"What DO you think?" she asked eagerly. "I suppose now I shall hear something about those great books."

She put herself at ease in her chair like one who prepares to listen quietly.

"Shall I tell you how the whole argument runs as I have arranged it? I shall have to begin far away and come down to the subject by degrees." He looked apologetic.

"Tell me everything; I have been waiting a long time."

David reflected a few moments and then began:—

"The first of my books as I have arranged them, considers what we call the physical universe as a whole—our heavens—the stars—and discusses the little that man knows about it. I used to think the earth was the centre of this universe, the most important world in it, on account of Man. That is what the ancient Hebrews thought. In this room float millions of dust-particles too small to be seen by us. To say that the universe is made for the sake of the earth would be something like saying that the earth was created for the sake of one of these particles of its own dust."

He paused to see how she received this.

"That ought to be a great book," she said approvingly. "I should like to study it."

"The second takes up that small part of the universe which we call our solar system and sums up the little we have learned regarding it. I used to think the earth the most important part of the solar system, on account of Man. So the earliest natural philosophers believed. That is like believing that the American continent was created for the sake, say, of my father's farm."

He awaited her comment.

"That should be a great book," she said simply. "Some day let me see THAT."

"The third detaches for study one small planet of that system—our earth—and reviews our latest knowledge of that: as to how it has been evolved into its present stage of existence through other stages requiring unknown millions and millions and millions of years. Once I thought it was created in six days. So it is written. Do you believe that?"

There was silence.

"What is the next book?" she asked.

"The fourth," said David, with a twinkle in his eye at her refusal to answer his question, "takes up the history of the earth's surface—its crust—the layers of this—as one might study the skin of an apple as large as the globe. In the course of an almost infinite time, as we measure things, it discovers the appearance of Life on this crust, and then tries to follow the progress of Life from the lowest forms upward, always upward, to Man: another time infinitely vast, according to our standards."

He looked over for some comment but she made none, and he continued, his interest deepening, his face kindling:—

"The fifth takes up the subject of Man, as a single one of the myriads of forms of Life that have grown on the earth's crust, and gives the best of what we know of him viewed as a species of animal. Does this tire you?"

Gabriella made the only gesture of displeasure he had ever seen.

"Now," said David, straightening himself up, "I draw near to the root of the matter. A sixth book takes up what we call the civilization of this animal species, Man. It subdivides his civilization into different civilizations. It analyzes these civilizations, where it is possible, into their arts, governments, literatures, religions, and other elements. And the seventh," he resumed after a grave pause, scrutinizing her face most eagerly, "the seventh takes up just one part of his civilizations—the religions of the globe—and gives an account of these. It describes how they have grown and flourished, how some have passed as absolutely away as the civilizations that produced them. It teaches that those religions were as natural a part of those civilizations as their civil laws, their games, their wars, their philosophy; that the religious books of these races, which they themselves often thought inspired revelations, were no more inspired and no more revelations than their secular books; that Buddha's faith or Brahma's were no more direct from God than Buddhistic or Brahman temples were from God; that the Koran is no more inspired than Moorish architecture is inspired; that the ancient religion of the Jewish race stands on the same footing as the other great religions of the globe—as to being Supernatural; that the second religion of the Hebrews, starting out of them, but rejected by them, the Christian religion, the greatest of all to us, takes its place with the others as a perfectly natural expression of the same human desire and effort to find God and to worship Him through all the best that we know in ourselves and of the universe outside us."

"Ah," said Gabriella, suddenly leaning forward in her chair, "that is the book that has done all the harm."

"One moment! All these books," continued David, for he was aroused now and did not pause to consider her passionate protest, "have this in common: that they try to discover and to trace Law. The universe—it is the expression of Law. Our solar system—it has been formed by Law, The sun—the driving force of Law has made it. Our earth—Law has shaped that; brought Life out of it; evolved Life on it from the lowest to the highest; lifted primeval Man to modern Man; out of barbarism developed civilization; out of prehistoric religions, historic religions. And this one order—method—purpose—ever running and unfolding through the universe, is all that we know of Him whom we call Creator, God, our Father. So that His reign is the Reign of Law. He, Himself, is the author of the Law that we should seek Him. We obey, and our seekings are our religions."

"If you ask me whether I believe in the God of the Hebrews, I say 'Yes'; just as I believe in the God of the Babylonians, of the Egyptians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of all men. But if you ask whether I believe what the Hebrews wrote of God, or what any other age or people thought of God, I say 'No.' I believe what the best thought of my own age thinks of Him in the light of man's whole past and of our greater present knowledge of the Laws of His universe," said David, stoutly, speaking for his masters.

"As for the theologies," he resumed hastily, as if not wishing to be interrupted, "I know of no book that has undertaken to number them. They, too, are part of Man's nature and civilization, of his never ceasing search. But they are merely what he thinks of God—never anything more. They often contain the highest thought of which he is capable in his time and place; but the awful mistake and cruelty of them is that they have regularly been put forth as the voice of God Himself, authoritative, inviolable, and unchanging. An assemblage of men have a perfect right to turn a man out of their church on theological grounds; but they have no right to do it in the name of God. With as much propriety a man might be expelled from a political party in the name of God. In the long life of any one of the great religions of the globe, how many brief theologies have grown up under it like annual plants under a tree! How many has the Christian religion itself sprouted, nourished, and trampled down as dead weeds! What do we think now of the Christian theology of the tenth century? of the twelfth? of the fifteenth? In the nineteenth century alone, how many systems of theology have there been? In the Protestantism of the United States, how many are there to-day? Think of the names they bear—older and newer! According to founders, and places, and sources, and contents, and methods: Arminian—Augustinian—Calvinistic—Lutheran— Gallican—Genevan—Mercersburg—New England—Oxford—national— revealed—Catholic—evangelical—fundamental—historical— homiletical—moral—mystical—pastoral—practical—dogmatic— exegetical—polemic—rational—systematic. That sounds a little like Polonius," said David, stopping suddenly, "but there is no humor in it! One great lesson in the history of them all is not to be neglected: that through them also runs the great Law of Evolution, of the widening thoughts of men; so that now, in civilized countries at least, the churches persecute to the death no longer. You know what the Egyptian Priesthood would have done with me at my trial. What the Mediaeval hierarchy would have done. What the Protestant or the Catholic theology of two centuries ago might have done. Now mankind is developing better ideas of these little arrangements of human psychology on the subject of God, though the churches still try to enforce them in His name. But the time is coming when the churches will be deserted by all thinking men, unless they cease trying to uphold, as the teachings of God, mere creeds of their ecclesiastical founders. Very few men reject all belief in God; and it is no man's right to inquire in what any man's belief consists; men do reject and have a right to reject what some man writes out as the eternal truth of the matter."

"And now," he said, turning to her sorrowfully, "that is the best or the worst of what I believe—according as one may like it or not like it. I see all things as a growth, a sublime unfolding by the Laws of God. The race ever rises toward Him. The old things which were its best once die off from it as no longer good. Its charity grows, its justice grows. All the nobler, finer elements of its spirit come forth more and more—a continuous advance along the paths of Law. And the better the world, the larger its knowledge, the easier its faith in Him who made it and who leads it on. The development of Man is itself the great Revelation of Him! But I have studied these things ignorantly, only a little while. I am at the beginning of my life, and hope to grow. Still I stand where I have placed myself. And now, are you like the others: do you give me up?"

He faced her with the manner in which he had sat before his professors, conceiving himself as on trial a second time. He had in him the stuff of martyrs and was prepared to stand by his faith at the cost of all things.

The silence in the room lasted. Her feeling for him was so much deeper than all this—so centred, not in what his faith was to her but in what HE was to her, that she did not trust herself to speak. He was not on trial in these matters in the least: without his knowing it, he had been on trial in many other ways for a long time.

He misunderstood her silence, read wrongly her expression which was obeying with some severity the need she felt to conceal what she had no right to show.

"Ah, well! Ah, well!" he cried piteously, rising slowly.

When she saw his face a moment later across the room as he turned, it was the face she had first seen in the dark street. It had stopped her singing then; it drew an immediate response from her now. She crossed over to him and took one of his hands in both of hers. Her cheeks were flushed, her voice trembled.

"I am not your judge," she said, "and in all this there is only one thing that is too sad, too awful, for me to accept. I am sorry you should have been misled into believing that the Christian religion is nothing more than one of the religions of the world, and Christ merely one of its religious teachers. I wish with all my strength you believed as you once believed, that the Bible is a direct Revelation from God, making known to us, beyond all doubt, the Resurrection of the dead, the Immortality of the Soul, in a better world than this, and the presence with us of a Father who knows our wants, pities our weakness, and answers our prayers. But I believe you will one day regain your faith: you will come back to the Church."

