The Winepress

by Christine Beals

"Keep my girl, dear God, keep my girl," she murmured, as she turned in at the gate. "Keep my dear, dear girl."

A man, gaunt and worn, with signs of recent illness upon his face, stepped out of one of the prosperous-looking, well-kept homes of Edgerly. His step was not so elastic as it once had been, but the face had lost none of its alertness, nor the eyes their keenness. He passed the Mayhew house; how familiar it looked. Not a tree or shrub seemed changed; he noticed the sweet-brier by the library window, and in fancy he could hear it tapping against the window-pane. Farther out he passed the home of Dr. Eldrige and saw the old doctor in an invalid's chair on the porch. He had heard the harrowing story of the old man's affliction, also some gruesome reports concerning it. That blood and froth oozed from his nostrils and mouth during his attacks, which contained a virus that poisoned all flesh that came in contact with it was supposed to be a fact; but that this poison exuded continually from his body was believed by most people to be an exaggeration of the case.

The next house was the home of Dr. Eldrige Jr. This was a cottage less pretentious than the house where the old doctor lived; but there were shrubs and flowers in the yard; the grass was well kept and vines grew over the door. A woman, partly screened by the greenery, was sitting on the porch rocking back and forth in a wicker chair, a woman with golden hair coiled about her head and soft, clustering curls about her face. And tenderly in her arms she was cradling a wee bit of a rosy child. Perhaps she was crooning a lullaby; the little one put out his hand, a little roseleaf hand, and the mother bent her head and laid her lips upon it.

The man, in passing, saw the mother and child, and his face lighted with a smile. During his absence his friends had kept him informed about the happenings at home. He knew that the woman with the crown of golden hair was married; his sister had written him about it at the time, and he remembered now that the news had brought him no sadness and no regret, but that in his heart he had been glad that it was so. And as he went on his way his thoughts went back to that far-away foreign land, to an island of the sea where he had been when this letter of his sister's reached him. For weeks he, with his regiment, had been in the deep heart of a forest and sometimes there were marshes to cross and streams to ford and their beds at night was the damp, black ground. In fancy it all came back to him now: the dusky natives with their scant raiment; the towering forests with their weird majesty, and the call and cry of the wild creatures that inhabited them; the smell of the reeking mould, where year after year the decaying mass of vegetation had not been disturbed; the reedy marshes where all through the lonesome nights the wind sighed and moaned in the long marsh grass.

And there in that sun-kissed, tropical land, where the stars came out at night, calm and familiar as in his native land, as he stretched his weary limbs on his blanket for his night's repose, sometimes a cool hand would be laid on his brow and a sense of peace and rest would steal over him, and then, sometimes, in the mist and clinging darkness a face would appear before his vision, and it was not the fair face of the woman with the shining golden hair, but a dark, slender face with great, dark eyes burning into his soul; pain and pleading and the anguish of a woman's heart were written there. And once on a misty night, when the darkness was thick and heavy with moisture and all the moaning forest was dripping wet, a white circle was outlined in the blackness and a slight, supple form glided close to him and knelt beside him in the mist and dripping rain; the thin fingers that he remembered so well were clasped in anguish and the face was wet as the dripping foliage about him--wet with a woman's tears. All the heart within him rose in anguish to meet her, and he would have given his life and soul to take her in his arms and soothe the remorse and despair from her anguished face; but when he put out his hand to touch her, a great fear came over her and she recoiled from him and shrank and shuddered in the darkness and was gone.

"Margaret!" he cried, and his heart broke within him--"Margaret!" The cry sounded dully through the heavy silence and a comrade partly awoke and asked him why he was moaning and calling in the night.

The man, with his thoughts still partly in the past and partly on the familiar objects about him, passed on through the streets of Edgerly and slowly, as one who toils, he climbed the incline up to the church. He seated himself on the church steps to rest for a time, and then perhaps he would go back--or perhaps--but his thoughts again became reminiscent; the spirit of the past was with him. His mind went over the long weeks spent in the hospital, where the doctors had pronounced his case hopeless and the nurses believed that he must die. Long, weary days he had lain on his bed of pain, and in his heart waged open rebellion against the power that held him there; then for many, many days he lay, too weak to struggle, too helpless to care. Down into the dark valley where the air was damp and dank, where gruesome things, weird and fantastic, glided noiselessly among the shadows--shadows ever growing deeper, darker, closer--down in the dark valley he left the last remnant of his vaunted power and felt himself a child--just a child--with the Everlasting Arms, the abiding, sustaining force of the universe, about him. And like a gnarled and cankered plant that the gardener cuts to the root that it may put forth a more vigorous and healthful growth, little by little he came again into the sunshine, and a new heaven and a new earth opened before him.

The great purpose of God is absolute in the universe; it reaches out, covers and enfolds the purposes of man as the shades of night cover and enfold the earth at eventide. All the struggling, sin-tossed creatures of earth are folded tenderly close to the great heart of God; yet our vain imaginings and foolish desires often take us a long and weary way, over mountains and vale and sea, before we lift up our eyes and know that God is love. When passion has burned itself out, when lust is dead, when the human is crucified and laid in the grave to rise again divine; when all the mocking demons of false belief and evil thought are rebuked and sent cowering from before our consciousness, then the soul comes into its own and the Kingdom of Heaven is ours.

Margaret was seated on a ledge of rock by the brook. Her eyes were strained far off to the dim blue hills in the distance; her heart was torn with restless pain, and her life's hunger was in her face, but her soul was anchored safe and secure.

"Expiation!" she murmured. "Dear God, only keep me from day to day--keep me--keep your child." Softly over her memory floated a fragment of the words that Mrs. Thorpe had read that morning: "He that keeps thee will not slumber."