The Doctor : A Tale of the Rockies. Ralph Connor
had taken sixteen years of wholesome country life to round that supple form into its firm lines of grace, and to tint those moulded cheeks with the dainty bloom that seemed a reflection from the thistle heads that nodded at her through the snake fence. It had taken sixteen years of pure-hearted, joyous living to lend those eyes, azure as the sky above, their brave, clear glance; sixteen years of unsullied maidenhood to endow her with that divine something of mystery which, with its shy reserve and fearless trust, awakens reverence and rebukes impurity as with the vision of God.
Her sunbonnet, fallen back from her yellow hair, shining golden in the sun, revealed a face strong, brave and kind, with just a touch of pride. The pride showed most, however, in the poise of her head and the carriage of her shoulders. But when the mobile lips parted in a smile over the straight rows of white teeth one forgot the pride and thought only of the soft persuasive lips.
As she sprang up the green turf, she drew in deep breaths of clover-scented air, and exclaimed aloud, “Oh, this is good!” She peeped through the snake fence at the luscious rich masses of red clover. “What a bed!” she cried; “I believe I'll try it.” Over the fence she sprang, and in a thorn tree's shade, deep in the fragrant blossoms, she stretched herself at full length upon her back. For some minutes she lay in the luxury of that fragrant bed looking up through the spreading thorn tree branches to the blue sky with its floating, fleecy clouds far overhead. The lazy drone of the bees in the clover beside her, the languorous summer airs swaying into gentle nodding the timothy stalks just above her head, and all the soothing sounds of a summer morning, that many-voiced choir that sings to the great God Nature's glad content that all is so very good, rested and comforted the girl's heart and body, making her know as she had not known before how very weary she had been and how deep an ache her heart had held.
“Oh, it's good!” she cried again, stretching her hands at full length above her head. “I wish I could stay for one whole day, just here in the clover with the bees and the birds and the trees and the clouds and the blue sky, no children, no dinner, no tidying up.”
As she lay there it seemed to her as if she had thrown off for the moment the load she had been carrying for many months. For a year she had tried to fill in the minister's household her mother's place. Without a day's warning the burden had been laid upon her shoulders, but with the fine courage that youth and love combine to give, denying herself even the poor luxury of indulgence of the grief that had fallen upon her young heart, she had given herself, without thought of anything heroic in her giving, to the caring for the house and the household, and the comforting as best she could of her father, suddenly bereft of her who had been to him not wife alone, but comrade and counsellor as well. Without a thought, she had at once surrendered all the bright plans that she, with her mother, had cherished for the cultivation of her varied talents, and had turned to the dull, monotonous routine of household duties with never a thought but that she must do it. There was no one else.
“I believe I am tired,” she said again aloud; then letting her heart follow her eyes into and beyond the blue above her, she cried softly, “O mother, how tired you must have been with it all, and how much you did for me! For me, great, big lump that I am! Dear little mother. Oh, if I had only known! Oh, we were all so thoughtless!” She stretched up her hands again to the blue sky with its fleecy clouds. “For your sake, mother dear,” she whispered. Not often had any seen those brave eyes dim with tears. Not often since that day when they had carried her mother out from the Manse and left her behind with the weeping, clinging children, and even now she hastily wiped the tears away, chiding herself the while. “I never saw HER cry,” she said to herself, “not once, except for some of us. And I will try. I MUST try. It is hard to give up,” and again the tears welled up in the brave blue eyes. “Nonsense,” she cried impatiently, sitting up straight, “don't be a big, selfish baby. They're just the dearest little darlings in the world, and I'll do my best for them.”
Her moment of self-pity was gone in a flood of shamed indignation. She locked her hands round her knees and looked about her. “It is a beautiful world after all. And how near the beauty is to us; just over the fence and you are in the thick of it. Oh, but this is great!” Once more she rolled in an ecstasy of luxurious delight in the clover and lay again supine, revelling in that riot of caressing sounds and scents.
“Kir-r-r-ink-a-chink, kir-r-r-ink-a-chink—”
She sprang up alert and listening. “That is old Charley, I suppose, or Barney, perhaps, sharpening his scythe.” She climbed up the conveniently jutting ends of the fence rails and looked over the field.
“It's Barney,” she said, shading her eyes with her hand; “I wonder he does not cut his fingers.” She sat herself down upon the top rail and leaned against the stake.
“My! what a sweep,” she said in admiring tones as the young man swayed to and fro in all the rhythmic grace of the mower's stride, swinging easily now backward the curving blade and then forward in a cutting sweep, clean and swift, laying the even swath. Alas! the clattering machine-knives have driven off from our hay-fields the mower's art with all its rhythmic grace.
Those were days when men were famous according as they could “cut off the heels of a rival mower.” There are that grieve that, one by one, from field and from forest, are banished those ancient arts of daily toil by which men were wont to prove their might, their skill of hand and eye, their invincible endurance. But there still offer in life's stern daily fight full opportunity to prove manhood in ways less picturesque perhaps, but no less truly testing.
Down the swath came Barney, his sinewy body swinging in very poetry of motion.
“Doesn't he do it well!” said the girl, following with admiring eyes every movement of his well-poised frame. “How big he is! Why—” and her blue eyes widened with startled surprise, “he's almost a man!” The tint of the thistle bloom deepened in her cheek. She glanced down and made as if to spring to the ground; then settling herself resolutely back against her fence stake, she exclaimed, “Pshaw! I don't care. He is just a boy. Anyway, I'm not going to mind Barney Boyle.”
On came the mower in mighty sweeps, cutting the swath clean out to the end.
“Well done!” cried the girl. “You'll be cutting off Long John's heels in a year or so.”
“A year or so! If I can't do it to-day I never can. But I don't want to blow.”
“You needn't. They're all talking about you, with your binding and pitching and cradling, and what not.”
“They are, are they? Who is good enough to waste breath on me?”
“Oh, everybody. The McKenzie girls were just telling me the other day.”
“Oh, pshaw! I ran away from their crowd, but that's nothing.”
“And I suppose you have not an idea how nice you look as you go swinging along?”
“Do I? That's the only time then.”
“Oh, now you're fishing, and I'm not going to bite. Where did you learn the scythe?”
“Where? Right here where we had to, Dick and I. By the way, he's coming home to-day.” He glanced at her face quickly as he said this, but her face showed only a frank pleasure.
“To-day? Good. Won't your mother be glad?”
“Yes. And some other people, too,” said Barney.
“And who, particularly?”
A sudden shyness seemed to seize the young man, but recovering himself, “Well, I guess I will, myself, a little. This is the first time he has ever been away. We never slept a night apart from each other as long as I can mind till he went to college last year. He used to put his arm just round me here,” touching his breast. “I'll tell you the first nights after he went I used to feel for him in the dark and be sick to find the place empty.”
“Well,” said the girl doubtfully, “I hope he won't be different. College does make a difference, you know.”
“Different! Dick! He'd better not. I'll thrash the