The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories

It seemed a poor return to Callie, for her sisterly service in the valley, to come home and find her lover a changed man. Mrs. Meadows said he was like all the soldiers she had ever known, – light come, light go. But this did not comfort Callie much, nor more to be reminded what a good thing it was she had found him out in time.

Henniker was not scoundrel enough to make love to two girls at once, two semi-sisters, who slept in the same room and watched each other's movements in the same looking-glass. It was no use pretending that he and Callie could "heat their broth over again;" so the coolness came speedily to a breach, and Henniker no longer openly, in fair daylight, took the path to the cottage gate. But there were other paths.

He had found a way to talk to Meta with his trumpet. He sent her messages at guard-mounting, as the guard was forming, when, as senior trumpeter, he was allowed a choice in the airs he played; and when he was orderly trumpeter, and could not come himself to say it, he sent her his good-night in the plaintive notes of taps.

This was the climax of Henniker's flirtations: all that went before had been as nothing, all that came after was not much worse than nothing. It was the one sincere as it was the one poetic passion of his life; and had it not cost him his self-respect through his baseness to Callie, and the treachery and dissimulation he was teaching to an innocent child, it might have made him a faithful man. As it was, his soldier's honor slept; it was the undisciplined part of him that spoke to the elemental nature of the girl; and it was fit that a trumpet's reckless summons, or its brief inarticulate call, like the note of a wild bird to its mate, should be the language of his love.

Retreat had sounded, one evening in October, but it made no stir any more in the cottage where the girls had been so gay. Callie, putting the tea on the table, remembered, as she heard the gun fire, how in the the spring Henniker had said that when "sound off" was at six he would drop in to supper some night, and show her how to make chili con carne, a dish that every soldier knows who has served on the Mexican border. Her face grew hard, for these foolish, unsleeping reminders were as constant as the bugle calls.

The women waited for the head of the house; but as he did not come, they sat down and ate quickly, saving the best dish hot for him.

They had finished, and the room was growing dusk, when he came in breezily, and called at once, as a man will, for a light. Meta rose to fetch it. The door stood open between the fore-room and the kitchen, where she was groping for a lamp. Mr. Meadows spoke in a voice too big for the room. He had just been conversing across the common with the quartermaster-sergeant, as the two men's footsteps diverged by separate paths to their homes.

"I hear there's going to be a change at the post;" he shouted. "The – th is going to leave this department, and C troop of the Second is coming from Custer. Sergeant says they are looking for orders any day now."

Mrs. Meadows, before she thought, glanced at Callie. The girl winced, for she hated to be looked at like that. She held up her head and began to sing audaciously, drumming with her fingers on the table: —

"'When my mother comes to knowThat I love the soldiers so,She will lock me up all day,Till the soldiers march away.'"

"What sort of a song is that?" asked her father sharply.

Callie looked him in the eyes. "Don't you know that tune?" said she. "Henniker plays that at guard-mount; and sometimes he plays this: —

'Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad,Though father and mither and a' should go mad.'"

"Let him play what he likes," said the father angrily. "His saucy jig tunes are nothing to us. I'm thankful no girl of mine is following after the army. It's a hard life for a woman, I can tell you, in the ranks."

Callie pushed her chair back, and looked out of the window as if she had not heard.

"Where's Meta with that lamp? Go and see what's keeping her."

"Sit still," said Mrs. Meadows. She went herself into the kitchen, but no one heard her speak a word; yet the kitchen was not empty.

There was a calico-covered lounge that stood across the end of the room; Meta sat there, quite still, her back against the wall. Mrs. Meadows took one look at her; then she lighted the lamp and carried it into the dining-room, and went back and shut herself in with Meta.

"'When my mother comes to know,'"

hummed Callie. Her face was pale. She hardly knew that she was singing.

"Stop that song!" her father shouted. "Go and see what's the matter with your sister."

"Sister?" repeated Callie. "Meta is no sister of mine."

"She's your tent-mate, then. Ye grew nest-ripe under the same mother's wing."

"Meta can use her own wings now, you will find. She grew nest-ripe very young."

