第75章 THE LAST STAGE(4)

He ran across the road, shouting with joy, a dog at his heels and a bow in his hand.Before he disappeared she marked the ring, this time on his finger....He had scarcely gone ere another appeared on the road, a slim pale child, dressed in some stuff that gleamed like satin, and mounted on a pony....The spectacle delighted her, for it brought her in mind of the princes she had been told of in fairytales.And there was the ring, worn over a saffron riding glove....

A sudden weakness made her swoon; and out of it she woke to a consciousness of the hut where she lay.She had thought she was dead and in heaven among fair children, and the waking made her long for her own child.Surely that was Abe in the doorway....No, it was a taller and older lad, oddly dressed, but he had a look of Abe--something in his eyes.He was on the road too, and marching purposefully--and he had the ring.Even in her mortal frailty she had a quickening of the heart.These strange people had something to do with her, something to tell her, and that something was about her son....

There was a new boy in the picture.A dejected child who rubbed the ring on his small breeches and played with it, looking up now and then with a frightened start.The woman's heart ached for him, for she knew her own life-long malady.He was hungry for something which he had small hope of finding....And then a wind seemed to blow out-of-doors and the world darkened down to evening.But her eyes pierced the gloaming easily, and she saw very plain the figure of a man.

He was sitting hunched up, with his chin in his hands, gazing into vacancy.

Without surprise she recognised something in his face that was her own.He wore the kind of hunter's clothes that old folk had worn in her childhood, and a long gun lay across his knees.His air was sombre and wistful, and yet with a kind of noble content in it.He had Abe's puckered-up lips and Abe's steady sad eyes....Into her memory came a verse of the Scriptures which had always fascinated her."These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims upon the earth "She saw it all in a flash of enlightenment.These seekers throughout the ages had been looking for something and had not found it.But Abe, her son, was to find it.That was why she had been shown those pictures.

Once again she looked through the door into bright sunshine.It was a place that she knew beside the Ohio she remembered the tall poplar clump.She did not see the Jacksons' farm which stood south of the trees, but there was the Indian graveyard, which as a little girl she had been afraid to pass.Now it seemed to be fresh made, for painted vermilion wands stood about the mounds.On one of them was a gold trinket, tied by a loop of hide, rattled in the wind.It was her ring.The seeker lay buried there with the talisman above him.

She was awake now, oblivious of the swift sinking of her vital energy.She must have the ring, for it was the pledge of a great glory....

A breathless little girl flung herself into the cabin.It was Sophy Hanks, one of the many nieces who squattered like ducks about the settlement.

"Mammy!" she cried shrilly."Mammy Linkorn!" She stammered with the excitement of the bearer of ill news."Abe's lost your ring in the crick.

He took it for a sinker to his lines, for Indian Jake telled him a piece of gold would cotch the grit fish.And a grit fish has cotched it.Abe's bin divn' and divn' and can't find it nohow.He reckons it's plumb Ain't he a bad 'un, Mammy Linkhorn?"It was some time before the dying woman understood.Then she began feebly to cry.For the moment her ring loomed large in her eyes: it was the earnest of the promise, and without it the promise might fail.She had not strength to speak or even to sob, and the tears trickled over her cheeks in dumb impotent misery.

She was roused by the culprit Abe.He stood beside her with his wet hair streaked into a fringe along his brow.The skin of his neck glistened wet in the opening of his shirt.His cheeks too glistened, but not with the water of the creek.He was crying bitterly.

He had no words of explanation or defence.His thick underlip stuck out and gave him the appeal of a penitent dog; the tears had furrowed paler channels down grimy cheeks; he was the very incarnation of uncouth misery.

But his mother saw none of these things....On the instant he seemed to her transfigured.Something she saw in him of all the generations of pleading boys that had passed before her, something of the stern confidence of the man over whose grave the ring had fluttered.But more--far more.She was assured that the day of the seekers had passed and that the finder had come....The young features were transformed into the lines of a man's strength.The eyes dreamed but also commanded, the loose mouth had the gold of wisdom and the steel of resolution.The promise had not failed her...

.She had won everything from life, for she had given the world a master.

Words seemed to speak themselves in her ear..."Bethink you of the blessedness.Every wife is like the Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind."She lay very still in her great joy.The boy in a fright sprang to her side, knocking over the stool with the pannikin of water.He knelt on the floor and hid his face in the bed-clothes.Her hand found his shaggy head.

Her voice was very faint now, but he heard it.

"Don't cry, little Abe," she said."Don't you worry about the ring, dearie.

It ain't needed no more.

Half an hour later, when the cabin door was dim with twilight, the hand which the boy held grew cold.