The windows were opened, and the blue paper curtains had disappeared to be replaced by white muslin ones. A dozen pitchers were placed around the room containing the brilliant wild flowers of the neighborhood that had been sent in by Jim and his friends. A wreath of golden-rod and purple asters at Jim’s desire was laid upon the white counterpane at Mildred’s feet. For the news that there was for some strange reason to be a marriage had spread like wildfire, and many a rough, sunburned man had tapped softly at the door of the little shop to ask what it meant, and beg Alice, who stood on guard, to be allowed to come up and stand, if only in the doorway, and see the “boss” married.
One day, a month later, Alice told me all about it. “You don’t suppose, Miss, he’s agoin ter die?” asked one of them, as they stood around the door in a quiet, awe-struck group. “I don’t know what we fellers ’ud ever do without him,” he added huskily, as he drew the back of his grimy hand across his eyes.
“I don’t go much on religion,” said another, who sat on the doorstep leaning his head in his hands; “but I’ll be blamed ef that ere feller, with all his college larnin’ and soft-spoken ways, a-comin’ out here and roughin’ it with us, and a-nursin’ and a-teachin’ and a-helpin’ of us all,—I’ll be blamed if that ain’t the Christianest thing I ever see.”
I did not wonder that these men loved their teacher.
Ralph—I learned to call him that afterwards, so I call him so now, for it seems more natural—Ralph Everett had a face such as one sees only once or twice in a lifetime. I did not wonder that Mildred loved it so that she kept awake to look at it as he slept.
The forehead was broad and low, from which the brown hair rose thick and abruptly, framing the strong, almost rugged face. The eyes—such eyes! They were the frankest, truest eyes that ever glorified a human face. Not even Mildred’s eyes were like those, although hers could sparkle or command or grow wonderfully soft and tender. The chin and mouth were hidden in a luxuriant blond beard, in which gleamed now and then a silver thread. The broad chest, the sunburned face and hands which the pallor of sickness was fast restoring to their pristine whiteness, all evinced a strong, active life, strangely contrasting with the pitiful helplessness which had now prostrated it.
But surely strength and health would soon return; surely love would triumph; and these two, so strangely reunited in the very jaws of death, would some day make all previous joys as nothing to that deep, full, complete satisfaction with which heaven should crown their lives; these two, who seemed of all the world the ones most worthy of such blessedness.
I had dreamed it all out. Some beautiful day in the months to come I should stand as bride’s-maid beside a happy, white-robed bride. There would be flowers and music and smiles. There would be the strong, gallant lover, the one man of all the world who was worthy to wed my precious Mildred. The man whom she would always know had married her for herself alone, a man whom wealth or happiness could not tempt, who should nobly help her in the great work that she had set herself to do.
To tell the truth, I had thought also, with almost a pang of jealousy, what this would mean to me, and what my life would be without her.
I could scarcely realize that now, here, in this brown, unplastered attic room, in a dreary frontier mining town, with no music but the chirping of the August crickets in the little field behind us, without wedding-robe or wedding guests, my Mildred was to become a bride.