. Tune up, Cap."

Williams came from the obscurity somewhere, and looked over the shoulders of the men.

"Down in front!" somebody called, and the men took seats on the benches, leaving Field standing with the violin in hand. He smiled around upon them in a frank, pleased way, quite ready to show his skill. He played _Annie Laurie_, and a storm of applause broke out.

"_Hoo-ray!_ Bully for you!"

"Sam, you're out of it!"

"Sam, your name is Mud!"

"Give us another, Cap!"

"It ain't the same fiddle!"

He played again some simple tune, and he played it with the touch which showed the skilled amateur. As he played, Mrs. Field noticed a growing restlessness on Williams' part. He moved about uneasily. He gnawed at his finger-nails. His eyes glowed with a singular fire. His hands drummed and fingered. At last he approached, and said, roughly:

"Let me take that fiddle a minute."

"Oh, cheese it, Williams!" the men cried. "Let the other man play."

"What do _you_ want to do with the fiddle--think it's a music-box?" asked Sam, its owner.

"Go to hell!" said Williams. As Field gave the violin over to him, his hands seemed to tremble with eagerness.

He raised his bow, and struck into an imposing, brilliant strain, and the men fell back in astonishment.

"Well, I'll be damned!" gasped the owner of the violin.

"Keep quiet, Sam."

Mrs. Field looked at her husband. "Why, Ed, he is playing _Sarasate_!"

"That's what he is," he returned, slangily, too much astonished to do more than gaze. Williams played on.

There was a faint defect in the high notes, as if his fingers did not touch the strings properly, but his bow action showed cultivation and breadth of feeling. As he struck into one of those difficult octave-leaping movements his face became savage. On the E string a squeal broke forth; he flung the violin into Sam's lap with a ferocious curse, and then, extending his hands, hard, crooked to fit the axe-helve, calloused and chapped, he said to Field:

"Look at my hands! Lovely things to play with, aren't they?"

His voice trembled with passion. He turned and went outside. As he passed Mrs. Field his head was bowed, and he was uttering a groaning cry like one suffering physical pain.

"That's what drink does for a man," Ridgeley said, as they watched Williams disappear down the swampers' trail.

"That man has been a violinist," said Field. "What's he doing up here?"

"Came to get away from himself, I guess," Ridgeley replied.

"I'm afraid he's failed," said Field, as he put his arm about his wife and led her to the sleigh.

The ride home was made mainly in silence. "Oh, the splendid stillness!" the woman kept saying in her heart. "Oh, the splendid moonlight, the marvellous radiance!" Everywhere a heavenly serenity--not a footstep, not a bell, not a cry, not a cracking tree--nothing but vivid light, white snow dappled and lined with shadows, and trees etched against a starlit sky. Unutterable splendor of light and sheen and shadow. Wide wastes of snow so white the stumps stood like columns of charcoal. A night of Nature's making, when she is tired of noise and blare of color.

And in the midst of it stood the camp, with its reek of obscenity, foul odors, and tobacco smoke, to which a tortured soul must return.

IV

The following Saturday afternoon, as Ridgeley and Field entered the office, Williams rose to meet them. He looked different--finer some way, Field imagined. At any rate, he was perfectly sober. He was freshly shaven, and though his clothes were rough, he appeared the man of education he really was. His manner was cold and distant.

"I'd like to be paid off, Mr. Ridgeley," he said. "I guess what's left of my pay will take me out of this."

"Where do you propose to go?" Ridgeley asked, with kindly interest.

Williams must have perceived his kindliness, for he answered: "I'm going home to my wife, to my violin. I am going to try living once more."

After he had gone out, Field said, "I wonder if he'll do it?"

"Oh, I shouldn't wonder. I've seen men brace up just as mysteriously as that and stay right by their resolutions. I thought he didn't look like a common lumber Jack when he came in."

"Ed, your playing did it!" Mrs. Field cried, when she heard of Williams' resolution. "Oh, how happy his wife will be! She'll save him yet!"

"Well, I don't know; depends on what kind of a woman she is."

BEFORE THE LOW GREEN DOOR

Matilda Bent was dying; there was no doubt of that now, if there had been before. The gruff old physician--one of the many overworked and underpaid country doctors--shook his head and pushed by Joe Bent, her husband, as he passed through the room which served as dining-room, sitting-room, and parlor. The poor fellow slouched back to his chair by the stove as if dazed, and before he could speak again the doctor was gone.

