LIGHT—INTO DARKNESS
"Yes, Martha," came the answer after an instant's pause, and Nickols Powers stepped from my side to that of Martha Ensley and took her wrung hands in his. For another long moment we all stood tense at the acknowledgment that the tragedy had forced to the surface. I stood beside father like a woman of ice, yet on fire with a contemptuous humiliation. The eyes of all my world were for an instant turned on me, then they were all called back to the tragedy that was tottering over us.
"Hurry, hurry!" came another wail from within the ruins in Charlotte's voice. "He's bleeding!"
Again Martha started to fling herself past Nickols and the parson with a scream of terror which was faintly echoed from within.
"Somebody come to Martha," commanded Mr. Goodloe, as he held her off with one hand while he eased the beam on his shoulder so that Nickols could slip in past him to the other end.
Suddenly a great, beautiful warmth melted the horror of pride and humiliation that had frozen my heart as Nickols had stepped from my side to that of Martha in acknowledgment of her claim upon him for the saving of the child. All fear for her or us or the babies passed from me. My soul had gone out into a darkness, called on some great Power that must be there directing such a thing as was happening to us, and calm and clear the answer of courage flowed into me.
Then without another moment's hesitation I stepped forward and held out my arms to Gregory Goodloe for Martha. He put her into their strong embrace and I pressed her head down upon my shoulder in a great tenderness I had never felt before, while Nickols, with a long, hunted look at us both, crawled into the crumbling ruin and crouched under the beam as Gregory Goodloe directed him.
The wind had died down, the clouds were rolling away the darkness and the rain had almost stopped as we all stood and waited for Gregory Goodloe to bring from that ruin, in the way his superior judgment thought best, either life or death. From within there came sobs and smothered little moans that were so mingled that they could not be identified by even the mother hearts held at bay by the faith that made them obey the parson's command.
And then as I stood there with the mother of the child of my lover cowering against my breast, with the man who in a few days was to have been my husband, crouched under almost certain grinding death, and looked into what at any moment might be the grave of all the babies of the women I held dear, a light was flooding into my darkness and all of the obscure, untranslatable writings on my nature became clear and I received my consciousness of my Master, the Lord Jesus, with a cry that I sent up for His mediation for the lives of the little ones. It was my first prayer.
"O Christ in Heaven, help save them!" I pleaded. "Quick, Gregory, quick!" I added another supplication in the next breath.
"Sue is bleeding, too!" again came a wail in Charlotte's voice. "Mikey's got the baby, but he's caught."
Nell had been kneeling beside Mark's prostrate form, but at Charlotte's call she laid his head on Harriet's breast and flung herself against my arm outstretched to receive and restrain her.
"Now, Nickols, steady! I'll lift them past the beam," said the parson, as he braced himself in the door space which had been crushed into a narrow opening.
"Charlotte, take the baby from Mikey and hand her to me first," he commanded. "Where are you caught, Mikey?"
"Me leg," wailed Mikey and his wail was echoed by poor little Mrs. Burns.
"Here," said the parson, as he handed the brown swaddled bundle to Nell, who caught it in her arms and sank shuddering to my feet.
"Now, Charlotte, I want you to get all the other children who are not caught into line and make them walk carefully, just as you did here to me," said the parson in a perfectly calm voice, the one he had used to command his small congregation in the weeks of the drill.
"They are all crying and got their heads covered up," answered Charlotte in despair. "They won't get up and march." Loud wails of fear and anguish accompanied this statement, as if to corroborate it.
"Sing with me, Susan, sing the march," came the command without an instant's delay from the lips of the beloved Minister.
"Onward, Christian soldiers
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before—"
came wee Sue's high, sweet voice which rose from the cavern and joined with the parson's in the old song that has led strong men through many a death watch.
For a long moment we all waited and then out of the hole in the mass of stones and timbers and bricks, led by wee bleeding Susan, crawled a slow stream of bloody, bruised, sobbing infant humanity to be absorbed with cries of rapture into waiting arms.
"Hurry, Goodloe, get the boy and Charlotte; my God, hurry, the beam is sinking!" came in Nickols' smothered voice.
Martha started, but I held her tight against my breast.
"I've got Mikey's pants loose with my teeth," came in Charlotte's voice, as a creaking of the timbers made a shudder run through the waiting crowd as every man and woman who held a restored treasure close, waited to see what would happen to the three left in the settling ruins.
