The firelight ran over him, and as
he slept he stirred and muttered something in his dreams.
After the first glance, his master passed him by and moved on to the
adjoining cabin. "Does Mahaley live here?" he asked again and yet again,
until, suddenly, he had no need to put the question for from the last room
he heard a low voice praying, and upon looking in saw his wife kneeling
with her open Bible near the bedside.
With his hat in his hand, he stood within the shadow of the doorway and
waited for the earnest voice to fall silent. Mahaley was dying, this he saw
when his glance wandered to the shrunken figure beneath the patchwork
quilt; and at the same instant he realized how small a part was his in
Mahaley's life or death. He should hardly have known her had he met her
last week in the corn field; and it was by chance only that he knew her now
when she came to die.
As he stood there the burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like
old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death
showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as
mere events in the orderly working out of natural laws--events as
seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these
simple lives, so closely lived to the ground, grave things were sweetened
by an unconscious humour which was of the soil itself; and even death lost
something of its strangeness when it came like the grateful shadow which
falls over a tired worker in the field.
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