Men, Women, and Ghosts Part 21

This was her birthday,--hers whose name had not pa.s.sed his lips for years. Do you think he had once forgotten it since its morning? Did not the memories it brought crowd into every moment? Did they not fill the very prayers in which he besought a sin-hating G.o.d to avenge him of all his enemies?

So many times the child had sat there at his feet on this day, playing with some birthday toy,--he always managed to find her something, a doll or a picture-book; she used to come up to thank him, pus.h.i.+ng back her curls, her little red lips put up for a kiss. He was very proud of her,--he and the mother. She was all they had,--the only one. He used to call her "G.o.d's dear blessing," softly, while his eyes grew dim; she hardly heard him for his breaking voice.

She might have stood there and brought back all those dead birthday nights, so did he live them over. But none could know it; for he did not speak, and the frown knotted darkly on his forehead. Martha Ryck looked up at last into her husband's face.

"Amos, if she _should_ ever come back!" He started, his eyes freezing.

"She won't! She--"

Would he have said "she _shall_ not?" G.o.d only knew.

"Martha, you talk nonsense! It's just like a woman. We've said enough about this. I suppose He who's cursed us has got his own reasons for it.

We must bear it, and so must she."

He stood up, stroking his beard nervously, his eyes wandering about the room; he did not, or he could not, look at his wife. m.u.f.f, rousing from his slumbers, came up sleepily to be taken some notice of. She used to love the dog,--the child; she gave him his name in a frolic one day; he was always her playfellow; many a time they had come in and found her asleep with m.u.f.f's black, s.h.a.ggy sides for a pillow, and her little pink arms around his neck, her face warm and bright with some happy dream.

Mr. Ryck had often thought he would sell the creature; but he never had.

If he had been a woman, he would have said he could not. Being a man, he argued that m.u.f.f was a good watch-dog, and worth keeping.

"Always in the way, m.u.f.f!" he muttered, looking at the patient black head rubbed against his knee. He was angry with the dog at that moment; the next he had repented; the brute had done no wrong. He stooped and patted him. m.u.f.f returned to his dreams content.

"Well, Martha," he said, coming up to her uneasily, "you look tired."

"Tired? No, I was only thinking, Amos."

The pallor of her face, its timid eyes and patient mouth, the whole crushed look of the woman, struck him freshly. He stooped and kissed her forehead, the sharp lines of his face relaxing a little.

"I didn't mean to be hard on you, Martha; we both have enough to bear without that, but it's best not to talk of what can't be helped,--you see."

"Yes."

"Don't think anything more about the day; it's not--it's not really good for you; you must cheer up, little woman."

"Yes, Amos."

Perhaps his unusual tenderness gave her courage; she stood up, putting both arms around his neck.

"If you'd only try to love her a little, after all, my husband! He would know it; He might save her for it."

Amos Ryck choked, coughed, and said it was time for prayers. He took down the old Bible in which his child's baby-fingers used to trace their first lessons after his own, and read, not of her who loved much and was forgiven, but one of the imprecatory Psalms.

When Mrs. Ryck was sure that her husband was asleep that night, she rose softly from her bed, unlocked, with noiseless key, one of her bureau drawers, took something from it, and then felt her way down the dark stairs into the kitchen.

She drew a chair up to the fire, wrapped her shawl closely about her, and untied, with trembling fingers, the knots of a soft silken handkerchief in which her treasures were folded.

Some baby dresses of purest white; a child's little pink ap.r.o.n; a pair of tiny shoes, worn through by pattering feet; and a toy or two all broken, as some impatient little fingers had left them; she was such a careless baby! Yet they never could scold her, she always affected such pretty surprises, and wide blue-eyed penitence: a bit of a queen she was at the farm.

Was it not most kindly ordered by the Infinite Tenderness which pitieth its sorrowing ones, that into her still hours her child should come so often only as a child, speaking pure things only, touching her mother so like a restful hand, and stealing into a prayer?

For where was ever grief like this one? Beside this sorrow, death was but a joy. If she might have closed her child's baby-eyes, and seen the lips which had not uttered their first "Mother!" stilled, and laid her away under the daisies, she would have sat there alone that night, and thanked Him who had given and taken away.

But _this_,--a wanderer upon the face of the earth,--a mark, deeper seared than the mark of Cain, upon the face which she had fondled and kissed within her arms; the soul to which she had given life, accursed of G.o.d and man,--to measure this, there is no speech nor language.

Martha Ryck rose at last, took off the covers of the stove, and made a fresh blaze which brightened all the room, and shot its glow far into the street. She went to the window to push the curtain carefully aside, stood a moment looking out into the night, stole softly to the door, unlocked it, then went upstairs to bed.

The wind, rising suddenly that night, struck sharply through the city.

It had been cold enough before, but the threatened storm foreboded that it would be worse yet before morning. The people crowded in a warm and brilliant church cast wandering glances from the preacher to the painted windows, beyond which the night lay darkly, thought of the ride home in close, cus.h.i.+oned carriages, and s.h.i.+vered.

