The Dark Star

For the Sublime Porte and the Kurds had had their usual way at last;

there was nothing left of the Mission; school and converts were gone;

her wounded husband, her baby, and herself refugees in a foreign

consulate; and the Turkish Government making apologies with its fat

tongue in its greasy cheek.

The Koran says: "Woe to those who pray, and in their prayers are

careless."

The Koran also says: "In the name of God the Compassionate, the

Merciful: What thinkest thou of him who treateth our religion as a

lie?"

Mrs. Carew and her crippled husband knew, now, what the Sublime Porte

thought about it, and what was the opinion of the Kurdish cavalry

concerning missionaries and converts who treated the Moslem religion

as a lie.

She looked at her pallid and crippled husband; he was still reading;

his crutches lay beside him on the floor. She turned her eyes to the

window. Out there the solitary crow was still walking busily about in

the frozen pasture. And again she remembered the vultures that hulked

and waddled amid the débris of the burned Mission.

Only that had been in May; and above the sunny silence in that place

of death had sounded the unbroken and awful humming of a million

million flies....

* * * * *

And so, her husband being now hopelessly broken and useless, they had

come back with their child, Ruhannah, to their home in Brookhollow.

Here they had lived ever since; here her grey life was passing; here

her daughter was already emerging into womanhood amid the stark,

unlovely environments of a country crossroads, arid in summer, iron

naked in winter, with no horizon except the Gayfield hills, no outlook

save the Brookhollow road. And that led to the mill.

She had done what she could--was still doing it. But there was nothing

to save. Her child's destiny seemed to be fixed.

Her husband corresponded with the Board of Missions, wrote now and

then for the Christian Pioneer, and lived on the scanty pension

allowed to those who, like himself, had become incapacitated in line

of duty. There was no other income.

There was, however, the six thousand dollars left to Ruhannah by her

grandmother, slowly accumulating interest in the Mohawk Bank at

Orangeville, the county seat, and not to be withdrawn, under the terms

of the will, until the day Ruhannah married or attained, unmarried,

her twenty-fifth year.

Neither principal nor interest of this legacy was available at

present. Life in the Carew family at Brookhollow was hard sledding,

and bid fair to continue so indefinitely.

* * * * *

The life of Ruhannah's father was passed in reading or in gazing

silently from the window--a tall, sallow, bearded man with the eyes of

a dreaming martyr and the hands of an invalid--who still saw in the

winter sky, across brown, snow-powdered fields, the minarets of

Trebizond.