The Path of the King Part 27

She had not listened to Abe's reading, but some words of it had caught her ear. The phrase "delectable mountains" for one. She did not know what "delectable" meant, but it sounded good; and mountains, though she had never seen more of them than a far blue line, had always pleased her fancy. Now she seemed to be looking at them through that magical doorway.... The country was not like anything she remembered in the Kentucky bluegra.s.s, still less like the s.h.a.ggy woods of Indiana. The turf was short and very green, and the hills fell into gracious folds that promised homesteads in every nook of them. It was a "delectable"

country--yes, that was the meaning of the word that had puzzled her....

She had seen the picture before in her head. She remembered one hot Sunday afternoon when she was a child hearing a Baptist preacher discoursing on a Psalm, something about the "little hills rejoicing."

She had liked the words and made a picture in her mind. These were the little hills and they were joyful.

There was a white road running straight through them till it disappeared over a crest. That was right, of course. The road which the Pilgrims travelled.... And there, too, was a Pilgrim.

He was a long way off, but she could see him quite clearly. He was a boy, older than Abe, but about the same size--a somewhat forlorn figure, who seemed as if he had a great way to go and was oppressed by the knowledge of it. He had funny things on his legs and feet, which were not proper moccasins. Once he looked back, and she had a glimpse of fair hair. He could not be any of the Hanks or Linkhorn kin, for they were all dark.... But he had something on his left arm which she recognised--a thick ring of gold. It was her own ring, the ring she kept in the trunk and she smiled comfortably. She had wanted it a little while ago, and now there it was before her eyes. She had no anxiety about its safety, for somehow it belonged to that little boy as well as to her.

His figure moved fast and was soon out of sight round a turn of the hill. And with that the landscape framed in the doorway began to waver and dislimn. The road was still there, white and purposeful, but the environs were changing.... She was puzzled, but with a pleasant confusion. Her mind was not on the landscape, but on the people, for she was a.s.sured that others would soon appear on the enchanted stage.

He ran across the road, shouting with joy, a dog at his heels and a bow in his hand. Before he disappeared she marked the ring, this time on his finger.... He had scarcely gone ere another appeared on the road, a slim pale child, dressed in some stuff that gleamed like satin, and mounted on a pony.... The spectacle delighted her, for it brought her in mind of the princes she had been told of in fairytales. And there was the ring, worn over a saffron riding glove....

A sudden weakness made her swoon; and out of it she woke to a consciousness of the hut where she lay. She had thought she was dead and in heaven among fair children, and the waking made her long for her own child. Surely that was Abe in the doorway.... No, it was a taller and older lad, oddly dressed, but he had a look of Abe--something in his eyes. He was on the road too, and marching purposefully--and he had the ring. Even in her mortal frailty she had a quickening of the heart.

These strange people had something to do with her, something to tell her, and that something was about her son....

There was a new boy in the picture. A dejected child who rubbed the ring on his small breeches and played with it, looking up now and then with a frightened start. The woman's heart ached for him, for she knew her own life-long malady. He was hungry for something which he had small hope of finding.... And then a wind seemed to blow out-of-doors and the world darkened down to evening. But her eyes pierced the gloaming easily, and she saw very plain the figure of a man.

He was sitting hunched up, with his chin in his hands, gazing into vacancy. Without surprise she recognised something in his face that was her own. He wore the kind of hunter's clothes that old folk had worn in her childhood, and a long gun lay across his knees. His air was sombre and wistful, and yet with a kind of n.o.ble content in it. He had Abe's puckered-up lips and Abe's steady sad eyes.... Into her memory came a verse of the Scriptures which had always fascinated her. "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims upon the earth."

She saw it all in a flash of enlightenment. These seekers throughout the ages had been looking for something and had not found it. But Abe, her son, was to find it. That was why she had been shown those pictures.

Once again she looked through the door into bright suns.h.i.+ne. It was a place that she knew beside the Ohio she remembered the tall poplar clump. She did not see the Jacksons' farm which stood south of the trees, but there was the Indian graveyard, which as a little girl she had been afraid to pa.s.s. Now it seemed to be fresh made, for painted vermilion wands stood about the mounds. On one of them was a gold trinket, tied by a loop of hide, rattled in the wind. It was her ring.

The seeker lay buried there with the talisman above him.

She was awake now, oblivious of the swift sinking of her vital energy.

