Part 15

Then she meditated swiftly upon her theory that Mrs. Larrabee had reasons of her own for all her good works; that they were subtle investments, as it were, sure of a return in better kind, and quadrupled in value. She could evolve no view in which the promised "settin' of tur-r-key aigs" could figure as assets save for a general conciliatory purpose; and then she remembered that Cap'n Lucy was a widower. A sneering smile stole over her face, arrested suddenly by a grave afterthought; if for this reason the family were worth conciliating for Mrs. Larrabee's sake, surely more for her own. "Lord knows, I need a house, an' home, an' land, an' horse critters, an' cows, an' sheep, an' hawgs--he hev jes' two childern, an' them growed, an' that niece gal could be turned out" (she hastily went over the list of Cap'n Lucy's earthly gear, omitting only that important possession, himself)--"a sight more 'n Mis' Lar'bee do, ennyhows."

With a sudden change of heart, she ran to the road, holding her hand to the level of her eyes to shade them from the glare of the sun; but look as she might, there was not a flitting vestige to be seen of the dark brickdust red, the color of the dress which Julia wore. She called again and again without response. She thought the girl must surely have heard; then she reassured herself by the reflection that the wind was blowing a gale, and doubtless the sound of her voice went far afield.

Its shrill pipe might have been easily enough distinguishable to ears that would heed, although the surges of the wind beat loud on every rock and slope. Julia took angry note as she went swiftly on and on, her skirts flying, her bonnet blown back, her heart hot with wrath against Mrs. Timson, against herself, against Adelicia who had sent her on so ill starred an errand. Her eyes and her gesture were singularly like Cap'n Lucy's, as, threading the narrow path above the precipice, she paused and flung the empty basket into the wilderness below, and then walked on less swiftly, her tense nerves relaxed by this ebullition of rage. Like Cap'n Lucy, too, she felt the better for it, albeit she realized as he never would have done that the basket would be sorely missed at home. With the riddance she somehow discharged her mind of the thought of the Larrabee threshold, of her inhospitable reception there, of the whole ignoble episode. She looked out with a sort of enjoyment at the muster of the clouds, the gathering of rank after rank; ever and again her unaffrighted eyes followed the swift yellow lightnings darting through the gray masses, and she seemed to be just opposite them as she stood on the verge of the precipice on the mountain side. Lower down on the wooded slope across the narrow valley, she could see the track of the wind, which never touched those silent, vaporous congregations, motionless, or coming with contrary currents from opposite directions. The trees below bent and sprang back into place, and she could hear the sibilant shouting of the leaves. It was like a myriad of shrill tiny voices, but they combined into a massive chorus. The growths hard by were adding a refrain; the wind was winning new territory as it came up the mountain. She could see far away a cloud torn into fringes, and presently the rain was falling. It was coming nearer and nearer; she would meet it long before she could reach home. She quickened her steps at the thought. Sometimes the growths intervened on both sides of the path, and shut out the observation of the coming storm. Whenever she emerged, she noted the darkening aspect. More than once the thunder shook the very mountains. Suddenly, a searching, terrible illumination, the rising of the tumultuous wind, a frightful succession of peals, brought her to a pause. She hardly dared to face a storm like this, shelterless, and the store at the Lost Time mine was close at hand. Nevertheless she hesitated for a moment. Cap'n Lucy's well-worn jest as to the "perfessional widower" was hardly so funny to her as to him. She stood, disconcerted, conscious, averse, in the teeth of the storm, her dress fluttering, her bonnet tossed back from her shining coiled hair, her eyes bright and wide and wistful, and the breath almost blown back from her lips. Then she noted suddenly the portal of the Lost Time mine. She did not pause to reflect; to dread the long, darkening, solitary afternoon in its dim recesses; to remember the terrors of its traditions, and what ghastly presence she might meet, and what sepulchral voices she might hear, in the awful isolations of the coming storm, when all the laws that govern the outside world seemed set at naught; for if ever the supernatural should break bounds, it might be at a place like this. She ran against the wind as swiftly as she might; skirted the water on the stones in the channel at the mouth of the cave, now more deeply submerged than their wont, for the stream was rising visibly, its underground tributaries already fed by the rains falling elsewhere; felt with a shiver the chill of the place, as the high, grim, rough-hewn rocks towered above her head; climbed up on the inner ledges; and as the first floodlike outbreak of the torrents came down with a crash of thunder, and a glare of lightning, and a wild shrieking of swirling winds, she sat down, high and dry, and drew a breath of relief.