Mrs. Ridings was just coming up the walk as the doctor stepped out of the door.

"Oh, doctor, how is she?"

"She is a dying woman, madam."

"Oh, don't say that, doctor! What's the matter?"

"Cancer."

"Then the news was true--"

"I don't know anything of the news, Mrs. Ridings, but Mrs. Bent is dying from the effects of a cancer primarily, which she has had for years--since her last child, which died in infancy, you remember."

"But, doctor, she never told me--"

"Neither did she tell me. But no matter now. I have done all I can for her. If you can make death any easier for her, go and do it. You will find some opiate powders there with directions. Keep the pain down at all hazards. Don't let her suffer; that is useless. She is likely to last a day or two; but if any change comes to-night, send for me."

When the good matron entered the dowdy, suffocating little room where Matilda Bent lay gasping for breath, she was sick for a moment with sympathetic pain. There the dying woman lay, her world narrowed to four close walls, propped up on the pillows near the one little window. Her eyes seemed very large and bright, and the brow, made prominent by the sinking away of the cheeks, gave evidence that it was an uncommon woman who lay there quietly waiting the death angel.

She smiled, and lifted her eyebrows in a ghastly way.

"Oh, Marthy!" she breathed.

"Matildy, I didn't know you was so bad or I'd 'a' come before. Why didn't you let me know?" said Mrs. Ridings, kneeling by the bed and taking the ghostly hands of the sufferer in her own warm and soft palms. She shuddered as she kissed the thin lips.

"I think you'll soon be around ag'in," she added, in the customary mockery of an attempt at cheer. The other woman started slightly, turned her head, and gazed on her old friend long and intently. The hollowness of her neighbor's words stung her.

"I hope not, Marthy--I'm ready to go. I want to go. I don't care to live."

The two women communed by looking for a long time in each other's eyes, as if to get at the very secretest desires and hopes of the heart. Tears fell from Martha's eyes upon the cold and nerveless hands of her friend--poor, faithful hands, hacked and knotted and worn by thirty years of ceaseless daily toil. They lay there motionless upon the coverlet, pathetic protest for all the world to see.

"Oh, Matildy, I wish I could do something for you! I want to help you so! I feel so bad that I didn't come before! Ain't they somethin'?"

"Yes, Marthy--jest set there--till I die--it won't be long," whispered the pale lips. The sufferer, as usual, was calmer than her visitor, and her eyes were thoughtful.

"I will! I will! But oh, must you go? Can't somethin' be done? Don't yo' want the minister to be sent for?"

"No, I'm all ready. I ain't afraid to die. I ain't worth savin' now. Oh, Marthy, I never thought I'd come to this--did you? I never thought I'd die--so early in life--and die--unsatisfied."

She lifted her head a little as she gasped out these words with an intensity of utterance that thrilled her hearer--a powerful, penetrating earnestness that burned like fire.

"Are you satisfied?" pursued the steady lips. "My life's a failure, Marthy--I've known it all along--all but my children. Oh, Marthy, what'll become o' them? This is a hard world."

The amazed Martha could only chafe the hands, and note sorrowfully the frightful changes in the face of her friend. The weirdly calm, slow voice began to shake a little.

"I'm dyin', Marthy, without ever gittin' to the sunny place we girls--used to think--we'd git to, by-an'-by. I've been a-gittin' deeper 'n' deeper--in the shade--till it's most dark. They ain't been no rest--n'r hope f'r me, Marthy--none. I ain't--"

"There, there, Tillie, don't talk so--don't, dear! Try to think how bright it'll be over there--"

"I don't know nawthin' about over there; I'm talkin' about here. I ain't had no chance here, Marthy."

"He will heal all your care--"

"He can't wipe out my sufferin's here."

"Yes, He can, and He will. He can wipe away every tear and heal every wound."

"No--he--can't. God Himself can't wipe out what has been. Oh, Mattie, if I was only there!--in the past--if I was only young and purty ag'in! You know how tall I was! How we used to run--oh, Mattie, if I was only there! The world was all bright then--wasn't it? We didn't expect--to work all our days. Life looked like a meadow, full of daisies and pinks, and the nicest ones and the sweetest birds were just a little ways on--where the sun was--it didn't look--wasn't we happy?"