She must have the ring, for it was the pledge of a great glory....

A breathless little girl flung herself into the cabin. It was Sophy Hanks, one of the many nieces who squattered like ducks about the settlement.

"Mammy!" she cried shrilly. "Mammy Linkorn!" She stammered with the excitement of the bearer of ill news. "Abe's lost your ring in the crick. He took it for a sinker to his lines, for Indian Jake telled him a piece of gold would cotch the grit fish. And a grit fish has cotched it. Abe's bin divn' and divn' and can't find it nohow. He reckons it's plumb lost. Ain't he a bad 'un, Mammy Linkhorn?"

It was some time before the dying woman understood. Then she began feebly to cry. For the moment her ring loomed large in her eyes: it was the earnest of the promise, and without it the promise might fail. She had not strength to speak or even to sob, and the tears trickled over her cheeks in dumb impotent misery.

She was roused by the culprit Abe. He stood beside her with his wet hair streaked into a fringe along his brow. The skin of his neck glistened wet in the opening of his s.h.i.+rt. His cheeks too glistened, but not with the water of the creek. He was crying bitterly.

He had no words of explanation or defence. His thick underlip stuck out and gave him the appeal of a penitent dog; the tears had furrowed paler channels down grimy cheeks; he was the very incarnation of uncouth misery.

But his mother saw none of these things.... On the instant he seemed to her transfigured. Something she saw in him of all the generations of pleading boys that had pa.s.sed before her, something of the stern confidence of the man over whose grave the ring had fluttered. But more--far more. She was a.s.sured that the day of the seekers had pa.s.sed and that the finder had come.... The young features were transformed into the lines of a man's strength. The eyes dreamed but also commanded, the loose mouth had the gold of wisdom and the steel of resolution. The promise had not failed her.... She had won everything from life, for she had given the world a master. Words seemed to speak themselves in her ear... "Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of G.o.d and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind."

She lay very still in her great joy. The boy in a fright sprang to her side, knocking over the stool with the pannikin of water. He knelt on the floor and hid his face in the bed-clothes. Her hand found his s.h.a.ggy head.

Her voice was very faint now, but he heard it.

"Don't cry, little Abe," she said. "Don't you worry about the ring, dearie. It ain't needed no more."

Half an hour later, when the cabin door was dim with twilight, the hand which the boy held grew cold.

CHAPTER 14. THE END OF THE ROAD

When Edward M. Stanton was a.s.sociated at Cincinnati in 1857 with Abraham Lincoln in the great McCormick Reaper patent suit, it was commonly a.s.sumed that this was the first time the two men had met. Such was Lincoln's view, for his memory was apt to have blind patches in it. But in fact there had been a meeting fifteen years before, the recollection of which in Stanton's mind had been so overlaid by the acc.u.mulations of a busy life that it did not awake till after the President's death.

In the early fall of 1842 Stanton had occasion to visit Illinois. He was then twenty-five years of age, and had already attained the position of leading lawyer in his native town of Steubenville in Ohio and acted as reporter of the Supreme Court of that State. He was a solemn reserved young man, with a square fleshy face and a strong ill-tempered jaw. His tight lips curved downwards at the corners and, combined with his bold eyes, gave him an air of peculiar shrewdness and purpose. He did not forget that he came of good professional stock--New England on one side and Virginia on the other--and that he was college-bred, unlike the common backwoods attorney. Also he was resolved on a great career, with the White House at the end of it, and was ready to compel all whom he met to admit the justice of his ambition. The consciousness of uncommon talent and a s.h.i.+ning future gave him a self-possession rare in a young man, and a complacence not unlike arrogance. His dress suited his pretensions--the soft rich broadcloth which tailors called doeskin, and linen of a fineness rare outside the eastern cities. He was not popular in Ohio, but he was respected for his sharp tongue, subtle brain, and intractable honesty.

His business finished, he had the task of filling up the evening, for he could not leave for home till the morrow. His host, Mr. George Curtin, was a little shy of his guest and longed profoundly to see the last of him. It was obvious that this alert lawyer regarded the Springfield folk as mossbacks--which might be well enough for St. Louis and Chicago, but was scarcely becoming in a man from Steubenville. Another kind of visitor he might have taken to a chickenfight, but one glance at Stanton barred that solution. So he compromised on Speed's store.