The next instant her heart gave a great plunge, and then seemed to stand still. She was not alone. A man in a further recess appeared suddenly, approaching cautiously. He evidently had not seen her. Her entrance into the place had preceded his appearance only by a few seconds. He was watching the rain with intense interest. She would have said that he had been apprised of it by the rise of the water within. He bestowed an eager, careful, calculating scrutiny upon the stream below the high shadowy point where he stood; then he looked toward the portal where the descending sheets of rain cut off all glimpse of the world without. He was turning away, with the furtive, skulking, cautious air that had characterized his approach, when his eyes fell upon her. He dropped out of sight as if he had been shot.

She sat there, silent, trembling, her eyes fixed upon the spot where he had disappeared, her heart beating wildly. She heard the flow of the stream below, its volume and momentum continually increasing, and the foaming turmoil where the currents met the dash of the rain at the outlet of the mine; now and again she was conscious that lightning flashed through the gray and white descending torrents without, and lit up this dreary subterranean recess with its uncanny glare for a space, till distance annulled its power, and she heard the thunder roar. But she did not withdraw her eyes, and she wondered if he had known her in that short moment as she had recognized him. For it was Jack Espey.

It seemed so long while she sat there, waiting for some sign, or token, or further intimation, that she might have thought the apparition a mere illusion, had she ever heard enough of the tricks of the imagination to learn to doubt her senses. She was trembling still, although her voice was calm enough as at last she called his name.

"Jack Espey!" the echoes cried out, as promptly as if it were a familiar sound and long ago conned. They fell to silence gradually. She did not call again, but, with her slow and composed manner, she waited for him to answer.

When he finally approached, apparently ascending an incline from depths below, he met her intent gaze fixed upon him; but she seemed to him as impassive and as unmoved of aspect as if this were a daily occurrence in her life.

"I war in hopes ye didn't know me, Julia," he said, dully sad, as he came up near her.

He stood leaning his elbow on one of the shelves of rock, looking up at her, mechanically shielding himself behind the jagged ledges from observation without, although it might seem naught could stand in the storm that raged beyond.

His plight was forlorn. His clothes were worn and torn, and miry with clay; it adhered in flakes and smears to his long boots, incongruously spurred. His face was lined and white. His hat was pushed far back on his black hair, as of yore, and his long-lashed grayish-blue eyes had an appealing look which she had not seen before.

"What fur ye wished I wouldn't know ye?"

He looked hard at her. "'Kase it's dangersome. I'm a man hunted fur my life, I reckon. It's dangersome fur me, an' fur ye too, ter know I be hyar."

"It's jes' ez well I ain't one of the skeery kind, then," said Julia hardily. "I be powerful glad I seen ye hyar."

She seemed curiously unfamiliar to him in some sort. So alert had his faculties become in the suspense of jeopardy that this slight point perturbed him, until he bethought himself that he had hitherto heard her speak so seldom, and had observed her so little, that the very inflections of her voice were strange. It was of a different timbre from Adelicia's. It did not vibrate. It had a conclusive, flutelike quality, without a trailing sequence of resonance.

"Waal, I 'lowed ez mos' ennybody mought be sorry ter see me in sech a fix as this," he said dolorously.

The deliberate, impassive Julia was almost in haste to avert this apparent misconstruction. "Oh, I war glad ter view ye, 'kase a heap o' folks 'lowed ye couldn't hev got away 'thout yer horse, him bein' kilt, an' ez ye war a-lyin' in the laurel somewhar, dead, yit."

She turned her head, and looked steadily at him. Her deep, dark, translucent eyes were full of shoaling lights of variant blue, like the heart of some great sapphire. The long, curling lashes flung a fibrous shadow on her cheek; its texture, as the light fell upon it, was so fine, so soft, its tints so fair, its curve so delicate. Her lips, chiseled like some triumph of ideal beauty, but that no sculpture could express their mobile sweetness, parted suddenly in her rare and brilliant smile.

Many a man, under its glamours, might have taken heart of grace to be glad that he was alive; but Espey's face hardened.