He shook his head.

"Don't be deceived," he said.

"Men, great men, have said that before and they have come back. I am a woman, and these questions never trouble us; but is it not a common occurrence that men who think deeply on such mysteries pass through their period of doubt?"

"But suppose I never pass through mine! You have not answered my question," he said determinedly. "Does this make no difference in your feeling for me? Would it make none?"

"Will you bring me that book on the religions of the world?"

"Ah," he said, "you have not answered."

"I have told you that I am not your judge."

"Ah, but that tells nothing: a woman is never a judge. She is either with one or against him."

"Which do I look like?"—she laughed evasively—"Mercy or Vengeance? And have you forgotten that it is late—too late to ask questions?"

He stood, comprehending her doubtfully, with immeasurable joy, and then went out to get his overcoat.

"Bring your things in here," she said, "it is cold in the hall. And wrap up warmly! That is more important than all the Genevan and the homiletical!"

He bade her good night, subdued with happiness that seemed to blot out the troublous past, to be the beginning of new life. New happiness brought new awkwardness:—

"This was not my regular night," he said threateningly. "I came to-night instead of to-morrow night."

Gabriella could answer a remark like that quickly enough.

"Certainly: it is hard to wait even for a slight pleasure, and it is best to be through with suffering."

He looked as if cold water and hot water had been thrown on him at the same time: he received shocks of different kinds and was doubtful as to the result. He shook his head questioningly.

"I may do very well with science, but I am not so sure about women."

"Aren't women science?"

"They are a branch of theology," he said; "they are what a man thinks about when he begins to probe his Destiny!"



XVII

David slept peacefully that night, like a man who has reached the end of long suspense. When he threw his shutters open late, he found that the storm had finished its work and gone and that the weather had settled stinging cold. The heavens were hyacinth, the ground white with snow; and the sun, day-lamp of that vast ceiling of blue, made the earth radiant as for the bridal morn of Winter. So HIS thoughts ran.

"Gabriella! Gabriella!" he cried, as he beheld the beauty, the purity, the breadth, the clearness. "It is you—except the coldness, the cruelty."

All day then those three: the hyacinthine sky, the flashing lamp, the white earth, with not one crystal thawing.

It being Saturday, there was double work for him. He knocked up the wood for that day and for Sunday also, packed and stored it; cut double the quantity of oats; threw over twice the usual amount of fodder. The shocks were buried. He had hard kicking to do before he reached the rich brown fragrant stalks. Afterwards he made paths through the snow about the house for his mother; to the dairy, to the hen-house. In the wooden monotony of her life an interruption in these customary visits would have been to her a great loss. The snow being over the cook's shoe-tops, he took a basket and dug the vegetables out of the holes in the garden.

In the afternoon he had gone to the pond in the woods to cut a drinking place for the cattle. As he was returning with his axe on his shoulder, the water on it having instantly frozen, he saw riding away across the stable lot, the one of their neighbors who was causing him so much trouble about the buying of the farm. He stopped hot with anger and watched him.

In those years a westward movement was taking place among the Kentuckians—a sad exodus. Many families rendered insolvent or bankrupt by the war and the loss of their slaves, while others interspersed among them had grown richer by Government contracts, were now being bought out, forced out, by debt or mortgage, and were seeking new homes where lay cheaper lands and escape from the suffering of living on, ruined, amid old prosperous acquaintances. It was a profound historic disturbance of population, destined later on to affect profoundly many younger commonwealths. This was the situation now bearing heavily on David's father, on three sides of whose fragmentary estate lay rich neighbors, one of whom especially desired it.

The young man threw his axe over his shoulder again and took a line straight toward the house.

"He shall not take advantage of my father's weakness again," he said, "nor shall he use to further his purposes what I have done to reduce him to this want."

He felt sure that this pressure upon his father lay in part back of the feeling of his parents toward him. His expulsion from college and their belief that he was a failure; the fact that for three years repairs had been neglected and improvements allowed to wait, in order that all possible revenues might be collected for him; even these caused them less acute distress than the fear that as a consequence they should now be forced so late in life to make that mournful pilgrimage into strange regions. David was saddened to think that ever at his father's side sat his mother, irritating him by dropping all day into his ear the half idle, half intentional words which are the water that wears out the rock.

The young man walked in a straight line toward the house, determined to ascertain the reason of this last visit, and to have out the long-awaited talk with his father. He reached the yard gate, then paused and wheeled abruptly toward the barn.

"Not to-day," he said, thinking of Gabriella and of his coming visit to her now but a few hours off. "To-morrow! Day after to-morrow! Any time after this! But no quarrels to-day!" and his face softened.

Before the barn door, where the snow had been tramped down by the stock and seeds of grain lay scattered, he flushed a flock of little birds, nearly all strangers to each other. Some from the trees about the yard; some from the thickets, fences, and fields farther away. As he threw open the barn doors, a few more, shyer still, darted swiftly into hiding. He heard the quick heavy flap of wings on the joists of the oats loft overhead, and a hawk swooped out the back door and sailed low away.

The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was the second day of famine—all seeds being buried first under ice and now under snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this granary, the larger following to prey on them. To-night there would be owls and in the darkness tragedies. In the morning, perhaps, he would find a feather which had floated from a breast. A hundred years ago, he reflected, the wolves would have gathered here also and the cougar and the wildcat for bigger game.

It was sunset as he left the stable, his work done. Beside the yard gate there stood a locust tree, and on a bough of this, midway up, for he never goes to the tree-tops at this season, David saw a cardinal. He was sitting with his breast toward the clear crimson sky; every twig around him silver filigree; the whole tree glittering with a million gems of rose and white, gold and green; and wherever a fork, there a hanging of snow. The bird's crest was shot up. He had come forth to look abroad upon this strange wreck of nature and peril to his kind. David had scarcely stopped before him when with a quick shy movement he dived down into one of his ruined winter fortresses-a cedar dismembered and flattened out, never to rise again.

The supper that evening was a very quiet one. David felt that his father's eyes were often on him reproachfully; and that his mother's were approvingly on his father's. Time and again during the meal the impulse well-nigh overcame him to speak to his father then and there; but he knew it would be a cruel, angry scene; and each time the face of Gabriella restrained him. It was for peace; and his heart shut out all discord from around that new tenderer figure of her which had come forth within him this day.

Soon even the trouble at home was forgotten; he was on his way through the deep snow toward her.



XVIII

Gabriella had brought with her into this neighborhood of good-natured, non-reading people the recollections of literature. These became her library of the mind; and deep joy she drew from its invisible volumes. She had transported a fine collection of the heroes and heroines of good fiction (Gabriella, according to the usage of her class and time, had never read any but standard works). These, when the earlier years of adversity came on, had been her second refuge from the world: religion was the first. Now they were the means by which she returned to the world in imagination. The failure to gather together so durable a company of friends leaves every mind the more destitute—especially a woman's, which has greater need to live upon ideals, and cannot always find these in actual life. Then there were short poems and parts of long poems, which were as texts out of a high and beautiful Gospel of Nature. One of these was on the snowstorm; and this same morning her memory long was busy, fitting the poem within her mind to the scenery around the farmhouse, as she passed joyously from window to window, looking out far and near.

There it all was as the great New England poet had described it: that masonry out of an unseen quarry, that frolic architecture of the snow, nightwork of the North Wind, fierce artificer. In a few hours he had mimicked with wild and savage fancy the structures which human art can scarce rear, stone by stone, in an age: white bastions curved with projected roof round every windward stake or tree or door; the gateway overtopped with tapering turrets; coop and kennel hung mockingly with Parian wreaths; a swanlike form investing the hidden thorn.

From one upper window under the blue sky in the distance she could see what the poet had never beheld: a field of hemp shocks looking like a winter camp, dazzlingly white. The scene brought to her mind some verses written by a minor Kentucky writer on his own soil and people.

SONG OF THE HEMP

Ah, gentle are the days when the Year is young And rolling fields with rippling hemp are green And from old orchards pipes the thrush at morn. No land, no land like this is yet unsung Where man and maid at twilight meet unseen And Love is born.

Oh, mighty summer days and god of flaming tress When in the fields full-headed bends the stalk, And blossoms what was sown! No land, no land like this for tenderness When man and maid as one together walk And Love is grown.

Oh, dim, dim autumn days of sobbing rain When on the fields the ripened hemp is spread And woods are brown. No land, no land like this for mortal pain When Love stands weeping by the sweet, sweet bed For Love cut down.

