A Dozen Ways Of Love. L. Dougall
I am?' he said again.
She knew him, and took leave of him. She took leave of each of her daughters, but in a calm, weak way, as one who had waded too far into the river of death to be much concerned with the things of earth.
The doctor pressed her hand, and the faithful nurse. The minister, feeling that justice should be done to one whose wit had brought great relief, bid the maid go forward.
She was weeping, but she spoke in the free, caressing way that she had used so long.
'Ye know who I am, ma'am?'
The dying eyes looked her full in the face, but gave no recognition.
'It's Jeanie Trim.'
'Na, na, I remember a Jeanie Trim long syne, but you're not Jeanie Trim!'
The maid drew back discomfited.
The minister began to repeat a psalm that she loved. The daughters sat on the bedside, holding her hands. So they waited, and she seemed to follow the meaning of the psalm as it went on, until suddenly——
She turned her head feebly towards a space by the bed where no one stood. She drew her aged hands from her daughters', and made as if to stretch them out to a new-comer. She smiled.
'Mr. Kinnaird!' she murmured; then she died.
'You might have thought that he was there himself,' said the daughters, awestruck.
And the minister said within himself, 'Who knows but that he was there?'
II
A MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN
In the backwoods of Canada, about eighty miles north of Lake Ontario, there is a chain of three lakes, linked by the stream of a rapid river, which leads southward from the heart of a great forest. The last of the three lakes is broad, and has but a slow current because of a huge dam which the early Scottish settlers built across its mouth in order to form a basin to receive the lumber floated down from the lakes above. Hence this last lake is called Haven, which is also the name of the settlement at the side of the dam. The worthy Scotsmen, having set up a sawmill, built a church beside it, and by degrees a town and a schoolhouse. The wealth of the town came from the forest. The half-breed Indian lumber-men, toiling anxiously to bring their huge tree-trunks through the twisting rapids, connected all thoughts of rest and plenty with the peaceful Haven Lake and the town where they received their wages; and, perhaps because they received their first ideas of religion at the same place, their tripping tongues to this day call it, not 'Haven,' but 'Heaven.'
The town throve apace in its early days, and no one in it throve better than Mr. Reid, who kept the general shop. He was a cheerful soul; and it was owing more to his wife's efforts than his own that his fortune was made, for she kept more closely to the shop and had a sharper eye for the pence.
Mrs. Reid was not cheerful; she was rather of an acrid disposition. People said that there was only one subject on which the shopkeeper and his wife agreed, that was as to the superiority of their daughter in beauty, talent, and amiability, over all other young women far or near. In their broad Scotch fashion they called this daughter Eelan, and the town knew her as 'Bonnie Eelan Reid'; everyone acknowledged her charms, although there might be some who would not acknowledge her preeminence.
Mr. and Mrs. Reid carried their pride in their daughter to a great extent, for they sent her to a boarding-school in the town of Coburgh, which was quite two days' journey to the south. When she came back from this educating process well grown, healthy, handsome, and, in their eyes, highly accomplished, the parents felt that there was no rank in the Canadian world beyond their daughter's reach, if it should be her pleasure to attain it.
'It wouldn't be anything out of the way even,' chuckled the happy Mr. Reid, 'if our Eelan should marry the Governor-General.'
'Tuts, father, Governors!' said his wife scornfully, not because she had any inherent objection to Governors as sons-in-law, but because she usually cried down what her husband said.
'The chief difficulty would be that they are usually married before they come to this country—aren't they, father?' Eelan spoke with a twinkling smile. She did not choose to explain to any one what she really thought; she had fancies of her own, this pretty backwoods maiden.
'Well, well, there are lads enough in town, and I'll warrant she'll pick and choose,' said the jolly father in a resigned tone. He was not particular as to a Governor, after all.
That conversation happened when Eelan first came home; but a year or two after, the family conferences took a more serious tone. She had learnt to keep her father's books in the shop, and had become deft at housework; but there was no prospect of her settling in a house of her own; many of the best young men in the place had offered themselves as lovers and been refused.
'Oh! what's the use o' talking, father,' cried Mrs. Reid; 'if the girl won't, she won't, and that's all.—But I can tell you, Eelan Reid, that all your looks and your manners won't save you from being an old maid, if you turn your back on the men.'
'I wasn't talking,' said Mr. Reid humbly; 'I was only saying to the lassie that I didn't want her to hurry; but I'd be right sorry when I'm getting old not to have some notion where I was going to leave my money—it'll more than last out Eelan's day, if it's rightly taken care of.'
'But I can't marry unless I should fall in love,' said Eelan wistfully. Her parents had a vague notion that this manner of expressing herself was in some way a proof of her high accomplishments.
Life was by no means dull in the little town. There were picnics in summer, sleigh-drives in winter, dances, and what not; and Eelan was no recluse. Still, she loved the place better than the people, and there was not a spot of ground in the neighbourhood that she did not know by heart.
In summer, the sparkling water of the lake rippled under a burning sun, and the thousand tree-trunks left floating in it, held near to the edge by the floating boom of logs, became hot and dry on the upper side, while the green water-moss caught them from beneath. It was great fun for the school children to scamper out daringly on these floating fields of lumber; and Eelan liked to go with them, and sometimes walk far out alone along the edge of the boom. She would listen to the birds singing, the children shouting, to the whir of the saws in the mill, and the plash of the river falling over the dam; and she would feel that it was enough delight simply to live without distressing herself about marriage yet awhile.
When winter came, Eelan was happier still. All the roughness and darkness of the earth was lost in a downy ocean of snow. Where the waterfall had been there was a fairy palace of icicles glancing in the sun, and smooth white roads were made across the frozen lake. Eelan never drew back dazzled from the glittering landscape; she was a child of the winter, and she loved its light. She would often harness her father's horse to the old family sleigh and drive alone across the lake. She took her snow-shoes with her, and, leaving the horse at some friendly farmhouse, she would tramp into the woods over the trackless snow. The girl would stand still and look up at the solemn pines and listen, awed by their majestic movement and the desolate loveliness all around. At such time, if the thought of marriage came, she did not put it aside with the light fancy that she wished still to remain free; she longed, in the drear solitude, for some one to sympathise with her, some one who could explain the meaning of the wordless thoughts that welled up within her, the vague response of her heart to the mystery of external beauty. Alas! among all her suitors there was not such a friend.
There was no one else in the town who cared for country walks as Eelan did—at least, no one but the schoolmaster. She met him occasionally, walking far from home; he was a quaint, old-looking man, and she thought he had a face like an angel's. She might have wished sometimes to