It was comfort rather than advice that a very weary and dispirited Beatrice needed when at last she arrived at Dr. Minturn’s house. She greeted the rosy, laughing Nancy with much enthusiasm, for the sisters had missed each other sorely; but she was impatient for the moment when she could talk over their whole affair with the kindly doctor. After supper, accordingly, he sat, on the grassy bank in the moonlight, with a girl on each side of him, and listened gravely to all that Beatrice, with occasional additions from Nancy, had to say. It was not easy for her to confess what harm she had done by her impulsive and over confident words, but she told her story bravely to the end.
“There is no use in the world,” the doctor commented cheerfully, “in spending time in vain remorse. We should decide what must be done now. It may be, the only thing is to wait.”
Beatrice drew a deep quivering sigh. It seemed, in the midst of excitement and the anxiety to atone, that waiting was the one intolerable thing.
“I can’t bear to wait,” she burst out at last.
“I have never told you,” Dr. Minturn rejoined slowly, “of how Miriam and I came to live here. We used to be in a big city and we had that same full, restless life that most city dwellers know. Some people thrive in such an atmosphere, some can endure it, but it was destruction to us both. I had more patients than I could care for, Miriam’s days were as crowded as mine. We saw each other little and were always tired when our daily duties were done. I realized vaguely that such unceasing toil must kill any man before long, but the excitement of my growing practice was something I could not give up. Then Miriam, one day, asked me some questions; she knew some one who had such and such symptoms, who felt this way during the smoky winter and that way when the air was damp and the wind was raw. I was in haste and my verdict was quick. ‘Such a person could not live a year,’ I declared. And then she told me the person was herself!”
He paused to look down at the quiet house under the trees, where Miriam’s shadow showed on one white curtain after another as she went to and fro about her work. For a minute he watched as though to assure himself that the memory of that terrible day was only a dream.
“It is something we all have to learn; how to watch our whole, secure, happy world fall to pieces before our eyes, and still keep our minds clear and be able to think what to do. ‘A change of climate,’ my fellow-doctors advised; ‘Quiet, rest, no anxiety’; but they all shook their heads. We tried place after place, it would be too long a story to tell how we drifted here at last. The cottage was only half its size, then, but it was habitable; the place seemed good as any; and neither of us had the heart to go farther. The wrench of leaving the old life, the weariness of wandering from place to place had all done harm; and the good effect of the change had not yet come. Miriam was always cheerful, always hopeful, but I watched her grow thinner and weaker every day. I stood by, helpless. There was nothing to do but wait, though it seemed that waiting must drive me mad.”
Beatrice nodded understandingly. Waiting—how she hated it! It seemed as though there must always be something to do other than to wait; but it was likely to be the wrong thing.
“There was one morning when I had been watching beside her bed all night, thinking, as she slept, how pinched and thin and shadowy she had grown. We were young then, if you can think of us as that, young like your Aunt Anna and John Herrick, with years to dream of still before us. And that night it seemed as though it all was coming to an end. I can remember how the dawn came in at the windows and how Miriam opened her eyes to look up at me and smile. I believe she was thinking that she would rather die here in the clean, empty quiet than in that roaring, smoke-filled town that we called home.
“But it was no place of peace for me. I called the nurse and flung myself out of the house; I tramped away up the mountain, crushing the roses and forget-me-nots under foot with a savage pleasure that I can still recall. I stood on the highest ridge at last, looked out over the valley and the dark hills with their summits bathed in sunshine, at the winding silver thread of the river, and I held up my arms and opened my lips to curse them all.
“The words I meant to say were never spoken. I heard a footstep on the trail behind me and, as I looked around, a man passed by me and went down the mountain. He was old, far older than I am now, his face was so weather-beaten, his long hair so grizzled, and his back so bent that he might have passed for Father Time himself. He said no word, but he gave me one look that seemed to read every thought within me, a glance of complete and utter scorn. Some old prospector he was, a man who had spent his life trudging over the barren hillsides, looking for new mines, disappointed a thousand times, seeking fortune and never finding it. Others who followed him had prospered by his discoveries, had found the riches that he could not keep; for the man who prospects is seldom the man who gathers wealth. He gathers other things, however; forbearance, understandings, and a strange, deep patience, born of lonely valleys, endless trails, and wide starry skies. It was no wonder he scorned me and my pitiful little anger with the mountains he called his.
“I never saw him again. He stepped into my life and out of it again, and we did not even exchange a word. Yet I have never forgotten the lesson his one look taught me. I went down the hill after a little, and the nurse met me at the door.
“‘I thought you would never come,’ she said. ‘I have been thinking for days that there was a little change, and now I am sure of it.’
“Yes, the broad daylight showed it: the flame of Miriam’s life was burning a little brighter; the mountain air was beginning to do its work at last. In a week she could sit up; in a month she could walk about; and in a year she was well.”
“And you never went home again?” Nancy asked, when a pause marked the end of his tale.
“Home was here now, and we had no wish to go back to a life that had so nearly been the end of both of us. For a time there was no doctor in the valley below us here, so I used to do what I could for the sick people in these mountains. My place at home was soon filled; the tasks I had left went on without me. By and by a younger man moved into this valley to take the work, so that I was free to try that experiment that I had long thought of—what Miriam calls my Christmas-tree Garden. I have helped again when there were epidemics in the valley and when our doctor went to war; but I am always glad to lay the burden down and come back to my trees. And the point of all my long story is, my dear, that some time in the course of our growing up, we must learn how to wait. To be eager and ardent is part of being young, but to learn that eagerness does not bring all things is a truth that the years bring us.”
He made a gesture toward the summit of Gray Cloud Mountain, a black mass against the twinkling stars.
“He is learning his lesson, too, that boy up there, camping in the dark and the silence, thinking it all out, coming nearer and nearer to the truth of things at last.”
“Do you—oh, do you think that he might change and come back to us in the end?” cried Beatrice in eager hope.
“I believe so. And when the time comes to act, you will know what to do.”
A very sleepy and comforted girl was tucked into bed by the doctor’s wife—a young person who thought she could not sleep on account of her many anxieties, but who was lost in slumber almost before the door was closed. She did not even hear the storm of wind and rain that swept over the cottage in the night, but awoke in the morning to see the sun shining, and to hear a camp-robber jay calling so loudly from the nearest tree that she could sleep no longer.
“Your horse is not fit to go back for a day or two,” Dr. Minturn said at breakfast. “You pushed him too hard when you climbed the pass, and you should leave him here to rest. I will lend you my brown Presto. He is not such a pony as Buck, I admit, but he will carry you safely enough. You can come back for your horse later, or I will send him over the range as soon as some one passes.”
The sun was high when she and Nancy set out together, shining above the pass as they mounted upward.
“But there is something the matter with it,” Beatrice declared to her sister; “there doesn’t seem to be any warmth in it, somehow.” And she shivered a little.
An unusual haze seemed to hang like a blanket between them and the sun, and the air held a strange chill. Even when wrapped in their warm coats, the two girls felt cold as they climbed to the summit of the pass and began the descent on the other side. Beatrice said very little, so busy was her mind with many difficult problems. Must she tell Aunt Anna what had happened, and let her know that all hopes of meeting her brother were at an end? Would John Herrick’s house soon be closed, and would Hester have to leave them too?
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