Father Meadows knew that there was trouble inside of that closed door, as there was trouble inside the white lips and shut heart of his frank and joyous Callie, but it was "the women's business." He went out to attend to his own.

Irrigation on the scale of a small cottage garden is tedious work. It has intervals of silence and leaning on a hoe while one little channel fills or trickles into the next one; and the water must be stopped out here, and floated longer there, like the bath over the surface of an etcher's plate. Water was scarce and the rates were high that summer, and there was a good deal of "dry-point" work with a hoe in Father Meadows's garden.

He had come to one of the discouraging places where the ground was higher than the water could be made to reach without a deal of propping and damming with shovelfuls of earth. This spot was close to the window of the kitchen chamber, which was "mother's room." She was in there talking to Meta. Her voice was deep with the maternal note of remonstrance; Meta's was sharp and high with excitement and resistance. Her faintness had passed, but Mother Meadows had been inquiring into causes.

"I am married to him, mother! He is my husband as much as he can be."

"It was never Father Magrath married you, or I should be knowing to it before now."

"No; we went before a judge, or a justice, in the town."

"In town! Well, that is something; but be sure there is a wrong or a folly somewhere when a man takes a young girl out of her home and out of her church to be married. If Henniker had taken you 'soberly, in the fear of God'" —

"He was sober!" cried Meta. "I never saw him any other way."

"Mercy on us! I was not thinking of the man's habits. He's too good to have done the way he has. That's what I have against him. I don't know what I shall say to Father Josette. The disgrace of this is on me, too, for not looking after my house better. 'Never let her be humbled through her not being all white,' the father said when he brought you to me, and God knows I never forgot that your little heart was white. I trusted you as I would one of my own, and was easier on you for fear of a mother's natural bias toward her own flesh and blood; and now to think that you would lie to me, and take a man in secret that had deceived your sister before you, – as if nothing mattered so that you got what you wanted! And down in the town, without the priest's blessing or a kiss from any of us belonging to you! It's one way to get married, but it's not the right way."

"Did no white girl ever do as I have?" asked Meta, with a touch of sullenness.

"Plenty of them, but they didn't make their mothers happy."

Meta stirred restively on the bed. "Will Father Magrath have to talk to me, and Father Josette, and all the fathers?" she inquired. "He said he never would have married Callie anyway, – not even if he couldn't have had me."

"And the more shame to him to say such a thing to one sister of another! Callie is much the best off of you two." Mrs. Meadows rose and moved heavily away from the bed. "Well," she said, "most marriages are just one couple more. It's very little of a sacrament there is about the common run of such things, but I hoped for something better when it came to my girls' turn. However, sorrow is the sacrament God sends us, to give us a chance to learn a little something before we die. I expect you'll learn your lesson."

She came back to the bed, and Meta moaned as she sat down again, to signify that she had been talked to enough. But the mother had something practical to say, though she could not say it without emotional emphasis, for her outraged feelings were like a flood that has come down, but has not yet subsided.

"If there's any way for you to go with Henniker when the troop goes, it's with him you ought to be; but if he has married without his captain's consent, he'll get no help at barracks. Do you know how that is, Meta?"

Meta shook her head; but presently she forced herself to speak the truth. She did know that Henniker had told no one at the post of his marriage. She had never asked him why, nor had thought that it mattered.

"Oh my! I was afraid of that," said Mrs. Meadows. "The colonel knows it was Callie he was engaged to. Father went up to see him about Henniker, and the colonel as good as gave his word for him that he was a man we could have in the family. A commanding officer doesn't like such goings-on with respectable neighbors."

Mrs. Meadows possibly overestimated the post commandant's interest in these matters, but she had gratefully remembered his civility to her husband when he went to make fatherly inquiries. The colonel was a father himself, and had seemed to appreciate their anxiety about Callie's choice. It was just as well that Meta should know that none of the constituted authorities were on the side of her lover's defection.

Meta said nothing to all this. It did not touch her, only as it bore on the one question, Was Henniker going to leave her behind him?

"How long is it since you have seen him, that he hasn't told you this news himself?" asked the mother.

"Last night; but perhaps he did not know."

