_ IT was a balmy September evening, some weeks after Mr. Brown's
return to Ohio, when Karl, or, as he was now generally styled, Dr.
Windsor, standing beside his horse, in the quiet Main Street of
Greenfield, saw Dr. Gershom riding lazily into town, accompanied by
a sturdy, good-looking lad, also on horseback, whom Karl failed to
recognize.
"A new student, maybe," thought he, and, taking his foot out of the
stirrup, waited to see.
"Hollo, Windsor, hold on a minute!" shouted Dr. Gershom as they
approached. "Here's a young gentleman asking for you."
Karl bowed, and began hastily to review his half-forgotten army
acquaintances; failing, however, to identify any of them with the
young man now bowing to him, and taking a letter from his
pocket-book.
"Mr. Brown favored me with this letter of introduction to you, sir,"
said he, holding it out.
Karl glanced hastily at the few lines, and remembered an allusion
the chaplain had made to a particularly promising student of his,
whom he thought of sending to travel a little in the West. So he
frankly smiled, extended his hand, and said,--
"Ah, yes! I have heard Mr. Brown speak of you, Mr. Ginniss; and I am
very happy to welcome you to our prairie life. I am just setting out
for home; and, if you please, we will ride along directly."
"Better come in, boys, and have a glass of bitters to keep the
night-air off your stomachs. Got some of the real stuff right here
in the office," said the old doctor; but, both young men declining
the proffered hospitality, he withdrew, grumbling,--
"You never'll make it work, Windsor, I tell you now! Such a dog's
life as a country doctor's isn't to be kept up without fuel."
Karl laughed, and, turning to his new acquaintance, said,--
"So they told me in the army; but I got through without. I never
tasted spirit but once, and then I didn't like it."
"I never have at all," said Ginniss simply. "I gave my mother a
promise, when I was twelve years old, that I never would; and I
never have."
Karl nodded.
"That's right," said he; "and all the better for you to have had
such a mother."
"You'd say that, Mr. Windsor, if you knew what she'd done for me.
There ain't many such mothers in any class," said the young man
heartily.
Karl looked at his new acquaintance with increasing favor, and found
something very attractive in his open, manly face, and the honest
smile with which he met his scrutiny.
"I hope you'll stay with us some time, Mr. Ginniss," said he
heartily.
"Thank you; but, I believe, only for one day. The journey was my
principal object in coming; and I must be at Antioch College again
in a week, or ten days at the outside."
"Tell me about the life there. I was at old Harvard, and never
visited any other college," said Karl; and the young men found
plenty of conversation, until, in the soft twilight, they came upon
the pleasant slope and vine-clad buildings of Outpost.
"Here is our house, or rather my cousin's house," said Karl. "You
have heard Mr. Brown speak of Dora?"
"Yes, before he went away," said Ginniss significantly.
"But not since his return?" asked Karl eagerly.
"Very seldom."
"Hem! Seth, will you take our horses round? Jump off, and come in,
sir. This is my sister Kitty, Mr. Ginniss. A scholar of Mr. Brown's,
Kitty: I dare say you remember his speaking of him."
"Yes, indeed! Very happy to see you, Mr. Ginniss; walk in," said
Kitty, who, if she had never heard the line, certainly knew how to
apply the idea, of,--"It is not the rose; but it has lived near the
rose."
"Where is Dora?" asked Karl, glancing round the room where the
pretty tea-table stood spread, and Dora's hat and gloves lay upon a
chair; but no other sign of her presence was to be found.
"Why," said Kitty, laughing a little, "Dolly took a fancy for
rafting down the river on a log that she somehow managed to push off
from the bank. Of course, she slipped off the first thing, and might
have been drowned; but Argus got her out somehow, and Seth, hearing
the noise, ran down and brought her home. Of course, she was
dripping wet; and Dora has put her to bed."
"Is it a sanitary or a disciplinary measure?" asked Karl: "because,
if the latter, we shall have Dora out of spirits all the evening.
She never punishes Dolce half so much as she does herself."
"Well, I believe it is a little of both this time," replied Kitty.
"I think she'll be down to tea. You had better take Mr. Ginniss
right into your bedroom, Charlie. Perhaps he'd like to wash his
hands before tea."
"Thank you; I should, if you please," said the guest, and left the
room with his host.
When they returned, Dora was waiting to receive them, somewhat pale
and sad at having felt obliged to refuse Sunshine's entreaties to
"get up, and be the 'bedientest little girl that ever was," but
courteously attentive to the guest, and ready to be interested and
sympathetic in hearing all Karl's little experiences of the day. As
for Kitty, her careless inquiry on seating herself at the table,
of,--
"How has Mr. Brown been since he got home?" may serve as index to
the course of her meditations.
"How in the world came Dolce to undertake the rafting business?"
asked Karl, when his sister's inquiries had been amply satisfied.
