Chapter 13. The Last Stage

The Path of the King

by John Buchan

A small boy crept into the darkened hut. The unglazed windows were
roughly curtained with skins, but there was sufficient light from the
open doorway to show him what he wanted. He tiptoed to a corner where
an old travelling trunk lay under a pile of dirty clothes. He opened
it very carefully, and after a little searching found the thing he
sought. Then he gently closed it, and, with a look towards the bed in
the other corner, he slipped out again into the warm October
afternoon.

The woman on the bed stirred uneasily and suddenly became fully
awake, after the way of those who are fluttering very near death. She
was still young, and the little face among the coarse homespun
blankets looked almost childish. Heavy masses of black hair lay on
the pillow, and the depth of its darkness increased the pallor of her
brow. But the cheeks were flushed, and the deep hazel eyes were
burning with a slow fire. . . . For a week the milk-sick fever had
raged furiously, and in the few hours free from delirium she had been
racked with omnipresent pain and deadly sickness. Now those had gone,
and she was drifting out to sea on a tide of utter weakness. Her
husband, Tom Linkhorn, thought she mending, and was even now
whistling--the first time for weeks--by the woodpile. But the woman
knew that she was close to the great change, and so deep was her
weariness that the knowledge remained an instinct rather than a
thought. She was as passive as a dying animal. The cabin was built of
logs, mortised into each other--triangular in shape, with a fireplace
in one corner. Beside the fire stood a table made of a hewn log, on
which lay some pewter dishes containing the remains of he last family
meal. One or two three-legged stools made up the rest of the
furniture, except for the trunk in the corner and the bed. This bed
was Tom Linkhorn's pride, which he used to boast about to his
friends, for he was a tolerable carpenter. It was made of plank stuck
between the logs of the wall, and supported at the other end by
crotched sticks. By way of a curtain top a hickory post had been sunk
in the floor and bent over the bed, the end being fixed in the log
wall. Tom meant to have a fine skin curtain fastened to it when
winter came. The floor was of beaten earth, but there was a rough
ceiling of smaller logs, with a trap in it which could be reached by
pegs stuck the centre post. In that garret the children slept. Tom's
building zeal had come to an end with the bed. Some day he meant to
fit in a door and windows, but these luxuries could wait till he got
his clearing in better order.

On a stool by the bed stood a wooden bowl containing gruel. The
woman had not eaten for days, and the stuff had a thick scum on it.
The place was very stuffy, for it was a hot and sickly autumn day and
skins which darkened the window holes kept out the little freshness
that was in the air. Beside the gruel was a tin pannikin of cold
water which the boy ,Abe fetched every hour from the spring. She saw
the water, but was too weak to reach it.

The shining doorway was blocked by a man's entrance. Tom
Linkhorn was a little over middle height, with long muscular arms,
and the corded neck sinews which tell of great strength. He had a
shock of coarse black hair, grey eyes and a tired sallow face, as of
one habitually overworked and underfed. His jaw was heavy, but
loosely put together, so that he presented an air of weakness and
irresolution. His lips were thick and pursed in a kind of weary good
humour. He wore an old skin shirt and a pair of towlinen pants, which
flapped about his bare brown ankles. A fine sawdust coated his hair
and shoulders, for he had been working in the shed where he eked out
his farming by making spinning wheels for his neighbours.

He came softly to the bedside and looked down at his wife. His
face was gentle and puzzled.

"Reckon you're better, dearie," he said in a curious harsh
toneless voice.

The sick woman moved her head feebly in the direction of the
stool and he lifted the pannikin of water to her lips.

"Cold enough?" he asked, and his wife nodded. "Abe fetches it as
reg'lar as a clock."

"Where's Abe?" she asked, and her voice for all its feebleness
had a youthful music in it.

"I heerd him sayin' he was goin' down to the crick to cotch a
fish. He reckoned you'd fancy a fish when you could eat a piece. He's
a mighty thoughtful boy, our Abe. Then he was comin' to read to you.
You'd like that, dearie?"

The sick woman made no sign. Her eyes were vacantly regarding
the doorway.

"I've got to leave you now. I reckon I'll borrow the Dawneys'
sorrel horse and ride into Gentryville. I've got the young hogs to
sell, and I'll fetch back the corn-meal from Hickson's. Sally Hickson
was just like you last fall, and I want to find out from Jim how she
got her strength up."

He put a hand on her brow, and felt it cool.

"Glory! You're mendin' fast, Nancy gal. You'll be well in time
to can the berries that the childern's picked. He fished from below
the bed a pair of skin brogues and slipped them on his feet. "I'll be
back before night."

"I want Abe," she moaned.

