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Page 64
She did not know that they had already heard it, listening outside her
door with heavy hearts and troubled faces, and when Joyce had found it
and again read it aloud, she told them the story of the memory road that
she was trying to leave behind her.
"It will be harder to do now that I am blind," she said, at the last,
"for I can't help being a care and a trouble to everybody, everywhere I
go now. But godmother says people won't mind that much if I'll only be
pleasant and cheerful about my misfortune, and not let it cast its
shadow on other lives any more than I can help. I haven't said anything
about it yet to her, but if there is enough money in the bank that papa
left to educate me with, I want to go to a school for the blind and
learn to read those queer raised letters, and to do everything for
myself. Then I'll not be such a trouble to everybody."
"But how can you be cheerful and pleasant, and go on that way for a
whole lifetime?" asked Eugenia, with a shiver. "You may live to be an
old, old woman."
"Oh, Eugenia!" exclaimed Joyce, in a shocked undertone. "Don't remind
the poor little thing of of that."
"I know," answered Betty, her smile all gone now, and her lip trembling.
"Sometimes when I think of that, it's so awful that I can hardly stand
it. But it will be only a day at a time, and if I can manage to get
through them one by one, and keep my courage up to the end, it will be
all right afterward, you know, for there is no night _there_. The nurse
read me that yesterday out of Revelation. That's the only thing that
comforts me sometimes." She repeated it in a soft whisper, turning her
face away: "There'll be _no night there_!"
CHAPTER XV.
"THE ROAD OF THE LOVING HEART."
Joyce sat with her elbows on her dressing-table and her chin in her
hands, gazing thoughtfully into the mirror. She had just come from
Betty's room, and the child's patient cheerfulness, in the face of the
dark future that threatened her, had brought the tears to her eyes.
"Dear little Betty!" she said to her reflection in the mirror. "What a
beautiful memory of her we will all carry away with us! There isn't a
single thing I would want to forget about her. She will be leaving each
one of us a Road of the Loving Heart to look back on. And it's like the
work of the old Samoan chiefs, too! Built to last for ever. It frightens
me to think that what I've done is going to be remembered for ever and
ever and ever; but that is what Mrs. Sherman said: '_The memories we dig
into our souls will go with us into eternity_.'
"If I should die right now, what a lot of things I would want people to
forget about me; especially the family. I've been so mean to Jack and
so selfish with Mary. I'm going to begin the minute I get back to the
little brown house to start to make a memory road for everybody, that I
need not be ashamed of when I lie a-dying."
Then she gave a shamefaced little glance at her reflection in the
mirror. "No, that's putting it off too long. That is one of my worst
habits. I'll begin this minute and write that letter to mamma that I
have been putting off all week. And I'll take time to make it
interesting, and write all the little things that I know she wants to
hear about. And I'll not be so snappish with Eugenia, and make her feel
that she was most to blame about our getting the measles. I've taken a
mean sort of pleasure in doing it before. Poor thing, she seems to feel
dreadfully bad about it, and there's no use my adding anything to her
distress." And Joyce, jumping up, took out her writing materials, and
sat down at her desk.
At the same moment the Little Colonel was hanging around the door
waiting for Mrs. Sherman, who sat in the room until Betty fell asleep.
There was a lingering tenderness in Lloyd's kiss as she threw her arms
around her mother's neck, and, though no word was spoken, Mrs. Sherman
knew that Lloyd had taken Betty's little sermon to heart.
"Where is Eugenia, dear?" she asked.
"She has gone to her room, I think."
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