John Ward, Preacher Part 43

"What--what was I speaking of, Gifford?" said Mr. Denner.

"You gave my aunt Ruth the picture, sir."

"Oh, yes, just so, just so. I merely wished to add that I desired to present it to Miss Deborah's sister,--though it is of no value, not the least value; but I should be honored by its acceptance. And perhaps you will be good enough to--to convey the a.s.surance of my esteem to Miss Deborah. And Gifford--my friend Gifford is to give her the miniature of my little sister."

"Yes," said Miss Ruth, who was crying softly.

"Not that I have--have changed my mind," said Mr. Denner, "but it is not improper, I am sure, that Miss Deborah's sister should give me--if she will be so good--her hand, that I may say good-by?"

Miss Ruth did not quite understand, until Gifford motioned to her to lay her little hand in that feeble one which was groping blindly towards her.

Mr. Denner's eyes were very dim.

"I--I am very happy," he murmured. "I thank you, Ruth;" and then, a moment after, "If you will excuse me, I think I will rest for a few moments."

Still holding Miss Ruth's hand, he turned his head in a weary way towards the light, and softly closed his eyes.

Mr. Denner rested.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Perhaps the majesty of Death is better understood when some little soul is swallowed up in the great Mystery than when one is taken on whom Life has laid her bright touch, and made famous and necessary.

Even in quiet Ashurst, Mr. Denner was, as he himself would have, said, of no consequence, and his living was not felt in any way; yet when he was gone, a sudden knowledge came of how much he was to them, and how great a blank he left. So Death creates greatness.

It was well for Lois Howe, in those first sad days, that her cousin was with her, or the reaction from the excitement of anxiety into hopeless grief might have been even more prostrating than it was. All the comfort and tenderness Helen could give her in her helpless self-reproach were hers, though she as well as Gifford never sought to make the sorrow less by evading the truth. But Helen was troubled about her, and said to Dr.

Howe, "Lois must come to see me for a while; she does need a change very much. I'm afraid she won't be able to go with me next week, but can't she come as soon as she is strong enough to travel?"

And so it was decided that she should come with Gifford, who would go back to Lockhaven in about a fortnight. Business, which never reached Mr.

Denner in Mercer, had been offered the young lawyer, and he had been willing to stay in Ashurst a little longer, though he had told himself he was a fool.

Lois looked forward to the visit with feverish anxiety. Mr. Forsythe, perhaps to please his mother, but certainly with rather an ill grace, had lingered in Ashurst. But he had not been very much at the rectory; perhaps because it was not a time to make visits, or be careless and light-hearted, while little Mr. Denner was fading out of life, and his mother felt herself trembling on the edge of the grave. This, at least, was what Mrs. Forsythe said to Lois more than once, with an anxious, troubled look, which perhaps explained more than her words did.

She had accepted very complacently Lois's protestations of joy and grat.i.tude that she was no longer, as she expressed it, in immediate danger, but she did not apparently feel that that altered at all the conditions of the promise Lois had given her, which was evidently a very precious thing. Nor did Lois remonstrate against being held by it. She felt she deserved any grief that came to her, and it would have been cowardly, she thought, to shrink from what she had undertaken merely because she had been so far mercifully spared the grief of Mrs.

Forsythe's death. And who could tell that she would live, even yet?

Certainly Mrs. Forsythe herself seemed to consider her recovery a matter of grave doubt, and Lois's anxieties were quick to agree with her.

So she went about with a white face and eyes from which all the careless gayety had gone, simply bearing her life with a dull pain and in constant fear. Gifford saw it, and misunderstood it; he thought, in view of what Miss Deborah had told him and what he knew of Mr. Forsythe's plans, that it was natural for Lois to look unhappy. Anxieties are very misleading; the simple explanation of remorse for her carelessness did not come into Gifford's mind at all.

One afternoon,--it was the day following Mr. Denner's funeral,--Gifford thought this all over, and tried to see what his life offered him for the future, now that the last faint hope of winning Lois's love had died. Mr.

Denner's will had been read that morning in his dining-room, with only Dr. Howe and Mary and Willie present, while the rain beat persistently against the windows, and made the room so dark that Gifford had to call for a candle, and hold the paper close to his eyes to see to read. Willie had shivered, and looked steadfastly under the table, thinking, while his little heart beat suffocatingly, that he was glad there were no prayers after a will. When that was over, and Dr. Howe had carried Willie back with him to be cheered and comforted at the rectory, Gifford had devoted himself to disposing of such small effects as Mr. Denner had left as personal bequests.

They were not very many. A certain bamboo rod with silver mountings and a tarnished silver reel, were for Dr. Howe; and there were a few books to be sent to Mr. Dale, and six bottles of Tokay, '52, for Colonel Drayton.

There was a mourning-ring, which had been Mr. Denner's father's, for a distant cousin, who was further comforted by a few hundred dollars, but all the rest was for Willie.

Gifford had felt, as he sat at Mr. Denner's writing-desk and touched some small possessions, all the pathetic powerlessness of the dead. How Mr.

Denner had treasured his little valueless belongings! There was a pair of silver shoe-buckles, wrapped in chamois skin, which the little gentleman had faithfully kept bright and shining; they had belonged to his grandfather, and Mr. Denner could remember when they had been worn, and the knee-breeches, and the great bunch of seals at the fob. Perhaps, when his little twinkling brown eyes looked at them, he felt again the thrill of love and fear for the stately gentleman who had awed his boyhood.

