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The September nights were cool among the mountains, and as Mr. Kirke and his elder daughter drove home through the moonlight, between eleven and twelve o'clock, from the visit of mercy they had been paying on the other side of the ridge, there were white blankets of mist upon the meadows, and filling up the valleys along which their route lay.
The fire was out in the kitchen, and Patsey had been asleep for two hours and more, having made up her mind that her master would not return until the morrow. There was still a light in Jessie's chamber, and she came down, wide-awake and dressed, to admit the travellers. The servant man slept in a room over the stable, and, after calling to him two or three times without arousing him, the worthy clergyman took pity upon his weariness after his hard day's work, and groomed his horse himself. Eunice exclaimed at the dampness of his overcoat in helping him remove it, and Jessie—instructed in such appliances to health and comfort by her watery adventure, the telling of which she reserved for a more convenient season—prescribed a glass of brandy-and-water. Mr. Kirke needed nothing except a night's rest, he assured them both; pinched Jessie's cheek, in kissing her "good-night," and rallied her upon her anti-temperance proclivities, then ascended to his chamber. He came down late to breakfast, the next morning; owned that sleep had proved obdurate to his wooing; that he had had something very like an ague during the night, and that it was a violent headache which deprived him of appetite.
When he arose from table, Jessie coaxed him, almost in the old winsome way he could never resist, into the parlor; made him lie upon the sofa; tucked a shawl warmly about his shoulders, and sitting down of her own accord to the piano, played plaintive, soothing airs until he fell asleep.
This was the beginning of the spell of fever that, within twelve hours, laid him upon his bed, and which, ten days later, assumed a typhoid form.
His daughters were his nurses, by day and night. Offers of watchers poured in from the few gentle and the many simple who were his parishioners and neighbors; but the sisters courteously and gratefully declined them all. Their patient was all-deserving of the name, and needed no other care than they could give him. He slept much, and suffered little pain, and their light household tasks allowed one or the other to be constantly with him. Thus, to the kindly applicants; while to each other and their parent they said that love would not allow them to delegate a duty so dear and pious even to the true friends who sought to divide their labors. No man ever had more tender and gentle custodians. There was no perceptible difference in the assiduity and skill of the two, but visitors were unanimous in the expression of the opinion that their anxious vigils told more visibly upon Jessie than upon her sister. She wasted almost as rapidly as the sick man, while her eyes were settled in their mournfulness, and she seemed to forget how to smile days before the physician expressed any doubt as to the sequel of her parent's illness.
He had been confined to his room three weeks, when, on the morning of the 27th of September, Jessie met the doctor on the stairs, as she was carrying in a bowl of beef tea she had just made.
"Ah, doctor! I did not know you were here!" she said, more cheerfully than he had heard her speak for several days, unless when within her father's hearing. "Papa is more comfortable—is he not?"
"He is more quiet, certainly. Can I see you for a moment, my dear, when you have taken that in? I shall wait for you in the parlor."
He spoke very gravely, averting his eyes as he finished; and hope went suddenly and completely out of the daughter's heart.
She bore the basin carefully and steadily into the chamber, up to the bedside of the patient, and called his name clearly:
"Papa, dear, will you take a little of this for me?"
She watched him narrowly as he aroused himself to respond.
"He sleeps all the time, to-day," whispered Eunice.
There was a dull glow in his half-open eyes, and he put his hand to his head, confusedly, staring in his younger daughter's face, as she repeated her request.
"It is Jessie, papa! You have been dreaming, and are not yet awake. Here is your beef tea. May I give you a spoonful or two?"
"I thought you were your mother, child!" he said, smiling faintly but lovingly at her. "I was dreaming, as you say."
She fed him as she would an infant, but he would take only a few spoonfuls of the nourishment, turned his face away, and fell asleep again instantly.
The doctor's delicate and unenviable duty was half done for him before she joined him in the lower room.
"You consider my father worse?" was the address with which she opened the interview.
"I grieve to say that I do."
"Can nothing be done for him?"
He hesitated.
"I am answered!" she said, hastily. "Don't shelter yourself behind the hateful, worthless subterfuge about hope ceasing only with life. Tell me, instead, how long—"
The rest of the sentence was beyond her powers of utterance. But she did not succumb in aspect, after the wordless struggle died away in a quiver of the unmoistened lips. She was very white, but very still. The doctor congratulated himself upon the sagacity that had led him to choose this one of the twain as the recipient of his unwelcome intelligence. Jessie was his favorite, and he had always contended that hers was the stronger, as well as the more sprightly nature of the two. Since she was so collected—so well prepared for the sad probability—if not the fell certainty—he could be entirely frank.
