In Wild Rose Time Part 11

and he would give Dil a new and better chance in spite of her mother.

Dil drew a long, long breath.

"Can we all get to the pallis?" she asked, with a soft awe in her tone.

"Yes, there are many things to do-you will see what Christiana and Mercy did. And if you love the Lord Jesus and pray to him-"

Poor Dil was again conscience smitten. Only this morning she had said praying wasn't any good. She glanced up through tears,-

"'Pears as if I couldn't ever get to understand. I wasn't smart at school-"

"But you _are_ smart," interposed Bess. "An' now we've got the book we'll find just how Christiana went. There's only six months left.

You'll surely be back by April?"

"I shall be back." His heart smote him. He was a coward after all. Ah, could he ever undertake any of the Master's business?

"Do you remember a hymn an old lady sang for you once?" he said, glad of even this faltering way out. "I have been learning the words."

"'Bout everlasting spring?" and Bess's eyes were alight. "Oh, do please sing it! I'm in such an awful hurry for spring to come. Sometimes my breath gets so short, as if I reely couldn't wait."

Dil raised her eyes with a slow, beseeching movement. He pushed a chair beside the wagon, and held Bess's small hands, that were full of leaping pulses.

The sweet old hymn, almost forgotten amid the clash of modern music. Ah, there was some one who would love and care for Dil in her desolation-his grandmother. He would write to her. Then he began, and at the first note the children were enraptured:-

"There is a land of pure delight, Where saints immortal reign; Infinite day excludes the night, And pleasures banish pain.

Oh, the transporting, rapturous scene, That dawns upon my sight; Sweet fields arrayed in living green, And rivers of delight.

There everlasting spring abides, And never-withering flowers; Death, like a narrow sea, divides This heavenly land from ours.

No chilling winds nor poisonous breath Can reach that blessed sh.o.r.e; Sickness and sorrow, pain and death, Are felt and feared no more.

O'er all those wide extended plains, s.h.i.+nes one eternal day; There Christ the Son forever reigns, And scatters night away.

Filled with delight, my raptured soul Can here no longer stay; Though Jordan's waves around me roll, Fearless I launch away."

John Travis had a tender, sympathetic voice. Just now he was more moved by emotion than he would have imagined. Dil turned her face away and picked up the tears with her fingers. It was too beautiful to cry about, for crying was a.s.sociated with sorrow or pain. A great inarticulate desire thrilled through her, a blind, pa.s.sionate longing for a better, higher life, as if she belonged somewhere else. And, like Bess, an impatience pervaded her to be gone at once.

"Oh, please do sing it again!" besought Bess in a transport, her face spiritualized to a seraphic beauty. "Did they sing like that in the Mission School, Dil?"

Dil shook her head in speechless ecstasy.

There was a knock, and then the door opened softly. It was Mrs. Murphy, with her sick baby in her arms.

"Ah, dear," she began deprecatingly, with an odd little old country courtesy, "I heard the singing, an' I said to poor old Mis' Bolan, 'That's never the Salvation Army, for they do make such a hullabaloo; but it must be a Moody an' Sankey man that I wunst haird, with the v'ice of an angel.' An' the pore craythur is a hankerin' to get nearer. Will ye lit her come down, plaise, or will ye come up?"

John Travis flushed suddenly. Dil glanced at her visitor aghast. Some finer instinct questioned whether he were offended. But he smiled. If it would give a poor old woman a pleasure-

Dil was considering a critical point. She had learned to be wise in evading the fury of a half-drunken woman. There were many things she kept to herself. But Mrs. Murphy would talk _him_ over. A Moody and Sankey man,-she had not a very clear idea; but if Mrs. Murphy knew, it might be wisdom to have some one here who would speak a good word for her if it should be needed.

"Ye can bring her down," she answered, still looking at John Travis with rising color.

She simply stepped into the hall; but the old woman was half-way down-stairs, and needed no further summons.

"Ah, dear, it's the v'ice of an angel shure. An' though I'm not given to them kind of maytins, on account of the praist, they do be beautiful an'

comfortin' whiles they sing. Come in. It's Dilly Quinn that'll bid ye welcome. For it's the Moody an' Sankey man."

"Yer very good, Dilly Quinn, very good, to ask in a poor old woman; though I'm main afeared of yer mother in a tantrum." Her voice was shrill and shaky, though she was not seventy; but poverty and hards.h.i.+ps age people fast. A bowed and shrunken woman, with thin, white, straggling hair, watery, hungry-looking eyes, a wrinkled, ashen skin, her lips a leaden blue and sunken from lack of teeth. She had one of Mrs. Murphy's rooms since the head of the house was safely bestowed within prison limits. Mrs. Bolan's only son had been killed in the war, and she had her pension. Now and then some one gave her a little work out of pity.

She dropped down on the lounge. "When I heard that there hymn," she went on quaveringly, "it took me back forty year an' more. There was great revival meetin's. My poor old mother used to sing it. But meetin's don't seem the same any more, or else we old folks kinder lost the end er r'ligion."

She was so pitiful, with her timorous, lonely look, and the hard struggles time had written on her everywhere.

"Will you sing it for her?" Dil asked timidly, glancing up at Travis.

Some one else paused to listen and look in, and stared with strange interest at the fine young fellow, whose rich, deep voice found a way to their hearts. And as he sang, a realization of their pinched, joyless lives filled him with dismay. Mrs. Bolan rocked herself too and fro, her hands clutched tightly over her breast, as if she was hugging some comfort she could not afford to let go. The tears rolled silently down her furrowed cheeks.

The foreign part of the audience was more outspoken.

"Ah, did yez iver listen to the loikes! Shure, it would move the heart of a sthone. It's enough to take yez right t'ro' to heaven widout the laste taste o' purgatory. Shure, Mrs. Kelly, it's like a pack o'

troubles fallin' off, an' ye step out light an' strong to yer work agen.

There'll be a blissin' for ye, young man, for the pleasure ye've given."

Mrs. Bolan shuffled forward and caught his hand in hers, which seemed almost to rattle, they were so bony.

"G.o.d bless you, sir." Her voice was so broken it sounded like sobs. "An'

there's something 'bout makin' his face s.h.i.+ne on you-I disremember, it's so long since I've read my Bible, more shame to me; but my eyes are so old and bad, I hope the Lord won't lay it up agen me. I'm a poor old body, pushed outen the ranks. And you get kicked aside. Ye see, 'tain't every voice that takes one to heaven. Lord help us 'bout gettin' in. But mebbe he'll be merciful to all who go astray. An'-if ye wouldn't mind sayin' a bit of prayer, 'pears like 'twould comfort me to my dyin' day."

Her hungry eyes pleaded through their tears.

A bit of prayer! He had been praying a little for himself of late, but it came awkward after his years of intellectual complacency. A youngish woman was glancing at him in frightened desperation, as if she waited for something to turn her very life. There was but one thing he could think of in this stress-the divine mandate. Could anything be more complete? When ye pray, say,-

"Our Father which art in heaven-"

VI-A WONDERFUL STORY

John Travis stood with upraised hand. Clearly, slowly, the words fell, and you could hear only the labored respiration of the women. There was a benediction-he could not recall it, but a verse of Scripture came into his mind. _"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."_

"The Lord will bless you," said the trembling old woman.

He squeezed something into her hand as she turned to go. Mrs. Murphy's sickly baby began to cry, and one of Dil's woke up. The little crowd dispersed.

It began to grow dusky. Night came on early in Barker's Court. Days were shorter, and sunless at that.