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 hoa.r.s.e 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 grat.i.tude 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 rea.s.sembling 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 coa.r.s.e 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