The Dark Star. Robert W. Chambers
“Must I wait till I’m twenty-five before I can have my money?” she asked for the hundredth time. “I do so need it to educate myself. Why did grandma do such a thing, mother?”
“Your grandmother never supposed you would need the money until you were a grown woman, dear. Your father and I were young, vigorous, full of energy; your father’s income was ample for us then.”
“Have I got to marry a man before I can get enough money to take lessons in drawing with?”
Her mother’s drawn smile was not very genuine. When a child asks such questions no mother finds it easy to smile.
“If you marry, dear, it is not likely you’ll marry in order to take lessons in drawing. Twenty-five is not 24 old. If you still desire to study art you will be able to do so.”
“Twenty-five!” repeated Rue, aghast. “I’ll be an old woman.”
“Many begin their life’s work at an older age––”
“Mother! I’d rather marry somebody and begin to study art. Oh, don’t you think that even now I could support myself by making pictures for magazines? Don’t you, mother dear?”
“Rue, as your father explained, a special course of instruction is necessary before one can become an artist––”
“But I do draw very nicely!” She slipped from her chair, ran to the old secretary where the accumulated masterpieces of her brief career were treasured, and brought them for her parents’ inspection, as she had brought them many times before.
Her father looked at them listlessly; he did not understand such things. Her mother took them one by one from Ruhannah’s eager hands and examined these grimy Records of her daughter’s childhood.
There were drawings of every description in pencil, in crayon, in mussy water-colours, done on scraps of paper of every shape and size. The mother knew them all by heart, every single one, but she examined each with a devotion and an interest forever new.
There were many pictures of the cat; many of her parents, too—odd, shaky, smeared portraits all out of proportion, but usually recognisable.
A few landscapes varied the collection—a view or two of the stone bridge opposite, a careful drawing of the ruined paper mill. But the majority of the subjects were purely imaginary; pictures of demons and angels, of damsels and fairy princes—paragons of 25 beauty—with castles on adjacent crags and swans adorning convenient ponds.
Her mother rose after a few moments, laid aside the pile of drawings, went to the kitchen and returned with her daughter’s schoolbooks and lunch basket.
“Rue, you’ll be late again. Get on your rubbers immediately.”
The child’s shabby winter coat was already too short in skirt and sleeve, and could be lengthened no further. She pulled the blue toboggan cap over her head, took a hasty osculatory leave of her father, seized books and lunch basket, and followed her mother to the door.
Below the house the Brookhollow road ran south across an old stone bridge and around a hill to Gayfield, half a mile away.
Rue, drawing on her woollen gloves, looked up at her mother. Her lip trembled very slightly. She said:
“I shouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t draw pictures. … When I draw a princess I mean her for myself. … It is pleasant—to pretend to live with swans.”
She opened the door, paused on the step; the frosty breath drifted from her lips. Then she looked back over her shoulder; her mother kissed her, held her tightly for a moment.
“If I’m to be forbidden to draw pictures,” repeated the girl, “I don’t know what will become of me. Because I really live there—in the pictures I make.”
“We’ll talk it over this evening, darling. Don’t draw in study hour any more, will you?”
“I’ll try to remember, mother.”
When the spindle-limbed, boyish figure had sped away beyond sight, Mrs. Carew shut the door, drew her wool 26 shawl closer, and returned slowly to the sitting-room. Her husband, deep in a padded rocking-chair by the window, was already absorbed in the volume which lay open on his knees—the life of the Reverend Adoniram Judson—one of the world’s good men. Ruhannah had named her cat after him.
His wife seated herself. She had dishes to do, two bedrooms, preparations for noonday dinner—the usual and unchangeable routine. She turned and looked out of the window across brown fields thinly powdered with snow. Along a brawling, wintry-dark stream, fringed with grey alders, ran the Brookhollow road. Clumps of pines and elms bordered it. There was nothing else to see except a distant crow in a ten-acre lot, walking solemnly about all by himself.
… Like the vultures that wandered through the compound that dreadful day in May … she thought involuntarily.
But it was a far cry from Trebizond to Brookhollow. And her husband had been obliged to give up after the last massacre, when every convert had been dragged out and killed in the floating shadow of the Stars and Stripes, languidly brilliant overhead.
For the Sublime Porte and the Kurds had had their usual way at last; there was nothing left of the Mission; school and converts were gone; her wounded husband, her baby, and herself refugees in a foreign consulate; and the Turkish Government making apologies with its fat tongue in its greasy cheek.
The Koran says: “Woe to those who pray, and in their prayers are careless.”
The Koran also says: “In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful: What thinkest thou of him who treateth our religion as a lie?” 27
Mrs. Carew and her crippled husband knew, now, what the Sublime Porte thought about it, and what was the opinion of the Kurdish cavalry concerning missionaries and converts who treated the Moslem religion as a lie.
She looked at her pallid and crippled husband; he was still reading; his crutches lay beside him on the floor. She turned her eyes to the window. Out there the solitary crow was still walking busily about in the frozen pasture. And again she remembered the vultures that hulked and waddled amid the débris of the burned Mission.
Only that had been in May; and above the sunny silence in that place of death had sounded the unbroken and awful humming of a million million flies. …
And so, her husband being now hopelessly broken and useless, they had come back with their child, Ruhannah, to their home in Brookhollow.
Here they had lived ever since; here her grey life was passing; here her daughter was already emerging into womanhood amid the stark, unlovely environments of a country crossroads, arid in summer, iron naked in winter, with no horizon except the Gayfield hills, no outlook save the Brookhollow road. And that led to the mill.
She had done what she could—was still doing it. But there was nothing to save. Her child’s destiny seemed to be fixed.
Her husband corresponded with the Board of Missions, wrote now and then for the Christian Pioneer, and lived on the scanty pension allowed to those who, like himself, had become incapacitated in line of duty. There was no other income. 28
There was, however, the six thousand dollars left to Ruhannah by her grandmother, slowly accumulating interest in the Mohawk Bank at Orangeville, the county seat, and not to be withdrawn, under the terms of the will, until the day Ruhannah married or attained, unmarried, her twenty-fifth year.
Neither principal nor interest of this legacy was available at present. Life in the Carew family at Brookhollow was hard sledding, and bid fair to continue so indefinitely.
The life of Ruhannah’s father was passed in reading or in gazing silently from the window—a tall, sallow, bearded man with the eyes of a dreaming martyr and the hands of an invalid—who still saw in the winter sky, across brown, snow-powdered fields, the minarets of Trebizond.