"'T would be jes' ez well, jes' ez well, lying dead in the laur'l," he said bitterly. Then, with an afterthought, "Let them folks stay 'feared. They won't spile thar health quakin' an' shudderin' 'bout me," he added cynically. As he marked her expression change, her smile vanish, he realized the necessity to please, to propitiate. He knew her so slightly; his temper must not be too savage and surly with so complete a stranger, and perhaps earn her antagonism, especially since he and his refuge were at her mercy.

"Course," he went on, with a clumsy effort at amends, "I don't mean Ad'licia. Ye knowed we-uns war keepin' comp'ny?"

She nodded gravely.

"I know Ad'licia hev quaked an' shuddered 'bout me a heap mo' 'n I be wuth," he added.

Was the day darker outside, or how was quenched that subtle brightness of aspect that had made the girl's face radiant? It was beautiful still, that statuesque contour, but as chill and unresponsive as if indeed its every line had been wrought with a chisel. The smooth hair, with its sheen of silken fineness, caught the light on its coiled and plaited chestnut-tinted strands. One hand rested on her brown sunbonnet, laid on the ledge of the gray rock, and she leaned her weight upon it. Her head and her fair complexion--so fair that it transmitted to the surface an outline of the blue veins in her temple and throat, and even her eyelids--and the roseate fluctuations in her cheek were very distinct against the yellow clay of the bank of earth behind her. Her little rough low-quarter shoes and the brown stockings showed a trifle beneath the skirt of the brick-dust-colored homespun dress she wore, as they were placed on a boulder that stood out of the tawny rushing stream below.

He noted the change. He could not account for it other than as a vicarious resentment.

"I ain't faultin' Ad'licia," he said, more emphatically. "She war tormented powerful 'bout me, warn't she?"

"A-fust," said Julia veraciously. Her voice was as inexpressive as her eyes. "But Ad'licia is one ez always hopes fur the best."

He drew back with a sudden recoil. "Waal, now, by the Lord!" he cried furiously, "she's welcome ter her hope! Settin' thar in the house, warm, an' dry, an' fed, an' clean,"--he looked down with a sort of repulsion upon his miry garments,--"a-hopin' fur the bes', an' makin' herself mighty comfort'ble an' contented, an' _me_ hyar, freezin' in this cold hole, an' mighty nigh starvin', in rags an' mis'ry, an' sick, an' sorry, an' lonesome enough ter die, an' shet out o' the light! My God, ef I warn't 'feared o' my life, I'd let the off'cer take me! The State hain't got no sech term o' imprisonment ez this!"

Julia was leaning forward, each line of her impassive face replete with meaning, reflecting his every sentiment, but with the complement of sympathy and acquiescence and responsive anger in his anger.

He turned suddenly, lifting his arm with a scornful gesture toward the low vault with its dank, earthy odor, the ledges of barren, inhospitable rock, the cold stream rushing forth from the darkness within, seen in an appalling blackness adown the tunnel, against which his white-lined face looked whiter, his form taller in his closely belted garb and with his long boots drawn up to the knees. He waved his arm as if to include it all. "An' Ad'licia,--she hopes for the bes'."

He broke out into a harsh laugh, which the echoes repeated so promptly, and with apparently so malignant an intent, that he checked it hastily, and the sound died on his colorless lips; but far down the black tunnel something uncanny seemed to fall to laughing suddenly, and as suddenly to break off; and again a further voice still was lifted in weird mirth, and the laughter failed midway.

He waited for silence, and then he leaned against a higher ledge near which she was sitting, and, resting his elbow on it, looked at her once more, wondering how he might best revert to his object of propitiation. He was remembering that Adelicia had told him how prone was Julia to notice slights, and how quick to take offense. He felt hardly equal to the effort of repairing the damage of his outbreak against her relative, so spent was his scanty strength by the violence of his anger and his agitation. He could only look at her silently, more forlorn, more pallid, more appealing, than before.

"I oughtn't ter think hard o' Ad'licia," he said at last. "Nobody else would, I know. Would they?" he added.

For, with Julia's silent habit, conversation was somewhat difficult without a direct appeal. It was a direct appeal. She liked to remember that afterward.

"Waal," she said, slowly and judicially, as if weighing matters submitted for arbitrament, "I 'low Ad'licia treated ye right mean, fust an' las'."

