From Kingdom to Colony

by Mary Devereux

Dorothy was alone with the stricken man, Aunt Lettice, who took 'Bitha with her, having gone into the town early that afternoon, to make some purchases, intending to return later with Mary.

Dr. Paine had told them how the end would probably come; and it was as he had said. He himself was away toward Boston, where his services were most needed, and there was no other physician for Dorothy to summon, even had she felt it necessary.

But she well knew the uselessness of this. No human skill could prolong the life of him who had been stricken down late in the afternoon, and now lay unconscious, breathing heavily, like a strong swimmer breasting heavy seas. And what sea beats so relentlessly as do the black waters of Death?

Dorothy had stolen for a moment to the window, scarcely able to endure to sit longer by the bed, listening to those gasping breaths that wrung her heart with the passionate sense of impotence to help, or even ease, the dying man.

Curled up in the broad window-seat, her face turned from the dimly lighted room to the fast-falling night outside, the past, and its contrast with the present, seemed to unroll before her with a vividness of detail such as we are told comes to one who is drowning.

All that was happy seemed to lie behind her; all the cheer and comfort of the old home were gone, never to return—no more than would her father's protecting love.

And he—her father—was now drawing nigh to the day that knows no darkness, no dawning; while for her the night shadows of the bitter parting were closing about, dark and cold.

The incoming tide was almost at the full, and the surf sounded like a moaning voice from the sea. It was to the young girl's tortured imagination a warning voice, bidding her heed that the fashion of this world must pass away, and with it the souls of its children, who, like merry little ones gathering flowers in fair fields, unheeding, unthinking, grow grave only as the day draws on. It told her that they grow wise—sad, perhaps—as the sun sinks; and that when the darkness falls they lie down to sleep, with tired brains and heavy hearts, all their buoyancy gone with the day's brightness. They have come to know its bitter lesson of weary struggle, of sore disappointment and heart-breaks.

The sky was filled with broken banks of ragged clouds that sent great tattered streamers across the zenith, entangling the glittering stars that seemed struggling to push them away, as if they were smothering draperies, from before their silvery faces.

Over in the east a faint spot of dusky red was showing in a cloud-rift. It was the rising moon, seeming to battle, like the stars, with the black hosts seeking to envelop it. It fought bravely, like a valiant soldier, and emerging triumphantly at last, threw a bar of dull red, like a pathway, across the sullen floor of the ocean.