CHAPTER VII
A DESERT OF WAITING
It was so still on the porch where Mary and her mother sat sewing thatwarm May afternoon that they could distinctly hear the Moredockphonograph, playing some new records over and over. One of them was aquick-step that the military band had often played at Fort Sam Houston,and as Mary listened an intolerable longing for stir and excitement tookpossession of her. She wanted to be back in the midst of people andconstantly changing scenes. She felt that she could not endure thedeadly monotony of Lone-Rock another day.
Usually she had much to say as they sat and sewed through the long stillafternoons, but to-day the music claimed her attention. It was verypleasing at that distance, but it was disquieting in its effect. Shedropped her embroidery into her lap and sat looking out at the narrowgrass-grown road winding past the house and over the hill, and ending ina narrow mountain path beyond.
"Mamma," she asked suddenly, in one of the pauses of the music, "wereany of our ancestors tramps or gypsies? Seems to me they must have been,or I wouldn't feel the 'Call of the Road' so strongly. Don't you feelit? As if it beckons and you _must_ break loose and follow, to findwhat's waiting for you around the next turn?"
Mrs. Ware shook her head. "No," she said slowly. "I'm like the oldIsraelites. When they came to Elim, with its wells and palm trees, theywere glad to camp there indefinitely. This is my Elim."
"I wonder, now," mused Mary, "if they really were satisfied. I don'tmean to be irreverent, but only last night I read that verse, '_Whetherit were two days or a month or a year that the cloud tarried upon thetabernacle, the Children of Israel abode in their tents and journeyednot._' And I thought that among so many, there must have been a lot ofthem who were impatient to get on to their promised land; who frettedand fumed when day after day the pillar of cloud never lifted to leadthem on. I'd have been like that. If we could only know how long we haveto stay in a place it would make it lots easier. Now, if I had knownlast fall that eight months would go by and find me still here inLone-Rock, I'd have made up my mind to the inevitable and settled downcomfortably. It's the dreadful uncertainty that is so hard to bear."
Just then the phonograph started up one of its old records. "_I wantwhat I want when I want it!_" They both looked up and laughed at eachother.
"That is the cry of the ages," said Mrs. Ware merrily. "I've no doubtthat even the tribes of Israel had some version of that same song, andwailed it often on the march. But their very impatience showed that theywere not fit to go on towards their conquest of Canaan."
"Then you think that _I_ am not fitted yet to take possession of myCanaan?" Mary asked quickly.
"I don't know, dear," was the hesitating answer, "but I've come tobelieve that every one who reaches the best that life holds for himreaches it through some Desert of Waiting. You remember that legend ofold Camelback Mountain, don't you?"
Mary nodded, and Mrs. Ware quoted softly, "No one fills his crystal vasetill he has been pricked by the world's disappointments and bowed by itstasks. . . . Oh, thou vendor of salt, is not any waiting worth the while,if in the end it give thee wares with which to gain a royal entrance?"
Mary waited a moment, then with an impatient shrug of her shoulderspicked up her embroidery hoops again. In her present mood it irritatedher to be told that waiting was good for her. The legend itselfirritated her. She wondered how any one could find any comfort in it,least of all her mother, whose life had been so largely a desert of hardwork and hard times.
Presently, as if in answer to her thought, Mrs. Ware looked up, saying,"You spoke just now of the call of the road. It is strange how stronglyI've felt it all afternoon, only my call takes me backward. I've beenliving over little scenes that I haven't thought of before in years;hearing little things your father said when Joyce and Jack were babies;seeing the neighbors back in Plainsville. Maybe that is one reason I amnot impatient to push on any farther into the future. I have such abeautiful Memory Road to travel back over. I'd rather sit and recall theturns in that than wonder what lies on ahead."
"For instance," suggested Mary, and Mrs. Ware immediately began areminiscence that Mary remembered hearing when a child. But to-day sherealized that there was a difference in the telling. Her mother was notrepeating it as she used to do to amuse the children who clamored fortales of Once upon a time. She was speaking as one woman to another,opening a chapter into the inmost history of her heart.
"She recognizes the fact that I'm grown up," Mary thought to herselfwith satisfaction, and she was conscious that her mother was takingquite as deep a pleasure in this sense of equal understanding andcompanionship as she.
It was nearly sundown when a slow creaking of wheels and soft thud ofhoofs on the grass-grown road called their attention to a shortprocession of wagons and horsemen, winding along towards the house. Along pine box was in the first wagon, and several families crowded intothe others.
