HE is dead!”

“Oh! Miss ‘Lizbeth! and you alone with him?”

“Yes, I was alone with him.”

She said this in a manner which seemed to imply that there was nothing strange in the fact that she was alone with him. She was always alone with him, was she not? Was it necessary that she open the doors and call them all in because he was dying?

They passed from the narrow hall into the front room with its green-paper window-shades, its worn carpet and meagre furniture. His bed had been moved down from the floor above when his last illness had seized him, and here it had remained, a black walnut bedstead, with towering head-board, which shut out the light from one of the two windows in the room. This bedstead had been one of his few, his very few, extravagances in years gone by, and in its dark shadow he lay now rigid. He had been a stern, grizzled man in life, but the sternness then had been as very softness compared with the hard, cold outline of the lace now upon the pillow in the green light of the lowered window-shade.

They moved about the room on tip-toe, speaking in the hissing whispers considered appropriate by them in the presence of death.

“When did it happen?” some one asked.

“Half-hour ago.”

“Had n’t I better call the doctor or the minister?”

“I don’t see what good they’d be.”

Another woman crept in silently, a shawl huddled about her head.

“I jest heard,” she whispered.

They waited in silence for her to go on. She was the woman of the village who always officiated at the “laying out” of their dead. The reason for this no one had ever sought. Possibly the right was hers because she so enjoyed the grewsome privilege. At least she clung to it tenaciously.

“Now, Miss ‘Lizbeth, you jest go upstairs and I’ll tend to things,” she said, while the other women awaited her commands, half resenting her cool assumption of control, but with a full consciousness of her capability in “tending” to such “things.”

The bare little church, with its white walls and staring windows, its stiff pine pulpit painted a dingy yellow, with the minister’s green upholstered chair behind it, was well-filled the day of the funeral. A “burying” was not a thing to miss without grave cause. There were old men and old women in the congregation who had not missed a funeral within ten miles of them for fifty years. They sat solemnly waiting for the minister to begin the services, taking close notice of the coffin and calculating its cost. Not a difficult problem for them with their long experience. They also noted closely the appearance of the one mourner who sat directly in front of the pulpit, alone save for the presence in her pew of the woman who had come to her huddled under a shawl. This strange woman always sat with the mourners as though she felt a claim upon the bodies of the dead until their final surrender to mother earth. But the dead man’s daughter sat away from her companion quite at the farthest end of the seat, as if she would be as much apart from them all in her present loneliness as she had been before. It was fifteen years since she had sat with them in the church, and they looked at her now with curiosity. A slight little woman, with tired eyes and dull brown hair streaked with gray!

The minister arose and folded upon the open Bible his lean hands with their great veins and yellow joints. He prayed long and laboriously, his voice rising from a doleful sing-song drawl into a shout and then sinking into a whisper. They wagged their heads knowingly in the pews and whispered to one another that it was a “pow’ful effort.” Toward the close of his prayer many eyes were turned expectantly toward the woman who sat alone. The minister was calling loudly for “the lost sheep who is not with us safe in the shelta’ of Zion’s walls. O Lord!” he wailed, “make yoh wahnin’ plain to her onseein’ eyes that she may seek safety from the wrath to come.” If the woman heard or understood his words no acknowledgment of that fact touched her thin face. She sat with folded hands, her eyes upon the narrow front of the box like pulpit. Then the minister began his sermon. From the earliest dawn of the dead man’s life, through his childhood, youth, and manhood unto the last moment of his old age the speaker journeyed, going unctuously over the dreary details of the meagre, common history. They all knew it well enough, but they listened greedily, jealously fearful that the speaker might overlook a single incident in the man’s dull story. When he had exhausted every period of his subject’s life, the minister began the apotheosis of the man. His goodness, his charity, his uprightness, and, above all, his “tireless labors in the vineyard of the Lord” were dwelt upon. He had in truth been cruel and hard and mean. They all knew this, but he had lived and died “a member in good standing,” and any other treatment of his character by the preacher would have been a scandalous thing, unheard of and not to be forgiven. At the close of his discourse the minister turned his colorless eyes upon the woman who sat apart. “There was,” he said, his voice falling into a slow and solemn drawl, “there was one cross which our Lord and Master seen fit to bind upon the shoulders of the brother who has jest gone befoh us into the glory of the Heavenly Kingdum. A cross hard to bear, a cross whose liftin’ he had wrestled for with the Lord Jesus often and mightily in prayer. But which Divine Providence seen fit to allow to remain upon the shoulders of his faithful son. It was, my brothers and sisters, the refusal of the only one of his kin to accept the Lord, to wash herself in the blood of the Lamb, to join with those who journey onward safe in the arms of Jesus into the glory of everlastin, life.” His voice had risen into a shout. “The night is comin’, the day is almost done. Oh! let us pray for them who falters and will not turn from the wrath of God befoh it is too late.” His voice sank suddenly into a whisper, and the words “too late” went hissing out over the heads of the people who sat with craning necks and knowing faces cruelly turned toward the woman, whose eyes for a single instant had not left the front of the dingy yellow pulpit.

