MARRIED IN GOD'S SIGHT
Night—for night and death, are they not one? A farm cabin in a little valley beyond the mountain. An Indian Summer night in November, but a little fire is pleasant, throwing its cheerful light on a room rough from puncheon floor to axe-hewn rafters, but cleanly-tidy in its very roughness. It looked sinewy, strong, honest, good-natured. There was roughness, but it was the roughness of strength. Knots of character told of the suffering, struggles and privations of the sturdy trees in the forest, of seams twisted by the tempests; rifts from the mountain rocks; fibre, steel-chilled by the terrible, silent cold of winter stars.
And now plank and beam and rafter and roof made into a home, humble and honest, and giving it all back again under the warm light of the hearth-stone.
On a bed, white and beautifully clean, lay a fragile creature, terribly white herself, save where red live coals gleamed in her cheeks beneath the bright, blazing, fever-fire burning in her eyes above.
She coughed and smiled and lay still, smiling.
She smiled because a little one—a tiny, sickly little girl—had come up to the bed and patted her cheek and said: “Little mother—little mother!”
There were four other children in the room, and they sat around in all the solemn, awe-stricken sorrow of death, seen for the first time.
Then a man in an invalid chair, helpless and with a broken spine, spoke, as if thinking aloud:
“She's all the mother the little 'uns ever had, Bishop—'pears like it's cruel for God to take her from them.”
“God's cruelty is our crown,” said the old man—“we'll understand it by and by.”
Then the beautiful woman who had come over the mountain arose from the seat by the fireside, and came to the bed. She took the little one in her arms and petted and soothed her.
The child looked at her timidly in childish astonishment. She was not used to such a beautiful woman holding her—so proud and fine—from a world that she knew was not her world.
“May I give you some nourishment now, Maggie?”
The girl shook her head.
“No—no—Miss Alice,” and then she smiled so brightly and cheerfully that the little one in Alice Westmore's arms clapped her hands and laughed: “Little mother—be up, well, to-morrow.”
Little Mother turned her eyes on the child quickly, smiled and nodded approval. But there were tears—tears which the little one did not understand.
An hour went by—the wind had ceased, and with it the rain. The children were asleep in bed; the father in his chair.
A cold sweat had broken out on the dying girl's forehead and she breathed with a terrible effort. And in it all the two watchers beside the bed saw that there was an agony there but not the fear of death. She kept trying to bite her nails nervously and saying:
“There is only— ... one thing— ... one ... thing....”
“Tell me, Maggie,” said the old man, bending low and soothing her forehead with his hands, “tell us what's pesterin' you—maybe it hadn't oughter be. You mustn't worry now—God'll make everything right—to them that loves him even to the happy death. You'll die happy an' be happy with him forever. The little 'uns an' the father, you know they're fixed here—in this nice home an' the farm—so don't worry.”
“That's it!... Oh, that's it!... I got it that way— ... all for them ... but it's that that hurts now....”
He bent down over her: “Tell us, child—me an' Miss Alice—tell us what's pesterin' you. You mustn't die this way—you who've got such a right to be happy.”
The hectic spark burned to white heat in her cheek. She bit her nails, she picked at the cover, she looked toward the bed and asked feebly: “Are they asleep? Can I talk to you two?”
The old man nodded. Alice soothed her brow.
Then she beckoned to the old preacher, who knelt by her side, and he put his arms around her neck and raised her on the pillow. And his ear was close to her lips, for she could scarcely talk, and Alice Westmore knelt and listened, too. She listened, but with a griping, strained heartache,—listened to a dying confession from the pale lips, and the truth for the first time came to Alice Westmore, and kneeling, she could not rise, but bent again her head and heard the pitiful, dying confession. As she listened to the broken, gasping words, heard the heart-breaking secret come out of the ruins of its wrecked home, her love, her temptation, her ignorance in wondering if she were really married by the laws of love, and then the great martyrdom of it all—giving her life, her all, that the others might live—a terrible tightening gathered around Alice Westmore's heart, her head fell with the flooding tears and she knelt sobbing, her bloodless fingers clutching the bed of the dying girl.
“Don't cry,” said Maggie. “I should be the one to weep, ... only I am so happy ... to think ... I am loved by the noblest, best, of men, ... an' I love him so, ... only he ain't here; ... but I wouldn't have him see me die. Now—now ... what I want to know, Bishop, ...” she tried to rise. She seemed to be passing away. The old man caught her and held her in his arms.
Her eyes opened: “I—is—” she went on, in the agony of it all with the same breath, “am ... am I married ... in God's sight ... as well as his—”
The old man held her tenderly as if she were a child. He smiled calmly, sweetly, into her eyes as he said:
“You believed it an' you loved only him, Maggie—poor chile!”
“Oh, yes—yes—” she smiled, “an' now—even now I love him up—right up—as you see ... to the door, ... to the shadow, ... to the valley of the shadow....”
“And it went for these, for these”—he said looking around at the room.
“For them—my little ones—they had no mother, you kno'—an' Daddy's back. Oh, I didn't mind the work, ... the mill that has killed ... killed me, ... but, ... but was I”—her voice rose to a shrill cry of agony—“am I married in God's sight?”
Alice quivered in the beauty of the answer which came back from the old man's lips:
“As sure as God lives, you were—there now—sleep and rest; it is all right, child.”
Then a sweet calmness settled over her face, and with it a smile of exquisite happiness.
She fell back on her pillow: “In God's sight ... married ... married ... my—Oh, I have never said it before ... but now, ... can't I?”
The Bishop nodded, smiling.
“My husband, ... my husband, ... dear heart, ... Good-bye....”
She tried to reach under her pillow to draw out something, and then she smiled and died.
When Alice Westmore dressed her for burial an hour afterwards, her heart was shaken with a bitterness it had never known before—a bitterness which in a man would have been a vengeance. For there was the smile still on the dead face, carried into the presence of God.
Under the dead girl's pillow lay the picture of Richard Travis.
The next day Alice sent the picture to Richard Travis, and with it a note.
“It is your's,” she wrote calmly, terribly calm—“from the girl who died believing she was your wife. I am helping bury her to-day. And you need not come to Westmoreland to-morrow night, nor next week, nor ever again.”
And Richard Travis, when he read it, turned white to his hard, bitter, cruel lips, the first time in all his life.
For he knew that now he had no more chance to recall the living than he had to recall the dead.