"Oh, it's a funeral procession!" whispered Mary, pushing back a littlefurther into the shadow of the vines, so as to be out of sight. "It mustbe that Mr. Locksley who was killed yesterday over at Hemlock Ridge by afalling tree. Isn't it awful?"
She gave a little shiver and her eyes filled with tears as they restedon the children in the second wagon. There had been a pitiful attempt tohonor the dead by following the conventions. The woman who sat bowedover on the front seat like an image of despair, wore a black veil andcotton gloves; and black sunbonnets, evidently borrowed from grown-upneighbors, covered the flaxen hair of three little girls in pink calicodresses, who nestled against her. There was a band of rusty crapefastened around the gray cow-boy hat that the boy wore.
The pathetic little procession wound on past the house and up the hill,then was lost to sight as it passed into a grove of cedars on the right,behind which lay the lonely cemetery. Only a few times in her life hadMary come this close to death. Now the horror of it seemed to blot outall the brightness of the sweet May day, and the thought of thegrief-stricken woman in the wagon cast such a shadow over her that hereyes were full of unshed tears and her hands trembled when she took upher needle again.
"It's so awful!" she exclaimed, when they had passed out of hearing."They were all over at that dinner at Hemlock Ridge that Pink took me tolast winter. I remember Mr. Locksley especially because he was so bigand strong-looking, like a young giant, almost. I asked Pink who he was,because I noticed how good he was to his family, carrying the babyaround on one arm and helping his wife unpack baskets with the other.Yesterday morning when he left the house he was just as well and strongas anybody in the world, Captain Doane told me. He went off laughing andjoking, and stopped to call back something to his wife about the garden,and two hours later they carried him home--like that! In just an instantthe life had been crushed out of him."
Her voice broke and she swallowed hard before she could go on.
"I've always thought death wouldn't be so bad if one could die as dearBeth did, in 'Little Women.' Don't you remember how sweetly and gentlyshe faded away, and so slowly that there was no great shock when the endcame? She had time to get used to the idea of going, and to say thingsthat would comfort them after she was gone. But to be snatched away likeMr. Locksley--without a moment's warning--it seems too dreadful! I don'tsee how God can let such cruel things happen."
"But think, little daughter," urged Mrs. Ware gently, "how much he wasspared. No long illness, no racking pain, no lingering with theconsciousness that he was a burden to others! There is nothing cruel inthat. It's a happy way for the one who goes, dear, to go suddenly. Itis the way of all others I would choose for myself."
"But think of the ones left behind!" said Mary, with a shudder. "I don'tsee how that poor woman can go on living after having the one she lovedbest in all the world, torn so suddenly and so utterly out of her life."
"But he isn't, dear!" persisted Mrs. Ware gently. "You do not thinkbecause Joyce has gone away to another land, which we have never seen,and an ocean rolls between us, that she is torn out of our lives, doyou?
She does not know what we are doing, and we cannot follow herthrough her busy, happy days over there, but we know that she is stillours, that her love flows out to us just the same, that separationcannot make her any less our own, and that she looks forward with us tothe happy time when we shall once more be together. That's all thatdeath is, Mary. Just a going away into another country, as Joyce hasgone. Only the separation is harder to bear because there can be noletters to bridge the silence. I used to have the same horror of it thatyou do, but after your father went away I learned to look upon it as Godintended we should. Not a horrible doom which must overtake every one ofus, but as a beautiful mystery through which we pass as through an opengate, with glad surprise at the things that shall be made plain to us,and with a great sense of triumph."
As she spoke, the light of the sunset seemed to turn the mountain trailup which she was gazing, into a golden path which led straight up to theCity of the Shining Ones, and its radiant glow was reflected in herface. Mary's eyes followed hers. Somehow she felt warmed and comfortedby her mother's strong faith, but she said nothing. Only sat and watchedwith her, the gorgeous colors of the sunset that were transfiguring thegray old mountain.
If there were only some way of recognizing at their beginning, the dayswhich are to be hallowed days in our lives! We know them as such afterthey have slipped by, and we enshrine them in our memories and go backto live them over, moment by moment. But it is always with the cry, "Oh,if I had only known! If I had only filled them fuller while I had them!If I had not left so much unasked, unsaid!"
Unconscious that this was such a time, Mary sat rocking back and forthin the silence that followed, drifting into vague day dreams, as theywatched the changing colors over the western mountain tops. Then aclick of the back gate-latch called them both back to speech, and Normancame around the corner of the house swinging a string of fish. Heannounced that Billy Downs had helped catch them and was going to stayto supper to help eat them.