"Why, poor little thing!" said Dora, laughing a little, "she thought
she had found the way to heaven. She noticed from the window how
very blue the river was, and, as she says, 'goldy all over in
spots:' so she slipped out, and ran down there, forgetting for once
that she is forbidden to do so. Standing on the brink, she saw the
reflection of the little white clouds floating overhead, and was
suddenly possessed with an idea that this was heaven, or the
entrance to it. So, as she told me, she thought she would float out
on the log till she got to the middle, and then 'slip off, and fall
right into heaven.'"
"How absurd!" said Kitty, laughing.
"Not at all. She would certainly have reached heaven if she had
carried out the plan," said Karl.
"Don't, please," murmured Dora, with a little shiver. "Don't talk of
it."
"That is like a little sister of mine; a little adopted sister, at
least. She was always talking of going to heaven, and planning to
get there," said the guest.
Dora looked at him with pity in her honest eyes, and hastened to
prevent Kitty's evident intention of questioning him further with
regard to this "little sister."
"It seems to be a natural instinct with children," said she "to long
for heaven. Perhaps that is the reason they bring so much of heaven
to earth."
"I'm afraid mothers of large and troublesome families would say that
earth would be better with less of heaven," suggested Karl slyly;
and the conversation suddenly veered to other topics. But all
through the evening, and even after he had gone to rest, the mind of
Teddy Ginniss was haunted by the memory of the pretty child, so
loved and mourned, and of whom this anecdote of the little
heaven-seeker so forcibly reminded him.
"Whose child is this, I wonder?" thought he a dozen times: but, in
the hints he had solicited from Mr. Brown upon manners, none had
been more urgent than that forbidding inquisition into other
people's affairs; and indeed Teddy's natural tact and refinement
would have prevented his erring in this respect. So now he held his
peace, and slept unsatisfied.
This may have been the reason of his rising unusually early,--in
fact, while the rosy clouds of dawn were yet in the sky,--and quietly
leaving the house with the purpose of a river-bath. Strolling some
distance down the bank, until the intervening trees shut off the
house, he plunged in, and found himself much refreshed by a swim of
ten minutes through waters gorgeous with the colors of the
sunrise-sky; and, as he paused to notice them, Teddy muttered,--
"The poor little sister! She'd have done just the same if she'd been
here."
It was hardly time to return to the house when the young man stood
again upon the bank; and he strolled on through the wood, at this
point touching upon the river so closely, that a broken reflection
of the green foliage curved and shimmered along the fast-flowing
waves.
Teddy looked at the water; he looked at the trees; he looked long
and eagerly across the wide prairie that far westward imperceptibly
melted its dim green into the faint blue of the horizon, leaving
between the two a belt of tender color, nameless, but inexpressibly
tempting and suggestive to the eye. All this the lad saw, and,
raising his face skyward, drew in a long draught of such air as
never reaches beyond the prairies.
"Oh, but it's good!" exclaimed he, with more meaning to the simple
phrase than many a man has put to an oration. And then he muttered,
as he walked on,--
"If it wasn't for the thought that's always lying like a stone at
the bottom of my heart, there'd not be a happier fellow alive to-day
than I. Oh the little sister!-the little sister that I never shall
forget, nor forgive myself for the loss of!"
And, from the cottonwood above his head, a mocking-bird, who had
perhaps caught the trick of grief from some neighbor whippoorwill,
poured suddenly a flood of plaintive melody, that to the boy's warm
Irish fancy seemed a lament over the loved and lost.
He took off his hat, and looked up into the tree.
"Heaven's blessings on you, birdy!" said he. "It's the very way I'd
have said it myself; but I didn't know how."
The mocking-bird flew on; and Teddy followed, hoping for a
repetition of the strain: but the capricious little songster only
twittered promises of a coming happiness greater than any pleasure
his best efforts could afford, and darted away to the recesses of
the forest, where was in progress an Art-Union matinée of such music
as all the wealth of all our cities cannot buy for us.
Teddy followed for a while; and then, fearing that he should be lost
in the trackless wood, turned his back upon the rising sun, and
walked, as be supposed, in the direction of the house, his eyes upon
the ground, his mind strangely busy with thoughts and memories of
the life he had left so far behind, that, in the press and hurry of
his present career, it sometimes seemed hardly to belong to him.
"God and my lady have been very good to me," thought the boy; "but I
never'll be as happy again as when the little sister put her arms
about my neck, and called me her dear Teddy, and kissed me with her
own sweet mouth that maybe is dust and ashes now. No: I never'll be
happy that way again."
He raised his eyes as he spoke, and started back, pale and
trembling, fain to lean against the nearest tree for support under
the great shock.
