Chapter 12 - UNDYING LOVE

E stood there, stunned by the shock, shaken to the founda- tions of his faith, that Betty ^J could drop out of life and he live on, unknowing, and with no sense of loss. Then a com- forting reassurance filled his mind and heart. He had known! And he had not lost her! When he spoke it was in assertion:

"It was early in October; in that brief season of Indian summer."

"Yes, Johnny, but you could not know!" "I knew! She told me about it herself, but I did not understand." He described the heavenly voice with its tidings of great joy, preparing his soul for the vision of that hazy moonlit evening on the St. Joseph River. "She appeared to me like that to comfort us all with the thought that she was as welland happy as the little girl I knew and loved in Marietta  immortally young and well and happy, all her cares and pains and tragic memories fallen from her. Oh, Mary, heaven is not far away, but within and close around us." Then with entire unconsciousness he used one of Betty's endearing mannerisms of speech: "Don't cry so; please, dear. It grieves her."

It gave her the strange, consoling feeling that her mother was speaking to her through him. As the chill of the dropping tempera- ture penetrated the house and the pathetic, uncomplaining child shivered in her arms, she went to Betty's wardrobe-chest and took out the scarlet cloak to wrap around it.

"I could not bear to use this before, John- ny, but now I can. Nothing else seems to keep my pale little Blossom so warm." The splendid color trailing to the floor, and Mary's words, reminded him of Betty's girlish fancy about Mrs. Blennerhasset's riding-habit: "No day could be so dark and cold but that glow- ing thing would warm and cheer it."

Now he had something to say that would try the soul of the bravest: "That is your part, Mary, to stay in the house, cherish thisfrail little life, and keep us all warm and in good cheer. Can you be brave? Another storm is coming; and Dr. Hildreth thinks it may storm all winter, as it did in that ter- rible season of Valley Forge. Ethan may not be able to get through until spring. Let us pray that he may not try."

She went white and swallowed hard, but with a new understanding of their peril, and gratitude for the love which had impelled him to make this desperate journey for their protection, she returned his look with one of resolute courage.

"I should be ashamed to fail you, Johnny. Tell me what I must do."

"Get supper at once," was his practical suggestion. "Otto and I will need plenty of hot food to keep us going for some hours yet."

In a moment, so did he imbue them all with his undismayed spirit, the household, which for two weeks had lived in a state of half -paralyzed alarm, began to wear its normal aspect of cheerful industry. While one child laid the table and Mary pre- pared supper, Little Betty sat in the low rocking-chair and held the baby. With twoboisterous little ones scrambling over him, and a tired collie sprawling and lolling at his feet, Johnny took the strong and willing G man boy into his confidence.

After a hasty meal they went out together, comrades in arms for the weeks of battling with arctic weather which lay before them. By the spectral illuminations in the sky they stretched guide-ropes to outbuildings, bed- ded the stock, fetched in a week's supply of wood, and, digging the rest of the fuel out of the snow, stored it in the oven-shed. It was ten o'clock when they came in, the boy to fall asleep at once in his warm feather-bed in the loft, and Johnny His days of men- tal and physical strain, followed by the spirit- ual shock, and that by further hours of toil, had brought their reaction of mood. He stood within the door, struggling for self- control, hollow-eyed with the torturing fear that Betty might have been laid away in that most desolate and forlorn of all earthly pla< the remote and neglected country- burying- ground. He could not bear to think of her as forsaken, out alone in the cold and dark- ness and coming storm.

''Where  where is she, Mary?"

"In the orchard, Johnny, under the tree with the drooping branches, where she loved to sit in the little rocking-chair.' '

He went out again to pace the drifted aisles, and to sit on the bench under the twin trees where, on one morning of many a spring, he had wakened to see her so blithe and hap- py under the tent of pink bloom. Now he watched beside her frozen bed, questioning his guidance. He had left her, and through dan- ger, hardship and grief she had come to this untimely end. The snow laid so deep above her was spread with reflections from the cold fires in the sky, a mockery of the comfort and glow of the fireside; and the snow-burdened, rose-tinted trees of his generation of patient planting and yearning love might well have their next blooming beside the River of Life. Had his sacrifice been in vain?

