Part 14 (2/2)

The thin stuff of the little, listless sleeves and yellowed skirts clung to his roughened fingers; he freed them with gentleness.

”An' her hair would hev curled,” she said, when the last piece was in.

Davie had been kneeling among his vegetables that summer-time long since that Elizabeth had come to stand beside him in their garden, pus.h.i.+ng from her forehead her heavy falling hair, then dark, in the way she had if very glad. Seeing that she had something to tell him, and wondering at her eyes, he waited for her to speak. She did not keep him long. For an instant her serene glance went up to the blue sky. Then her hands stretched out to him.

”Davie,” she began, ”that old cradle of your ma's--” She broke off shyly.

Davie stayed on his knees. He could not at once answer her, but could only grope toward her blindly. Presently her touch calmed him.

”It rocks from head to foot,” he quavered in joy, ”'stead o' from side to side--the motion's better for 'em.”

Striving to go well through her troubled months until her hour should come, Elizabeth smiled often at Davie, and sometimes the smile was a tender laugh in her throat--Davie clumping excitedly over the farm about his work; Davie bringing home from town the cautious purchase of a child's sack, and crying out in exultation, ”It's got tossels on it!” Davie storing singular treasures in a box in the garret--seed-pods which rattled when you shook them; scarlet wood-berries, gay and likely to please; a tin whistle, a rubber ball, a doll with joints, and a folded paper having written on it, ”For Croup a poultis of onions and heeting the feet”; and Davie, his importance dropped from him as a garment, coming to put his head down against her shoulder.

”I dun'no',” he said to her, ”as a man better feel too uppity 'bout becomin' a pa. It's an awful solemn undertakin', an' the more you think it over the solemner it gets. Seems to me it's somethin' like playin' the fiddle. There can't jest anybody rush in an' play a real good time on a fiddle--takes a terrible lot o' preparin' 'n' hard work to tech them little strings to music. An' mebbe the man that can tech 'em the best is him that's always been clean 'n' honest 'n' real grave. I'm beginnin' to feel so no 'count--why, I dun'no' a note o'

fiddle music!”

”Oh, Davie,” she had comforted, ”it don't seem to me that the man jest _born_ good 'd play the sweetest, but the one who had fought for things.”

While she turned the tiny hems and ran the wonderful seams, Davie, winter-bound, sat on the tall stool before his loom, the bobbins wound with rags for a hit and miss. Weaving eked out a slender income. His father's finger-tips, too, had become stained by colors of warp and woof after the end of the pig-killing had been announced by the children racing with the bladders through the thin snow.

On Christmas day he brought down the cradle from the garret, and wiped its gathered dust from it with a white cloth. To please him, Elizabeth spread it ready with the sheets and blankets. The sight of the pillow unmanned him. ”The idee o' that stove smokin' so Christmas!” he choked. She turned to him quickly. Their seamed hands met as in that joyous moment among the vegetables, but this time they clasped above a dusted cradle. In view of the increased expenses before the household they made each other no gifts; only Davie put a fir bough and a teething-ring in his box.

Then he wove as though the clack of his shuttle were the beat of a drum going by, then in a vast impatience, then with the bridle hanging on the rim of the manger by the plough-horse which had a saddle gait.

The morning that he clambered, frightened, into the saddle a great cold wave was on the Ridge, with a fierce wind continually blowing.

Smoke curled up from the chimneys to perish against the sunny sky.

Cattle left in the open crowded in the lee of the straw-stacks, their rough flanks crawling, and in the folds the ewes, yet frail from their travail, stood stung and still, mothering their weak-kneed lambs.

Beside the thud of the horse's hoofs toward town there was no sound on the road save a little, dry cracking of the frost. The doctor, as he started in his carriage for Davie's house, drew his robes closely about him and scowled at the fierceness of the blast; but Davie, riding far ahead, his elbows flying wildly up and down, did not know that he had forgotten to fasten his shabby overcoat. Crouched by the silent loom, he clutched helplessly at the hit and miss as Elizabeth went down into that loneliest of all earth's agonies.

But from the beginning the child hung a doomed thing on her breast.

After three months they followed her up to the burying-ground, the murmuring of its cedars never again to be wholly out of their ears.

Away from the grave Davie gave an exceedingly bitter cry--”She's little to leave!” But Elizabeth's tears fell back in her heart unshed.

She waved her handkerchief to Melindy Ethel. ”But she's brave like her pa,” she said. And Davie stiffened.

Memories of these and other days, mingled with forebodings for the parting, were so heavy upon him that he could get no farther in the night's devotions than the reading of the Bible chapter.

”I can't pray to-night, 'Lisbeth,” he said.

Propped with pillows for the last rest before her journey, she was still faithfully brave. ”Mebbe the Lord'll jest take care o' me, anyway, bein' as I've tried to do his ways.” The old man did not know how wistful was her speech.

In the morning she was early dressed in her decent black. To those who came for the leave-taking she bade good-by with gentle courtesy.

Kerrenhappuch Green lent his buggy because of its comfortable seat, but Davie drove her carefully over the six miles to the station. No shriek of an engine's whistle disturbed the quiet of Turkey Ridge; to go into wider ways one must needs start from the nearest town. Once she looked back at the house, set like an ancient brown bird's nest on the narrow fields.

The yellow-bodied stage, going every other day across the country, brought the minister the letter from his niece with the happy tidings of Elizabeth's safe arrival, under her guidance, at the city hospital.

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