Through Welsh Doorways

by Jeannette Augustus Marks

“No, Maggie, no, not—a—word,” she answered. Then suddenly Barbara cried out, “Sammie!” the first terror of death in her voice.

“There, there, mam dear; aye, dearie, I’m here.”

“Oh, Sammie, to die—away—from home,—aye, once—over—the threshold,” she murmured.

For an instant her eyes tried to smile into his, then consciousness slipped away, and a wing swept over them,—they fluttered and they closed. The doctor’s stern “No matter, she will recover in the air,” checked the sobs of Maggie; and so they bore her, still and white, over the threshold of her home, past the farm-servants, to the carriage.

Fields, hills, buildings flashed by, seeming with their shadows and forms to flick the windows of the railway coach. The doctor and Samuel sat side by side, and opposite on the long seat lay Barbara, quiet and semi-conscious. The half-day’s journey to Liverpool stretched out interminably, even now the most of it had been covered. Samuel was thinking, thinking, thinking, as he had never thought before, and the discipline of these thoughts was biting into him like acid. There were lines graven on his face which years alone could never write there. Aye, to learn a lesson like this in a few hours which should be learned through a lifetime,—to learn it thus in one last brief discipline! Oh, Barbara, Barbara, what had he done for her, what had he been to her? And now if—the thought strangled him—where, where was she going?

Then came to him the years when he might not be able to tell her any more how he regretted the selfishness of weeks and months, aye, of half a century. Even now the separation had begun; she was too weak to listen to him, he could not tell her, and in a few hours the one chance might be gone. Already, as she lay there hovering between life and death, she was no longer his in the old substantial way, but merely a hostage, fragile, ethereal, of a past life. If he had loved her every hour of those days that seemed so lastingly secure, if he had tried in every way—all the little ways—to show her how tenderly, how deeply he really loved her, the years would have been too short. And to-day, at the best, there was the one chance growing less certain every minute; there were but a few years at the most when he might try to make her know what she was to him.

Then, with a revulsion of feeling, the little commonplace joys dear to them both crowded in upon him; he felt benumbed in their midst, helplessly conscious that the heart of them all was slipping, slipping away. The road of their life flowed swiftly behind him, receding ribbonlike, as the hills and trees and fields passed the coach-window, into indistinguishable distance. Their tea-time with its happy quiet, their greeting at night, their rest side by side, their goodbye in the morning, Barbara’s caps, Barbara’s knitting, the shining eyes, the smile—each daily commonplace thing a part of his very being. He had a sickening sense of having the roots of existence torn out.

With a pang came the thought of that other trip to Liverpool they had planned to take. What would the boy say now? And he must know how that mother-life had been wasted, neglected. And the books they were going to bring the lad, and the socks Barbara had made, and the shoes that were to delight her, and the new clothes for both, and the bonnet over which they had laughed so merrily—the agony of these simple things, remembered, ate at his thoughts like fire. They were so little; he had never known before what they meant, or he had forgotten; now, surely, they could not be taken from him. Samuel’s mind prostrated itself in petition to that Inexorable in whose power lay these little joys, his, his only, of account only to him, sacred to him only, that he might be allowed to keep them.

His face was gray with the battle of these hours when the doctor spoke, telling him that they were almost in Liverpool and must move quickly. Their voices aroused Barbara; her eyes sought Sammie’s and smiled faithfully into them.

“Dearie!” he said, leaning forward with such an expression that Barbara, if she saw it clearly, could never doubt his love again.