Chilled to the bone, trembling with ex- haustion, rilled with profound spiritual con- fusion, for even the angels, he believed, have their hours of dark discouragement and sepa- ration from God, he returned to the house. On the hearth he passed his hand across his eyes in an effort to recall some urgent reality of the physical world.

"There is something  I think my feet need some attention, Mary."

They were white and shrunken with frost. When thawed out to a swollen and burning redness he was obliged to sit helpless for two days, while a fresh fall of snow was laid to the depth of fifteen more inches over the entire Mississippi Valley. But, in Ethan's larger socks and boots, he was out in the bliz- zard of wind which blew the loose snow down from the circling ridge.

No morning dawned thereafter in which the temperature was above zero. Day after gray, lowery da}' the wind was a steady, fierce gale with new snow falling, or old snow blowing be- fore it. Fences, corn-shocks and low outbuild- ings were submerged. Doors banked over- night had to be cleared for exit, windows for daylight ; runways plowed in the barn-yard so animals could be let out for air and exercise; snow broken up and shoveled from under or- chard trees, when the lower limbs lay on the surface and bruised their bark by threshing over a glazing of sleet. And, daily, snow had to be melted for water ; corn, hay and bedding- straw dug out of frozen tombs ; feed cut up for sheep, and warmed for pigs and chickens.

The house was well stocked with food, but as the bitter weather continued unabated, and the supply of fuel ran low, all Johnny's waking hours and troubled dreams were filled with alarm. Ethan had left a quantity of cord-wood in the forest, but even if it could be located and uncovered horses could not be driven into the woods where low branches rested on the ground, and their legs could not plumb the great depths of crusted layers of snow. Johnny and Otto felled small trees along the creek, and dragged the logs up into the yard with ropes. This wood was wet and green, and warmed the house so ill that on the coldest days the children were kept in bed.

By incessant toil and sleepless vigilance the twin specters of freezing and famine were kept at bay ; but the bitter cold, biting winds and bewildering blurs or stinging blasts of snow became an obsession. And there was danger to the mind in this storm-beleaguered isolation. From the last week of December no travelers were seen on the road. Rarely did the air clear sufficiently for the nearest neighbor, a half-mile distant, to be hailed with dinner-horn and fluttered table-cloth;and if a letter from Ethan lay in the village post-office, three miles away, it might as well have been in the moon. Upon their hearts lay the unspoken fear that Ethan might have tried to get through, and was now lost in some tragic mystery never to be solved until Judgment Day. For all they knew, the earth had swung into some cataclysmic cycle and lay forever congealed, all life locked in crystal prisons, to be sepultured in imme- morial snow.

The white mantle had lain unsullied on the frozen earth for ten weeks, and had increased to the depth of four feet on the level, with every valley, hollow, forest, fence and build- ing a trap for deeper drifts, when Johnny was awakened one morning in March by the sound of water dripping from the eaves. He scrambled into his clothing and ran out into the soft glow of the rising sun and a balmy southern breeze.

"A thaw, Alary! The snow is going off!" he cried. He was wild with relief himself, and Mary broke into such tears and laughter as frightened the children when she gathered them into her arms for morning prayers.

It was true ! It was unbelievably true thatwater was dripping everywhere, from eaves and trees, and trickling away in clear riv- ulets. Avalanches slid from roofs; trees dropped their white burdens; buried things emerged, and the snow sank visibly. In three days they watched the wild ducks and geese go north, hour after hour, in hurrying flight. Then the sky brightened ; patches and fringes of misty emerald appeared; song-sparrows, phcebes and bluebirds arrived, and the buds swelled and turned green on the lilac-bushes and fruit-trees. The orchards had weath- ered this historic winter!

With a bright apple-twig in his button- hole, Johnny went slopping about in the wet, making preparations for the coming flood. Soon Betty would have her tender coverlet of grass, and birds and blossoms would burst into song, color and perfume above her. He could bear to think of her as here in this dear, familiar place, cher- ished by those she had loved. All summer she would lie in shine and shade and shower, under silver moon and soft starlight, and in his beneficent wanderings he would have her with him, in spirit, under the same kind canopy.

And now he could bear another thing which had haunted his nights of sleepless pain. It was certain that, in the Northern woods and on the treeless prairies, the snow must have lain deeper, the temperatures fallen lower, the wind raged with destructive force. Undoubtedly his nurseries and young or- chards in Michigan and Indiana had per- ished, and his five years of labor there been brought to naught. But that was of small importance compared with the suffering, and the loss of crops and live-stock, by thousands of new settlers who would sink at once into deeper poverty. It was his to keep them from falling into despair. Better luck next time! Better days coming!