Billy usually stayed to supper three or four times a week, and on thenights when he was not there Norman was at his house. The two boys wereinseparable, and a pleasant intimacy had grown up between the families.That night as usual, he went home at nine o'clock, but came running backalmost immediately, bareheaded and breathless. His mother had been takensuddenly ill. The only doctor in the place had been called to a case onthe other side of the mountain, and nobody knew when he would be home.His father and Sara were nearly scared stiff, they were so frightened,and wouldn't Mrs. Ware please come and tell them what to do?
It was the beginning of a long siege, for no nurses were to be had inthe little settlement, and there were only the neighbors to turn to intimes of stress and trouble. What true neighborliness is, in the fullestmeaning of the word, can be known only in pioneer places like this.Hands already full of burdens stretched out to help lighten theirs, andfor awhile one common interest and anxiety made the families ofLone-Rock as one.
But most of the women who came to offer their services had littlechildren at home, or helpless old people who could not be left longalone, or more work than one pair of hands could manage. The only two ofexperience, not thus burdened, were Mrs. Ware and old Aunt Sally Doane.So they took turns sitting up at nights, and did all they could onalternate days to relieve poor frightened Sara and her anxious father.
Mary, not experienced enough to be left in charge in the sick room, diddouble duty at home. She did the baking for both families, sometimesthree; for many a time old Aunt Sally, too worn out to cook, went hometo find a basket full of good things spread out for her and the Captainon the pantry shelves. The Downs family mending went into Mary's basket,and Billy's darns and patches alone were no small matter. Several timesa week she slipped over to sweep and dust and do many necessary thingsthat Sara had neither time nor strength to do.
Remembering how valiantly the neighbors had served them during Jack'slong illness, Mary gladly did her part, and a very large one towardsrelieving the stricken household. When she saw Mr. Downs' anxious facerelax, at some evidence of her thoughtfulness, and heard Sara's tearfulthanks poured out in a broken voice, she was glad that fate had kept herin Lone-Rock to play the good angel in this emergency. If she had notbeen at home, Mrs. Ware could not have been free to take charge of theinvalid, and it was her skilful nursing, so the doctor said, which wouldpull her through the crisis if anything could.
After the first week, Mrs. Ware came home only in the afternoon eachday, to sleep. While she was doing that, Mary tiptoed softly around thehouse till her tasks were done, careful not to disturb the rest that wasso precious and so necessary. Then she took her mending basket out onthe front porch, where she could meet any chance comers before theycould knock, or could chase away the insistent roosters whotantalizingly chose that corner of the yard to come to when they feltimpelled to crow.
It was hard to sit there alone through the long still afternoons whileher mother slept. There were a hundred things she wanted to talk about,so many questions she wanted to ask, so many little matters on which sheneeded advice. There was not even the Moredock phonograph to listen tonow, for it had not been wound up since the beginning of Mrs. Downs'illness, lest its playing disturb her. All she could do was to sit andstitch as patiently as she could, till she heard the bedroom door open,and then fly to make her mother a cup of tea and have a tempting littlesupper ready for her when she should come out, dressed and ready to goback to another exhausting vigil.
The few minutes while Mrs. Ware sat enjoying the dainty meal were thebest in the day for Mary, for she poured out her pent-up questions andspeeches, reported all that had gone on since the last time she satthere, and crowded into that brief space as much of Jack's sayings andNorman's doings as she could possibly remember.
"Oh, it'll be so good to have you home again to stay!" she would sayevery time when Mrs. Ware rose to start back, ending her good-byeembrace with a tight squeeze. "I miss you so I can hardly stand it. Thehouse is so still when you are gone, that if a fly happens to get in itsbuzz sounds like a roar. You can't imagine how deathly still it is."
"Oh, yes, I can!" laughed Mrs. Ware. "I've been left alone myself. Idon't need to imagine. I've experienced it."
Mary hung over the gate to which she had followed her mother, andlooked after her down the road, thinking, "That never occurred to mebefore. Of course, if I miss her as I do, quiet as she is, she wouldmiss a rattletybang person like me twice as much. I had never thought of_her_ getting lonely, but she'd be bound to if I went away. How'd I feelif she'd gone with Joyce and I had to stay here day after day alone, andknow that I'd never have her again except on flying visits, and that shewas wrapped up in all sorts of interests that I could never have a partin?"