"Why?" he rejoined, in genuine interest, his face resuming its normal expression before flight and hardship and darkness and loneliness and fear and privation had so marked it.

"'Kase," she went on in that soft, unfamiliar voice that the echoes seemed hardly to follow, so complete, so indivisible, was every flutelike tone, "she oughter married ye whenst ye axed her--ef she liked ye."

A faint surprise was dawning in his eyes.

"Cap'n Lucy wouldn't gin his cornsent," he said succinctly.

"I reckon he 'lowed 't war his jewty ter say no. But ef Ad'licia hed married ye ennyhows, do ye reckon dad would hev let that leetle fice o' the law, 'Dolphus Ross, jail _his_ nephew-in-law 'kase a man he fought in Tanglefoot Cove _mought_ die ef he didn't hev the industry ter git well? Naw, sir: ye'd hev hed dad an' Luther fur backers, an' they air toler'ble stiff backers, fur enny man. Dad would hev fixed a way out'n it fur ye, fur sure, count o' Ad'licia. She war a turr'ble fool not ter marry ye, an' I tole her so."

The surprise, the doubt, and at last the conviction successively expressed in Espey's face might have been easily discriminated by one skilled in reading the human physiognomy. But Julia possessed no such craft, and when he spoke she appreciated no change in his manner, albeit it was not guarded; for he did not conceive it necessary to closely screen the discovery of a secret of which he perceived that Julia was herself unconscious.

"Julia," he said appealingly, "ye see how I be hunted an' harried, an' nobody keers fur me. Jes' let the folks shudder an' quake fur a while longer 'thout knowin' what's kem o' me. Don't tell nobody ez ye hev seen me hyar."

She was gazing out at the steely lines of the rain curtain, so dense as to be like a veritable fabric, as it swayed in the wind at the rugged mouth of the mine, and its foaming white fringes that seemed to trail upon the brown water where the continuous downfall splashed into its currents. The peculiarly clear, colorless light of a gray day, which, in its adequacy for all the purposes of mere vision, would seem to point the munificence and splendid lavishness of the sun's bestowals in the interests of beauty and growths and the gladdening of the heart of man, was upon her face, which responded with a sort of subdued glister like marble. Her eyes and the shadowy long black lashes were meditatively downcast. She was evidently reviewing the course of action which she had just sketched for him, for Adelicia, for Cap'n Lucy. He did not hold her undivided attention, and he realized that it was only a mechanical assent as she nodded, her face still reflective, absorbed.

"Not even Cap'n Lucy," he urged eagerly. "Not Jasper Lar'bee"--He paused suddenly.

The word seemed to arrest, to enchain, her elusive attention. The delicate roseate tints of her fair complexion deepened from throat to brow; her cheek was vividly red. She was remembering the Larrabee threshold, the greeting she had encountered there, the grotesque indignity of Henrietta Timson's affronts. But hers was a reticent habit, and she had a reserved nature. She only said, conclusively, slowly, "Ye may be sure I won't tell Jasper Lar'bee."

Somehow Espey felt a sense of loss; and he had so little to lose, poor fellow, that albeit her affection was unsought, uncared for, unsuspected till a moment ago, the doubt of it afflicted him as if his heart were cruelly rifled. That flush at Larrabee's name! To him it was conclusive. He had no other indication by which to judge. He had mistaken her sympathy, her idle talk; she was wont to talk so seldom that it was not surprising that he hardly knew how to take her words; he knew so little of her and her mental processes. She cared for Larrabee, not for him. Nobody cared for him. And Adelicia was hoping for the best.

"This be a mighty pore shelter an' home an' hope," he said, grimly looking about him. "I hed prayed I mought crope inter a hole ter hide or die, like a hunted fox or bar or painter be 'lowed ter do sometimes. That didn't 'pear ter me much fur a man ter ax of the Lord."

He stood off from the rock for an instant, his big white wool hat in one hand, the other in his leather belt where that formidable array of weapons still gleamed. His head was thrown back from the loose collar of his blue-checked shirt; his straight hair was tossed from his brow; his gray eyes, scornfully bitter, surveyed the dripping walls,--so dark that in the recesses here and there clusters of bats hung head downward, dimly descried, awaiting the night,--the rugged obtrusion of rock through the clay, the chill, chill flowing of the brown water in the channel below, as ceaseless, as cold, as heedless, as relentless, as in the days of yore when it broke its allotted bounds, rose into alien hewn-out caverns, and flooded the mine, wrecking the humble industry of man, wresting away with its grasping currents two struggling human lives, and carrying not even a gruesome memory or token of its deeds upon its sleek waves out into the sunshine, and the free air, and the genial warmth of the upper world.

