Margret Howth, a Story of To-Day, Rebecca Harding Davis [best novels for students TXT] 📗

Kitts used to come every day to see her, though he never said much when he was there: he lugged his great copy of the Venus del Pardo along with him one day, and left it, thinking she would like to look at it; Knowles called it trash, when he came. The Doctor came always in the morning; he told her he would read to her one day, and did it always afterwards, putting on his horn spectacles, and holding her old Bible close up to his rugged, anxious face. He used to read most from the Gospel of St. John. She liked better to hear him than any of the others, even than Margret, whose voice was so low and tender: something in the man's half-savage nature was akin to the child's.
As the day drew near when she was to go, every pleasant trifle seemed to gather a deeper, solemn meaning. Jenny Balls came in one night, and old Mrs. Polston.
"We thought you'd like to see her weddin'-dress, Lois," said the old woman, taking off Jenny's cloak, "seein' as the weddin' was to hev been to-morrow, and was put off on 'count of you."
Lois did like to see it; sat up, her face quite flushed to see how nicely it fitted, and stroked back Jenny's soft hair under the veil. And Jenny, being a warm-hearted little thing, broke into a sobbing fit, saying that it spoiled it all to have Lois gone.
"Don't muss your veil, child," said Mrs. Polston.
But Jenny cried on, hiding her face in Lois's skinny hand, until Sam Polston came in, when she grew quiet and shy. The poor deformed girl lay watching them, as they talked. Very pretty Jenny looked, with her blue eyes and damp pink cheeks; and it was a manly, grave love in Sam's face, when it turned to her. A different love from any she had known: better, she thought. It could not be helped; but it WAS better.
After they were gone, she lay a long time quiet, with her hand over her eyes. Forgive her! she, too, was a woman. Ah, it may be there are more wrongs that shall be righted yonder in the To-Morrow than are set down in your theology!
And so it was, that, as she drew nearer to this To-Morrow, the brain of the girl grew clearer,--struggling, one would think, to shake off whatever weight had been put on it by blood or vice or poverty, and become itself again. Perhaps, even in her cheerful, patient life, there had been hours when she had known the wrongs that had been done her, known how cruelly the world had thwarted her; her very keen insight into whatever was beautiful or helpful may have made her see her own mischance, the blank she had drawn in life, more bitterly. She did not see it bitterly now. Death is honest; all things grew clear to her, going down into the valley of the shadow; so, wakening to the consciousness of stifled powers and ungiven happiness, she saw that the fault was not hers, nor His who had appointed her lot; He had helped her to bear it,--bearing worse himself. She did not say once, "I might have been," but day by day, more surely, "I shall be." There was not a tear on the homely faces turning from her bed, not a tint of colour in the flowers they brought her, not a shiver of light in the ashy sky, that did not make her more sure of that which was to come. More loving she grew, as she went away from them, the touch of her hand more pitiful, her voice more tender, if such a thing could be,--with a look in her eyes never seen there before. Old Yare pointed it out to Mrs. Polston one day.
"My girl's far off frum us," he said, sobbing in the kitchen,--"my girl's far off now."
It was the last night of the year that she died. She was so much better that they all were quite cheerful. Kitts went away as it grew dark, and she bade him wrap up his throat with such a motherly dogmatism that they all laughed at her; she, too, with the rest.
"I'll make you a New-Year's call," he said, going out; and she called out that she should be sure to expect him.
She seemed so strong that Holmes and Mrs. Polston and Margret, who were there, were going home; besides, old Yare said, "I'd like to take care o' my girl alone to-night, ef yoh'd let me,"--for they had not trusted him before. But Lois asked them not to go until the Old Year was over; so they waited down-stairs.
The old man fell asleep, and it was near midnight when he wakened with a cold touch on his hand.
"It's come, father!"
He started up with a cry, looking at the new smile in her eyes, grown strangely still.
"Call them all, quick, father!"
Whatever was the mystery of death that met her now, her heart clung to the old love that had been true to her so long.
He did not move.
"Let me hev yoh to myself, Lo, 't th' last; yoh're all I hev; let me hev yoh 't th' last."
It was a bitter disappointment, but she roused herself even then to smile, and tell him yes, cheerfully. You call it a trifle, nothing? It may be; yet I think the angels looking down had tears in their eyes, when they saw the last trial of the unselfish, solitary heart, and kept for her a different crown from his who conquers a city.
