Dr. Sevier Part 80

"Doesn't it?" said the other, meekly.

"No. It means the wisdom necessary to let--patience--have her perf-- I was a long time--getting any where near that.

"Doctor--do you remember how fond--Mary was of singing--all kinds of--little old songs?"

"Of course I do, my dear boy."

"Did you ever sing--Doctor?"

"O my dear fellow! I never did really sing, and I haven't uttered a note since--for twenty years."

"Can't you sing--ever so softly--just a verse--of--'I'm a Pilgrim'?"

"I--I--it's impossible, Richling, old fellow. I don't know either the words or the tune. I never sing." He smiled at himself through his tears.

"Well, all right," whispered Richling. He lay with closed eyes for a moment, and then, as he opened them, breathed faintly through his parted lips the words, spoken, not sung, while his hand feebly beat the imagined cadence:--

"'The sun s.h.i.+nes bright in my old Kentucky home; 'Tis summer, the darkies are gay; The corn-tops are ripe, and the meadows are in bloom, And the birds make music all the day.'"

The Doctor hid his face in his hands, and all was still.

By and by there came a whisper again. The Doctor raised his head.

"Doctor, there's one thing"--

"Yes, I know there is, Richling."

"Doctor,--I've been a poor stick of a husband."

"I never knew a good one, Richling."

"Doctor, you'll be a friend to Mary?"

The Doctor nodded; his eyes were full.

The sick man drew from his breast a small ambrotype, pressed it to his lips, and poised it in his trembling fingers. It was the likeness of the little Alice. He turned his eyes to his friend.

"I didn't need Mary's. But this is all I've ever seen of my little girl.

To-morrow, at daybreak,--it will be just at daybreak,--when you see that I've pa.s.sed, I want you to lay this here on my breast. Then fold my hands upon it"--

His speech was arrested. He seemed to hearken an instant.

"Doctor," he said, with excitement in his eye and sudden strength of voice, "what is that I hear?"

"I don't know," replied his friend; "one of the servants probably down in the hall." But he, too, seemed to have been startled. He lifted his head. There was a sound of some one coming up the stairs in haste.

"Doctor." The Doctor was rising from his chair.

"Lie still, Richling."

But the sick man suddenly sat erect.

"Doctor--it's--O Doctor, I"--

The door flew open; there was a low outcry from the threshold, a moan of joy from the sick man, a throwing wide of arms, and a rush to the bedside, and John and Mary Richling--and the little Alice, too--

Come, Doctor Sevier; come out and close the door.

"Strangest thing on earth!" I once heard a physician say,--"the mysterious power that the dying so often have to fix the very hour of their approaching end!" It was so in John Richling's case. It was as he said. Had Mary and Alice not come when they did, they would have been too late. He "tarried but a night;" and at the dawn Mary uttered the bitter cry of the widow, and Doctor Sevier closed the eyes of the one who had committed no fault,--against this world, at least,--save that he had been by nature a pilgrim and a stranger in it.

CHAPTER LIX.

AFTERGLOW.

Mary, with Alice holding one hand, flowers in the other, was walking one day down the central avenue of the old Girod Cemetery, breaking the silence of the place only by the soft grinding of her footsteps on the sh.e.l.l-walk, and was just entering a transverse alley, when she stopped.

Just at hand a large, broad woman, very plainly dressed, was drawing back a single step from the front of a tomb, and dropping her hands from a coa.r.s.e vase of flowers that she had that moment placed on the narrow stone shelf under the tablet. The blossoms touched, without hiding, the newly cut name. She had hung a little plaster crucifix against it from above. She must have heard the footfall so near by, and marked its stoppage; but, with the oblivion common to the practisers of her religion, she took no outward notice. She crossed herself, sank upon her knees, and with her eyes upon the shrine she had made remained thus. The tears ran down Mary's face. It was Madame Zen.o.bie. They went and lived together.

The name of the street where their house stood has slipped me, as has that of the clean, unfrequented, round-stoned way up which one looked from the small cottage's veranda, and which, running down to their old arched gate, came there to an end, as if that were a pretty place to stop at in the shade until evening. Gra.s.s grows now, as it did then, between the round stones; and in the towering sycamores of the reddened brick sidewalk the long, quavering note of the cicada parts the wide summer noonday silence. The stillness yields to little else, save now and then the tinkle of a mule-bell, where in the distance the softly rumbling street-car invites one to the centre of the town's activities, or the voice of some fowl that, having laid an egg, is a.s.serting her right to the credit of it. Some forty feet back, within a mossy brick wall that stands waist-high, surmounted by a white, open fence, the green wooden b.a.l.l.s on top of whose posts are full eight feet above the sidewalk, the cottage stands high up among a sweet confusion of pale purple and pink c.r.a.pe myrtles, oleanders white and red, and the bristling leaves and plumes of white bells of the Spanish bayonet, all in the shade of lofty magnolias, and one great pecan.

"And this is little Alice," said Doctor Sevier with gentle gravity, as, on his first visit to the place, he shook hands with Mary at the top of the veranda stairs, and laid his fingers upon the child's forehead. He smiled into her uplifted face as her eyes examined his, and stroked the little crown as she turned her glance silently upon her mother, as if to inquire if this were a trustworthy person. Mary led the way to chairs at the veranda's end where the south breeze fanned them, and Alice retreated to her mother's side until her silent question should be settled.

It was still May. They spoke the praises of the day whose sun was just setting. And Mary commended the house, the convenience of its construction, its salubrity; and also, and especially, the excellence and goodness of Madame Zen.o.bie. What a complete and satisfactory arrangement! Was it not? Did not the Doctor think so?

But the Doctor's affirmative responses were unfrequent, and quite without enthusiasm; and Mary's face, wearing more cheer than was felt within, betrayed, moreover, the feeling of one who, having done the best she knew, falls short of commendation.

She was once more in deep black. Her face was pale, and some of its lines had yielded up a part of their excellence. The outward curves of the rose had given place to the inward curves of the lily--nay, hardly all that; for as she had never had the full red queenliness of the one, neither had she now the severe sanct.i.tude of the other; that soft glow of inquiry, at once so blithe and so self-contained, so modest and so courageous, humble, yet free, still played about her saddened eyes and in her tones. Through the glistening sadness of those eyes smiled resignation; and although the Doctor plainly read care about them and about the mouth, it was a care that was forbearing to feed upon itself, or to take its seat on her brow. The brow was the old one; that is, the young. The joy of life's morning was gone from it forever; but a chastened hope was there, and one could see peace hovering just above it, as though it might in time alight. Such were the things that divided her austere friend's attention as she sat before him, seeking, with timid smiles and interrogative argument, for this new beginning of life some heartiness of approval from him.

"Doctor," she plucked up courage to say at last, with a geniality that scantily hid the inner distress, "you don't seem pleased."

"I can't say I am, Mary. You've provided for things in sight; but I see no provision for unseen contingencies. They're sure to come, you know.

How are you going to meet them?"

"Well," said Mary, with slow, smiling caution, "there's my two thousand dollars that you've put at interest for me."

"Why, no; you've already counted the interest on that as part of your necessary income."

"Doctor, 'the Lord will provide,' will he not?"

"No."

"Why, Doctor!"--