"Yes, yes, dear. But you mustn't talk so much." The good woman thought Matilda's mind was wandering. "Don't you want some med'cine? Is your fever risin'?"

"But the daisies and pinks all turned to weeds," she went on, waiting a little, "when we picked 'em. An' the sunny place--has been always behind me, and the dark before me. Oh, if I was only there--in the sun--where the pinks and daisies are!"

"You mustn't talk so, Mattie! Think about your children! You ain't sorry y'had them? They've been a comfort to y'? You ain't sorry you had 'em?"

"I ain't glad," was the unhesitating reply of the failing woman; and then she went on, in growing excitement: "They'll haf to grow old jest as I have--git bent and gray, an' die. They ain't be'n much comfort to me: the boys are like their father, and Julyie's weak. They ain't no happiness--for such as me and them."

She paused for breath, and Mrs. Ridings, not knowing what to say, did better than speak. She fell to stroking the poor face and the hands, getting more restless each moment. It was as if Matilda Fletcher had been silent so long, had borne so much without complaint, that now it burst from her in a torrent not to be stayed. All her most secret doubts and her sweetest hopes seemed trembling on her lips or surging in her brain, racking her poor, emaciated frame for utterence. Now that death was sure, she was determined to rid her bosom of its perilous stuff. Martha was appalled.

"I used to think--that when I got married I'd be perfectly happy; but I never have been happy sence. It was the beginning of trouble to me. I never found things better than they looked; they was always worse. I've gone further an' further from the sunshiny meadow, an' the birds an' flowers--and I'll never git back to 'em again, never!" She ended with a sob and a low wail.

Her face was horrifying with its intensity of pathetic regret. Her straining, wide-open eyes seemed to be seeing those sunny spots in the meadow.

"Mattie, sometimes when I'm asleep I think I am back there ag'in--and you girls are there--an' we're pullin' off the leaves of the wild sunflower--'rich man, poor man, beggar man'--and I hear you all laugh when I pull off the last leaf; and then I come to myself--and I'm an old, dried-up woman, dyin'--unsatisfied!"

"I've felt that way a little myself, Matildy," confessed the watcher, in a scared whisper.

"I knew it, Mattie; I knew you'd know how I felt. Things have been better for you. You ain't had to live in an old log house all your life, an' work yourself to skin an' bone for a man you don't respect nor like."

"Matildy Bent, take that back! Take it back, for mercy sake! Don't you dare die thinkin' that--don't you dare!"

Bent, hearing her voice rising, came to the door, and the wife, recognizing his step, cried out:

"Don't let him in! Don't! I can't bear him--keep him out; I don't want to see him ag'in."

"Who do you mean? Not Joe?"

"Yes! Him!"

Had the dying woman confessed to murder, good Martha could not have been more shocked. She could not understand this terrible revulsion in feeling, for she herself had been absolutely loyal to her husband through all the trials which had come upon them.

But she met Bent at the threshold, and, closing the door, went out with him into the summer kitchen, where the rest of the family were sitting. A gloomy silence fell on them all after the greetings were over. The men were smoking; all were seated in chairs tipped back against the wall. Joe Bent, a smallish man, with a weak, good-natured face, asked, in a hoarse whisper:

"How is she, Mis' Ridings?"

"She seems quite strong, Mr. Bent. I think you had all better go to bed; if I want you, I can call you. Doctor give me directions."

"All right," responded the relieved man. "I'll sleep on the lounge in the other room. If you want me, just rap on the door."

When, after making other arrangements, Martha went back to the bedroom, she was startled to hear the sick woman muttering to herself, or perhaps because she had forgotten Martha's absence.

"But the shadows on the meadow didn't stay; they passed on, and then the sun was all the brighter on the flowers. We used to string sweet-williams on spears of grass--don't you remember?"

Martha gave her a drink of the opiate in the glass, adjusted her on the pillow, and threw open the window, even to the point of removing the screen, and the gibbous moon flooded the room with light. She did not light a lamp, for its flame would heat the room. Besides, the moonlight was sufficient. It fell on the face of the sick woman till she looked like a thing of marble--all but her dark eyes.

"Does the moon hurt you, Tilly? Shall I put down the curtain?"

