The River's Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi

by Ruth McEnery Stuart

For a moment only, she sat thus. Then she began to lower herself into the water, until, leaning, she could lay her face against the sod, so that a wave passed over it, and when, letting her weight go, she subsided, with arms extended, into the shallow pool, a close listener might have heard an undulating song, so like the river's in tone as to be separable from it only through the faint suggestion of words, interrupted or drowned at intervals by the creaking and knocking of the rafts and the gurgling of the sucking eddies about them.

The woman's voice—song, speech, or what not?—seemed intermittent, as if in converse with another presence.

Suddenly, while she stood thus, she dropped bodily, going fully under the water for a brief moment, as if renewing her baptism, and when she presently lifted herself, she was crying aloud, sobbing as a child sobs in the awful momentary despair of grief at the untwining of arms—shaken, unrestrained.

While she stood thus for a few minutes only,—a pathetic waste of sorrow, wet, dark and forlorn, alone on the night-shore,—a sudden wind, a common evening current, threw a foaming wave over the logs beside her so that its spray covered her over; while the straining ropes, breaking and bumping timbers, with the slow dripping of the spent wave through the raft, seemed to answer and possibly to assuage her agitation; for, as the wind passed and the waters subsided, she suddenly grew still, and, climbing the bank as she had come, walked evenly as one at peace, into her cabin.

No one will ever know what, precisely, was the nature of this last communion. Was it simply an intimate leave-taking of a faithful companionship grown dear through years of stress? Or had it deeper meaning in a realization—or hallucination—as to the personality of the river—the "secret" to which she only once mysteriously referred in a gush of confidence on her master's return?

Perhaps she did not know herself, or only vaguely felt what she could not tell. Certainly not even to her old husband, one with her in life and spirit, did she try to convey this mystic revelation. We know by intuition the planes upon which our minds may meet with those of our nearest and dearest. To the good man and soldier, Israel,—the prophet, even, who held up the wavering hands of the imaginative woman when her courage waned, pointing to the hour of fulfilment,—the great river, full of potencies for good or ill, could be only a river. As a mirror it had shown him divinity, and in its character it might typify to his image-loving mind another thing which service would make it precious. But what he would have called his sanity—had he known the word—would have obliged him to stop there.

The stars do not tell, and the poor moon—at best only hinting what the sun says—is fully half-time off her mind. And the soul of the River—if, indeed, it has once broken silence—may not speak again.

And, so, her secret is safe—safe even if the broken winds did catch a breath, here and there, sending it flurriedly through and over the logs until they trembled with a sort of mad harp-consciousness, and were set a-quivering for just one full strain—one coherent expression of soul-essence—when the wave broke. Perhaps the arms of the twin spirits were untwined—and they went their separate ways smiling—the woman and the river.

When, after a short time, the old wife came out, dressed in fresh clothing, her white, starched tignon shining in the moonlight, to sit and talk with her husband, her composure was as perfect as that of the face of the water which in its serenity suggested the voice of the Master, when Peter would have sunk but for his word.

This was to be their last night here. Harold was to bring a carriage on the next day to take them to his mother and Blossom, and, despite the joy in their old hearts, it cost them a pang to contemplate going away. Every woodpile seemed to hold a memory, each feature of the bank a tender association. Blucher lay sleeping beside them.