Not fifty feet from him, and bathed in the early sunlight that came
sifting through the trees to greet her, stood a child, dressed in a
white robe, her sunny hair crowned with flowers, her little hand
holding sceptre-wise a long stalk with snow-white bells drooping
from its under edge. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and her
slender feet gleamed white from the bed of moss that almost buried
them. Still as a little statue, or a celestial vision printing
itself in one never-to-be-forgotten moment upon the heart of the
beholder, she stood looking at him; and Teddy dropped upon his
knees, gasping,--
"It's out of glory you've come to comfort me, darling! and God ever
bless you for the same!"
The child looked at him with her starry eyes, and slowly smiled.
"I knew you sometime," said she. "Was it in heaven ?"
"No: it's better than ever I'll be, you know, in heaven, little
sister. Are you happy there, mavourneen?" asked Teddy timidly.
"Oh! I haven't gone to heaven yet. I never could find the way," said
the child, with a troubled expression suddenly clouding her sweet
face; and then she added musingly,--
"I thought I'd get there through the river last night; but I tumbled
off the log, and only got wet: and Dora said I was naughty; and so I
had to go to bed, and not have some supper, only"--
"What's that, then!" shouted Teddy, springing to his feet, and
holding out his hands toward her, though not yet daring to approach.
" It's not the spirit of the little sister you are, but a live
child?"
"Yes, I'm alive; though, if I'd staid into the river, I wouldn't
have been, Dora says," replied Sunshine quietly.
"Oh! but the Lord in heaven look down on us this day, and keep me
from going downright mad with the joy that's breaking my heart! Is
it yourself it is, O little sister! is it yourself that's in it, and
I alive to see it?"
He was at her feet now, his white face all bathed with tears, his
trembling fingers timidly clasping her robe, his eyes raised
imploringly to those serenely bent upon him.
"I knew you once and you was good to me," said the child musingly;
"but I got tired when I danced so much in the street. I don't ever
dance now, only with Argus."
"But, little sister, are you just sure, it's yourself alive? And
don't you mind I was Teddy, and we used to go walking in the Gardens
and on the Commons; and there was the good mammy at home that used
to rock you on her lap, and warm the pretty little feet in her
hands, and sing to you till you dropped asleep? Don't you mind them
things, Cherry darling?"
The child looked attentively in his face while he thus spoke, and at
the end nodded several times; while a light, like that of earliest
dawn, began to glimmer in her eyes.
"Tell me some more," said she briefly.
"And do you mind the picture-books I used to bring you home, and the
story of the Cock Robin you used to like so well to hear, and the
skip-jack you played with, and the big doll that mammy made for you,
and you called it Susan?"--
"O--h! Susan!" cried the child suddenly, and then stood all pale and
trembling, while her earnest eyes seemed searching in the past for
some dimly-remembered secret, which to lose was agony, to recall
impossible.
"Susan!" said she softly again. "Yes, there was Susan, somewhere,
and--Oh! tell me the rest, tell me who it was that loved me so!"
"Sure, it was Teddy loved you best of all," said the boy longingly:
for, though her eager eyes dwelt upon his face, it was not for him
or his that the depths of her heart were stirring; and, with the old
thrill of jealous pain, he felt it so.
But then from the remorse and bitterness of the fault he had never
ceased to mourn rose a nobler purpose, a higher love. He took the
child in his arms, and kissed her tenderly, then released her,
saying,--
"Good-by, little sister; for I never will call you so again, and you
never more will call me brother. It's your own lady-mother, darling,
that you're missing and mourning,--the own beautiful mother that lost
you two years ago, and has gone to heaven's gates looking for you,
and never would have come back if you had not been found. It's your
own home, darling, that you have remembered for heaven; and it's
waiting for you, with father and mother, and joy and plenty, all
ready to receive you the minute you can get there."
But it was too much for the fine organization and sensitive
temperament; and, as Teddy's words reached her heart in their full
meaning, the child, with a long sobbing cry, fell forward into his
arms, utterly insensible.
Teddy, not too much terrified for he had seen her thus before,
raised the slender little figure in his arms, and carried it swiftly
toward the house, now just visible through a vista of the wood, but,
before he reached it, met Dora coming to look for her little charge.
"Good-morning, Mr. Ginniss. So you have caught my naughty runaway,"
cried she gayly; but coming near enough to notice Sunshine's
drooping figure, and Teddy's agitated face, she sprang forward,
asking,--
"Is any thing the matter with her? Where did you find her, Mr.
Ginniss?"
"She's fainted, ma'am; but it's with joy, and will never hurt her.
It's you and I that will be the sufferers, I'm afraid," said Teddy,
with a sudden pang at his heart of love not yet cleansed of selfish
jealousy.
"Bring her to the house, please, as quickly as you can. Poor little
darling, she is so delicate!" said Dora, not yet caring to ask this
strange news, but walking close beside Teddy, her hand clasping that
cold little one which swung nervelessly over his shoulder, her eyes
anxiously watching the beautiful pale face, half hidden in the
showering curls. _