There was a lock of faded gray hair in a yellow old envelope, on which was written, in the lawyer's precise hand, "My mother's hair," and a date which seemed to Gifford very far back. There were one or two relics of the little sister: a small green morocco shoe, which had b.u.t.toned about her ankle, and a pair of gold shoulder-straps, and a narrow pink ribbon sash that had grown yellow on the outside fold.

There was a pile of neatly kept diaries, with faithful accounts of the weather, and his fishing excursions, and the whist parties; scarcely more than this, except a brief mention of a marriage or a death. Of course there were letters; not very many, but all neatly labeled with the writer's name and the date of their arrival. These Gifford burned, and the blackened ashes were in the wide fireplace, behind a jug of flowers, on which he could hear, down the chimney, the occasional splash of a raindrop. There was one package of letters where the name was "Gertrude;"

there were but few of these, and, had Gifford looked, he would have seen that the last one, blistered with tears, said that her father had forbidden further correspondence, and bade him, with the old epistolary formality from which not even love could escape, "an eternal farewell."

But the tear-stains told more than the words, at least of Mr. Denner's heart, if not of pretty sixteen-year-old Gertrude's. These were among the first to be burned; yet how Mr. Denner had loved them, even though Gertrude, running away with her dancing-master, and becoming the mother of a family of boys, had been dead these twenty years, and the proverb had pointed to Miss Deborah Woodhouse!

Some papers had to be sealed, and the few pieces of silver packed, ready to be sent to the bank in Mercer, and then Gifford had done.

He was in the library, from which the bed had been moved, and which was in trim and dreary order. The rain still beat fitfully upon the windows, and the room was quite dark. Gifford had pushed the writing-desk up to the window for the last ray of light, and now he sat there, the papers all arranged and nothing more to do, yet a vague, tender loyalty to the little dead gentleman keeping him. And sitting, leaning his elbows on the almost unspotted sheet of blue blotting-paper which covered the open flap of the desk, he fell into troubled thinking.

"Of course," he said to himself, "she's awfully distressed about Mr.

Denner, but there's something more than that. She seems to be watching for something all the time; expecting that fellow, beyond a doubt. And why he is not there oftener Heaven only knows! And to think of his going off on his confounded business at such a time, when she is in such trouble! If only for a week, he has no right to go and leave her. His business is to stay and comfort her. Then, when he is at the rectory, what makes him pay her so little attention? If he wasn't a born cad, somebody ought to thrash him for his rudeness. If Lois had a brother!--But I suppose he does not know any better, and then Lois loves him. Where's Helen's theory now, I wonder? Oh, I suppose she thinks he is all right. I'd like to ask her, if I hadn't promised aunt Deborah."

Just here, Gifford heard the garden gate close with a bang, and some one came down the path, holding an umbrella against the pelting rain, so that his face was hidden. But Gifford knew who it was, even before Mary, shuffling asthmatically through the hall, opened the door to say, "Mr.

Forsythe's here to see you."

"Ask him to come in," he said, pushing his chair back from the secretary, and lifting the flap to lock it as he spoke.

d.i.c.k Forsythe came in, shaking his dripping umbrella, and saying with a good-natured laugh, "Jove! what a wet day! You need a boat to get through the garden. Your aunt--the old one, I think it was--asked me, if I was pa.s.sing, to bring you these overshoes. She was afraid you had none, and would take cold."

He laughed again, as though he knew how amusing such nonsense was, and then had a gleam of surprise at Gifford's gravity.

"I'd gone to her house with a message from my mother," he continued; "you know we get off to-morrow. Mother's decided to go, too, so of course there are a good many things to do, and the old lady is so strict about Ashurst customs I've had to go round and 'return thanks' to everybody."

Gifford had taken the parcel from d.i.c.k's hand, and thanked him briefly.

The young man, however, seemed in no haste to go.

"I don't know which is damper, this room or out-of-doors," he said, seating himself in Mr. Denner's big chair,--though Gifford was standing--and looking about in an interested way; "must have been a gloomy house to live in. Wonder he never got married. Perhaps he couldn't find anybody willing to stay in such a hole,--it's so confoundedly damp.

He died in here, didn't he?" This was in a lower voice.

"Yes," Gifford answered.

"Shouldn't think you'd stay alone," d.i.c.k went on; "it is awfully dismal.

I see he cheered himself once in a while." He pointed to a tray, which held a varied collection of pipes and a dingy tobacco pouch of buckskin with a border of colored porcupine quills.

"Yes, Mr. Denner smoked," Gifford was constrained to say.

"I think," said d.i.c.k, clapping his hand upon his breast-pocket, "I'll have a cigar myself. It braces one up this weather." He struck a match on the sole of his boot, forgetting it was wet, and vowing good-naturedly that he was an a.s.s. "No objection, I suppose?" he added, carefully biting off the end of his cigar.

"I should prefer," Gifford replied slowly, "that you did not smoke. There is an impropriety about it, which surely you must appreciate."

d.i.c.k looked at him, with the lighted match flaring bluely between his fingers. "Lord!" he said, "how many things are improper in Ashurst! But just as you say, of course." He put his cigar back in an elaborate case, and blew out the match, throwing it into the fireplace, among the flowers. "The old gentleman smoked himself, though."

Gifford's face flushed slowly, and he spoke with even more deliberation than usual. "Since you have decided not to smoke, you must not let me detain you. I am very much obliged for the package."

"You're welcome, I'm sure," d.i.c.k said. "Yes, I suppose I'd better be getting along. Well, I'll say good-by, Mr. Woodhouse. I suppose I sha'n't see you before I go? And Heaven knows when I'll be in Ashurst again!"