"I'll send him to you," he said as he went out

Left alone the woman lay still for a little in a stupor of
weariness. Waves of that terrible lassitude, which is a positive
anguish and not a mere absence of strength, flowed over her. The
square of the doorway, which was directly before her eyes, began to
take strange forms. It was filled with yellow sunlight, and a red
glow beyond told of the sugar-maples at the edge of the clearing. Now
it seemed to her unquiet sight to be a furnace. Outside the world was
burning; she could feel the heat of it in the close cabin. For a
second acute fear startled her weakness. It passed, her eyes cleared,
and she saw the homely doorway as it was, and heard the gobble of a
turkey in the forest.

The fright had awakened her mind and senses. For the first time
she fully realised her condition. Life no longer moved steadily in
her body; it flickered and wavered and would soon gutter out. . . .
Her eyes marked every detail of the squalor around her--the unwashed
dishes, the foul earthen floor, the rotting apple pile, the heap of
rags which had been her only clothes. She was leaving the world, and
this was all she had won from it. Sheer misery forced a sigh which
seemed to rend her frail body, and her eyes filled with tears. She
had been a dreamer, an adept at make-believe, but the poor coverings
she had wrought for a dingy reality were now too threadbare to hide
it.

And once she had been so rich in hope. She would make her
husband a great man, and--when that was manifestly impossible without
a rebirth of Tom Linkhorn--she would have a son who would wear a
black coat like Lawyer Macneil and Colonel Hardin way back in
Kentucky, and make fine speeches beginning "Fellow countrymen and
gentlemen of this famous State." She had a passion for words, and
sonorous phrases haunted her memory. She herself would have a silk
gown and a bonnet with roses in it; once long ago she had been to
Elizabethtown and seen just such a gown and bonnet. . . . Or Tom
would be successful in this wild Indiana country and be, like Daniel
Boone, the father of a new State, and have places and towns called
for him--a Nancyville perhaps or a Linkhorn County. She knew about
Daniel Boone, for her grandfather Hanks had been with him. . . . And
there had been other dreams, older dreams, dating far back to the
days when she was a little girl with eyes like a brown owl. Someone
had told her fairy-tales about princesses and knights, strange beings
which she never quite understood, but of which she made marvellous
pictures in her head She had learned to read in order to follow up
the doings of those queer bright folk, but she had never tracked them
down again. But one book she had got called The Pilgrim's Progress,
printed by missionaries in a far-away city called Philadelphia, which
told of things as marvellous, and had pictures, too--one especially
of a young man covered with tin, which she supposed was what they
called armour. And there was another called The Arabian Knights, a
close-printed thing difficult to read by the winter fire, full of
wilder doings than any she could imagine for herself; but beautiful,
too, and delicious to muse over, though Tom, when she read a chapter
to him, had condemned it as a pack of lies. . . . Clearly there was
a world somewhere, perhaps outside America altogether, far more
wonderful than even the magnificence of Colonel Hardin. Once she had
hoped to find it herself; then that her children should find it. And
the end was this shack in the wilderness, a few acres of rotting
crops, bitter starving winters, summers of fever, the deeps of
poverty, a penniless futureless family, and for herself a coffin of
green lumber and a yard or two of stony soil.

She saw everything now with the clear unrelenting eyes of
childhood. The films she had woven for selfprotection were blown
aside. She was dying--she had often wondered how she should feel when
dying--humble and trustful, she had hoped, for she was religious
after a fashion, and had dreamed herself into an affection for a kind
fatherly God. But now all that had gone. She was bitter, like one
defrauded She had been promised something, and had struggled on in
the assurance of it. And the result was nothing--nothing. Tragic
tears filled her eyes. She had been so hungry' and there was to be no
satisfying that hunger this side the grave or beyond it. She was
going the same way as Betsy Sparrow, a death like a cow's, with
nothing to show for life, nothing to leave. Betsy had been a poor
crushed creature, and had looked for no more. But she was different.
She had been promised something, something fine--she couldn't
remember what, or who had promised it, but it had never been out of
her mind.

There was the ring, too. No woman in Indiana had the like of
that. An ugly thing, but very ancient and of pure gold. Once Tom had
wanted to sell it when he was hard-pressed back at Nolin Creek, but
she had fought for it like a tigress and scared the life out of Tom.
Her grandfather had left it her because she was his favourite and it
had been her grandmothers, and long ago had come from Europe. It was
lucky, and could cure rheumatism if worn next the heart in a skin
bag. . . . All her thoughts were suddenly set on the ring, her one
poor shred of fortune. She wanted to feel it on her finger, and press
its cool gold with the queer markings on her eyelids.

But Tom had gone away and she couldn't reach the trunk in the
corner. Tears trickled down her cheeks and through the mist of them
she saw that the boy Abe stood at the foot of the bed.

"Feelin' comfortabler?" he asked. He had a harsh untunable
voice, his father's, but harsher, and he spoke the drawling dialect
of the backwoods.