Henniker had known, as Mrs. Meadows supposed, but having to shift for himself in the matter of transportation for the wife he had never acknowledged, and seeing no way of providing for her without considerable inconvenience to himself, he had put off the pain of breaking to her the parting that must come. In their later consultations Meta had mentioned her "pony money," as she called it, and Henniker had privately welcomed the existence of such a fund. It lightened the pressure of his own responsibility in the future, in case – but he did not formulate his doubts. There are more uncertainties than anything else, except hard work, in the life of an enlisted man.

Father Meadows purposely would not speak of Meta's resources. He felt that Henniker had not earned his confidence in this or any other respect where his girls were concerned. Till Meta should come of age, – she was barely sixteen, – or until it could be known what sort of a husband she had got in Henniker, her bit of money was safest in her guardian's hands.

So the orders came, and the transfer of troops was made; and now it was the trumpeter of C troop that sounded the calls, and Henniker's bold messages at guard-mounting and his tender good-night at taps called no more across the plain. The summer lilies were all dead on the hills, and the common was white with snow. But something in Meta's heart said, —

"'Weep no more! Oh, weep no more!Young buds sleep in the root's white core.'"

And she dried her eyes. The mother was very gentle with her; and Callie, hard-eyed, saying nothing, watched her, and did her little cruel kindnesses that cut to the quick of her soreness and her pride.

When the Bannock brethren came, late in September, the next year, she walked the sagebrush paths to their encampment with her young son in her arms. They looked at the boy and said that it was good; but when they asked after the father, and Meta told them that he had gone with his troop to Fort Custer, and that she waited for word to join him, they said it was not good, and they turned away their eyes in silence from her shame. The men did, but the women looked at her in a silence that said different things. Her heart went out to them, and their dumb soft glances brought healing to her wounds. What sorrow, what humiliation, was hers that they from all time had not known? The men took little notice of her after that: she had lost caste both as maid and wife; she was nothing now but a means of existence to her son. But between her and her dark sisters the natural bond grew strong. Old lessons that had lain dormant in her blood revived with the force of her keener intelligence, and supplanted later teachings that were of no use now except to make her suffer more.

It was impossible that Mother Meadows should not resent the wrong and insult to her own child; she felt it increasingly as she came to realize the girl's unhappiness. It grew upon her, and she could not feel the same towards Meta, who kept herself more and more proudly and silently aloof. She was one alone in the house, where no one spoke of the past to reproach her, where nothing but kindness was ever shown. The kindness was like the hand of pardon held out to her. Why did they think she wanted their forgiveness? She was not sorry for what she had done. She wanted nothing, only Henniker. So she crept away with her child and sat among the Bannock women, and was at peace with them whom she had never injured; who beheld her unhappiness, but did not call it her shame.

When she walked the paths across the common, her eyes were always on the skyward range of hills that appeared to her farther away than ever, – beyond a wider gulf, now that their tops were white, and the clouds came low enough to hide them. Often yellow gleams shot out beneath the clouds and turned the valleys green. It seemed to her that Henniker was there; he was in the cold, bright north, and the trumpets called her, but she could not go, for the way was very long. Such words as these she would sometimes whisper to her dark sisters by the camp-fire, and once they said to her, "Get strong and go; we will show you the way."

Henniker was taking life as it comes to an enlisted man in barracks. He thought of Meta many times, and of his boy, very tenderly and shamefully; and if he could have whistled them to him, or if a wind of luck could have blown them thither, he would have embraced them with joy, and shared with them all that he had. There was the difficulty. He had so little besides the very well fitting clothes on his back. His pay seemed to melt away, month by month, and where it went to the mischief only knew. Canteen got a good deal of it. Henniker was one of the popular men in barracks, with his physical expertness, his piping and singing and story-telling, and his high good humor at all times with himself and everybody else. He did not drink much, except in the way of comradeship, but he did a good deal of that. He was a model trumpeter, and a very ornamental fellow when he rode behind his captain on full-dress inspection, more bedight than the captain himself with gold cords and tags and bullion; but he was not a domestic man, and the only person in the world who might perhaps have made him one was a very helpless, ignorant little person, and – she was not there.