Ah, dark, unfathomably dark, white winter days When falls the sun from out the crystal deep On muffled farms. No land, no land like this for God's sad ways When near the tented fields Love's Soldier lies asleep With empty arms.

The verses were too sorrowful for this day, with its new, half-awakened happiness. Had Gabriella been some strong-minded, uncompromising New England woman, she might have ended her association with David the night before—taking her place triumphantly beside an Accusing Judge. Or she might all the more fiercely have set on him an acrid conscience, and begun battling with him through the evidences of Christianity, that she might save his soul. But this was a Southern girl of strong, warm, deep nature, who felt David's life in its simple entirety, and had no thought of rejecting the whole on account of some peculiarity in one of its parts; the white flock was more to her than one dark member. Inexpressibly dear and sacred as was her own church, her own faith, she had never been taught to estimate a man primarily with reference to his. What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorable character, his manners, his manhood—these were what Gabriella had always been taught to look for first in a man.

In many other ways than in his faith and doubt David was a new type of man to her. He was the most religious, the only religious, one she had ever known—a new spiritual growth arising out of his people as a young oak out of the soil. Had she been familiar with the Greek idea, she might have called him a Kentucky autochthon. It was the first time also that she had ever encountered in a Kentuckian the type of student mind—that fitness and taste for scholarship which sometimes moves so unobtrusively and rises so high among that people, but is usually unobserved unless discovered pre-eminent and commanding far from the confines of the state.

Touching his scepticism she looked upon him still as she had thought of him at first,—as an example of a sincere soul led astray for a time only. Strange as were his views (and far stranger they seemed in those years than now), she felt no doubt that when the clouds marshalled across his clear vision from the minds of others had been withdrawn, he would once more behold the Sun of Righteousness as she did. Gabriella as by intuition reasoned that a good life most often leads to a belief in the Divine Goodness; that as we understand in others only what we are in ourselves, so it is the highest elements of humanity that must be relied upon to believe in the Most High: and of David's lofty nature she possessed the whole history of his life as evidence.

Her last act, then, the night before had been, in her nightgown, on her knees, to offer up a prayer that he might be saved from the influences of false teachers and guided back to the only Great One. But when a girl, with all the feelings which belong to her at that hour, seeks this pure audience and sends upward the name of a man on her spotless prayers, he is already a sacred happiness to her as well as a care.

On this day she was radiant with tender happiness. The snow of itself was exhilarating. It spread around her an enchanted land. It buried out of sight in the yard and stable lots all mire, all ugly things. This ennoblement of eternal objects reacted with comic effect on the interior of the house itself; outside it was a marble palace, surrounded by statuary; within—alas! It provoked her humor, that innocent fun-making which many a time had rendered her environment the more tolerable.

When she went down into the parlor early that evening to await David's coming, this gayety, this laughter of the generations of men and women who made up her past, possessed her still. She made a fresh investigation of the parlor, took a new estimate of its peculiar furnishings. The hearthstones—lead color. The mohair furniture—cold at all temperatures of the room and slippery in every position of the body. The little marble-top table on which rested a glass case holding a stuffed blue jay clutching a varnished limb: tail and eyes stretched beyond the reach of muscles. Near the door an enormous shell which, on summer days, the cook blew as a dinner horn for the hands in the field. A collection of ambrotypes which, no matter how held, always caused the sitter to look as though the sun was shining in his eyes. The violence of the Brussels carpet. But the cheap family portraits in thin wooden frames—these were Gabriella's delight in a mood like this.

The first time she saw these portraits, she turned and walked rapidly out of the parlor. She had enough troubles of her own without bearing the troubles of all these faces. Later on she could confront them with equanimity—that company of the pallid, the desperately sick, the unaccountably uncomfortable. All looked, not as though there had been a death in the family, but a death in the collection: only the same grief could have so united them as mourners. And whatever else they lacked, each showed two hands, the full number, placed where they were sure to be counted.

She was in the midst of this psychological reversion to ancestral gayety when David arrived. Each looked quickly at the other with unconscious fear. Within a night and a day each had drawn nearer to the other; and each secretly inquired whether the other now discovered this nearness. Gabriella saw at least that he, too, was excited with happiness.

He appeared to her for the first time handsome. He WAS better looking. When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders of beauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, of transformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he would probably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul and continued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of night such roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplined singer. Had he been a master violinist, he would have been unable to play a note from a wild desire to flourish the bow. He had long stood rooted passively in the soil of being like a century plant when it is merely keeping itself in existence. But latterly, feeling in advance the approach of the Great Blossoming Hour, he had begun to shoot up rapidly into a lofty life-stalk; there were inches of the rankest growth on him within the last twenty-four hours. To-night he was not even serious in his conversation; and therefore he was the more awkward. His emotions were unmanageable; much more his talk. But she who witnesses this awkwardness and understands—does she ever fail to pardon?

"Last night," he said with a droll twinkle, after the evening was about half spent, "there was one subject I did not speak to you about—Man's place in Nature. Have you ever thought about that?"

"I've been too busy thinking about my place in the school!" said Gabriella, laughing—Gabriella who at all times was simplicity and clearness.

"You see Nature does nothing for Man except what she enables him to do for himself. In this way she has made a man of him; she has given him his resources and then thrown him upon them. Beyond that she cares nothing, does nothing, provides, arranges nothing. I used to think, for instance, that the greenness of the earth was intended for his eyes—all the loveliness of spring. On the contrary, she merely gave him an eye which has adapted itself to get pleasure out of the greenness. The beauty of spring would have been the same, year after year, century after century, had he never existed. And the blue of the sky—I used to think it was hung about the earth for his sake; and the colors of the clouds, the great sunsets. But the blueness of the sky is nothing but the dust of the planet floating deep around it, too light to sink through the atmosphere, but reflecting the rays of the sun. These rays fall on the clouds and color them. It would all have been so, had Man never been born. The earth's springs of drinking water, refreshing showers, the rainbow on the cloud,—they would have been the same, had no human being ever stood on this planet to claim them for ages as the signs of providence and of covenant."

Gabriella had her own faith as to the rainbow.

"So, none of the other animals was made for Man," resumed David, who seemed to have some ulterior purpose in all this. "I used to think the structure and nature of the ass were given him that he might be adapted to bear Man's burdens; they were given him that he might bear his own burdens. Horses were not made for cavalry. And a camel—I never doubted that he was a wonderful contrivance to enable man to cross the desert; he is a wonderful contrivance in order that the contrivance itself may cross the desert."

"I hope I may never have to use one," said Gabriella, "when I commence to ride again. I prefer horses and carriages—though I suppose you would say that only the carriage was designed for me and that I had no right to be drawn in that way."

"Some day a horse may be designed for you, just as the carriage is. We do not use horses on railroads now; we did use them at first in Kentucky. Sometime you may not use horses in your carriage. You may have a horse that was designed for you."

"I think," said Gabriella, "I should prefer a horse that was designed for itself."

"And so," resumed David, moving straight on toward his concealed climax, "if I were a poet, I'd never write poems about flowers and clouds and lakes and mountains and moonbeams and all that; those things are not for a man. If I were a novelist, I'd never write stories about a grizzly bear, or a dog, or a red bird. If I were a sculptor, I'd not carve a lynx or a lion. If I were a painter, I'd never paint sheep. In all this universe there is only one thing that Nature ever created for a man. I'd write poems about that one thing! I'd write novels about it! I'd paint it! I'd carve it! I'd compose music to it!"

"Why, what is that?" said Gabriella, led sadly astray.

"A woman!" said David solemnly, turning red.

Gabriella fled into the uttermost caves of silence.

"And there was only one thing ever made for woman."

"I understand perfectly."

David felt rebuffed. He hardly knew why. But after a moment or two of silence he went on, still advancing with rough paces toward his goal:—

"Sometimes," he said mournfully, "it's harder for a man to get the only thing in the world that was ever made for him than anything else! This difficulty, however, appertains exclusively to the human species."

Gabriella touched her handkerchief quickly to her lips and held it there.

"But then, many curious things are true of our species," he continued, with his eyes on the fire and in the manner of a soliloquy, "that never occur elsewhere. A man, for instance, is the only animal that will settle comfortably down for the rest of its days to live on the exertions of the female."

"It shows how a woman likes to be depended on," said Gabriella, with her deep womanliness.

"Tom-cats of the fireside," said David, "who are proud of what fat mice their wives feed them on. It may show what you say in the nature of the woman. But what does it show in the nature of the man?"

"That depends."