"Come out, Mikey, come out," called the Burns paternal parent.
"I won't! I'm going to help Charlotte git out Stray," was the undutiful response of courage to the craven.
"Where is he caught, Charlotte?" asked the parson, as he edged a little farther under the beam, which tottered and brought him to a cautious standstill.
"His middle. Mikey's pushing and I'm pulling, but he's all bluggy. He's dead all but his toes that wiggle."
"Hurry, Goodloe, hurry!" groaned Nickols, with what seemed a final inspiration of breath.
"Pull him loose and come quick, Charlotte, you and Mikey. Never mind the blood," was the firm command and in a few seconds Charlotte and Mikey squeezed through the fast closing opening, bloody and torn, but with the limp Stray dragged between them. A great cheer went up as Martha turned and caught the unconscious boy in her arms, then it froze in the throats that had been uttering it. Slowly, but more rapidly than could be stayed by human hands, the whole heavy roof crushed down upon the rest of the ruin; and under it and the beam went Nickols Powers with only one deep groan. Mr. Goodloe tried to hold up the whole side of the roof on his own shoulders and only staggered out from the very brink of being involved in the crash. Martha sank to the ground and hid her head in my knees and sobbed while I heard a great cry break from my father's lips. Nickols was the last of his race and our pride was blasted when he fell.
"Now forward, every man of you, but lift and dig carefully," commanded the parson, as he stood on the very edge of the ruin. "Todd, you stand at the corner and show them how to roll back the timbers to the right. Carefully, men, but quick, quick, and with the help of God!"
It seemed hours that the men wrestled with the timbers and tore away brick and stone and steel, but it was only a few minutes before they pried up a section of the heavy roof and lifted Nickols from the debris beneath.
"He's breathing," said Mr. Todd, as he laid him in the parson's great, strong, outstretched arms open to receive him and which bore him out through the crowd swiftly and laid him across the seats of Nickols' car. Doctor Harding had just put Mark, a limp, heavy body, into his own car, with Harriet to support the bleeding head, and Nell crouched beside him with the Suckling in her arms, and sent them on up into the devastated Town. Now he came and helped us settle Nickols on his cushions.
"Shall I send my car and Colonel Leftwick for surgeons and nurses from the Capital?" asked the Governor. "How is it with Morgan?"
"He is dead," answered the old doctor with the calm serenity that he had acquired after so many years of giving up his friends. "This case is another matter. There may be a chance and I'll need help. We don't yet know how many more are injured in the whole town. We'll need help."
"Then I'll drive for it myself," answered the Governor, as he swung into his powerful car and started it out into the valley. "I'll make it back in six hours. No other man can drive this car as fast as I can."
And true to his promise, he was back within the time with nurses and surgeons and supplies of all kinds. By that time the whole Harpeth Valley had heard of our tragedy and all who could find a way were hurrying to our rescue or comforting.
The dawn of the beautiful new day found Nickols still alive, stretched on his bed in his own wing of the Poplars, which alone of all the homes in the Town had not been touched by the storm monster. The old house stood unharmed in all its beauty in its garden which had hardly a leaf or a branch broken, and hovered under its roof the last of the name of its builders. He lay quiet and unconscious while his life jetted itself away from a great hole in his lung made by a splinter from the beam he had held up until old Goodloet's children had been given back to its future. The great surgeon who had come down with the Governor, watched, shook his head and went at his task again and again with a dogged courage. For an hour he would leave him to go and help Dr. Harding with some of the other injured, but back he would come to his fight for Nickols' life.
And all over the stricken town there were similar tragedies being enacted. Over at the Morgans Mark lay cold and still in the long parlor, which was almost the only part of the handsome old house left intact by the tornado, and Harriet sat beside him while Nell nursed maimed wee Susan and torn Jimmy, and restrained Charlotte from injuring her sorely twisted ankle.
Down at the Last Chance, Jacob Ensley was stretched upon a bed in the bar with a sheet drawn straight and decorously over his bruised white head. He had been killed by a blow from a roof timber, while from right beside him young George Spain had been rescued unharmed. When he had crawled from the ruins he had held in his hand a bottle of whiskey which he had just uncorked for his own and Jacob's refreshment when the tornado tore at the East Chance, and scarcely a drop had been spilt. And the tornado had displayed the vagaries of its kind.