It was a bad season for selling ponies. The Indians had arrived late with a larger band than usual, which partly represented an unwise investment they had made on the strength of their good fortune the year before. Certain big ditch enterprises had been starting then, creating a brisk demand for horses at prices unusual, especially in the latter end of summer. This year the big ditch had closed down, and was selling its own horses, or turning them out upon the range, and unbroken Indian ponies could hardly be given away.

The disappointment of the Bannocks was very great, and their comprehension of causes very slow. It took some time for them to satisfy themselves that Father Meadows was telling them a straight tale. It took still more time for consultations as to what should now be done with their unsalable stock. The middle of October was near, and the grumbling chiefs finally decided to accept their loss and go hunting. The squaws and children were ordered home to the Reservation by rail, as wards of the nation travel, to get permission of the agent for the hunt, and the men, with ponies, were to ride overland and meet the women at Eagle Rock.

Thus Meta learned how an Indian woman may pass unchallenged from one part of the country to another, clothed in the freedom of her poverty. In this way the nation acknowledges a part of its ancient indebtedness to her people. No word had come from Henniker, though he had said that he should get his discharge in October. Meta's resolve was taken. The Bannock women encouraged her, and she saw how simple it would be to copy their dress and slip away with them as far as their roads lay together; and thence, having gained practice in her part and become accustomed to its disguises, to go on alone to Custer, where her chief, her beautiful trumpeter, was sounding his last calls. She was wise in this resolution – to see her husband, at whatever cost, before the time of his freedom should come; but she was late in carrying it out.

Long before, she had turned over fruitlessly in her mind every means of getting money for this journey besides the obvious way of asking Father Meadows for her own. She had guessed that her friends were suspicious of Henniker's good faith, and believed that if they should come to know of her intention of running away to follow him they would prevent her for her own good, – which was quite the case.

That was the point Father Meadows made with his wife, when she argued that Meta, being a married woman now, ought to learn the purchasing power of money and its limitations by experimenting with a little of her own.

"We shall do wrong if we keep her a child now," she said.

"But if she has money, she'll lay it by till she gets enough to slip off to her soldier with. There's that much Injun about her; she'll follow to heel like a dog."

Father Meadows could not have spoken in this way of Meta a year ago. She had lost caste with him, also.

"Don't, father," the mother said, with a hurt look. "She'll not follow far with ten dollars in her pocket; but that much I want to try her with. She's like a child about shopping. She'll take anything at all, if it looks right and the man persuades her. And those Jew clerks will charge whatever they think they can get."

Mrs. Meadows had her way, and the trial sum was given to Meta one day, and the next day she and the child were missing.

At dusk, that evening, a group of Bannock squaws, more or less encumbered with packs, and children, climbed upon one of the flat cars of a freight train bound for Pocatello. The engine steamed out of the station, and down the valley, and away upon the autumn plains. The next morning the Bannocks broke camp, and vanished before the hoar frost had melted from the sage. Their leave-taking had been sullen, and their answers to questions about Meta, with which Father Meadows had routed them out in the night, had been so unsatisfactory that he took the first train to the Fort Hall Agency. There he waited for the party of squaws from Bisuka; but when they came, Meta was not with them. They knew nothing of her, they said; even the agent was deceived by their counterfeit ignorance. They could tell nothing, and were allowed to join their men at Eagle Rock, to go hunting into the wild country around Jackson's Hole.

Father Meadows went back and relieved his wife's worst fear, – that the girl had fulfilled the wrong half of her destiny, and gone back to hide her grief in the bosom of her tribe.

"Then you'll find her at Custer," said she. "You must write to the quartermaster-sergeant. And be sure you tell him she's married to him. He may be carrying on with some one else by this time."

Traveling as a ward of the nation travels; suffering as a white girl would suffer, from exposure and squalor, weariness and dirt, but bearing her misery like a squaw, Meta came at last to Custer station. In five days, always on the outside of comforts that other travelers pay for, she had passed from the lingering mildness of autumn in southern Idaho into the early winter of the hard Montana north.