The vision of sublime service to humanity brightened and beckoned as the blossoming maples began to light their fires of spring along the edges of the woods and water- courses. He waited only on Ethan's return with his seeds to be off to his blighted fields.

Before the end of that week of thaw, the ice of the snow-flooded creek suddenly broke up and went out with the crashing reports of artillery. Water swept up the lawn to the door-step, and a wild torrent uprooted treesand carried them away, together with small buildings and luckless animals. In the sta- ble at the time, Johnny ran out, driving the horses before him and shouting to Otto and the collie to get the cattle and sheep up on higher ground. Mary, standing in the door- way, screamed a warning as the oven-shed was whirled into the flood; but Johnny saw the danger too late. Struck by a corner of the roof, he went down.

The dog dragged him out, and Mary, struggling through rushing, ice-blocked water to her knees, led him to the house. Dazed by the blow, he still remembered his errand of mercy and would have broken from her, but she made him understand, at last, that the animals had all swum to safety. She bandaged the swelling bruise on his head; but when she had got him into bed he sank, almost at once, into a dreadful stupor with heavy, labored breathing.

No help for him who had kept them all from perishing! When he became violently ill, the utmost that she could do was to try to relieve his headache and nausea; and when fever came up and he wandered in his mind, she sat beside him in tearless anguishand kept cold water on his burning, restless head. She scarcely noticed the rapid going down of the flood, the sudden disappearance of the sun at midday, the slaty sky of night glittering with blue-white electric points, the flickering fires which played with sinister splendor along the northern horizon, or the icy chill of the air.

The last of the green wood was gone. Otto built up a smoking, sputtering fire with the water-soaked wreckage strewn about the yard. That night the soft earth and the creek, which had returned to its channel, were frozen to iron. Then on a polar gale the wild water-fowl fled southward from frigid lands of famine. The leaden sky of dawn was black with them, screaming before the blast. For two days the house rocked in the arctic tempest, and the world was obliterated in flying clouds of snow as thick and impene- trable as a fog at sea.

Through all the noises and horrors of that storm Johnny raved in delirium. At times it took both Alary and Otto to hold him in bed. He cried out for his seeds, and was comforted only for the moment by the assur- ance that Ethan would fetch them. When

295he reached out his arms for the little rocking- chair, Mary brought it to the bedside; and when he stared at the scarlet cloak hanging on the wall and muttered about the cold, she spread it over him. But when he begged her to put it over Betty to warm and cheer her, she knew nothing of that old memory which surged up and beat upon his heart, and could only weep in her helplessness.

"Oh, Johnny, try to remember! Mother is warm and happy in heaven."

As the storm died away in fitful gusts of sleet, and the cold hardened to minus de- grees that chilled the blood, he became quiet- er. Thinking that he slept at last, and pray- ing for Ethan to come in this extremity of peril, Mary lay down, without undressing, to nurse the baby whose delicate bloom of re- viving life she owed to Johnny's care of them all.

Then her exhaustion betrayed her. In the blessed silence and darkness, after that long time of storm and stress, she fell asleep. The first things of which she was vaguely aware, in the early hours of morning, were the frantic barking of the dog, and the river of cold which was flowing through the house. Andwhether in her dream or waking she never knew, but she heard her mother's voice:

"Mary, you go 'round, dear, and look after Johnny."

How sweet it was  the gentle tones, the quaint phrase treasured in her memory. But this was not spoken in the old manner of reminding a thoughtless child of duty in the midst of play, but was anxious, insistent, pleading :

"Mary, Mary, Mary! You go 'round, dear, and look after Johnny!"

She suddenly sat up, wide awake and with a sense of danger. Somewhere in the yard the dog was barking continuously in wild alarm. The door was open. Johnny's bed was empty.

She found him, the collie standing guard beside him, lying cold and senseless on Betty's snowy grave, over which he had spread the warm, red cloak. When she and Otto had carried him in, Mary put the brooms, the butter-bowls, the children's stools  every small, dry, wooden thing at hand  into the fire to heat blankets and water, and bade the frightened boy strip the fences of their top rails.

