Bassett stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
To Elizabeth the first days of Dick’s absence
were unbelievably dreary. She seemed to live
only from one visit of the postman to the next.
She felt sometimes that only part of her was at home
in the Wheeler house, slept at night in her white bed,
donned its black frocks and took them off, and made
those sad daily pilgrimages to the cemetery above
the town, where her mother tidied with tender hands
the long narrow mound, so fearfully remindful of Jim’s
tall slim body.
That part of her grieved sorely, and spent itself
in small comforting actions and little caressing touches
on bowed heads and grief-stooped shoulders.
It put away Jim’s clothing, and kept immaculate
the room where now her mother spent most of her waking
hours. It sent her on her knees at night to pray
for Jim’s happiness in some young-man heaven
which would please him. But the other part of
her was not there at all. It was off with Dick
in some mysterious place of mountains and vast distance
called Wyoming.
And because of this division in herself, because she
felt that her loyalty to her people had wavered, because
she knew that already she had forsaken her father
and her mother and would follow her love through the
rest of her life, she was touchingly anxious to comfort
and to please them.
“She’s taking Dick’s absence very
hard,” Mrs. Wheeler said one night, when she
had kissed them and gone upstairs to bed. “She
worries me sometimes.”
Mr. Wheeler sighed. Why was it that a man could
not tell his children what he had learned,—that
nothing was so great as one expected; that love was
worth living for, but not dying for. The impatience
of youth for life! It had killed Jim. It
was hurting Nina. It would all come, all come,
in God’s good time. The young did not
live to-day, but always to-morrow. There seemed
no time to live to-day, for any one. First one
looked ahead and said, “I will be so happy.”
And before one knew it one was looking back and saying:
“I was so happy.”
“She’ll be all right,” he said aloud.
He got up and whistled for the dog.
“I’ll take him around the block before
I lock up,” he said heavily. He bent over
and kissed his wife. She was a sad figure to
him in her black dress. He did not say to her
what he thought sometimes; that Jim had been saved
a great deal. That to live on, and to lose the
things one loved, one by one, was harder than to go
quickly, from a joyous youth.
He had not told her what he knew about Jim’s
companion that night. She would never have understood.
In her simple and child-like faith she knew that
her boy sat that day among the blessed company of
heaven. He himself believed that Jim had gone
forgiven into whatever lay behind the veil we call
death, had gone shriven and clean before the Judge
who knew the urge of youth and life. He did
not fear for Jim. He only missed him.