So did a woman outside, stopping just by the door, and looking in at the hushed and sacred shelter. Such a temperature was not the best medicine for that cough of hers. She had just crawled out of the garret, where she had lain sick, very sick, for weeks.

Pa.s.sing the door of the Temple which reared its ma.s.sive front and glittering windows out of the darkness of the street, her ear was caught by the faint, m.u.f.fled sound of some anthem the choir were singing. She drew the hood of her cloak over her face, turned into the shadow of the steps, and, standing so, listened. Why, she hardly knew. Perhaps it was the mere entreaty of the music, for her dulled ear had never grown deaf to it; or perhaps a memory, flitting as a shadow, of other places and other times, in which the hymns of G.o.d's church had not been strange to her. She caught the words at last, brokenly. They were of some one who was wounded. Wounded! she held her breath, listening curiously. The wind shrieking past drowned the rest; only the swelling of the organ murmured above it. She stole up the granite steps just within the entrance. No one was there to see her, and she went on tiptoe to the m.u.f.fled door, putting her ear to it, her hair falling over her face. It was some plaintive minor air they were hymning, as sad as a dying wail, and as sweet as a mother's lullaby.

"But He was wounded; He was wounded for our transgression; He was bruised for our iniquities."

Then, growing slower and more faint, a single voice took up the strain, mournfully but clearly, with a hush in it as if one sang on Calvary.

"Yet we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised, and we esteemed him not."

Well; He only knows what it spoke to the woman, who listened with her guilty face hidden in her hair; how it drew her like a call to join the throng that wors.h.i.+pped him.

"I'd like to hear the rest," she muttered to herself. "I wonder what it is about."

A child came down from the gallery just then, a ragged boy, who, like herself, had wandered in from the street.

"Hilloa, Meg!" he said, laughing, "_you_ going to meeting? That's a good joke!" If she had heard him, she would have turned away. But her hand was on the latch; the door had swung upon its noiseless hinges; the pealing organ drowned his voice. She went in and sat down in an empty slip close by the door, looking about her for the moment in a sort of childish wonder. The church was a blaze of light and color. One perceived a mist of gayly dressed people, a soft flutter of fans, and faint, sweet perfumes below; the velvet-cus.h.i.+oned pulpit, and pale, scholarly outlines of the preacher's face above; the warmth of rainbow-tinted gla.s.s; the wreathed and ma.s.sive carving of oaken cornice; the glitter of gas-light from a thousand prisms, and the silence of the dome beyond.

The brightness struck sharply against the woman sitting there alone. Her face seemed to grow grayer and harder in it. The very hush of that princely sanctuary seemed broken by her polluted presence. True, she kept afar off; she did not so much as lift up her eyes to heaven; she had but stolen in to hear the chanted words that were meant for the acceptance and the comfort of the pure, bright wors.h.i.+ppers,--sinners, to be sure, in their way; but then, Christ died for _them_. This tabernacle, to which they had brought their purple and gold and scarlet, for his praise, was not meant for such as Meg, you know.

But she had come into it, nevertheless. If He had called her there, she did not know it. She only sat and listened to the chanting, forgetting what she was; forgetting to wonder if there were one of all that reverent throng who would be willing to sit and wors.h.i.+p beside her.

The singing ended at last, and the pale preacher began his sermon. But Meg did not care for that; she could not understand it. She crouched down in the corner of the pew, her hood drawn far over her face, repeating to herself now and then, mechanically as it seemed, the words of the chant.

"Wounded--for our transgressions; and bruised,"--muttering, after a while,--"Yet we hid our faces." Bruised and wounded! The sound of the words attracted her; she said them over and over. She knew who He was.

Many years ago she had heard of him; it was a great while since then; she had almost forgotten it. Was it true? And was he perhaps,--was there a little chance it meant, he was bruised for her,--for _her_? She began to wonder dimly, still muttering the sorrowful words down in her corner, where no one could hear her.

I wonder if He heard them. Do you think he did? For when the sermon was ended, and the choir sang again,--still of him, and how he called the heavy-laden, and how he kept his own rest for them, she said,--for was she not very weary and heavy-laden with her sins?--still crouching down in her corner, "That's me. I guess it is. I'll find out."

She fixed her eyes upon the preacher, thinking, in her stunted, childish way, that he knew so much, so many things she did not understand, that surely he could tell her,--she should like to have it to think about; she would ask him. She rose instinctively with the audience to receive his blessing, then waited in her hooded cloak, like some dark and evil thing, among the brilliant crowd. The door opening, as they began to pa.s.s out by her, swept in such a chill of air as brought back a spasm of coughing. She stood quivering under it, her face livid with the pain.

The crowd began to look at her curiously, to nod and whisper among themselves.

The s.e.xton stepped up nervously; he knew who she was. "Meg, you'd better go. What are you standing here for?"

She flung him a look out of her hard, defiant eyes; she made no answer.

A child, clinging to her mother's hand, looked up as she went by, pity and fear in her great wondering eyes. "Mother, see that poor woman; she's hungry or cold!"

The little one put her hand over the slip, pulling at Meg's cloak, "What's the matter with you? Why don't you go home?"

"Bertha, child, are you crazy?" Her mother caught her quickly away.