"Keep the fire going! Burn every fence and building on the place, if you must, but keep up the fire! Here is one of God's angels perishing."

It was an hour before Johnny's heart beat with its full force, and from the death-like chill he passed into fever and delirium. The day dawned bright and still and intensely cold, the sun shining on dazzling fields of ice- glazed snow, and waking a million sparkles from swollen green buds frozen in the hearts of icicles.

They were all around his bed  Mary and Ethan, and the good doctor for whom Ethan had "swum through high water to Columbus," on the bleak April day that Johnny returned to consciousness. A winter that had streaked young Ethan's head with silver had bleached Johnny's hair and beard to the snowy white- ness of the pillow on which he lay. He knew them, and the old smile of love and gentle hap- piness lighted his cavernous eyes and wasted face; but in a moment he looked beyond them, around the room, in wistful inquiry. Mary had to lean over him to hear the faintly spoken words:

"Where's Betty?"

"Why, Johnny, don't you remember?' 1 And then, seeing how it was with him, thathe mercifully remembered nothing of the sor- row and terror and hardships of that night- mare of a winter, she finished, "Mother's in the orchard, Johnny."

"Are the trees in bloom ?"

"Not  not yet." The fruit-trees of Ohio did grow another set of buds, and, late in May, put forth a few, pale, scattered blooms.

His presence here, in this home of his heart, seemed perfectly natural, and about his ill- ness he expressed neither surprise nor curi- osity, but accepted it with the unquestion- ing simplicity and patience of a child. They all hung upon his next words.

"Betty will want  her little rocking-chair."

Ethan jumped up. "That's right, John- ny. Don't you let me forget my manners."

He carried the chair out to the orchard. Mary found him there on Johnny's bench, his gaunt face buried in his hands. His arms tightened around her and the precious little rosy Blossom on her breast.

"Mary, while I lay in Marietta with the broken rib I got in the boat-wreck, I should have gone raving mad if I had not known

JOHNNY APP.LESEEDthat Johnny was here. To think that I should find you all safe and well, not even a silly sheep lost, and him lying like that! And I dropped his seeds in the flood when the ice went out under me on the Scioto/' He clenched his fists, and the few, slow, diffi- cult tears of the man of Puritan ancestry were squeezed out and hung on his lashes. "I'd sweat blood to have Johnny his old self again and to get his seeds back for him."

"It is unlikely that he will ever ask for them," the doctor said, as he joined them. "He has had a concussion of the brain from the blow on his head, and that was followed by brain-fever of such severity and persistency that his recovery is surprising. Has he been under mental strain or suffered some emo- tional shock?"

Since the mischief was done and it would avail nothing, Mary could not speak of the effect of her mother's death on Johnny. "He felt responsible for all of us and worked far beyond his strength. And he was anxious about the orchards, especially his young trees and nurseries farther west  slept ill all winter," she said. As long as she lived she never could forget how often he had got upin the night to pace the floor of his little room for hours, or to go out to lonely vigils by Betty's ice-locked grave; and she could never speak of that time to any one but Ethan.

"It has been a trying season for every one," was the doctor's sober comment. "The minds of many people have been more or less affected. Johnny's young plantations in the West have all been destroyed, I am afraid, with the crops and stock and much of the game, for the snow lay ten feet deep on the prairies. He may always be spared the knowledge of this loss, for there is a lapse of memory extending over several years, and some mental confusion. Well, Ohio has its orchards  a debt to Johnny that we can never pay. It will be a long time before he gets back his physical vigor, but be pa- tient and hopeful. I think he will improve in both body and mind. Just now"  he tapped his own head significantly  "Johnny isn't all here."

When he was gone Mary turned and wept on Ethan's breast. "Oh, my dear, my dear, I understand Johnny's devotion to us who never did anything to deserve it. Once in his ravings he cried out, 'I'll take care ofyour babies, Betty!' He rescued us all in the war, he made this home beautiful for us twice, and he always has watched over us. In some strange way that I am content never to know, he belonged to mother. Now he is ours, to love and hold in reverence, and, if he is always to be like this, to care for ten- derly as long as he lives."

