VIII
THE SHADOWS OF DEATH
Over the sea, many months after, a runner brings a letter to those who sit beside a failing rushlight. The faces are too white—the eyes too brilliant for well-nourished bodies. Signs of wolfish poverty abound. They are but three. The rest are dead of hunger. One is old and blind. Upon his pathetic face the shadow of death has passed. Another has the smile of the simple—tortured into pain by the tight-drawn lines of want. Another is young and fair—yes—still young and fair—but not red-lipped now. For these many months which might all be years they have borne together the weariness of this watching and cold and hunger. The ice hangs just above their small thatch now, and the sea is at the door. Yet more than the hunger of their bodies—more than the cold and terror—have been the hunger and the cold and the terror of their souls. They have prayed God with agony to let their cup pass. Is there to be no word? No sign? If God wills—yes. They have both trusted and doubted God.
Yet now they repent. Here, in this letter, is the answer to their prayers. After all God is righteous—altogether righteous! Is it to bid them come? Is it to tell them when he will come? If the first, they will go in haste—for the ice is close, as he foretold. God has spoken. If the last, he must take them quickly, or the ice will come.
They gather a little closer about the dying light. The blind one clasps his hands hard on his staff to stop their shaking. The simple face is all one ghastly smile. The wan one—wiping her dry eyes where there should be tears—kneels before them, and with a quivering supplication breaks the seal. Her face is as ashes. She has not a word in her dry throat. The writing is not his. At her silence a shiver creeps over the blind one. The simple one smiles anew.
“Ha, ha!” he says, “I am hungry!”
The enclosure falls into the lap of the wan one. A short note in a stranger hand—that unruly curl she cut for him the day he went—an old letter of her own, beginning with a love word. The note tells a brief story ending in death.
There is nothing more. These are the tidings. This is the answer to their prayers.
Yet still they sit there—like ghosts—until their stony eyes are fixed—until the smile on the simple face passes into eternal calm—until the rushlight dies, and pitying darkness falls.
When the fickle northern summer comes again it lingers wonderingly about the idle cottage doors, fixed close in the ice, pausing at one with the reverence which befits the unclosing of a tomb. It stays for but a little day, then flies before the conquering ice and comes no more.
Yet, that tomb, far out toward the eternal ice cap, where the cottage is in the embrace of the ice, was “made in America,” the land of the brave and the home of the free—while the gentlemen of the bar and the benchers laughed, and in that city whose proudest boast is of the sublime quality of its justice—because a judge was impatient for his dinner—because a prosecuting officer would play golf. Was it wrong? And who will right the wrong? And where will it be righted? Is there a forum for such causes as these? And who will be punished for it? The judge—the jury—the district attorney—all of them?