Old Granny Todd had been lifted in her rocking chair and carried halfway over the Town and left beside the Spain cottage with her feeble life intact, while Mrs. Spain, upon whose shoulders the burden of mothering all seven of the Spains rested heavily, had had one of those valuable shoulders broken and was left crushed and bleeding beside the rocking chair in which the helpless old dame arrived for her enforced visit. The household goods of one family had been torn from them and thrown into the melee of another, and the Jamison clock was found ticking busily away over on the roof of the Todd's chicken house. A girl mother in a little cottage on the edge of the river bank was found floating against the shore in her wooden bedstead, drowned, while near her the little two days' old life had been perfectly preserved upon the pillow in the rocking chair where it had been sleeping when the great storm beast had made its raid.
And all Goodloets mourned, crying for her children, and would not be comforted. The second day after the storm the dead were buried. Mr. Goodloe, with old Mr. Stokes, the Presbyterian minister, on one hand, and the Baptist student preacher on the other, stood in the center of the beautiful city of the dead, over which the storm had passed unheeding, and had services for the rich and the poor alike. With the same ceremonial were buried Mark Morgan and Jacob Ensley, and the girl mother, Ted Montgomery, who had been struck down by the falling sign of the Bank and Trust Company on Main Street, and a score of others.
Then after all the tears had been shed and the sobs had ceased, all the flowers strewn and the reluctant feet had left the silent city, I went over behind the tall cedars into a corner and knelt beside Martha Ensley, who had flung herself down across the new-made grave that held all that was left of Jacob Ensley, the man who had bulwarked sin in his Settlement and menaced all of Goodloets for many a year. The wide-eyed boy crouched beside her and I took his hand in mine.
"Martha," I said, as I bent beside her in the twilight. "I want you to come home with me, you and Sonny. Your place is there now and you must bring him." All day I had thought and I had prayed to be aided in doing what I knew was best.
"Oh, no, Miss Charlotte, no," she said, and shrank from my arms.
"Yes, Martha," I said, and drew her closer.
"It happened the summer we were all first grown and you were in Europe. I couldn't fight him off. I knew he belonged to you and I loved you, but I couldn't fight him off," she sobbed and the Stray's little arms went around her neck.
"I'll fight fer you—I'll fight," he said, with brave, wonderment in his eyes and voice.
"I went away this summer and I wanted to stay. Mr. Goodloe tried to help me, but Nickols found where I was and made me come back. It was wrong to you and I knew it. I stayed shut up in my room, but he would come. And I sent him to his death. He was yours and I killed him for you! Please go away and leave me!" And again Martha cowered away from me.
"Nobody need know you are in the house, Martha, but you must come with me," I said, and I spoke with such quiet authority that she rose and followed me out of the shadows into the starlit night which had come down over stricken Goodloets. I found Billy waiting for me in his car and he spoke gently to Martha and settled her and the boy on the back seat with never a question in his kind eyes.
"God, you women!" he said to me under his breath, but I avoided his eye and he drove us silently to the Poplars. The long halls were quiet and empty in the anxious hush of the whole house which was keeping its life—or death watch. I led Martha to the room that opened into mine, in which all of the girl guests of the Poplars always slept, and made her take off her hat and make the boy comfortable. Then I went for Dabney and asked him to take food to them.
"Yes'm, I will. God love my little miss," was his answer, and I knew that I could trust his kindness to Martha and the boy.
Then I went into the library to father. I found Mr. Goodloe with him and father's calm under his anxious suffering gave me a thrill at the thought of the regained strength it implied. The parson's face was grave, but full of a white light from the fire burning back under the dull gold brows. His warm hands took my cold ones in them and pressed them palm to palm in the attitude of prayer and very tenderly, from his soul to mine, he said:
"'The Lord is good, for his mercy endureth forever.'"
"Forever?" I asked him, looking up with the child's faith that had been born in my heart shining in the confidence in my eyes.
"Forever," he answered me with quiet authority.
"Yes," said father solemnly, as if himself reassured after doubts. Then, after a second's pause: "Daughter, Nickols is conscious and is asking for you. Will you go to him?"
I took my hands out of those which had given to mine the strength of prayer and went.