第74章 THE LAST STAGE(3)

And then I'm goin' to take dad's gun and fetch you a turkey.You could eat a slice of a fat turkey, I reckon."The woman did not answer, for she was thinking.This uncouth boy was the son she had put her faith in.She loved him best of all things on earth, but for the moment she saw him in the hard light of disillusionment.Aloutish backwoods child, like Dennis Hanks or Tom Sparrow or anybody else.

He had been a comfort to her, for he had been quick to learn and had a strange womanish tenderness in his ways.But she was leaving him, and he would grow up like his father before him to a life of ceaseless toil with no daylight or honour in it....She almost hated the sight of him, for he was the memorial of her failure.

The boy did not guess these thoughts.He pulled up a stool and sat very close to the bed, holding his mother's frail wrist in a sunburnt hand so big that it might have been that of a lad half-way through his teens.He had learned in the woods to be neat and precise in his ways, and his movements, for all his gawky look, were as soft as a panther's.

"Like me to tell you a story?" he asked."What about Uncle Mord's tale of Dan'l Boone at the Blue Licks Battle?"There was no response, so he tried again.

Or read a piece? It was the Bible last time, but the words is mighty difficult.Besides you don't need it that much now.You're gettin' better.

...Let's hear about the ol'Pilgrim."

He found a squat duodecimo in the trunk, and shifted the skin curtain from one of the window holes to get light to read by.His mother lay very still with her eyes shut, but he knew by her breathing that she was not asleep.

He ranged through the book, stopping to study the crude pictures, and then started laboriously to read the adventures of Christian and Hopeful after leaving Vanity Fair--the mine of Demas, the plain called Ease, Castle Doubting, and the Delectable Mountains.He boggled over some of the words, but on the whole he read well, and his harsh voice dropped into a pleasant sing-song.

By and by he noticed that his mother was asleep.He took the tin pannikin and filled it with fresh water from the spring.Then he kissed the hand which lay on the blanket, looked about guiltily to see if anyone had seen him, for kisses were rare in that household and tiptoes out again.

The woman slept, but not wholly.The doorway, which was now filled with the deeper gold of the westering sun, was still in her vision.It had grown to a great square of light, and instead of being blocked in the foreground by the forest it seemed to give on an infinite distance.She had a sense not of looking out of a hut, but of looking from without into a great chamber.

Peace descended on her which she had never known before in her feverish dreams, peace and a happy expectation.

She had not listened to Abe's reading, but some words of it had caught her ear.The phrase "delectable mountains" for one.She did not know what "delectable" meant, but it sounded good; and mountains, though she had never seen more of them than a far blue line, had always pleased her fancy.

Now she seemed to be looking at them through that magical doorway....

The country was not like anything she remembered in the Kentucky bluegrass, still less like the shaggy woods of Indiana.The turf was short and very green, and the hills fell into gracious folds that promised homesteads in every nook of them.It was a "delectable" country--yes, that was the meaning of the word that had puzzled her....She had seen the picture before in her head.She remembered one hot Sunday afternoon when she was a child hearing a Baptist preacher discoursing on a Psalm, something about the "little hills rejoicing." She had liked the words and made a picture in her mind.These were the little hills and they were joyful.

There was a white road running straight through them till it disappeared over a crest.That was right, of course.The road which the Pilgrims travelled....And there, too, was a Pilgrim.

He was a long way off, but she could see him quite clearly.He was a boy, older than Abe, but about the same size--a somewhat forlorn figure, who seemed as if he had a great way to go and was oppressed by the knowledge of it.He had funny things on his legs and feet, which were not proper moccasins.Once he looked back, and she had a glimpse of fair hair.He could not be any of the Hanks or Linkhorn kin, for they were all dark...

.But he had something on his left arm which she recognised--a thick ring of gold.It was her own ring, the ring she kept in the trunk and she smiled comfortably.She had wanted it a little while ago, and now there it was before her eyes.She had no anxiety about its safety, for somehow it belonged to that little boy as well as to her.

His figure moved fast and was soon out of sight round a turn of the hill.

And with that the landscape framed in the doorway began to waver and dislimn.The road was still there, white and purposeful, but the environs were changing....She was puzzled, but with a pleasant confusion.Her mind was not on the landscape, but on the people, for she was assured that others would soon appear on the enchanted stage.