"There's one or two prominent citizens gathered there most nights," he explained. "Like as not we'll find Mr. Lincoln. I reckon you've heard of Abe Lincoln?"

Mr. Stanton had not. He denied the imputation as if he were annoyed.

"Well, we think a mighty lot of him round here. He's Judge Logan's law partner and considered one of the brightest in Illinois. He's been returned to the State Legislature two or three times, and he's a dandy on the stump. A hot Whig and none the worse of that, though I reckon them's not your politics.... We're kind of proud of him in Sangamon county. No, not a native. Rode into the town one day five years back from New Salem with all his belongings in a saddle-bag, and started business next morning in Joe Speed's back room.... He's good company, Abe, for you never heard a better man to tell a story. You'd die of laughing. Though I did hear he was a sad man just now along of being crossed in love, so I can't promise you he'll be up to his usual, if he's at Speed's to-night."

"I suppose the requirements for a western lawyer," said Mr. Stanton acidly, "are a gift of buffoonery and a reputation for gallantry." He was intensely bored, and had small desire to make the acquaintance of provincial celebrities.

Mr. Curtin was offended, but could think of no suitable retort, and as they were close on Speed's store he swallowed his wrath and led the way through alleys of piled merchandise to the big room where the stove was lighted.

It was a chilly fall night and the fire was welcome. Half a dozen men sat smoking round it, with rummers of reeking toddy at their elbows.

They were ordinary citizens of the place, and they talked of the last horseraces. As the new-comers entered they were appealing to a figure perched on a high barrel to decide some point in dispute.

This figure climbed down from its perch, as they entered, with a sort of awkward courtesy. It was a very tall man, thin almost to emaciation, with long arms and big hands and feet. He had a lean, powerful-looking head, marred by ugly projecting ears and made shapeless by a ma.s.s of untidy black hair. The brow was broad and fine, and the dark eyes set deep under it; the nose, too, was good, but the chin and mouth were too small for the proportions of the face. The mouth, indeed, was so curiously puckered, and the lower lip so thick and prominent, as to give something of a comic effect. The skin was yellow, but stretched so firm and hard on the cheek bones that the sallowness did not look unhealthy.

The man wore an old suit of blue jeans and his pantaloons did not meet his coa.r.s.e unblacked shoes by six inches. His scraggy throat was adorned with a black neckerchief like a boot-lace.

"Abe," said Mr. Curtin, "I would like to make you known to my friend Mr.

Stanton of Ohio."

The queer face broke into a pleasant smile, and the long man held out his hand.

"Glad to know you, Mr. Stanton," he said, and then seemed to be stricken with shyness. His wandering eye caught sight of a new patent churn which had just been added to Mr. Speed's stock. He took two steps to it and was presently deep in its mechanism. He turned it all ways, knelt beside it on the floor, took off the handle and examined it, while the rest of the company pressed Mr. Stanton to a seat by the fire.

"I heard Abe was out at Rochester helping entertain Ex-President Van Buren," said Mr. Curtin to the store-keeper.

"I reckon he was," said Speed. "He kept them roaring till morning. Judge Peck told me he allowed Mr. Van Buren would be stiff for a month with laughing at Abe's tales. It's curious that a man who don't use tobacco or whisky should be such mighty good company."

"I wish Abe'd keep it up," said another. "Most of the time now he goes about like a sick dog. What's come to him, Joe?"

Mr. Speed hushed his voice. "He's got his own troubles.... He's a deep-feeling man, and can't forget easily like you and me.... But things is better with him, and I kind of hope to see him wed by Thanksgiving Day.... Look at him with that churn. He's that inquisitive he can't keep his hands off no new thing."

But the long man had finished his inquiry and rejoined the group by the stove.

"I thought you were a lawyer, Mr. Lincoln," said Stanton, "but you seem to have the tastes of a mechanic."

The other grinned. "I've a fancy for any kind of instrument, for I was a surveyor in this county before I took to law."

"George Was.h.i.+ngton also was a surveyor."

"Also, but not LIKEWISE. I don't consider I was much of a hand with the compa.s.s and chains."

"It is the fas.h.i.+on in Illinois, I gather, for the law to be the last in a series of many pursuits--the pool where the driftwood from many streams comes to rest." Mr. Stanton spoke with the superior air of one who took his profession seriously and had been trained for it in the orthodox fas.h.i.+on.