"I don't think it depends," replied David. "I think it is either one of the results of Christianity or a survival of barbarism. As one of the results of Christianity, it demonstrates what women will endure when they are imposed upon. As a relic of barbarism—when it happens in our country—why not regard it as derived from the North American Indians? The chiefs lounged around the house and smoked the best tobacco and sent the squaws out to work for them. Occasionally they broke silence by briefly declaring that they thought themselves immortal."

Gabriella tried to draw the conversation into other channels, but David was not to be diverted.

"It has been a great fact in the history of your sex," he said, looking across at her, with a shake of his head, as though she did not appreciate the subject, "that idea that everything in the universe was made for Man."

"Why?" inquired Gabriella, resigning herself to the perilous and the irresistible.

"Well, in old times it led men to think that since everything else belonged to them, so did woman: therefore when they wanted her they did not ask for her; they took her."

"It is much better arranged at present, whatever the reason."

"Now a man cannot always get one, even when he asks for her," and David turned red again and knotted his hands.

"I am so glad the schoolhouse was not damaged by the storm," observed Gabriella, reflecting.

David fell into a revery but presently awoke.

"There are more men than women in the world. On an average, that is only a fraction of a woman to every man. Still the men cannot take care of them. But it ought to be a real pleasure to every man to take care of an entire woman."

"Did you ever notice the hands in that portrait?"

David glanced at the portrait without noticing it, and went his way.

"Since a man knows nothing else was created for him, he feels his loneliness without her so much more deeply. They ought to be very good and true to each other—a man and a woman—since they two are alone in the universe."

He gulped down his words and stood up, trembling.

"I must be going," he said, without even looking at Gabriella, and went out into the hall for his coat.

"Bring it in here." she called. "It is cold out there." She watched how careless he was about making himself snug for his benumbing walk. He had a woollen comforter which he left loosely tied about his neck.

"Tie it closer," she commanded. "You had a cold last night, and it is worse tonight. Tuck it in close about your neck."

David made the attempt. He was not thinking.

"This way!" And Gabriella showed him by using her fingers around her own neck and collar.

He tried again and failed, standing before her with a mingling of embarrassment and stubborn determination.

"That will never do!" she cried with genuine concern. She took hold of the comforter by the ends and drew the knot up close to his throat, he lifting his head to receive it as it came. Then David with his eyes on the ceiling felt his coat collar turned up and her soft warm fingers tucking the comforter in around his neck. When he looked down, she was standing over by the fireplace.

"Good night," she said positively, with a quick gesture of dismissal as she saw the look in his eyes.

Each of the million million men who made up the past of David, that moment reached a hand out of the distance and pushed him forward. But of them all there was none so helpless with modesty,—so in need of hiding from every eye,—even his own,—the sacred annals of that moment.

He was standing by the table on which burned the candles. He bent down quickly and blew them out and went over to her by the dim firelight.



XIX

All high happiness has in it some element of love; all love contains a desire for peace. One immediate effect of new happiness, new love, is to make us turn toward the past with a wish to straighten out its difficulties, heal its breaches, forgive its wrongs. We think most hopefully of distressing things which may still be remedied, most regretfully of others that have passed beyond our reach and will.

It was between ten and eleven o'clock of the next day—Sunday. David's cold had become worse. He had turned over necessary work to the negro man and stayed quietly in his room since the silent breakfast Two or three books chosen carelessly out of the trunk lay on his table before the fire: interest had gone out of them this day. With his face red and swollen, he was sitting beside this table with one hand loosely covering the forgotten books, his eyes turned to the window, but looking upon distant inward scenes.

Sunday morning between ten and eleven o'clock! the church-going hour of his Bible-student life. In imagination he could hear across these wide leagues of winter land the faint, faint peals of the church bells which were now ringing. He was back in the town again—up at the college—in his room at the dormitory; and it was in the days before the times of his trouble. The students were getting ready for church, with freshly shaved faces, boots well blacked, best suits on, not always good ones. He could hear their talk in the rooms around his, hear fragments of hymns, the opening and shutting of doors along the hallways, and the running of feet down the stairs. By ones and twos and larger groups they passed down and out with their hymnals, Testaments, sometimes blank books for notes on the sermon. Several thrust bright, cordial faces in at the door, as they passed, to see whether he and his roommate had started.

The scene changed. He was in the church, which was crowded from pulpit to walls. He was sitting under the chandelier in the choir, the number of the first hymn had just been whispered along, and he began to sing, with hundreds of others, the music which then released the pinions of his love and faith as the air releases the wings of a bird. The hymn ceased; he could see the pastor rise from behind the pulpit, advance, and with a gesture gather that sea of heads to prayer. He could follow the sermon, most of all the exhortation; around him was such stillness in the church that his own heart-beats were audible. Then the Supper and then home to the dormitory again—with a pain of happiness filling him, the rest and the unrest of consecration.

Many other scenes he lived through in memory this morning—once lived in reality amid that brotherhood of souls. His tenderest thoughts perhaps dwelt on the young men's prayer-meetings of Sunday afternoons at the college. There they drew nearest to the Eternal Strength which was behind their weakness, and closest to each other as student after student lifted a faltering, stumbling petition for a common blessing on their work. The Immortal seemed to be in that bare room, filling their hearts with holy flame, drawing around them the isolation of a devoted band. They were one in One. Then had followed the change in him which produced the change in them: no fellowship, no friendship, with an unbeliever; and he was left without a comrade.

His heart was yearning and sick this day to be reconciled to them all. How did they think of him, speak of him, now? Who slept in his bed? Who sat a little while, after the studies of the night were over, talking to his room-mate? Who knelt down across the room at his prayers when the lights were put out? And his professors—what bulwarks of knowledge and rectitude and kindness they were!—all with him at first, all against him at last, as in duty bound.

To one man alone among those hundreds could David look back as having begun to take interest in him toward the close of his college days. During that vacation which he had spent in reading and study, he had often refreshed himself by taking his book out to the woodland park near the city, which in those days was the grounds of one of the colleges of the University. There he found the green wild country again, a forest like his pioneer ancestor's. Regularly here he observed at out-of-door work the professor of Physical Science, who also was pressing his investigations forward during the leisure of those summer months. An authority from the north, from a New England university, who had resigned his chair to come to Kentucky, attracted by the fair prospects of the new institution. A great gray-bearded, eagle-faced, square-shouldered, big-footed man: reserved, absorbed, asking to be let alone, one of the silent masters. But David, desperate with intellectual loneliness himself, and knowing this man to be a student of the new science, one day had introduced himself and made inquiry about entering certain classes in his course the following session.

The professor shook his head. He was going back to New England himself the next year; and he moved away under the big trees, resuming his work.

As troubles had thickened about David, his case became discussed in University circles; and he was stopped on the street one day by this frigid professor and greeted with a man's grasp and a look of fresh beautiful affection. His apostasy from dogmatism had made him a friend of that lone thinker whose worship of God was the worship of Him through the laws of His universe and not through the dogmas of men.

This professor—and Gabriella: they alone, though from different motives, had been drawn to him by what had repelled all others. It was his new relation to her beyond anything else that filled David this day with his deep desire for peace with his past. She had such peace in herself, such charity of feeling, such simple steadfast faith: she cast the music of these upon the chords of his own soul. To the influence of her religion she was now adding the influence of her love; it filled him, subdued, overwhelmed him. And this morning, also out of his own happiness he remembered with most poignant suffering the unhappiness of his father. His own life was unfolding into fulness of affection and knowledge and strength; his father's was closing amid the weakness and troubles that had gathered about him; and he, David, had contributed his share to these. To be reconciled to his father this day—that was his sole thought.

It was about four o'clock. The house held that quiet which reigns of a Sunday afternoon when the servants have left the kitchen for the cabin, when all work is done, and the feeling of Sunday rest takes possession of our minds. The winter sunshine on the fields seems full of rest; the brutes rest—even those that are not beasts of burden. The birds appear to know the day, and to make note of it in quieter twitter and slower flight.

David rose resolutely and started downstairs. As he entered his father's room, his mother was passing out She looked at her son with apprehension, as she closed the door. His father was sitting by a window, reading, as was his Sunday wont, the Bible. He had once written to David that his had always been a religious people; it was true. A grave, stern man—sternest, gravest on Sunday. When it was not possible to go to church, the greater to him the reason that the house itself should become churchlike in solemnity, out of respect to the day and the duty of self-examination. A man of many failings, but on this subject strong.

David sat down and waited for him to reach the end of the page or chapter. But his father read on with a slow perceptible movement of his lips.

"Father."

The gray head was turned slowly toward him in silent resentment of the interruption.

"I thought it would be better to come down and talk with you."

The eyes resought the page, the lips resumed their movements.

"I am sorry to interrupt you."

The eye still followed the inspired words, from left to right, left to right, left to right.