She was fit only for a sick-bed when she came into the empty station at Custer, and learned that she was still thirty miles away from the fort. In her make-believe broken English, she asked a humble question about transportation. The station-keeper was called away that moment by a summons from the wire. It was while she stood listening to the tapping of the message, and waiting to repeat her question, that she felt a frightening pain, sharp, like a knife sticking in her breast. She could take only short breaths, yet longed for deep ones to brace her lungs and strengthen her sick heart. She stepped outside and spoke to a man who was wheeling freight down the platform. She dared not throw off her fated disguise and say, "I am the wife of Trumpeter Henniker. How shall I get to the fort?" for she had stolen a ride of a thousand miles, and she knew not what the penalty of discovery might be. She had borrowed a squaw's wretched immunity, and she must pay the price for that which she had rashly coveted. She pulled her blanket about her face and muttered, "Which way – Fort Custer?"

The freight man answered by pointing to the road. Dark wind clouds rolled along the snow-white tops of the mountains. The plain was a howling sea of dust.

"No stage?" she gasped.

The man laughed and shook his head. "There's the road. Injuns walk." He went on with his baggage-truck, and did not look at her again. He had not spoken unkindly: the fact and his blunt way of putting it were equally a matter of course, Squaws who "beat" their way in on freight trains do not go out by stage.

Meta crept away in the lee of a pile of freight, and sat down to nurse her child. The infant, like herself, had taken harm from exposure to the cold; his head passages were stopped, and when he tried to nurse he had to fight with suffocation and hunger both, and threw himself back in the visible act of screaming, but his hoarse little pipe was muted to a squeak. This, which sounds grotesque in the telling, was acute anguish for the mother to see. She covered her face with her blanket and sobbed and coughed, and the pain tore her like a knife. But she rose, and began her journey. She had little conception of what she was under-taking, but it would have made no difference; she must get there on her feet, since there was no other way.

She no longer carried her baby squaw fashion. She was out of sight of the station, and she hugged it where the burden lay heaviest, on her heart. Her hands were not free, but she had cast away her bundle of food; she could eat no more; and the warmth of the child's nestling body gave her all the strength she had, – that and her certainty of Henniker's welcome. That he would be faithful to her presence she never doubted. He would see her coming, perhaps, and he would run to catch her and the child together in his arms. She could feel the thrill of his eyes upon her, and the half groan of joy with which he would strain her to his breast. Then she would take one deep, deep breath of happiness, – ah, that pain! – and let the anguish of it kill her if it must.

The snows on the mountains had come down and encompassed the whole plain; the winter's siege had begun. The winds were iced to the teeth, and they smote like armed men. They encountered Meta carrying some hidden, precious thing to the garrison at Custer; they seized her and searched her rudely, and left her, trembling and disheveled, sobbing along with her silly treasure in her arms. The dust rose in columns, and traveled with mocking becks and bows before her, or burst like a bomb in her face, or circled about her like a band of wild horses lashed by the hooting winds.

Meantime, Henniker, in span-new civilian dress, was rattling across the plain on the box seat of the ambulance, beside the soldier driver. The ambulance was late to catch the east-bound train, and the pay-master was inside; so the four stout mules laid back their ears and traveled, and the heavy wheels bounded from stone to stone of the dust-buried road. Henniker smoked hard in silence, and drew great breaths of cold air into his splendid lungs. He was warm and clean and sound and fit, from top to toe. He had been drinking bounteous farewells to a dozen good comrades, and though sufficiently himself for all ordinary purposes, he was not that self he would have wished to be had he known that one of the test moments of his life was before him. It was a mood with him of headlong, treacherous quiet, and the devil of all foolish desires was showing him the pleasures of the world. He was in dangerously good health; he had got his discharge, and was off duty and off guard, all at once. He was a free man, though married. He was going to his wife, of course. Poor little Meta! God bless the girl, how she loved him! Ah, those black-eyed girls, with narrow temples and sallow, deep-fringed eyelids, they knew how to love a man! He was going to her by way of Laramie, or perhaps the coast. He might run upon a good thing over there, and start a bit of a home before he sent for her or went to fetch her; it was all one. She rested lightly on his mind, and he thought of her with a tender, reminiscent sadness, – rather a curious feeling considering that he was to see her now so soon. Why was she always "poor little Meta" in his thoughts?