Ethan wrote at once to his cousin, Dr. Hil- dreth, to assure him that the family and stock had come through the winter unharmed, owing to Johnny's care, and that Johnny himself had been seriously ill, but was now recovering. As there would be no seed for his gleaning this year, people must not be alarmed if he was not seen along his old routes.

"Nothing keeps so well as bad news," he remarked to Mary as he sealed the letter. "Let us work and pray that in another year there will be none to tell about Johnny."

As a beginning in that labor of love Mary laid aside the mourning which bewildered and distressed him. By and by he ceased to ask for Betty. It was as though he had found her and was companioned by some presence, invisible to others, in which he hada quiet happiness. The little rocking-chair, with the scarlet cloak thrown over it, stood by his bedside, and when he got up it v. returned to its old place on the hearth. Often when Johnny lay before the fire with his Bible or other book, he looked up at who- ever might be sitting in it, smiled, and read something aloud. They soon learned that he loved to see it occupied by Mary or Little Betty, with the baby in arms.

Ethan cleared the yard of wreckage, cut away dead and broken limbs, and grubbed out winter-killed trees and shrubbery; and the children gathered up and buried the many little bundles of feathers which lay under perches. Everything possible was done to give the place its normal, seasonal aspect; but the summer which followed the winter of the deep snow was dark and inclement. They were anxious about the effect upon Johnny the first time he came out into a day of threatening clouds and fitful sunshine. Puzzled by the sodden, dropping leaves, the absence of bloom and fruit, and by the scarcity of birds and bees, he asked:

"What season is it?"

"It's June, Johnny."

3

"But there are no apples!"

"Ohio has been lucky, but we must ex- pect a crop failure now and then." Ethan tried to speak lightly, but it was difficult not to be candid with Johnny. "A freeze in March killed the first buds, and the season has been bad for everything."

He stared at them wildly " I never heard of such a thing happening in Ohio. I  I don't remember anything about it."

"You were very ill at the time, Johnny." In spite of her the tears welled into Mary's eyes, his bewilderment and distress were so piteous. But she was inspired to add : "You know you always stop to spend a day with  with mother in the spring."

The mystery cleared, he lost his look of alarm, and, his interest in himself always of the slightest, he dismissed the matter from his mind. "Are the orchards like this all over Ohio?"

Ethan nodded, and they waited with sus- pended breath, half fearing, half hoping that he would ask for the seeds lost in the flood and for his blighted plantations in Michigan and Indiana. But for him those disasters had never happened and Betty had never

4died. As it was with her, all his cares and pains and tragic memories had fallen from him. He held only to the great fundamentals  his undying love for her and his beneficent purpose. " There will be no seeds this year," he said, but not sadly. His face took on the look it had worn in his youth in Pittsburg when his start on his mission had been so long delayed  that look which saw no hard or hindering circumstance, but only the dis- tant and splendid goal.

His compassion was all for others when he looked upon Ethan's fields, where seed had rotted in the cold, wet ground, or had sprung up in thin, pale growth, only to be beaten upon by hail-storms or deluges of rain. Even if the weather improved there could now be only the scantiest of crops, and peo- ple and animals must suffer many privations.

When skies are unkind the husbandman must work all the harder for what may be saved, so Johnny was out, now, bringing a wonderful store of practical wisdom and skill to Ethan's help. He guided the plow, swung the scythe, repaired tools and harness, followed the sheep on the hills, led the men of the neighborhood to a grassy marsh where

5wild forage might be cut to eke out their scanty meadows, and brought in the winter's supply of fuel. So he won back, if not his old, tireless strength, at least his old, well- directed energy, and fitted himself to take up his inspired task again. But as he said nothing about this, Ethan and Mary thought that even his mission was fading from his memory. They had a feeling of happy se- curity that he would remain with them in contentment. Capable as he was of doing his own work, he showed an increasing un- fitness to take care of himself.

It was in this year of profound discourage- ment and ruinous losses, when men had to sacrifice stock they could not feed, and go into debt for high-priced seed brought up from the South, that Johnny lost something of the natural man's instinct of self-preserva- tion. His spirit of brotherly love pushed him over the verge of reason into those ec- centric and endearing forms of self-sacrifice which ever afterward marked him. Because it had been necessary for men to do so when animals were on short rations, he continued to carry heavy loads, and to walk long dis- tances, to spare horses. He refused to eat,even at tables generously supplied, until sure that women and children had had enough, and he gave his clothing to any ill-clad stran- ger whom he met on the road.

