That afternoon when the sun was setting, the sick man wakened from a long, deep sleep. The first thing he saw was the bright pale-yellow of a tree out in the yard, which had changed color since he had seen it last. It was a golden tree now as it stood in the sun, its leaves rustling in a faint, chill wind. The next thing, he knew that there were people in the room who sat silent and all looked at him with kindly, even reverent, eyes. Then he turned a little and saw his child, who bent towards him with dilated eyes and trembling, parted lips. A strange, vague memory of weary pain and dragging, uncertain days and nights came to him and he knew, and yet felt no fear.
"Louisianny!" he said.
He could only speak in a whisper and tremulously. Those who sat about him hushed their very breath.
"Lay yer head--on the piller--nigh me," he said.
She laid it down and put her hand in his. The great tears were streaming down her face, but she said not a word.
"I haint got long--honey," he faltered. "The Lord--He"ll keer--fer ye."
Then for a few minutes he lay breathing faintly, but with his eyes open and smiling as they rested on the golden foliage of the tree.
"How yaller--it is!" he whispered. "Like gold. Ianthy was powerful--sot on it. It--kinder beckons."
It seemed as if he could not move his eyes from it, and the pause that followed was so long that Louisiana could bear it no longer, and she lifted her head and kissed him.
"Father!" she cried. "Say something to _me_! Say something to _me_!"
It drew him back and he looked up into her eyes as she bent over him.
"Ye"ll be happy--" he said, "afore long. I kinder--know. Lord! how I"ve--loved ye, honey--an" ye"ve desarved it--all. Don"t ye--do no one--a onjestice."
And then as she dropped her white face upon the pillow again he saw her no longer--nor the people, nor the room, but lay quite still with parted lips and eyes wide open, smiling still at the golden tree waving and beckoning in the wind.
This he saw last of all, and seemed still to see even when some one came silently, though with tears, and laid a hand upon his eyes.
CHAPTER XVII.
A LEAF.
There was a sunny old grave-yard half a mile from the town, where the people of Bowersville laid their dead under the long gra.s.s and tangle of wild-creeping vines, and the whole country-side gathered there when they lowered the old man into his place at his wife"s side. His neighbors sang his funeral hymn and performed the last offices for him with kindly hands, and when they turned away and left him there was not a man or woman of them who did not feel that they had lost a friend.
They were very good to Louisiana. Aunt "Nervy and Aunt Ca"line deserted their families that they might stay with her until all was over, doing their best to give her comfort. It was Aunt "Nervy who first thought of sending for the girl cousin to whom the trunkful of clothes had been given.
"Le"s send for Leander"s Jenny, Ca"line," she said. "Mebbe it"d help her some to hev a gal nigh her. Gals kinder onderstands each other, an" Jenny was allus powerful fond o" Lowizyanny."
So Jenny was sent for and came. From her lowly position as one of the fifteen in an "onfort"nit" family she had adored and looked up to Louisiana all her life. All the brightest days in her experience had been spent at Uncle Elbert"s with her favorite cousin. But there was no brightness about the house now. When she arrived and was sent upstairs to the pretty new room Louisiana occupied she found the girl lying upon the bed. She looked white and slender in her black dress; her hands were folded palm to palm under her check, and her eyes were wide open.
Jenny ran to her and knelt at her side. She kissed her and began to cry.
"Oh!" she sobbed, "somehow I didn"t ever think I should come here and not find Uncle Elbert. It don"t seem right--it makes it like a strange place."
Then Louisiana broke into sobs, too.
"It is a strange place!" she cried--"a strange place--a strange place!
Oh, if one old room was left--just one that I could go into and not feel so lonely!"
But she had no sooner said it than she checked herself.
"Oh, I oughtn"t to say that!" she cried. "I wont say it. He did it all for _me_, and I didn"t deserve it."
"Yes, you did," said Jenny, fondling her. "He was always saying what a good child you had been--and that you had never given him any trouble."
"That was because he was so good," said Louisiana. "No one else in the whole world was so good. And now he is gone, and I can never make him know how grateful I was and how I loved him."