"Father, things ought not to go on in this way between us. I have been at home now for two months. I have waited, hoping that you would give me the chance to talk about it all. You have declined, and meantime I have simply been at work, as I used to be. But this must not be put off longer for several reasons. There are other things in my life now that I have to think of and care for." The tone in which David spoke these last words was unusual and significant.

The eyes stopped at a point on the page. The lips were pressed tightly together.

David rose and walked quietly out of the room. After he had closed the door behind him and put his foot on the stairs, he stopped and with fresh determination reopened the door. His father had shut the Bible, laid it on the floor at the side of his chair, and was standing in the middle of the room with his eyes on the door through which David had passed. He pointed to his son to be seated, and resumed his chair. He drew his penknife from his pocket and slowly trimmed the ravellings from his shirt-cuffs, blowing them off his wrists. David saw that his hands were trembling violently. The tragedy in the poor action cut him to the heart and he threw himself remorsefully into the midst of things.

"Father, I know I have disappointed you! Know it as well as you do; but I could not have done differently."

"YOU not believe in Christianity! YOU not believe the Bible!"

The suppressed enraged voice summed up again the old contemptuous opinion.

The young man felt that there was another than himself whom it wounded.

"Sir, you must not speak to me with that feeling! Try to see that I am as sincere as you are. As to the goodness of my mind, I did not derive it from myself and am not to blame. I have only made an earnest and an honest use of what mind was given me. But I have not relied upon it alone. There are great men, some of the greatest minds of the world, who have been my teachers and determined my belief."

"All your life you had the word of God as your teacher and you believed it. Now these men tell you not to believe it and you believe them. And then you complain that I do not think more highly of you."

"Father," cried David, "there is one man whose name is very dear to us both. The blood of that man is in me as it is in you. Sir, it is your grandfather. Do you remember what the church of his day did with him? Do you forget that, standing across the fields yonder, is the church he himself built to freedom of opinion in religious matters? I grew up, not under the shadow of that church, for it casts none, but in the light of it. I have seen many churches worship there. I have had before me, from the time I could remember, my great-grandfather's words: they seemed to me the voice of God by whom all men were created, and the spirit of Christ by whom, as you believe, men are to be saved."

The younger man stopped and waited in vain for the older one to reply. But his father also waited, and David went on:—

"I do not expect you to stand against the church in what it has done with me: that HAD to be done. If you had been an elder of that church, I know you, too, would have voted to expel me. What I do ask of you is that you think me as sincere in my belief as I think you in yours. I do ask for your toleration, your charity. Everything else between us will be easy, if you can see that I have done only what I could. The faith of the world grows, changes. Sons cannot always agree with their fathers; otherwise the world would stand still. You do not believe many things your own grandfather believed—the man of whose memory you are so proud. The faith you hold did not even exist among men in his day. I can no longer agree with you: I do not think the less of you because I believe differently; do not think the less of me!"

The young man could not enter into any argument with the old one. He would not have disturbed if he could his father's faith: it was too late in life for that. Neither could he defend his own views without attacking his father's: that also would have been cruelty in itself and would have been accepted as insulting. Still David could not leave his case without witnesses.

"There are things in the old Bible that no scholar now believes."

"The Almighty declares they are true; you say they are not: I prefer to believe the Almighty. Perhaps He knows better than you and the scholars."

David fell into sorrowful silence. "There are some other matters about which I should like to speak with you, father," he said, changing the subject. "I recall one thing you said to me the day I came home. You asked me why I had come back here: do you still feel that way?"

"I do. This is a Christian house. This is a Christian community. You are out of place under this roof and in this neighborhood. Life was hard enough for your mother and me before. But we did for you what we could; you were pleased to make us this return. It will be better for you to go."

Every word seemed to have been hammered out of iron, once melted in the forge, but now cold and unchangeably shaped to its heavy purpose. The young man writhed under the hopelessness of the situation:—

"Sir, is it all on one side? Have I done nothing for you in all these years? Until I was nearly a man's age, did I not work? For my years of labor did I receive more than a bare living? Did you ever know a slave as faithful? Were you ever a harsh master to this slave? Do you owe me nothing for all those years?—I do not mean money,—I mean kindness, justice!"

"How many years before you began to work for us did your mother and I work for you? Did you owe us nothing for all that?"

"I did! I do! I always shall! But do you count it against me that Nature brought me forth helpless and kept me helpless for so many years afterwards? If my being born was a fault, whose was it? Is the dependence of an infant on its parent a debt? Father! father! Be just! be just! that you may be more kind to me."

"Kind to YOU! Just to YOU!" Hitherto his father had spoken with a quietude which was terrible, on account of the passion raging beneath. But now he sprang to his feet, strode across, and, pulling a ragged shirt-cuff down from under his coat-sleeve, shook it in his son's eyes—poverty. He went to one of the rotting doors and jerking it open without turning the knob, rattled it on its loose hinges—poverty. He turned to the window, and with one gesture depicted ruined outhouses and ruined barn, now hidden under the snow, and beautiful in the Sunday evening light—poverty. He turned and faced his son, majestic in mingled grief and care.

"Kind! just! you who have trifled with your advantages, you who are sending your mother out of her home—"

David sprang toward him in an agony of trouble and remorse.

"It is not true, it is not necessary! Father, you have been too much influenced by my mother's fears. This is Bailey's doing. It is about this I have wanted to talk to you. I shall see Bailey to-morrow."

"I forbid you to see him or to interfere."

"I must see him, whether you wish it or not," and David, to save other hard words that were coming, turned quickly and left the room.

He did not go down to supper. Toward bedtime, as he sat before his fire, he heard a slow, unfamiliar step mounting the stair. Not often in a year did he have the chance to recognize that step. His mother entered, holding a small iron stewpan, from under the cover of which steamed a sweet, spicy odor.

"This will do your cold good," she said, tasting the stew out of a spoon which she brought in her other hand, and setting it down on the hot hearth. Then she stood looking a little fearfully at her son, who had not moved. Ah, that is woman's way! She incites men to a difficulty, and then appears innocently on the battle-field with bandages for the belligerents. How many of the quarrels of this world has she caused—and how few ever witnessed!

David was sick in heart and body and kept his chair and made no reply. His mother suddenly turned, feeling a cold draft on her back, and observed the broken window-pane and the flapping sheet of paper.

"There's putty and glass in the store-room: why don't you put that pane of glass in?"

"I will sometime," said David, absently. She went over to his bed and beat up the bolster and made everything ready for him.

"You ought to have clean sheets and pillow-cases," she remarked confidently; "the negroes are worthless. Good night," she said, with her hand on the door, looking back at him timidly.

He sprang up and went over to her. "Oh, mother! mother! mother!" he cried, and then he checked the useless words that came rushing in a flood.

"Good night! and thank you for coming. Good night! Be careful, I'll bring the candle, the stairway is dark. Good night!"

"Oh, Gabriella! Gabriella!" he murmured as he went back to his table. He buried his head on his arms a moment, then, starting up, threw off his clothes, drank the mixture, and got into bed.



XX

At dead of night out in a lonely country, what sound freezes the blood like the quick cry of an animal seized and being killed? The fright, the pain, the despair: whosoever has heard these notes has listened to the wild death-music of Nature, ages old.

On the still frozen air near two or three o'clock of next morning, such a cry rang out from inside the barn. There were the short rushes to and fro, round and round; then violent leapings against the door, the troughs, and sides of the stable; then mad plunging, struggling, panting; then a long, terrified, weakened wail, which told everything beyond the clearness of words.

Up in his room, perfectly dark, for the coals in the grate were now sparkless, David was lying on his back, sleeping heavily and bathed in perspiration. Overheated, he had pushed the bed covers off from his throat; he had hollowed the pillow away from his face. So deep was the stillness of the house and of the night air outside, that almost the first sounds had reached his ear and sunk down into his brain: he stirred slightly. As the tumult grew louder, he tossed his head from side to side uneasily, and muttered a question in his broken dreams. And now the barn was in an uproar; and the dog, chained at his kennel behind the house, was howling, roaring to get loose. Would he never waken? Would the tragedy which he himself had unwittingly planned and staged be played to its end without his hearing a word? (So often it is that way in life.) At last, as one who has long tugged at his own sleep, striving to rend it as a smothering blanket and burst through into free air, he sat up in bed, confused, listening.

"Dogs!" he exclaimed, grinding his teeth.

He was out of bed in an instant, groping for his clothes. It seemed he would never find them. As he dressed, he muttered remorsefully to himself:—"I simply put them into a trap."

