Part 7

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.

“WHEN THE KING COMES IN”

By Anthony Leland

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.