And, seeing how hard plants and low animal orders struggled against extinction, his sym- pathy and reverence for all life developed into a poetic and fantastic consideration. An earthworm drowned out of its burrow, a bee made sluggish by cold rain, became a piteous thing. He pruned trees like a sur- geon, only to heal some ill, insisting that they could feel the cruel knife; and he was sure that seeds were moved by thought and emo- tion, as they lay in pulsing germination in the dark.

Again there were but ten days of Indian summer, and winter set in so early and severe that, by the middle of December, wagons were driven across the frozen Ohio. But while the weather was intensely cold, there were few storms and little snow, and the ice went out in February with such destructive floods as had never before been recorded. All Western streams were choked with wreck- age, and towns were cabled to trees on the bluffs. Then, as the water subsided, the bot-toms were spread with rich alluvia, and the season leaped into genial spring. As if by magic the ground thawed and dried out for the plowing in March. The birds, sadly dimin- ished in number but mad with joy, arrived early and raised an extra brood that golden summer, as if aware that they must restore nature's disturbed balance.

In Johnny's veins, too, the sap of spring ascended. He brought in the new-born lambs to the fire. He spaded the flower-beds and kitchen garden. From fruit-tree and shrub he cut away dead wood and parasitic suckers. As the sunny, showery days of April went by he had many secret sources of happiness about which those who loved him could only surmise. As though it were some un- folding drama, he watched the clustered buds of the apple-trees swell and swell until every little nosegay showed the pink edges of close- packed petals. He went to sleep one night on the bench in excited expectancy, and in the morning awoke to that miracle of spring  mounds and drifts and banks of rosy bloom, a blue ocean of incense, and the har- mony of birds and bees.

Before he was awake Mary had slippedout with Betty's little rocking-chair. For long, speechless moments he gazed at it swaying in the breeze, and at the blossoming boughs shaking out their fluttering draperies of pink and pearl. His breakfast was placed before him on the rustic table, and gleeful children tumbled out into the happy day. And here was friendly, helpful, cheerful Mary-go- 'round sitting beside him with a bit of sewing. He startled her by remarking that the trees were so lovely because it was their wedding-day, and told her something of the fertilization of the blossoms by the bees. But when the thought had dwelt in her mind a moment, she said:

"That is beautiful!" She blushed like any bride, and sat for a time in tender reverie. "Ethan and I were married under the apple- blossoms. Think of being canopied with bliss in such an hour!"

By and by she asked, "Johnny, do you remember how you used to take us children on a journey 'round the world?"

Yes, he remembered, with a pleasure as great as hers. There were little ones here to-day  no break now, to him, in the flow of the generations. The hours went by in theold manner of Betty's time. He got a scythe and mowed the grass, and he fetched out the big table for the picnic dinner. Then, yield- ing to tugging hands and coaxing voices, he took the littlest baby on his back and marched away at the head of a procession, for such brave and laughing adventure as would make them say, when they grew up, " Don't you remember ? ' ' When Mary heard them scram- bling on all-fours, and squealing like bear cubs under the shrubbery, she cried for pure hap- piness.

Johnny was having his old day in Paradise with Betty and her little brood.

They were not surprised in the morning to find that he was gone, but, more than a little anxious, Ethan followed him, unseen, for two days. Mary ran down the road to meet him on his return, and Ethan dropped from his horse to walk with her.

"It's all right, Mary. I watched Johnny go into farm-houses and villages all bowered in his orchards. The country never looked more beautiful. And such welcomes! Men and women, children and dogs, ran across fields and down the lanes to meet him. He will come back when the trees are doneblooming, and there will be no harm in his taking such a holiday at any time. He has a friend in every person, a home under every roof in Ohio."

When the scented snow of faded petals was drifting on every wind, Johnny reappears 1. He came in out of the dewy dusk, to stand erect in the doorway, his feet in bark sandals, his head minus a covering, his silver hair and beard a frame for a face of burning zeal and unquenchable youth, to announce a bit of news which had thrilled his heart and the heart of all America seven years before.

"The Erie Canal has been opened! Thou- sands of people are pouring over Lake Erie into the woods and prairies of Michigan and Indiana. Ohio does not need me now. I am going out there to plant orchards.' '