第44章

But as one who has traversed a long gallery of pictures, and, turning to look back upon all that he has passed, sees a straight track narrowing away into the dimming distance, and only the last few life scenes standing out lustrous and clear, so the school-master, gazing down this long vista, beheld at the far end of it a little girl, whom he did not know, playing on the silvery ancestral lawns of the James; at the near end, watching by his bedside on this rude border of the West, a woman who had become indispensable to his friendship.

More days passed, and still she did not return.His eagerness for her rose and followed, and sorrowfully set with every sun.

Meantime he read the book, beginning it with an effort through finding it hard to withdraw his mind from his present.But soon he was clutching it with a forgotten hand and lay on his bed for hours joined fast to it with unreleasing eyes; draining its last words into his heart, with a thirst newly begotten and growing always the more quenchless as it was always being quenched.So that having finished it, he read it again, now seeing the high end of it all from the low beginning.And then a third time, more clingingly, more yearningly yet, thrice lighting the fire in his blood with the same straw.Like a vital fire it was left in him at last, a red and white of flame; the two flames forever hostile, and seeking each to burn the other out.And while it stayed in him thus as a fire, it had also filled all tissues of his being as water fills a sponge--not dead water a dead sponge--but as a living sap runs through the living sponges of a young oak on the edge of its summer.So that never should he be able to forget it;never henceforth be the same in knowledge or heart or conscience; and nevermore was the lone spiritual battle of his life, if haply waged at all, to be fought out by him with the earlier, simpler weapons of his innocence and his youth, but with all the might of a tempted man's high faith in the beauty and the right and the divine supremacy of goodness.

One morning his wounds had begun to require attention.No one had yet come to him: it was hardly the customary hour: and moreover, by rising in bed he could see that something unusual had drawn the people into the streets.The news of a massacre on the western frontier, perhaps; the arrival of the post-rider with angry despatches from the East; or the torch of revolution thrown far northward from New Orleans.His face had flushed with feverish waiting and he lay with his eyes turned restlessly toward the door.

It was Mrs.Falconer who stepped forward to it with hesitation.But as soon as she caught sight of him, she hurried to the bed.

"What is the trouble? Have you been worse?""Oh, nothing! It is nothing."

"Why do you say that--to me?"

"My shoulder.But it is hardly time for them to come yet."She hesitated and her face showed how serious her struggle was.

"Let me," she said firmly.

He looked up quickly, confusedly, at her with a refusal on his lips; but she had already turned away to get the needful things in readiness, and he suffered her, if for no other reason than to avoid letting her see the painful rush of blood to his face.As she moved about the room, she spoke only to ask unavoidable questions; he, only to answer them; and neither looked at the other.

Then he sat up in the bed and bared his neck and shoulder, one arm and half his chest; and with his face crimson, turned his eyes away.She had been among the women in the fort during that summer thirteen years before, when the battle of the Blue Licks had been fought; and speaking in the quietest, most natural of voices, she now began to describe how the wounded had straggled in from the battle-field; one rifleman reeling on his horse and held in his seat by the arm of a comrade, his bleeding, bandaged head on that comrade's shoulder; another borne on a litter swung between two horses;others --footmen--holding out just long enough to come into sight of the fort, there to sink down; one, a mere youth, fallen a mile back in the hot dusty buffalo trace with an unspoken message to some one in his brave, beautiful, darkening eyes.But before this, she told him how the women had watched all that night and the day previous inside the poor little earth-mound of a defence against artillery, built by order of Jefferson and costing $37.5O; the women taking as always the places of the men who were gone away to the war; becoming as always the defenders of the land, of the children, of those left behind sick or too old to fight.How from the black edge of dawn they had strained their eyes in the direction of the battle until at last a woman's cry of agony had rent the air as the first of the wounded had ridden slowly into sight.How they had rushed forth through the wooden gates and heard the tidings of it all and then had followed the scenes and the things that could never be told for pity and grief and love and sadness.

After a little pause she began to speak of Major Falconer as the school-master had never known her to speak; tremulously of his part in that battle, a Revolutionary officer serving as a common backwoods soldier;eloquently of his perfect courage then and always, of his perfect manliness;and she ended by saying that the worst thing that could ever befall a woman was to marry an unmanly man.

"If any one single thing in life could ever have killed me," she said, "it would have been that."With her last words she finished the dressing of his wounds.Spots of the deepest rose were on her cheeks; her eyes were lighted with proud fire.

Confusedly he thanked her and, lying back on his pillow, closed his eyes and turned his face away.

When she had quickly gone he sat up in the bed again.He drew the book guiltily from under his pillow, looked long and sorrowfully at it, and then with a low cry of shame--the first that had ever burst from his lips--he hurled it across the room and threw himself violently down again, with his forehead against the logs, his eyes hidden, his face burning.