"'Tain't much I hev axed,--this hole ter starve an' die in,--but mebbe it's too much!" Then, turning, with an eye alight, and a furious flush that made him look all at once well and strong and alert and reckless again, "But tell whar I be hid out--tell--tell who ye want! Tell ennybody--everybody! Cap'n Lucy! the sher'ff! Taft! Jasper Lar'bee!"

And what miracle was this! The silent, impassive, reserved, reticent Julia fixed her eyes upon him for a moment, amazed, troubled, and then, as she suddenly comprehended, full of a keen but tender reproach. And until that moment he had not known how beautiful those much-vaunted eyes could be. The next they were full of tears, and Julia, leaning back against the wall behind her, had burst into sobs.

"Tell! Why, Jack Espey, how kin ye think I could be made to tell whar ye be hid out?" She turned her head to look at him again with hurt and indignant amazement. "I'd die first! Powder an' lead"--she hesitated for hyperbole that might express this impossibility--"all the powder and lead the men shot away in the war times couldn't git a word from me o' what I hev fund out this evenin'!"

"I know it!" he protested, coming up close to her, as she sat on the ledge. "I oughtn't ter hev said that, but ye see, Julia, I feel so s'picious, sometimes; I be so hunted an' harried, an' nobody keers fur me or whar I be--'ceptin' the sher'ff." He lifted his eyebrows, with a fleering laugh at his own forlorn estate.

"I keer," said Julia stoutly. "I won't tell nobody whar ye be hid out,--not even dad, nor Luther, nor nobody, 'ceptin' Ad'licia."

He gasped in haste for utterance. He caught at her hand as if he were drowning,--as if she might be gone before he could stay her for a word.

"Not Ad'licia! Oh my Lord, no! Jes' leave her a-hopin' fur the bes'!" He had hardly realized how deeply he had resented Adelicia's optimistic resignation to his fate. His sarcastic laugh was broken off halfway in his eager resumption of his argument. "Ad'licia mought feel obligated ter tell Cap'n Lucy, an' 'bide by his word. With her a-hopin' fur the bes', an' Cap'n Lucy's foolin' long o' his jewty ter his orphin niece, I'll git the sher'ff's bracelets locked round my wrists; an' the jail ain't ez sightly a place ez this beautisome spot. I be a man fur myself, an' I can't ondertake ter cut out all my cloth with Cap'n Lucy's scissors. Ad'licia's contented. Leff her be! She'll hope fur the bes' with a twenty horse power."

He did not remember Mrs. Larrabee's astute remark in the advice she had given him to the effect that "perlitin' round the t'other gal wouldn't go so hard with him," if she were really a "gyardin lily" for beauty. He only felt vaguely that he had not heretofore appreciated the radiance of the face that Julia bent upon him; he did not understand that it was the moment, the unrealized thought, which so embellished it, as she said cogitatingly, "Naw, 't won't do ter tell Ad'licia. I won't tell her."

"See ter it that ye don't," he sternly urged her. And once more he was impressed with the idea that he really had not before known how singularly beautiful she was.

"Ye see, Julia," he said, lowering his voice confidentially, "I can't git away, 'kase I got no horse; an' ef I hed one, I hev got no money, an' I'd jes' be tuk somewhar, now that the folks hev got sot onto the trail of me. So I 'lowed I'd hide hyarabout till I git news from Tanglefoot ez that man hev got better. Ye see I be hopin' fur the bes', too," he added, with a pathetic smile. "It's all I kin do."

"How do ye git suthin' ter eat?" she asked suddenly.

Espey looked embarrassed. "Oh, I makes out," he said evasively. "I gits out at night sometimes."

She assumed that he hunted or trapped at night for provisions. He noted that she did not argue nor contend, as Adelicia was wont to do. She accepted his arrangements as intrinsically the best.

"I could fetch ye suthin' wunst in a while," she suggested.

He looked aghast at the idea.