The hearse, with the one closed carriage of which the village boasted, moved slowly away from the church along the muddy road, followed by a straggling line of wagons. The majority of the people lingered about the church door watching the woman who sat stiffly erect in the carriage, the minister facing her, at her side the woman who seemed to have so strange a love for the dead. This woman sat with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes as if she must needs make amends for the other’s stony composure.

The road, after leaving the village in the bottom lands along the river, wound up the side of the bluff upon which the burying ground was situated. It was an autumn day, and the golden haze of that most glorious of seasons in the Missouri valley bathed the wide stretch of country upon which the cemetery looked down. A sky of marvellous blue spread its canopy above them, while the bright glow of the western sun brought out in pitiless detail the dreary little home of the dead with its crude tiptilted monuments and scattered, sunken graves, its rays enfolding with no mellowing touch the group of sallow-faced men and women in rusty and shapeless garb who clustered about the newly made grave. They lifted their voices and sang quaveringly amid the strangely death-like stillness of the declining day. It was a dismal tune in plaintive minors, and as they dragged it out in unmusical and uncertain tones it seemed a fitting symbol of their narrow, unlovely lives. When the last clod of reddish clay had fallen upon the oblong mound, they turned and walked away to leave their dead unnoticed until another of the living should pass from the grimness of life into the—to them—greater grimness of death.

As the procession crawled along the heavy road toward the cluster of houses upon the river’s bank, the minister, his great hands resting upon his knees, his pale eyes blinking solemnly, began:—

“E-eliz’beth, you are left alone now.” She nodded her head in affirmation. “You haven’t much of this world’s goods.”

“I’ve kept two of us from starvin’ for five years. I reckon I can keep myself,” she replied stiffly.

“Yoh father was well-fixed once, but the Lord seen fit to deprive him of his earthly treasures that he might lay more store by them gifts which is above earthly price.”

“He was a graspin’ man and over-reached himself.”

The woman beside her sniffed reproachfully and glanced at the minister with sorrowful air. The man stirred uneasily and lifted a hand in expostulation.

“A daughter shouldn’t jedge. If you was enlightened by the spirit you would n’t be so lackin’ in Christian charity.”

She had endured much that long afternoon, and she raised her eyes now defiantly.

“I’ve done my duty by him—I’ve done my duty for twenty years without complainin’.”

“The pride of the onregenerate must be humbled,” returned the minister.

She vouchsafed no reply, and they went on in silence, the setting sun touching with softened light her worn face and tired eyes.

The sun was low in the western sky when the two women reached the small house, once white but now a dirty gray, with great yellow streaks following the lines of the overlapping clapboards. The black waters of the swiftly flowing river were flecked with red and gold under the level rays of the sun, the rounded hills on the other side of the stream were softly blue, toward the east a white fog was rising. A flock of wild geese high in the gray-blue sky was flying swiftly southward, spread out in a great straggling V. The mournful cry of their leader reached the two women faintly, the flight of the wild geese was an unfailing sign of approaching winter, and they watched the black lines of the flying fowls until they vanished in the southern sky, their weird cry growing fainter and sadder and finally dying away, leaving the swish of the river against its muddy bank the only sound which troubled the quiet of the autumn twilight. Two women with hushed voices and funereal faces waited inside the dingy front room of the house.

“It was a right smart gathering,” said one of them.

“I never see a finer,” said the other.

“And the minister was mighty pow’ful,” ventured the third in mournful tone.