When he had drawn on socks, boots, and trousers, he slipped into his overcoat, felt for his hat, and hurried down. He released the dog, which instantly was off in a noiseless run, and followed, buttoning the coat about him as he went: the air was like ice against his bare, hot throat. Another moment and he could hear the dogs fighting. When he reached the door of the shed and threw it open, the flock of sheep bounded out past him in a wild rush for the open. He stepped inside, searching around with his foot as he groped. Presently it struck against something large and soft close to the wall in a corner. He reached down and taking it by the legs, pulled the sheep out into the moonlight, several yards across the snow: a red track followed, as though made with a broad dripping brush.

David stood looking down at it and kicked it two or three times.

"Did it make any difference to you whether your life were taken by dog or man? The dog killing you from instinct and famine; a man killing you as a luxury and with a fine calculation? And who is to blame now for your death, if blame there be? I who went to college instead of building a stable? Or the storm which deprived these prowlers of nearer food and started them on a far hunt, desperate with hunger? Or man who took you from wild Nature and made you more defenceless under his keeping? Or Nature herself who edged the tooth and the mind of the dog-wolf in the beginning that he might lengthen his life by shortening yours? Where and with what purpose began on this planet the taking of life that there might be life? Poor questions that never troubled you, poor sheep! But that follow, as his shadow, pondering Man, who no more knows the reason of it all than you did."

The fighting of the dogs had for the first few moments sounded farther and farther away, retreating through the barn and thence into the lot; and by and by the shepherd ran around and stood before David, awaiting orders. David seized the sheep by the feet and dragged it into the saddle-house; sent the dog to watch the rest of the flock; and ran back to the house, drawing his overcoat more tightly about him. As quickly as possible he got into bed and covered up warmly. Something caused him to recollect just then the case of one of the Bible students.

"Now I am in for it," he said.

And this made him think of his great masters and of Gabriella; and he lay there very anxious in the night.



XXI

Twilight had three times descended on the drear land. Three times Gabriella, standing at her windows and looking out upon the snow and ice, had seen everything disappear. How softly white were the snow-covered trees; how soft the black that thickened about them till they were effaced. Gabriella thought of them as still perfectly white out there in the darkness. Three evenings with her face against the pane she had watched for a familiar figure to stalk towering up the yard path, and no familiar figure had come. Three evenings she had returned to her firelight, and sat before it with an ear on guard for the sound of a familiar step on the porch below; but no step had been heard.

On the first night she had all but hoped that he would not seek her; the avowal of their love for each other had well-nigh left it an unendurable joy. But the second night she had begun to expect him confidently; and when the hour had passed and he had not come, Gabriella sat long before her fire with a new wound—she who had felt so many. By the third day she had reviewed all that she had ever heard of him or known of him: gathered it all afresh as a beautiful thing for receiving him with when he should come to her that night. Going early to her room she had taken her chair to the window and with her face close to the pane had watched again—watched that white yard; and again nothing moved in that white yard but the darkness.

She sprang up and began to walk to and fro.

"If he does not come to-night, something has happened. I know, I know, I know! Something is wrong. My heart is not mistaken. Oh, if anything were to happen to HIM! I must not think of it! I have borne many things; but THAT! I must not think of it!"

She sank into her chair with her ear strained toward the porch below. For a long time there was no sound. Then she heard the noise of heavy boots—a tapping of the toes against the pillars, to knock off the snow, and then the slow creaking of soles across the frozen boards. She started up. "It is some one else," she cried, wringing her hands. "Something has happened to him."

She stopped still in the middle of the room, her arms dropped at her sides, her eyes stretched wide.

The house girl's steps were heard running upstairs. Gabriella jerked the door open in her face.

"What is the matter?" she cried.

A negro man had come with a message for her. The girl looked frightened.

Gabriella ran past her down into the hall. "What is the matter?" she asked.

His Marse David had sent for her and wanted her to come at once. He had brought a horse for her.

"Is he ill—seriously ill?" He had had a bad cold and was worse.

"The doctor—has he sent for the doctor?"

The negro said that he was to take her back first and then go for the doctor.

"Go at once."

It was very dark, he urged, and slippery.

"Go on for the doctor! Where have you left the horse?"

The horse was at the stiles. The negro insisted that it would be better for him to go back with her.

"Don't lose time," she said, "and don't keep me waiting. Go! as quickly as you can!"

The negro cautioned her to dismount at the frozen creek.

When Gabriella, perhaps an hour later, knocked at the side door of David's home,—his father's and mother's room,—there was no summons to enter. She turned the knob and walked in. The room was empty; the fire had burned low; a cat lay on the hearthstones. It raised its head halfway and looked at her through the narrow slits of its yellow eyes and curled the tip of its tail—the cat which is never inconvenienced, which shares all comforts and no troubles. She sat down in a chair, overcome with excitement and hesitating what to do. In a moment she noticed that the door opening on the foot of the staircase stood ajar. It led to his room. Not a sound reached her from above. She summoned all her self-control, mounted the stairway, and entered.

The two negro women were standing inside with their backs to the door. On one side of the bed sat David's mother, on the other his father. Both were looking at David. He lay in the middle of the bed, his eyes fixed restlessly on the door. As soon as he saw her, he lifted himself with an effort and stretched out his arms and shook them at her with hoarse little cries. "Oh! oh! oh! oh!"

The next moment he locked his arms about her.

"Oh, it has been so long!" he said, drawing her close, "so long!"

"Ah, why did you not send for me? I have waited and waited."

He released her and fell back upon the pillows; then with a slight gesture he said to his father and mother:—

"Will you leave us alone?"

When they had gone out, he took one of her hands and pressed it against his cheek and lay looking at her piteously.

Gabriella saw the change in him: his anxious expression, his cheeks flushed with a red spot, his restlessness, his hand burning. She could feel the big veins throbbing too fast, too crowded. But a woman smiles while her heart breaks.

He propped himself a little higher on the pillows and turned on his side, clutching at his lung.

"Don't be frightened," he said, searching her face, "I've got something to tell you. Promise."

"I promise."

"I am going to have pneumonia, or I have it now. You are not frightened?"

Her eyes answered for her.

"I had a cold. I had taken something to throw me into a sweat—that was the night after I saw you."

At the thought of their last interview, he took her hand again and pressed it to his lips, looking tenderly at it.

"The dogs were killing the sheep, and I got up and went out while I was in a perspiration. I know it's pneumonia. I have had a long, hard chill. My head feels like it would burst, and there are other symptoms. This lung! It's pneumonia. One of the Bible college students had it. I helped to nurse him. Oh, he got well," he said, shaking his head at her with a smile, "and so will I!"

"I know it," she murmured, "I'm sure of it."

"What I want to ask is, Will you stay with me?"

"Ah, nothing could take me from you."

"I don't want you to leave me. I want to feel that you are right here by me through it all. I have to tell you something else: I may be delirious and not know what is going on. I have sent for the doctor. But there is a better one in Lexington. You try to get him to come. I know that he goes wherever he is called and stays till the danger is past or—or—till it is settled. Don't spare anything that can be done for me. I am in danger, and I must live. I must not lose all the greatness of life and lose you."

"Ah," she implored, seeing how ill he was. "Everything that can be done shall be done. Now oughtn't you to be quiet and let me make you comfortable till the doctor comes?"

"I must say something else while I can, and am sure. I might not get over this—"

"Ah—"

"Let me say this: I MIGHT not! If I should not, have no fear about the future; I have none; it will all be well with ME in Eternity."

He lay quiet a moment, his face turned off. She had buried hers on the bed. The flood of tears would come. He turned over, and seeing it laid his hand on it very lightly.

"If it be so, Gabriella, I hope all the rest of your life you will be happy. I hope no more trouble will ever come to you."

Suddenly he sat up, lifted her head, and threw his arms around her again. "Oh, Gabriella!" he cried, "you have been all there is to me."

"Some day," he continued a moment later, "if it turns out that way, come over here to see my father and mother. And tell them I left word that perhaps they had never quite understood me and so had never been able to do me justice. Now, will you call my mother?"

"Mother," he said, taking her by the hand and placing it in Gabriella's, "this is my wife, as I hope she will be, and your daughter; and I have asked her to stay and help you to nurse me through this cold."

Three twilights more and there was a scene in the little upper room of the farmhouse: David drawn up on the bed; at one side of it, the poor distracted mother, rocking herself and loudly weeping; for though mothers may not greatly have loved their grown sons, when the big men lie stricken and the mothers once more take their hands to wash them, bathe their faces with a cloth, put a spoon to their lips, memory brings back the days when those huge erring bodies lay across their breasts. They weep for the infant, now an infant again and perhaps falling into a long sleep.