"He did know," said Jenny.
"No," returned Louisiana. "It would have taken a long, long life to make him know all I felt, and now when I look back it seems as if we had been together such a little while. Oh! I thought the last night we talked that there was a long life before us--that I should be old before he left me, and we should have had all those years together."
After the return from the grave-yard there was a prolonged discussion held among the heads of the different branches of the family. They gathered at one end of the back porch and talked of Louisiana, who sat before the log fire in her room upstairs.
"She aint in the notion o" leavin" the place," said Aunt "Nervy. "She cried powerful when I mentioned it to her, an" wouldn"t hear to it.
She says over an" over ag"in "Let me stay in the home he made for me, Aunt Ca"line." I reckon she"s a kind o" notion Elbert "lowed fur her to be yere when he was gone."
"Wa-al now," said Uncle Leander, "I reckon he did. He talked a heap on it when he was in a talkin" way. He"s said to me "I want things to be jest as she"d enjoy "em most--when she"s sorter lonesome, es she will be, mebbe." Seemed like he hed it in his mind es he warnt long fur this world. Don"t let us cross her in nothin". _He_ never did. He was powerful tender on her, was Elbert."
"I seed Marthy Lureny Nance this mornin"," put in Aunt Ca"line, "an" I told her to come up an" kinder overlook things. She haint with no one now, an" I dessay she"d like to stay an" keep house."
"I don"t see nothin" ag"in it," commented Uncle Steve, "if Louisianny don"t. She"s a settled woman, an"s bin married, an" haint no family to pester her sence Nance is dead."
"She was allers the through-goin" kind," said Aunt "Nervy. "Things "ll be well looked to--an" she thought a heap o" Elbert. They was raised together."
"S"pos"n ye was to go in an" speak to Louisianny," suggested Uncle Steve.
Louisiana, being spoken to, was very tractable. She was willing to do anything asked of her but go away.
"I should be very glad to have Mrs. Nance here, Aunt Minerva," she said. "She was always very kind, and father liked her. It won"t be like having a strange face near me. Please tell her I want her to come and that I hope she will try to feel as if she was at home."
So Marthy Lureny Nance came, and was formally installed in her position. She was a tall, strongly-built woman, with blue eyes, black hair, and thick black eyebrows. She wore, when she arrived, her best alpaca gown and a starched and frilled blue sun-bonnet. When she presented herself to Louisiana she sat down before her, removed this sun-bonnet with a scientific flap and hung it on the back of her chair.
"Ye look mighty peak-ed, Louisianny," she said. "Mighty peak-ed."
"I don"t feel very well," Louisiana answered, "but I suppose I shall be better after a while."
"Ye"re takin" it powerful hard, Louisianny," said Mrs. Nance, "an" I don"t blame ye. I aint gwine to pester ye a-talkin". I jest come to say I "lowed to do my plum best by ye, an" ax ye whether ye liked hop yeast or salt risin"?"
At the end of the week Louisiana and Mrs. Nance were left to themselves. Aunt "Nervy and Aunt Ca"line and the rest had returned to their respective homes, even Jenny had gone back to Bowersville where she boarded with a relation and went to school.
The days after this seemed so long to Louisiana that she often wondered how she lived through them. In the first pa.s.sion of her sorrow she had not known how they pa.s.sed, but now that all was silence and order in the house, and she was alone, she had nothing to do but to count the hours. There was no work for her, no one came in and out for whom she might invent some little labor of love; there was no one to watch for, no one to think of. She used to sit for hours at her window watching the leaves change their color day by day, and at last flutter down upon the gra.s.s at the least stir of wind. Once she went out and picked up one of these leaves and taking it back to her room, shut it up in a book.
"Everything has happened to me since the day it was first a leaf," she said. "I have lived just as long as a leaf. That isn"t long."
When the trees were bare, she one day remembered the books she had sent for when at the Springs, and she went to the place where she had put them, brought them out and tried to feel interested in them again.