All that evening she thought about it, and all next morning; and whenMrs. Ware came home in the afternoon she met her with a seriousquestion:
"Mamma, when I'm away from home and you're here by yourself, do you missme as much as I do you?"
"Oh, a thousand times more!" was the quick answer.
"Then I've made up my mind. Promised Land or no Promised Land, I'm notgoing away to stay until Jack brings Betty here to take my place."
Taken by surprise, the look which illuminated Mrs. Ware's face for amoment showed more plainly than she had intended Mary to know, how muchit had cost her to consent to her going away. After that if there weretimes when Mary was tempted to pity herself and look upon that decisionas a great sacrifice, one thought of her mother's happy face and theglad little cry that had welcomed her announcement, immediatelydispelled any martyr-like feeling.
"Such good news rests me more than any amount of sleep can do," declaredMrs. Ware, as she slipped into her kimono and drew down the windowshades. "You don't know how the dread of having to give you up has hungover me. Every time that you've gone to the post-office since lastOctober I've been afraid to see you come home--afraid that you werebringing some summons that would take you away."
"Why, mamma!" cried Mary, surprised to see that there were tears in he
reyes, "I didn't dream that you felt _that_ way about it. Why didn't youtell me?"
"Because I knew that you'd stay if I asked it, and I _couldn't_ blockthe road in which you were sure you would find your highest good, justfor my own selfish pleasure. Oh, you don't know," she added, with awistfulness which brought a choke to Mary's throat, "what a comfortyou've been to me, ever since the day you came back from school, afterJack's accident. You've always been a comfort--but since that time it'sbeen in a different way. I've _leaned_ on you so!"
Deeply touched past all words, Mary's only answer was a kiss and animpulsive hug, before she turned away to hide her happy tears. Allafternoon as she sat and sewed, the words sang themselves over and overin her heart: "You've always been a comfort," and she began planningmany things to keep them true. She would do something to stir up asocial spirit among her mother's small circle of friends; start a club,perhaps, have readings and teas and old-fashioned quilting bees; even amasquerade party now and then. _Anything_ to give an air of gaiety tothe colorless monotony of the workaday life of Lone-Rock. So with herenergies turned into a new channel she at once set to work vigorouslymapping out a campaign to be put into effect as soon as Mrs. Downsshould be once more on her feet.
It was a happy day when Mrs. Ware came home saying that her serviceswere no longer needed. The family could manage without her, now that asister had come up from Phoenix to help the invalid through herconvalescence.
"It is high time! You are worn out!" said Jack, scanning her faceanxiously.
It was pale and drawn, and after a quick scrutiny he rose and followedher into the next room, saying in a low tone, "Mother, I believe you'vebeen having another one of those attacks. Have you?"
"Just a slight one, last night," she confessed. "But it was soon over."
He closed the door behind him, but low as the question had been, Mary'squick ears caught both it and the answer, and she pounced upon him themoment he reappeared, demanding to know what they were talking about. Heexplained in an undertone, although he had again closed the door behindhim when he came back to the dining-room.
"That winter you were at Warwick Hall she had several queer spells withher heart. The pain was dreadful for awhile, but the doctor soonrelieved it, and she made me promise not to tell you girls. She said shehad been over-exerting herself. That was all. It was that time theFitchs' house caught fire while they were away from home. She saw itfirst and ran to give the alarm and help save things, and after it wasall over she had a collapse. I made her promise just now that she'd goto bed and stay there till she is thoroughly rested. She's seen DoctorBates. He gave her the same remedies she had before, and she insistsshe's entirely over it now."
With a vague fear clutching at her, Mary started towards her mother'sroom, but Jack stopped her. "You mustn't go in there looking like ascared rabbit. It will do her more harm than good to let her know thatyou've found out about it. And really, I don't think there's any causefor alarm, now that the attack is safely over. She responds so quicklyto the remedies that she'll soon be all right again. But she _must_ takethings easy for awhile."
All the rest of that day Mary was troubled and uneasy, notwithstandingthe fact that her mother dressed and came out to the supper-table,seemingly as well as usual. Twice in the night Mary wakened with afrightened start, thinking some one had called her, and, raising herselfon her elbow, lay listening for some sound from the next room. Once shestepped out of bed and stole noiselessly to the door to look in at her.The late moon, streaming across the floor, showed Mrs. Ware peacefullysleeping, and Mary crept back, relieved and thankful.