On the other side of the bed sat David's father, bending over toward, trying now, as he had so often tried, to reach his son; thinking at swift turns of the different will he would have to make and of who would write it; of his own harshness; and also not free from the awful dread that this was the summons to his son to enter Eternity with his soul unprepared. At the foot of the bed were the two doctors, watchful, whispering to each other, one of whom led the mother out of the room; over by the door the two negro women and the negro man. Gabriella was not there.

Gabriella had gone once more to where she had been many times: gone to pour out in secret the prayer of her church, and of her own soul for the sick—with faith that her prayer would be answered.

A dark hour: a dog howling on the porch below; at the stable the cries of hungry, neglected animals; the winter hush settling over the great evening land.



XXII

When one sets out to walk daily across a wood or field in a fresh direction, starting always at the same point and arriving always at the same, without intention one makes a path; it may be long first, but in time the path will come. It commences at the home gate or bars and reaches forward by degrees; it commences at the opposite goal and lengthens backward thence: some day the ends meet and we discover with surprise how slightly we have deviated in all those crossings and recrossings. The mind has unconsciously marked a path long before the feet have traced it.

When Gabriella had begun teaching, she passed daily out of the yard into an apple orchard and thence across a large woodland pasture, in the remote corner of which the schoolhouse was situated. Through this woods the children had made their path: the straight instinctive path of childhood. But Gabriella, leaving this at the woods-gate, had begun to make one for herself. She followed her will from day to day; now led in this direction by some better vista; now drawn aside toward a group of finer trees; or seeing, farther on, some little nooklike place. In time, she had out of short disjointed threads sown a continuous path; it was made up of her loves, and she loved it. Of mornings a brisk walk along this braced her mind for the day; in the evening it quieted jangled nerves and revived a worn-out spirit: shedding her toil at the schoolhouse door as a heavy suffocating garment, she stepped gratefully out into its largeness, its woodland odors, and twilight peace.

On the night of the sleet tons of timber altogether had descended across this by-way. When the snow fell the next night, it brought down more. But the snow melted, leaving the ice; the ice melted, leaving the dripping boughs and bark. In time these were warmed and dried by sun and wind. New edges of greenness appeared running along the path. The tree-tops above were tossing and roaring in the wild gales of March, Under loose autumn leaves the earliest violets were dim with blue. But Gabriella had never once been there to realize how her path had been ruined, or to note the birth of spring.

It was perhaps a month afterward that one morning at the usual school hour her tall lithe figure, clad in gray hood and cloak, appeared at last walking along this path, stepping over or passing around the fallen boughs. She was pale and thin, but the sweet warm womanliness of her, if possible, lovelier. There was a look of religious gratitude in the eyes, but about her mouth new happiness.

Her duties were done earlier than usual that afternoon, for not much could be accomplished on this first day of reassembling the children. They were gone; and she stood on the steps of the school-house, facing toward a gray field on a distant hillside, which caught the faint sunshine. It drew her irresistibly in heart and foot, and she set out toward it.

The day was one of those on which the seasons meet. Strips of snow ermined the field; but on the stumps, wandering and warbling before Gabriella as she advanced, were bluebirds, those wings of the sky, those breasts of earth. She reached the spot she was seeking, and paused. There it was—the whole pitiful scene! His hemp brake; the charred rind of a stump where he had kindled a fire to warm his hands; the remnant of the shock fallen over and left unfinished that last afternoon; trailing across his brake a handful of hemp partly broken out.

She surveyed it all with wistful tenderness. Then she looked away to the house. She could see the window of his room at which she had sat how many days, gazing out toward this field! On his bed in that room he was now stretched weak and white, but struggling back into health.

She came closer and gazed down at his frozen boot prints. How near his feet had drawn to that long colder path which would have carried him away from her. How nearly had his young life been left, like the hand of hemp he last had handled—half broken out, not yet ready for strong use and good service. At that moment one scene rose before her memory: a day at Bethlehem nigh Jerusalem; a young Hebrew girl issuing from her stricken house and hastening to meet Him who was the Resurrection and the Life; then in her despair uttering her one cry:—"Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."

The mist of tears blinded Gabriella, whose love and faith were as Martha's. She knelt down and laid her cheek against the coarse hemp where it had been wrapped about his wrist.

"Lord," she said, "hadst Thou not been here, hadst Thou not heard my prayer for him, he would have died!"



XXIII

Spring, who breaks all promises in the beginning to keep them in the end, had ceased from chilling caprice and withdrawals: the whole land was now the frank revelation of her loveliness. Autumn—the hours of falling and of departing; spring—season of rise and of return. The rise of sap from root to summit; the rise of plant from soil to sun; the rise of bud from bark to bloom; the rise of song from heart to hearing: vital days. And days when things that went away come back, when woods, fields, thickets, and streams are full of returns.

Gabriella was not disappointed. Those provident old tree-mothers on the orchard slope, whose red-cheeked children are autumn apples, had not let themselves be fatally surprised by the great February frost: their bark-cradled bud-infants had only been wrapped away the more warmly till danger was over. For many days now the hillside had been a grove of pink and white domes under each of which hung faint fragrance: the great silent marriage-bells of the trees.

After the early family supper, Gabriella, if there had been no shower, would take her shawl to sit on and some bit of work for companionship. She would go out to the edge of this orchard away from the tumult of the house. The hill sloped down into a wide green valley winding away toward the forest below. Through this valley a stream of white spring water, drunk by the stock, ran within banks of mint and over a bed of rocks and moss. On the hillside opposite was a field of young hemp stretching westward—soon to be a low sea of rippling green. Beyond this field was the sunset; over it flashed the evening star; and for the past few days beside the star had hung the inconstant, the constant, crescent of ages.

She liked to spread her shawl on the edge of the orchard overlooking the valley—a deep carpet of grass sprinkled with wind-blown petals; to watch the sky kindle and burn out; see the recluse Evening come forth before the Night and walk softly down the valley toward the woods; feel as an elixir about her the air, sweet from the trees, sweet with earth odors, sweet with all the lingering history of the day. Nearer, ever nearer would swing the stars into her view. The moon, late a bow of thinnest, mistiest silver, now of broadening, brightening gold, would begin to drive the darkness downward from the white domes of the trees till it lay as a faint shadow beneath them. These were hours fraught with peace and rest to her tired mind and tired body.

One day she was sitting thus, absently knitting herself some bleaching gloves, (Gabriella's hands were as if stained by all the mixed petals of the boughs.) The sun was going down beyond the low hills, In the orchard behind her she could hear the flutter of wings and the last calls of quieting birds.

She had dropped the threads of her handiwork into her lap, and with folded hands was knitting memories.

At twilights such as this in years gone by, she, a little girl, had been used to drive out into the country with her grandmother—often choosing the routes herself and ordering the carriage to be stopped on the road as her fancy pleased. For in those aristocratic days, Southern children, like those of royal families, were encouraged early in life to learn how to give orders and to exact obedience and to rule: when they grew up they would have many under them: and not to reign was to be ruined. So that the infantile autocrat Gabriella was being instructed in this way and in that way by the powerful, strong-minded, efficient grandmother as a tender old lioness might train a cub for the mastering of its dangerous world. She recalled these twilight drives when the fields along the turnpikes were turning green with the young grain; the homeward return through the lamp-lit town to the big iron entrance-gate, the parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the great house, the noiseless movements, the perfect manners of the many servants; later in the evening the music, the dancing, the wild joy—fairyland once more. But how far, far away now! And how the forces of life had tossed things since then like straws on the eddies of a tempest: her grandmother killed, thousands of miles away, with sorrow; her uncles with their oldest sons, mere boys, fighting and falling together; tears, poverty, ruin everywhere: and she, after years of struggle, cast completely out of the only world she had ever known into another that she had never imagined.

Gabriella felt this evening what often came to her at times: a deep yearning for her own people of the past, for their voices, their ways of looking at life; for the gentleness and courtesy, and the thousand unconscious moods and acts that rendered them distinguished and delightful. She would have liked to slip back into the old elegance, to have been surrounded by the old rich and beautiful things. The child-princess who was once her sole self was destined to live within Gabriella always.

But she knew that the society in which she had moved was lost to her finally. Not alone through the vicissitudes of the war; for after the war, despite the overthrow, the almost complete disappearance, of many families, it had come together, it had reconstituted itself, it flourished still. It was lost to her because she had become penniless and because she had gone to work. When it transpired that she had declined all aid, thrown off all disguises, and taken her future into her own hands, to work and to receive wages for her work, in the social world where she was known and where the generations of her family had been leaders, there were kind offers of aid, secret condolences, whispered regrets, visible distress: her resolve was a new thing for a girl in those years. She could, indeed, in a way, have kept her place; but she could not have endured the sympathy, the change, with which she would have been welcomed—and discarded. She made trial of this a few times and was convinced: up to the day of the cruel discovery of that, Gabriella had never dreamed what her social world could be to one who had dropped out of it.