"The symptoms are of general congestion," he said. "If this should advance rapidly, we cannot hope to have him with us more than twenty-four hours, at the utmost. I shall return, presently, with Dr. Trimble. But his verdict will, I think, coincide with mine. The indications are distinct. Your father will probably be unconscious much of the time, and suffer little, if at all. No one can doubt his fitness for the great change. I have known him for over thirty years, and I can testify that he has walked humbly and closely with his God . He has instructed you so carefully, Jessie, my dear, that you, do not require to be told where to look for consolation, for grace, and strength, in this trying hour—"
A motion of prohibition that had in it none of the grace of entreaty, checked his formula.
"You will not be long absent?" asked a voice from between the rigid lips.
The circles under her eyes were blacker and broader each second.
"I shall be in again as soon as I can find Dr. Trimble. You had better take Miss Eunice into your confidence without delay. She might think it strange—might take it hard if anything were to happen, you know—"
"Yes! I know!"
That shut his mouth, and rid her of his presence.
The day was warm for the season—so sultry that the cirrus clouds swimming in the blue ether, looked soft to April tearfulness. How still it was, as Jessie stood in the open oriel-window, and let her eyes roam through garden and church-yard,—ever returning, without volition of hers, to the gap in the long lines of gravestones next her mother's tomb! Had Nature swooned all over the broad earth? Was there nothing real left in creation save the fact of her great woe?
"My father is dying!" she said, aloud and distinctly.
And, again—"I suppose this is what people mean when they talk of not realizing a sorrow!"
As if aught but overwhelming appreciation of the might of a present calamity could crush the heart into deadness.
She was picking the faded leaves from the creepers, and crumbling them into dust, when Eunice came in. Jessie's protracted absence after the conference with the doctor had excited her apprehensions, and she stole down, while her father slept, to inquire into the cause. Immeasurably relieved at sight of her sister's attitude and occupation, she smiled as she aroused her from her reverie.
"I could not think what had become of you, dear! What does Dr. Winters think of father?"
"Sit down, Eunice, and I will tell you!" said Jessie, dreamy pity in her eyes, but no change in her hard, hollow voice.
Eunice sank into the nearest chair, laying her hand quickly upon her heart.
"You cannot mean—"
"That he is dying? Yes!" interrupted the other; and in the same awful composure, she repeated the doctor's verdict, verbatim .
"Now"—she concluded—"I will go back to him. You may come presently, when you have had time to think over the matter."
The beryl eyes were washed with many tears before they again met Jessie's across the sick-bed, but, after that, Eunice bore herself bravely. Hour after hour, they sat in the hushed upper chamber, facing their nearing desolation, without a plaint or an audible sigh. Below stairs, all was silent as the grave. Patsey, with an indefinable idea that the house should be set in order for the coming of the grim guest, had dusted the furniture, set back the chairs in straight rows against the walls in parlor and dining-room, and closed all the blinds on the lower floor; made her kitchen neat as Miss Eunice could have wished; then seated herself upon the upper step of the side porch, her arms wrapped in her clean apron. Jessie's orders were positive that no one besides the doctors should be admitted, and as the servant's lookout commanded the front gate, she intercepted the many callers who flocked to the Parsonage, at the swift rumor of the pastor's extreme illness.
"We will keep him to ourselves while he stays with us!" the younger sister had answered the other's fear lest this proceeding should give offence to "the people." "He has belonged to them for thirty years. At the last, we may surely claim him!"
"But they love him dearly!" expostulated Eunice. "He is their spiritual father and guide."
"He is our all !" was the curt reply, and Eunice forbore to argue further.
In the midst of her grief, she was slightly afraid of Jessie. The wide eyes that were caverns of gloom; the tuneless accents that never shook or varied, cowed her into quiet and obedience.
There was little to be done. The sick man slept—if it were sleep—except when aroused to take medicine or food. At these periods, he recognized his children, and spoke coherently, although briefly. His kind heart and gentle breeding were with him to the end. His utterances were of thankfulness for the services they rendered, and love for those who bent over him, that not a word should be lost of that they felt, at each awakening, might be the last sentence they should ever hear from him.