They looked at the dead man’s daughter expectantly. Common decency surely required some expression of gratified approval of the congregation and the sermon. But she was folding her shawl carefully, laying it upon the bed alongside her rusty bonnet. She seemed not to have heard their voices. Then she sat stiffly by the window looking out at the mud-clogged road.

“I hope you feel reconciled, Miss ‘Lizbeth,” one of the women began.

“I reckon I am. He’s been awful hard to take care of,” she replied with her hard honesty. She turned her eyes away from the window and looked wearily at her visitors.

“It’s supper time. There ain’t any use of your stayin’ with me.”

The three women arose, angry at their dismissal.

“I ‘lowed you’d want some one to stay with you the first night,” said one of them with a lugubrious sniff.

“I ‘ve got all the nights of my life to stay alone in. I ‘bout as well begin now.”

She watched them as they went away through the deepening gloom, their heads together nodding wisely. They were talking about her, of course. She knew well enough what they said. She knew how hard and strange and unfeeling they were calling her. And as she sat alone by the window she wondered whether she was all these. The bed in its dark corner brought to her mind the picture of the man who had first quit it for his narrow bed upon the hillside. She fancied that she saw his hard, thin, yellow face upon the pillow now; that she heard his querulous voice demanding her attention, upbraiding her for some fancied forgetfulness, fiercely denouncing her for her lack of “religion.” How hard he had been! As the woman’s thoughts travelled back along the years she could not recall one kind word, one touch of thankfulness for her unremitting care, for her absolute immolation of life, hope, love upon the altar of “duty.” Twenty years! what a long time it seemed!

She passed into the back room and pressed close to the little square looking-glass which hung against its wall. The daylight was well-nigh gone, but she could yet discern the reflection of her face against the background of gray twilight. How old she looked! How sallow she had grown! There were great lines about her mouth and deep furrows between her eyes. And her hair,—how dingy it was with its streaks of yellowish gray! Twenty years ago she had been proud of her hair. It had been bright and soft. She was twenty years old then, and there were roses in her cheeks, and her eyes, so pale and tired now, had been blue and fresh then. She wondered if she had wept their color and their brightness away. Perhaps that was the reason no tears were left for her father. She had shed them all long ago for the man whom she had loved and given up.

She did not return to the front room where the great bed loomed so weirdly in the gloom, but sat by the one window in the little back room, half kitchen, half dining-room, looking out upon the river growing blacker and colder in the falling night as it flowed from out of the west where a rapidly diminishing, dull red streak marked the track of the vanished sun.

Twenty years since her mother died and her sister, selfish in her new life as a wife, had said that ‘Lizbeth’s duty lay in their father’s house. He might marry again or die in a few years. Surely it was not so hard for a young girl to wait. So she had waited, her lover fretting as lovers will, until one day she had awakened to the fact that a man’s patience is not like a woman’s. There had been one awful night which she remembered after all these years with a shudder. A night when, for the first and only time in her hard life, she had turned hotly upon the stern old man and told him of her love and of her wrecked girlhood, praying wildly for some help, for some sympathy. She caught her breath sharply now as she recalled her father’s bitter words. That same night her lover left. Fifteen years had come and gone since then. The great world had taken him, and whether he lived or had been claimed again by mother earth the woman who sat and dreamed of the past alone in the dusk knew naught of him. She had practised a woman’s faithfulness; she had reaped a woman’s hard reward. Afterwards her sister died and left to her care a blue-eyed babe. How she had poured out upon that baby boy the pent up mother-love within her. But the gods in their wisdom had taken him too. In this still night as she lived over again the years which were gone, she seemed to feel the clasp of those baby arms about her neck and to hear the crooning of that soft baby voice.

And then came the long years of her father’s illness when she knew no moment of rest or peace. It had been a long struggle between a loveless woman on one side and gaunt starvation upon the other without one word of gratitude to strengthen her. And they called her hard because she could not weep! She looked at her hands, holding them up close to her face. How misshapen and ugly from toil they were!

It was quite dark now and the river murmured strangely under the wind which was creeping down from the north. Her hands fell back into her lap and two great tears coursed slowly down her worn face—not for the man who lay under the stars in the little cemetery on the hill, but for her own vanished youth and love and hope.