Her church and the new life—these two had been left her. She no longer had a pew, but she had her faith and this was enough; for it always gave her, wherever she was, some secret place in which to kneel and from which to rise strengthened and comforted. As for the fearful fields of work into which she had come, a strange and solitary learner, these had turned into the abiding, the living landscapes of life now. Here she had found independence—sweet, wholesome crust; found another self within herself; and here found her mission for the future—David. So that looking upon the disordered and planless years, during which it had often seemed that she was struggling unwatched, Gabriella now believed that through them she had most been guided, When many hands had let hers go, One had taken it; when old pathways were closed, a new one was opened; and she had been led along it—home.

David's illness had deepened beyond any other experience her faith in an overruling Providence. His return to health was to her a return from death: it was an answer to her prayers: it was a resurrection. Henceforth his life was a gift for the second time to himself, to her, to the world for which he must work with all his powers and work aright. And her pledge, her compact with the Divine, was to help him, to guide him back into the faith from which he had wandered. Outside of prayer, days and nights at his bedside had made him hers: vigils, nursing, suffering, helplessness, dependence—all these had been as purest oil to that alabaster lamp of love which burned within her chaste soul.

The sun had gone down. The hush of twilight was descending from the clear sky, in the depths of which the brightest stars began to appear as points of silvery flame. The air had the balm of early summer, the ground was dry and warm.

Gabriella began to watch. The last time she had gone to see him, as he walked part of the way back with her, he had said:—

"I am well now; the next time I am coming to see YOU."

Soon, along the edge of the orchard from the direction of the house, she saw him walking slowly toward her, thin, gaunt; he was leaning on a rough, stout hickory, as long as himself, in the manner of an old man.

She rose quickly and hastened to him. "Did you walk?"

"I rode. But I am walking now—barely. This young tree is escorting me."

They went back to her shawl, which she opened and spread, making a place for him. She moved it back a little, for safety, so that it was under the boughs of one of the trees.

How quiet the land was, how beautiful the evening light, how sweet the air!

Now and then a petal from some finished blossom sifted down on Gabriella.

They were at such peace: their talk was interrupted by the long silences which are peace.

"Gabriella, you saved my life."

"It is not I who have power over life and death."

"It was your nursing."

"It was my prayers," murmured Gabriella.

"And you gave me the will to get well: that also was a great help: without you I should not have had that same will to live."

"It was a higher Will than yours or mine."

"And the doctor from town who stayed with me."

"And a Greater Physician who stayed also."

He made no reply for a while, but then asked, turning his face toward her uneasily:—

"Our different ways of looking at things—will they never make any difference with you?"

"Some day there will be no difference."

"You will agree with me?" he exclaimed joyfully.

"You will agree with me."

"Do not expect that! Do not expect that I shall ever again believe in the old things."

"I expect you to believe in God, in the New Testament, in the Resurrection, in the answer to prayer."

"If I do not?"

"Then you will in the Life to come."

"But will this separate us?"

"You will need me all the more."

The light was fading: they could no longer see the green of the valley. A late bird fluttered into the boughs overhead and more petals came down.

"It is a nest," said David, softly, "a good thing to go home to, a night like this."

"And now," he continued, "there are matters about which I must consult you. You will be glad to know that things are pleasanter at home. Since my illness my father and mother have changed toward me. Sickness, nearness to death, is a great reconciler. Your being in the house had much to do with this—especially your influence over my mother. My father was talked to by the doctor from town. During the days and nights he stayed with me, he got into my trunk of books, for he is a great reader; and—as he told me before leaving—a believer in the New Science, an evolutionist. He knew of my expulsion, of course, and of the reasons. I think he explained a great deal to my father, who said to me one day simply that the doctor had talked to him."

"He talked to me, also," said Gabriella. "And did not persuade you?"

"He said I almost persuaded him!"

"And then, too, my father and I have arranged the money trouble. It is not the best, but the best possible. When I came home from college, I brought with me almost half the money I had accumulated. I turned this over to my father, of course. It will go toward making necessary repairs. But it was not enough, and the woods has had to go. The farm shall not be sold, but the woods is rented for a term of years as hemp land, the trees must be deadened and cut down. I am sorry; it is the last of the forest of my great-grandfather. But with the proceeds, the place can be put into fairly good condition, and this is the greatest relief to my father and mother—and to me."

"It is a good arrangement."

After a pause, he continued in a changed tone:—

"And now while everything is pleasant at home, it is the time for me to go away. My father was right: this is no place for me. I must be where people think as I do—must live where I shall not be alone. There will soon be plenty of companions everywhere. The whole world will believe in Evolution before I am an old man."

"I think you are right," she said quietly. "It is best for you to go and to go at once."

When he spoke again, plainly he was inspired with fresh confidence by her support of his plans.

"And now, Gabriella, I must tell you what I have determined to do in life: I want your approval of that, and then I am perfectly happy."

"Ah," she said quickly, "that is what I have been wanting to know. It is very important. Your whole future depends on a wise choice."

"I am going to some college—to some northern university, as soon as possible. I shall have to work my way through, sometimes by teaching, in whatever way I can. I want to study physical science. I want to teach some branch of it. It draws me, draws all that is in me. That is to be my life-work. And now?"

He waited for her answer: it did not come at once.

"You have chosen wisely. I am so glad!"

"Oh, Gabriella!" he cried, "if you had failed me in that, I do not know what I should have done! Science! Science! There is the fresh path for the faith of the race! For the race henceforth must get its idea of God, and build its religion to Him, from its knowledge of the laws of His universe. A million years from now! Where will our dark theological dogmas be in that radiant time? The Creator of all life, in all life He must be studied! And in the study of science there is least wrangling, least tyranny, least bigotry, no persecution. It teaches charity, it teaches a well-ordered life, it teaches the world to be more kind. It is the great new path of knowledge into the future. All things must follow whither it leads. Our religion will more and more be what our science is, and some day they will be the same."

She had no controversy to raise with him about this. She was too intently thinking of troublous problems nearer heart and home.

And these rose before him also: he fell into silence.

"But, oh, Gabriella! how long, how long the years will be that separate me from you!"

"No!" she exclaimed, her whole nature starting up, terrified. "What do you mean? No!"

"I mean while I am going through college; while I am preparing a place for you."

"Preparing a place FOR ME! You have prepared a place for me and I have taken it. My place is with you."

"Gabriella, do you know I have not a dollar in the world?"

"I have!"

"But—"

"Ah, don't! don't! That would be the first time you had ever wounded me!"

"How can I—"

"How can you go away and leave me here—here—anywhere—alone—struggling in the world alone? And you somewhere else alone? Lose those years of being together? Can you even bear the thought of it? Ah, I did not think this!"

"It was only because—"

"But it shall never be! I will not be separated from you!"

David remembered a middle-aged man at the University, working his way through college with his wife beside him. His heart melted in joy and tenderness—before the possibility of life with her so near. He could not speak.

"I will never be separated from you!"

And then, feeling her victory won, she added joyously: "And what I have shall never be separated from me! We three—I, thou, it—go together. My two years' salary—do you think I love it so little as to leave it behind when I go away with you?"

"Oh, Gabriella!"—

The domes of the trees were white with blossoms now and with moonlight. How warm and sweet the air! How sacred the words and the silences! Two children of vast and distant revolutions guided together into one life—a young pair facing toward a future of wider, better things for mankind.

"Gabriella, when a man has heard the great things calling to him, how they call and call, day and night, day and night!"

"When a woman hears them once, it is enough."

Even in this hour Gabriella was receiving the wound which is so often the pathos and the happiness of a woman's love. For even in these moments he could not forget Truth for her. And so, she said to herself with a hidden tear, it would be always. She would give him her all, she could never be all to him. Her life would be enfolded completely in his; but he would hold out his arms also toward a cold Spirit who would forever elude him—Wisdom.

The golden crescent dropped behind the dark green hills of the silent land. Where were they? Gone? or still under the trees?

"Ah, Gabriella, it is love that makes a man believe in a God of Love!"

"David! David!"—

The south wind, warm with the first thrill of summer, blew from across the valley, from across the mighty rushing sea of the young hemp.

O Mystery Immortal! which is in the hemp and in our souls, in its bloom and in our passions; by which our poor brief lives are led upward out of the earth for a season, then cut down, rotted and broken—for Thy long service!

THE END