He spoke once intelligibly and calmly of the nearing separation.
"I am going fast!" he said to Eunice, who was lifting his head upon her arm that she might adjust the pillow. "The Father is very good. The 'precious blood' avails—even for me—for me! I go empty-handed, but rich—for there is the 'unspeakable gift!'" Closing his eyes he murmured softly to himself.
Eunice bowed her ear, and held her breath to catch the words.
"'The token was an arrow, with the point sharpened by love, let easily into the heart!' God is good—very good!"
It had been the testimony of his whole life.
"Jessie, dear! my little girl! you are wearing yourself out for me!" he said, at another time. "I wish Roy were here! But His will be done! He knows my darling's needs—her temptations—her trials. Like as a Father pitieth his children, dear! And it is true! Recollect that I told you so, this—and when—and how!"
She was to recollect it in the Father's good time. Now the words meant little, after she had heard the dying parent's wish for Roy's return. She said something in her own heart that was like a thanksgiving that her father was spared the one pang which the coming of the man he would have her marry, would bring,—that the sea rolled between them.
"We shall be cared for, Papa!" she replied, quietly.
"I know! The promise is sure," and he slept again, like a child at even-time upon the mother's breast.
"The 'great peace' is his!" said Eunice, in pious gratitude.
Jessie was mute.
So the afternoon went by, and the shortening twilight of Autumn drew on apace. The shutters of the southern windows were unclosed to admit the air which evening had not made raw. The fleecy clouds were packed in a cumulose mass upon the horizon, and this began to rise in portentous majesty, as the sun set behind it. Dun, while day lasted, with ragged, brassy edges, it darkened and thickened as Jessie watched it from her seat at the bed-head, into a banner of blackness absorbing the light from the rest of the heavens, and blotting out the earth from her sight. The silence was breathless. Not an insect chirped or leaf rustled. Even the pine boughs were motionless. The mill wheel was still; the roar of the waterfall was the only sound abroad under the inky sky. The sisters could no longer see each other, but all the waning light in the room seemed concentred upon the pallid face between them. The effect of the pale radiance and the brooding quiet about them was weird—unearthly. Eunice could bear it no longer.
"I will bring the night-lamp!" she said, rising.
She had hardly reached the foot of the staircase, when Jessie heard the garden-gate shut, and steps upon the gravel-walk leading to the kitchen; next, a stifled scream from Patsey, and a low, manly voice in rebuke or reassurance. Listening, as for her life, the deadly cold of hands and feet creeping up to her heart, she caught a faint exclamation from Eunice; then, the cautious tread of feet in the hall to the parlor-door, which was shut behind those who went in; after which all was quiet again.
For one moment, the darkness was Egyptian, and the night more freezing than winter. The watcher struggled to arise, to raise her hands to her madly throbbing head, but a dull paralysis was upon her limbs. It was not more than three minutes, but it seemed an hour, before will asserted its sway so far as to call back the blood in a tingling rush to the heart and extremities. Her trial was at hand. This—the coup de grace of the appointed torture—was not to be spared her, and she awaited it dumbly. But for the moveless face upon the pillow beside her, she must have rushed away to hide herself in thicket or cave—perhaps in the river-bed from which she had been rescued so lately. That she could not leave. Her father slept on, the pale, unearthly glimmering abiding still upon the broad brow and noble features. He was beyond the reach of earthly solicitude—the swimming and buffeting, the toil and anxiety, were forever overpast; his feet already touched the solid ground. He was very far off from her—bruised, struggling, condemned to endure the consequences of her own and another's wrong-doing.
A weary season of sickness and dread elapsed ere Eunice entered with the lamp. She put it down upon a stand in a distant corner, came around to Jessie's side, and stooped to listen to her father's breathing before she spoke.
Her voice was husky and uneven, and there was the shine of fresh tears upon her cheeks.
"There is some one down stairs who wishes to see you, dear," she said, laying her hand upon her sister's, to support her in case she should be overcome by the great joy in store for her. "Some one you will be glad and thankful to meet again!"
"Is it Roy Fordham?" asked the hard voice, while Jessie did not start or stir.
Eunice saw that her prefatory measures were thrown away.
"It is! He sailed a fortnight earlier than he expected; arrived in America but yesterday. Dear sister! our Heavenly Father has sent him to us in our sorest need. He is waiting, love!"
"Then let him come up. I shall not leave this room."