Part 18

A slight movement of Tabitha's ears might have intimated that she marked the mention of her name. Otherwise she passed it with indifference. With her skimpy, shabby attire,--her fur seemed never to flourish,--her meek air of disaffection with the ways of this world, her look of adverse criticism as her yellow eyes followed the movements of the family, her thankless but resigned reception of all favors as being less than she had a right to expect, her ladylike but persistent exactions of her prerogatives, gave her, somehow, the style of a reduced gentlewoman, and the quietude and gentle indifference and air of superiority of the manners on which Cap'n Lucy had remarked were very genteel as far as they went.

Adelicia seemed heedless of the mentor thus pointed out. She noisily gathered up her work, somewhat cumbrous of paraphernalia, since it consisted of a small cedar tub, a large wooden bowl, and a heavy sack of the reddest of apples which she was paring for drying, and carried it all around the fireplace to seat herself between the two parties to this controversy.

"Now, uncle Lucy, ye jes' got ter gin Jasper yer advices, an' holp him out'n whatever snap he hev got inter."

Her deep gray eyes smiled upon the young man, as the firelight flashed upon her glittering knife and the red fruit in her hand, although her delicate oval face was grave enough. Ever and again she raised her head, as she worked, to toss back the tendrils of her auburn hair which were prone to fall forward as she bent over the task. There was a moment's silence as Jasper vainly sought to collect his ideas.

"Tell on, Jasper," she exhorted him. "I'm by ter pertect ye now. An' ennyhows, uncle Lucy's bark is a long shakes wuss'n his bite."

She smiled encouragingly upon the suppliant for advice; her own face was all unmarred by the perception that matters had gone much amiss with the processioning of the land, for uncle Lucy was a man often difficult to please, and sometimes only a crumple in his rose leaf was enough to make him condemn the queen of flowers as a mere vegetable, much overrated. The girl's aspect was all the brighter as she wore a saffron-tinted calico blouse and apron with her brown homespun skirt, and she seemed, with her lighted gray eyes, her fair, colorless face, and her ruddy auburn hair, a property of the genial firelight, flickering and flaring on the bright spot of color which she made in the brown shadows where she sat and pared the red apples. She reverted in a moment to that proclivity to argue with Cap'n Lucy which was so marked in their conversation.

"An' who is the young men ter depend on in thar troubles, uncle Lucy, ef not the old ones?" she demanded.

"On the young gals, 'pears like," promptly retorted "uncle Lucy," pertinently and perversely.

Then he caught himself suddenly. In the impossibility, under the circumstances, to concentrate his mind exclusively on his own affairs, his interest in correlated matters was reasserted. It occurred to him that it behooved him to foster any predilection that Adelicia might show for any personable man other than the fugitive Espey. He could see naught but perplexity and complication of many sorts to ensue for himself and his household should Espey return; and although Cap'n Lucy selfishly hoped and believed that this was, in the nature of things, impossible, still he had reluctantly learned by bitter experience the fallibility of his own judgment. It seemed to him a flagrant instance of inconstancy on Adelicia's part, but Cap'n Lucy gave that no heed. Few men truly resent a woman's cruelty to another man. Adelicia might have brought all the youth in the county to despair, for all hard-hearted Cap'n Lucy would have cared. And thus her appeal for Jasper Larrabee was not altogether disregarded.

"Goin' ter set thar an' chaw on it _all_ day, Jasper?" he demanded acridly. "Whyn't ye spit it out?"

"Why," said Larrabee, "it's 'bout this hyar Jack Espey."

The apple dropped from Adelicia's hand, and rolled unheeded across the hearth; the spinning-wheel was suddenly silent, and Julia, all glorified in the deeply yellow glare about her, sat holding it still with one hand on its rim. Cap'n Lucy's head was canted to one side, as if he were prepared to deliberate impartially on some difficult proposition.

"This Jack Espey,--I met up with him at the cross-roads store, an' struck up a likin' fur him, an' brung him home an' tuk him in, an' he hev been thar with me fur months an' months--an'--an' he never tole me ez he hed enny cause ter shirk the law."

"He war 'feared ter, I reckon, Jasper," said Adelicia.

"He never meant no harm, Jasper," the silent Julia broke in from where she sat in her dull red dress against the tawnily gilded glories of the western sky.

Beyond a mechanical "Hesh up, Ad'licia," Cap'n Lucy gave them no heed, but Luther glanced sharply from one to the other.

Jasper Larrabee replied in some sort: "Then he never treated me with the same confidence I done him. An', Cap'n Lucy," he continued, "ye yerse'f seen the e-end o' it. He purtended ter the sher'ff ter be _me_, an' tuk advantage o' my mother's callin' him 'sonny,' an' wore my name, an' went with 'em a-sarchin' fur hisse'f; an' whenst he got skeered, thinkin' ez they knowed him, he resisted arrest, an' kem nigh ter takin' the off'cer's life, whilst purtendin' ter be _me_, in my name!"

