In the Border Country

by Josephine Daskam Bacon

And when they had worked over the great volume, lettered every letter by a patient hand and clasped with silver, it was the hour for bed.

"The Countess is tired," whispered Alys to their guest, "for she has been twice on the Dunes; once to tend a poor woodcutter of a broken leg and again when one of the shepherd's wives was found to be a-dying."

"In the city—which I have just left, we do these things differently now," said the woman. "There is so much pain and sickness that one woman's hands—or one hundred—would avail little enough to stem the tide. So it is organized and attended to by a few who do nothing else, and thus the others are left free."

"Free for what?" said the Countess, suddenly; "to seek rest?"

The woman looked coldly at her. "I do not know who you are," she said, "nor what you do here, but it is plain to see, at least, that you are a young woman. I am not. At your age, believe me, I did not rest. I have done better work of its kind than your tapestries. I have done other work, too—I have borne and reared children and they have children of their own. I have tended to his death a good man and laid him in his grave. My work is done. Now I look for some quiet room with a window to face the autumn sunsets, that I may sit by it, and think, and find out what life may be, perhaps, before I leave it. Why do you goad me on and seem to seek to prevent me?"

The Countess ran to her and kneeled by her and seized her hand.

"I goad you because I must, dear guest," she said; "believe me, I know—none better—what you have done. The tapestry which you drew to-day shall meet eyes you do not dream on now; the phœnix that made pattern for our Gildres here shall teach more than him. And it is in such that you must rest. For women were not made to sit and think what life may be—trust me for it. We are running streams, that muddy if we settle. We have to live, and find life out in living. Did it not seem clearer to you, what time you leaned so wisely over my heedless little Mawdlyn?"

Now the woman breathed hard, as one who runs a race, and stared at her who spoke.

"Yes, it did—I knew it did!" she cried, "but who are you that tell me this so young? And if you have learned so much, you are far too wise and necessary to those you teach to risk your life in this terrible cold, visiting wood-cutters!"

"If I am young, dear guest, I am yet not so young that I have not known this," said she of the coronet, "that I learned what I know on just such visitings! Mothers of Sorrow are we all, dear friend, and if we hold ourselves too far from sorrow, we are no true mothers of the world we make. If all did a little, there would be no need of a few who should do all—or so it seems to us on the Dunes."