The woman heard with difficulty, and when the question was repeated, said slowly:

"No, I like it." After a little: "Don't you remember, Mattie, how beautiful the moonlight seemed? It seemed to promise happiness--and love--but it never come for us. It makes me dream of the past now--just as it did of the future then; an' the whip-poor-wills, too--"

The night was perfectly beautiful, such a night as makes dying an infinite sorrow. The summer was at its liberalest. Innumerable insects of the nocturnal sort were singing in unison with the frogs in the pools. A whip-poor-will called, and its neighbor answered like an echo. The leaves of the trees, glossy from the late rain, moved musically to the light west wind, and the exquisite perfume of many flowers came in on the breeze.

When the failing woman sank into silence, Martha leaned her elbow on the window-sill, and, gazing far into the great deeps of space, gave herself up to unwonted musings upon the problems of human life. She sighed deeply at times. She found herself at moments in the almost terrifying position of a human soul in space. Not a wife, not a mother, but just a soul facing the questions which harass philosophers. As she realized her condition of mind she apprehended something of the thinking of the woman on the bed. Matilda had gone beyond--or far back--of the wife and mother.

The hours wore on; the dying woman stirred uneasily now and then, whispering a word or phrase which related to her girlhood--never to her later life. Once she said:

"Mother, hold me. I'm so tired."

Martha took the thin form in her arms, and, laying her head close beside the sunken cheek, sang, in half breath, a lullaby till the sufferer grew quiet again.

The lustrous moon passed over the house, leaving the room dark, and still the patient watcher sat beside the bed, listening to the slow breathing of the dying one. The cool air grew almost chill; the east began to lighten, and with the coming light the tide of life sank in the dying body. The head, hitherto restlessly turning, ceased to move. The eyes grew quiet and began to soften like a sleeper's.

"How are you now, dear?" asked the watcher several times, bending over the bed, and bathing back the straying hair.

"I'm tired--tired, mother--turn me," she murmured drowsily, with heavy lids drooping.

Martha patted the pillows once again, and turned her friend's face to the wall. The poor, tortured, restless brain slowly stopped its grinding whirl, and the thin limbs, heavy with years of hopeless toil, straightened out in an endless sleep.

Matilda Fletcher had found rest.

A PREACHER'S LOVE STORY

I

The train drew out of the great Van Buren Street depot at 4.30 of a dark day in late October. A tall young man, with a timid look in his eyes, was almost the last passenger to get on, and his pale face wore a worried look as he dropped into an empty seat and peered out at the squalid city reeling past in the mist.

The buildings grew smaller, and vacant lots appeared stretching away in flat spaces, broken here and there by ridges of ugly, squat, little tenement blocks. Over this landscape vast banners of smoke streamed, magnified by the misty rain which was driven in from the lake.

At last there came a swell of land clothed on with trees. It was still light enough for him to see that they were burr oaks, and the young student's heart thrilled at sight of them. His forehead smoothed out, and his eyes grew tender with boyish memories.

He was seated thus, with head leaning against the pane, when another young man came down the aisle from the smoking-car and took a seat beside him with a pleasant word.

He was a handsome young fellow of twenty three or four. His face was large and beardless, and he had a bold and keen look, in spite of the bang of yellow hair which hung over his forehead. Some commonplaces passed between them, and then silence fell on each. The conductor coming through the car, the smooth-faced young fellow put up a card to be punched, and the student handed up a ticket, simply saying, "Kesota."

After a decent pause the younger man said, "Going to Kesota, are you?"

"Yes."

"So am I. I live there, in fact."

"Do you? Then perhaps you can tell me the name of your County Superintendent. I'm looking for a school." He smiled frankly. "I'm just out of Jackson University, and--"

"That so? I'm an Ann Arbor man myself." They took a moment for mutual warming up. "Yes, I know the Superintendent. Why not come right up to my boarding-place, and to-morrow I'll introduce you? Looking for a school, eh? What kind of a school?"

"Oh, a village school, or even a country school. It's too late to get a good place; but I've been sick, and--"

"Yes, the good positions are all snapped up; still, you might by accident hit on something. I know Mott; he'll do all he can for you. By-the-way, my name's Allen."

The young student understood this hint and spoke. "Mine is Stacey."

The younger man mused a few minutes, as if he had forgotten his new acquaintance. Suddenly he roused up.

"Say, would you take a country school several miles out?"

"I think I would, if nothing better offered."