The fire-light grew warmer and redder; her eyes followed it, as if all that had been bright and kindly in her life were coming back in it. She put her hand on her father, trying vainly to smooth his gray hair. The old man's heart smote him for something, for his sobs grew louder, and he left her a moment; then she saw them all, faces very dear to her even then. She laughed and nodded to them all in the old childish way; then her lips moved. "It's come right!" she tried to say; but the weak voice would never speak again on earth.
"It's the turn o' the night," said Mrs. Polston, solemnly; "lift her head; the Old Year's 'goin' out."
Margret lifted her head, and held it on her breast. She could hear cries and sobs; the faces, white now, and wet, pressed nearer, yet fading slowly: it was the Old Year going out, the worn-out year of her life. Holmes opened the window: the cold night-wind rushed in, bearing with it snatches of broken harmony: some idle musician down in the city, playing fragments of some old, sweet air, heavy with love and regret. It may have been chance: yet, let us think it was not chance; let us believe that He, who had made the world warm and happy for her, chose that this best voice of all should bid her good-bye at the last.
So the Old Year went out in that music. The dull eyes, loving to the end, wandered vaguely as the sounds died away, as if losing something,--losing all, suddenly. She sighed as the clock struck, and then a strange calm, unknown before, stole over her face; her eyes flashed open with a living joy. Margret stooped to close them, kissing the cold lids; and Tiger, who had climbed upon the bed, whined and crept down.
"It is the New Year," said Holmes, bending his head.
The cripple was dead; but LOIS, free, loving, and beloved, trembled from her prison to her Master's side in the To-Morrow.
I can show you her grave out there in the hills,--a short, stunted grave, like a child's. No one goes there, although there are many firesides where they speak of "Lois" softly, as of something holy and dear: but they think of her always as not there; as gone home; even old Yare looks up, when he talks of "my girl." Yet, knowing that nothing in God's just universe is lost, or fails to meet the late fulfilment of its hope, I like to think of her poor body lying there: I like to believe that the great mother was glad to receive the form that want and crime of men had thwarted,--took her uncouth child home again, that had been so cruelly wronged,--folded it in her warm bosom with tender, palpitating love.
It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out limbs, the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into fresh atoms, woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when God smiled permission through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild ecstasy of the true beauty that she loved so well. In no questioning, sad pallor of sombre leaves or gray lichens: throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in lilies, white, exultant in a chordant life!
Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense, at her freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to hunger or to hope, and learn to be. And so thinking, the certainty of her aim and work and love yonder comes with a new, vital reality, beside which the story of the yet living men and women of whom I have told you grows vague and incomplete, like unguessed riddles. I have no key to solve them with,--no right to solve them.
My story is but a mere groping hint? It lacks determined truth, a certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of God's justice running through it, awarding apparent good and ill? I know: it is a story of To-Day. The Old Year is on us yet. Poor old Knowles will tell you it is a dark day; bewildered at the inexplicable failure of the cause for which his old blood ran like water that dull morning at Ball's Bluff. He doubts everything in the bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even, if the very flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic selfishness: if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain truth to give it strength. A dark day, he tells you: that the air is filled with the cry of the slave, and of nations going down into darkness, their message untold, their work undone: that now, as eighteen centuries ago, the Helper stands unwelcome in the world; that your own heart, as well as the great humanity, asks an unrendered justice. Does he utter all the problems of To-Day? Vandyke, standing higher, perhaps, or, at any rate, born with hopefuller brain, would show you how, by the very instant peril of the hour, is lifted clearer into view the eternal prophecy of coming content: could tell you that the unquiet earth, and the unanswering heaven are instinct with it: that the ungranted prayer of your own life should teach it to you: that in that Book wherein God has not scorned to write the history of America, he finds the quiet surety that the rescue of the world is near at hand.
Holmes, like most men who make destiny, does not pause in his cool, slow work for their prophecy or lamentation. "Such men will mould the age," old Knowles says, drearily, for he does not like Holmes: follows him unwillingly, even knowing him nearer the truth than he. "Born for mastership, as I told you long ago: they strike the blow, while----. I'm tired of theorists, exponents of the abstract right: your