第40章

WHEN Mrs.Falconer had drawn near John's hut on the morning of his misfortune, it was past noon despite all her anxious, sorrowful haste to reach him.His wounds had been dressed.The crowd of people that had gathered about his cabin were gone back to their occupations or their homes--except a group that sat on the roots of a green tree several yards from his door.Some of these were old wilderness folk living near by who had offered to nurse him and otherwise to care for his comforts and needs.The affair furnished them that renewed interest in themselves which is so liable to revisit us when we have escaped a fellow-creature's suffering but can relate good things about ourselves in like risks and dangers; and they were drawing out their reminiscences now with unconscious gratitude for so excellent an opportunity befalling them in these peaceful unadventurous days.Several of John's boys lay in the grass and hung upon these narratives.Now and then they cast awe-stricken glances at his door which had been pushed to, that he might be quiet; or, if his pain would let him, drop into a little sleep.They made it their especial care, when any new-comer hurried past, to arrest him with the command that he must not go in; and they would thus have stopped Mrs.Falconer but she put them gently aside without heed or hearing.

When she softly pushed the door open, John was not asleep.He lay in a corner on his low hard bed of skins against the wall of logs-- his eyes wide open, the hard white glare of the small shutter-less window falling on his face.He turned to her the look of a dumb animal that can say nothing of why it has been wounded or of how it is suffering; stretched out his hand gratefully; and drew her toward him.She sat down on the edge of the bed, folded her quivering fingers across his temples, smoothed back his heavy, coarse, curling hair, and bending low over his eyes, rained down into them the whole unuttered, tearless passion of her distress, her sympathy.

Major Falconer came for her within the hour and she left with him almost as soon as he arrived.

When she was gone, John lay thinking of her.

"What a nurse she is!" he said, remembering how she had concerned herself solely his about life, his safety, his wounds.Once she had turned quickly:

"Now you can't go away!" she had said with a smile that touched him deeply.

"I wish you didn't have to go!" he had replied mourningfully, feeling his sudden dependence on her.

This was the first time she had ever been in room--with its poverty, its bareness.She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry--as a woman is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant sheets--the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white linen.She put a curtain over the pitiless window.He saw a wild rose in a glass beside his Testament.He discovered moccasin slippers beside his bed.

"And here," she had said just before leaving, with her hand on a pile of things and with an embarrassed laugh--keeping her face turned away--"here are some towels."Under the towels he found two night shirts--new ones.

When she was gone, he lay thinking of her again.

He had gratefully slipped on one of the shirts.He was feeling the new sense of luxury that is imparted by a bed enriched with snow-white, sweet-smelling pillows and sheets.The curtain over his window strained into his room a light shadowy, restful.The flower on his table,--the transforming touch in his room--her noble brooding tenderness--everything went into his gratitude, his remembrance of her.But all this--he argued with a sudden taste for fine discrimination--had not been done out of mere anxiety for his life: it was not the barren solicitude of a nurse but the deliberate, luxurious regard of a mother for his comfort: no doubt it represented the ungovernable overflow of the maternal, long pent-up in her ungratified.And by this route he came at last to a thought of her that novel for him--the pitying recollection of her childlessness.

"What a mother she would have been!" he said rebelliously."The mother of sons who would have become great through her--and greater through the memory of her after she was gone."When she came again, seeing him out of danger and seeing him comfortable, she seated herself beside his table and opened her work."It isn't good for you to talk much," she soon said reprovingly, "and I have to work--and to think."And so he lay watching her--watching her beautiful fingers which never seemed to rest in life--watching her quiet brow with its ripple of lustrous hair forever suggesting to him how her lovely neck and shoulders would be buried by it if its long light waves were but loosened.To have a woman sitting by his table with her sewing--it turned his room into something vaguely dreamed of heretofore: a home.She finished a sock for Major Falconer and began on one of his shirts.He counted the stitches as they went into a sleeve.They made him angry.And her face!--over it had come a look of settled weariness; for perhaps if there is ever a time when a woman forgets and the inward sorrow steals outward to the surface as an unwatched shadow along a wall, it is when she sews.

"What a wife she is!" he reflected enviously after she was gone; and he tried not to think of certain matters in her life."What a wife! How unfaltering in duty!"The next time she came, it was early.She seemed to him to have bathed in the freshness, the beauty, the delight of the morning.He had never seen her so radiant, so young.She was like a woman who holds in her hand the unopened casket of life--its jewels still ungazed on, still unworn.There was some secret excitement in her as though the moment had at last come for her to open it.She had but a few moments to spare.