American fiction -- 19th century; Short stories, American
'Now, we sang on Sunday in the church; but then she led us, and we had a
kind of an idea that after all she did not hear us. But now, who was to
lead us? We stood awkwardly around the bed, and shuffled our hats in our
uneasy fingers. The Doctor fixed his eyes upon the Nightingale; Jack saw
it and cowered. 'Begin,' said the Doctor in a soft voice; but gripping
him in the back at the same time with an ominous clutch.
'I don't know the words,' faltered the unhappy Nightingale.
"'Now thank we all our God,
With hearts and hands and voices,'
began the Doctor, and repeated Luther's hymn with perfect accuracy from
beginning to end. 'What will happen next? The Doctor knows hymns!' we
thought in profound astonishment. But the Nightingale had begun, and
gradually our singers joined in; I doubt whether the grand old choral
was ever sung by such a company before or since. There was never any
further question, by the way, about that minute gun at sea; it stayed at
sea as far as we were concerned.
'Spring came, the faltering spring of Lake Superior. I won't go into my
own story, but such as it was, the spring brought it back to me with new
force. I wanted to go,--and yet I didn't. 'Where,' do you ask? To see
her, of course,--a woman, the most beautiful,--well, never mind all
that. To be brief, I loved her; she scorned me; I thought I had learned
to hate her--but--I wasn't sure about it now. I kept myself aloof from
the others and gave up my heart to the old sweet, bitter memories; I did
not even go to church on Sundays. But all the rest went; our Lady's
influence was as great as ever. I could hear them singing; they sang
better now that they could have the door open; the pent-up feeling used
to stifle them. The time for the bateaux drew near, and I noticed that
several of the men were hard at work packing the furs in bales, a job
usually left to the _voyageurs_ who came with the boats. 'What's that
for?' I asked.
'You don't suppose we're going to have those bateaux rascals camping on
Little Fishing, do you?' said black Andy, scornfully. 'Where are your
wits, Reub?'
'And they packed every skin, rafted them all over to the mainland, and
waited there patiently for days, until the train of slow boats came
along and took off the bales; then they came back in triumph. 'Now we're
secure for another six months,' they said, and began to lay out a park,
and gardens for every house. The Lady was fond of flowers; the whole
town burst into blossom. The Lady liked green grass; all the clearing
was soon tufted over like a lawn. The men tried the ice-cold lake every
day, waiting anxiously for the time when they could bathe. There was no
end to their cleanliness; Black Andy had grown almost white again, and
Frenchy's hair shone like oiled silk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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