“If it pleases you, I will go in for your sake.” As they entered the waiting doorway, Frost walked to the low lounge—he was more deeply moved than he cared to show. There, before him, lay the pulseless clay, the features horribly distorted, the hands and limbs terribly drawn.
“This,” he said to Cherokee, “was caused by paralysis. Nature was once a kind mother to her.”
He shook his head, musingly, and ran his fingers over the sleeper’s hands. At first he did it with a sort of tentativeness, as if waiting for something that eluded him. All at once he leaned over and kissed the hands—he seemed moved by a powerful impulse. Through his mind there ran a thousand incidents of his life, one growing upon the other without sequence; phantasmagoria, out of the scene-house of memory.
He saw a vast stretch of lonely forest in the white coverlet of winter, through which a man followed a desolate track. He saw a scanty home, yet mirthful, and warm from the winter wood. Again he saw that home, when even in the summer height it was chilled and blighted. Then, there, he saw a child with red-gold curls, and he wondered how fate would deal with that baby—a laughing, dimpled romper, without a name.
These are a few of the pictures he saw.
Cherokee, ever gentle in her ministries, spoke kind words to the old woman, whom she supposed was the mother.
She had come too late for another good; the dead do not answer even the most loving, the sweetest voices, and this girl had joined the mysteries. So, what was left but to offer prayers and tears for the living?
While Cherokee talked, the woman sat very still, her face ruled to quietness. At length she said:
“She is better dead.”