His figure stood in the light, so that the dying mother saw only
its outline. He was a boy about nine years old, but growing too fast,
so that he had lost the grace of childhood and was already lanky and
ungainly. As he turned his face crosswise to the light he revealed a
curiously rugged profile--a big nose springing sharply from the brow,
a thick underhung lower lip, and the beginning of a promising Adam's
apple. His stiff black hair fell round his great ears, which stood
out like the handles of a pitcher. He was barefoot, and wore a pair
of leather breeches and a ragged homespun shirt. Beyond doubt he was
ugly.

He moved round to the right side of the bed where he was wholly
in shadow.

"My lines is settin' nicely," he said. "I'll have a fish for
your supper. And then I'm goin' to take dad's gun and fetch you a
turkey. You could eat a slice of a fat turkey, I reckon."

The woman did not answer, for she was thinking. This uncouth boy
was the son she had put her faith in. She loved him best of all
things on earth, but for the moment she saw him in the hard light of
disillusionment. A loutish backwoods child, like Dennis Hanks or Tom
Sparrow or anybody else. He had been a comfort to her, for he had
been quick to learn and had a strange womanish tenderness in his
ways. But she was leaving him, and he would grow up like his father
before him to a life of ceaseless toil with no daylight or honour in
it. . . . She almost hated the sight of him, for he was the memorial
of her failure.

The boy did not guess these thoughts. He pulled up a stool and
sat very close to the bed, holding his mother's frail wrist in a
sunburnt hand so big that it might have been that of a lad half-way
through his teens. He had learned in the woods to be neat and precise
in his ways, and his movements, for all his gawky look, were as soft
as a panther's.

"Like me to tell you a story?" he asked. "What about Uncle
Mord's tale of Dan'l Boone at the Blue Licks Battle?"

There was no response, so he tried again.

Or read a piece? It was the Bible last time, but the words is
mighty difficult. Besides you don't need it that much now. You're
gettin' better. . . . Let's hear about the ol'Pilgrim."

He found a squat duodecimo in the trunk, and shifted the skin
curtain from one of the window holes to get light to read by. His
mother lay very still with her eyes shut, but he knew by her
breathing that she was not asleep. He ranged through the book,
stopping to study the crude pictures, and then started laboriously to
read the adventures of Christian and Hopeful after leaving Vanity
Fair--the mine of Demas, the plain called Ease, Castle Doubting, and
the Delectable Mountains. He boggled over some of the words, but on
the whole he read well, and his harsh voice dropped into a pleasant
sing-song.

By and by he noticed that his mother was asleep. He took the tin
pannikin and filled it with fresh water from the spring. Then he
kissed the hand which lay on the blanket, looked about guiltily to
see if anyone had seen him, for kisses were rare in that household
and tiptoes out again.

The woman slept, but not wholly. The doorway, which was now
filled with the deeper gold of the westering sun, was still in her
vision. It had grown to a great square of light, and instead of being
blocked in the foreground by the forest it seemed to give on an
infinite distance. She had a sense not of looking out of a hut, but
of looking from without into a great chamber. Peace descended on her
which she had never known before in her feverish dreams, peace and a
happy expectation.

She had not listened to Abe's reading, but some words of it had
caught her ear. The phrase "delectable mountains" for one. She did
not know what "delectable" meant, but it sounded good; and mountains,
though she had never seen more of them than a far blue line, had
always pleased her fancy. Now she seemed to be looking at them
through that magical doorway. . . . The country was not like anything
she remembered in the Kentucky bluegrass, still less like the shaggy
woods of Indiana. The turf was short and very green, and the hills
fell into gracious folds that promised homesteads in every nook of
them. It was a "delectable" country--yes, that was the meaning of the
word that had puzzled her. . . . She had seen the picture before in
her head. She remembered one hot Sunday afternoon when she was a
child hearing a Baptist preacher discoursing on a Psalm, something
about the "little hills rejoicing." She had liked the words and made
a picture in her mind. These were the little hills and they were
joyful.

There was a white road running straight through them till it
disappeared over a crest. That was right, of course. The road which
the Pilgrims travelled. . . . And there, too, was a Pilgrim.

He was a long way off, but she could see him quite clearly. He
was a boy, older than Abe, but about the same size--a somewhat
forlorn figure, who seemed as if he had a great way to go and was
oppressed by the knowledge of it. He had funny things on his legs and
feet, which were not proper moccasins. Once he looked back, and she
had a glimpse of fair hair. He could not be any of the Hanks or
Linkhorn kin, for they were all dark. . . . But he had something on
his left arm which she recognised--a thick ring of gold. It was her
own ring, the ring she kept in the trunk and she smiled comfortably.
She had wanted it a little while ago, and now there it was before her
eyes. She had no anxiety about its safety, for somehow it belonged to
that little boy as well as to her.

His figure moved fast and was soon out of sight round a turn of
the hill. And with that the landscape framed in the doorway began to
waver and dislimn. The road was still there, white and purposeful,
but the environs were changing. . . . She was puzzled, but with a
pleasant confusion. Her mind was not on the landscape, but on the
people, for she was assured that others would soon appear on the
enchanted stage.

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.