VII AFRAID

I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June. Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so different as we are alike.

On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed—the carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the room—the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following. Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy had told me, she herself was one of [Pg 97]Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.

Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap peremptory, confident.

"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door. Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore the mystery and authority of the hour.

"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."

"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again—a real, weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."

Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.

"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I should think you might—"

But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,—as if there were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not sufficiently simple to know it for herself.

[Pg 98]

Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.

"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you. What do you think of that?"

"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use' to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's me. I feel afraid of you—Allen. You're—differ'nt."

He laughed tenderly, confidently.

"Boo!" he said. "Now are you?"

"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."

"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."

"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the house—the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the rug not tacked down."

Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.

"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's—just us two by ourselves," Allen said. "And the presents. My!"

"Well, and company," she reminded him,[Pg 99] "that's what I want. The girls in to tea in our own house."

"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.

"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily. "They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll take it to the City"—she gave a little bounce on the skirt box—"and see a show, a really, truly show."

"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place I told you about—where I got picked up."

The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris, for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.

Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed them.

"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you always, always be just like you are now?"

"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."

[Pg 100]

"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.

"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over the telephone. What about you? Will you always, too?"

"Yes," she said, "always. Only—"

"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.

"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us, Allen—like they do, like with Bess and Opie,—business and sewin',—that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.

"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."

A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room, saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train time.

"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even. Till train time."

"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised him gayly.

"Honestly, now—" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate region where she moved.

[Pg 101]

"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.

In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived, in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills, and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"—and with that awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home back in the hills—Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was dying.

"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin' married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus' drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she can't—she won't[Pg 102] ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully, "ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."

"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."

Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.

"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.

"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager pride. "I'll drive ye."

Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying—somehow putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together. That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them, and came through the dining room to the stair door.

"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly,[Pg 103] and went back to the upper floor and to Chris's door again.

It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it while he told her, as well as he could.

"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.

She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other woman.

"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."

He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his mind.

"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia, cold as it is to-night. You—"

In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.

"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.

"Well, I'm sure—" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.

[Pg 104]

"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."

Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.

"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go—in the cold—all that long way—"

"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little brown hat on her head.

The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on—from the crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the gods, na?ve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.

"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with lights. "So many folks's houses—homes, all started. I s'pose it was just as big a thing for them. But theirs don't seem like anything, side of ours!"

[Pg 105]

"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs ain't anything side of ours!" he maintained stoutly.

"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.

Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the time of the arrival at Jacob's house.

"Allen!" she said at last.

"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."

"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then think. There's Bess and Opie—not speakin' to each other. Over there's the Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel—an' Threat Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin' fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses him."

"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with a difference.

Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.

"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm afraid!"

"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.

[Pg 106]

"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at 'em."

"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we ain't them."

"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do get that way or they just don't. How can you tell?"

"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.

"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married," Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with bracelets. And him drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh, Allen, I am! I'm afraid."

He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and with fresh, warm lips.

"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.

The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents, and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too,[Pg 107] of that shadowy, hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had brought.

"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw Jacob's cottage.

"It just is—it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the horse to the old man; and they two went within.

The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.

The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process, showed him the[Pg 108] nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder; and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.

Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood box, on the floor before the oven—that little stray boy whom Sarah Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at Christopha with big, soft eyes, na?ve as the first bird. Almost before she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word, and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.

"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"

The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.

The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.

[Pg 109]

"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him—a home somewheres. If you can...."

"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you worry any about him," said Allen.

"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him, Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."

"Like me," Allen said.

She shook her head feebly.

"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't—do much. I just—thought I could keep him from bein' wicked—mebbe."

"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.

Then she opened her eyes.

"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done that—I ain't afraid to die."

Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the bed's[Pg 110] foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed; and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little, and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.

It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that, as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to the village for the last bitter business of all.

Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's cottage. If Chris's mother would take him[Pg 111] for a little,—but Allen knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened, and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy—awake, warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.

"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.

"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I thought we could see. He mustn't be left here—now."

"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."

The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn. A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal lines.

"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."

"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."

"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she suggested hastily.

"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at this they fell silent.

[Pg 112]

"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep' up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."

"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."

"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."

"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over the great fields.

"My!" she said, "you'll miss her—miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres. Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"

"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.

"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together.

They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that looked watchfully awake[Pg 113] while their owners slept. It would not be well to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm, and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.

"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"

"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met above his head.

"Allen!" Chris said.

"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.

"Could—do you think—could we?" she demanded.

"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'—"

Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would be their waiting house.

"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.

"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."

"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess that'll be all right!"

[Pg 114]

"How much she'd of liked it," said Chris.

"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard what she said—that about keepin' him from bein'—wicked? Chrissie—could we, you and me? This little fellow?"

Chris lifted her face and nodded.

"I ain't afraid," she said simply.

"I ain't either," her husband said.

As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."

They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming dawn. And—as two others in such case might have seen—it was as if they were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage, even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of Allen, that she was not afraid to die.

"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if we could!"

"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"

Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new marriage, new birth. But[Pg 115] when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at the reins again, and,

"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards—there should be anybody—else. I mean for us. Would—would you keep on lovin' this little kiddie, too?"

She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.

"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"

At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.

"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An' here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"

Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.