"He never meant no harm," faltered Adelicia, aghast at this showing against her absent lover.

"None in the worl'; he never went ter harm nuthin'," protested Julia's flutelike tones.

"Did ye kem hyar ter git my advices fur Jack Espey?" demanded Cap'n Lucy sourly. "He needs 'em, I know, but"--

"Naw, Cap'n Tems. I kem ter git 'em fur myse'f, fur I dunno which way ter turn. You-uns hyar saw the e-end o' it,--the night the dep'ty kem a-sarchin' fur Jasper Lar'bee, who he 'lowed he hed flung over the bluffs, an' I went along at his summons, knowin' 'twar Espey ez hed got away from him, purtendin' ter be _me_."

Cap'n Lucy nodded.

"Now I have hearn that dep'ty air in the Cove agin."

Cap'n Lucy remembered the dark, facetious, malicious face that the officer had borne as a spectator of the processioning of the land. He nodded again. "I hev seen him hyar ter-day."

"Ef I war knowed ter him ez Lar'bee, whenst he finds out 'twar Espey ez escaped that night, I mought be 'rested fur harborin' a fugitive, ez holpin' out the murder arter the fac'--an'--an' my mother--Espey gin me no chance, no ch'ice! Wouldn't ye 'low ez ennybody--_ennybody_--would hev tole me that, Cap'n Lucy, ter gin me the ch'ice o' dangerin' myse'f afore he tuk so much from me an' mine?"

Cap'n Lucy changed countenance. This was a new view of the matter. He had not judged from Larrabee's standpoint; for he himself had had full knowledge of the circumstances and the fact that they were withheld from Espey's entertainer. This was made suddenly manifest.

"Why, Jasper," expostulated Adelicia, her eyes full of tears, her vibrant tones tremulous with emotion, "he 'lowed ter we-uns ez he war sure the man wouldn't die o' the gunshot wound, bein' powerful big an' hearty; but he tuk out an' run, bein' turr'ble 'feared o' the law, and arrest an' lyin' in jail fur a long time, waitin', an' uncle Lucy said"--

She paused suddenly, for Jasper Larrabee had leaned forward in his chair, scanning the faces about him with a blank amazement so significant that it palsied the words on her tongue.

"Espey tole _you-uns_! An' Espey tole yer _uncle Lucy_! Why, then ye all knowed him ter be a runaway, an' ye knowed ez he war a-playin' his deceits on nobody but me an' my mother ez hed got him quartered on us, an' mebbe war liable ter the law fur it."

Adelicia, trembling, leaned back in her chair. Cap'n Lucy cast an infuriated glance upon her, and then, with a hasty, nervous hand, rubbed his brow back and forth, as if to stimulate his brain that offered no solution of the difficulty. Jasper Larrabee still sat leaning forward, his clear-cut face full of keen thought, a flush on his pale cheek, a fire kindling in his brown eyes, and a sarcastic smile curving his angry lips.

"My Gawd!" he exclaimed, "it is a cur'ous thing ez my mother ain't got a frien' in this worl'! She says she don't work fur thanks, an' I'll take my livin' oath she don't git 'em. That thar door o' the widder's cabin on the Notch hev stood open ter the frien'less day an' night since I kin remember. Her table's spread for the hongry. Her h'a'th's the home o' them ez hev no welcome elsewise an' elsewhere. An' her nigh neighbor an' old frien' sees a s'pected murderer quarter himself thar, an' bring s'picion an' trouble _ennyhow_, an' danger mebbe, on her an' hern. Ye mought hev advised Espey ter gin her her ch'ice, or leave. Ye mought hev done ez much ez that! My mother's a old 'oman; an' she's a proud 'oman, though ye moughtn't think it, an' the bare idee o' sech talk ez that,--of s'picion, an' arrest, an' jail,--it would kill her! it would kill her!"

Cap'n Lucy sat almost stunned, as under an arraignment. He pulled mechanically at his pipe, but his head was sunk on his breast, and his face was gray and set. The circumstances so graphically placed before him seemed to have no relation to those of his recollection; they wore a new guise. He had known all his life instances of collision in which powder and lead had played more or less a tragic part; but the rôle of the law had always been subsidiary and inadequate in the background of the scene, sometimes represented only by an outwitted officer, and the jollity of details of hairbreadth escapes. This construction of crime was beyond his purview of facts. He did not know, or he did not remember, that aught that others than the principal could do subsequent to a crime might render them liable as accessory after the fact. Espey had, in a fight, shot his antagonist,--such things were of frequent occurrence in Cap'n Lucy's memory. He never expected to see or to hear of the beagles of the law on the trail of the fugitive; his care, and his only care, was to prevent his niece from marrying an expatriated man while expatriated.

He thought now with a grievous sense of fault of old "Widder Lar'bee,"--her softness, her kindness, her life of care for others; and then he thought of Rodolphus Ross and his crude brutality, his imperviousness to any sanctions, his rough interpretation of fun, his eagerness to shield his own lapses of official vigilance, his grudges against the supposed Larrabee, and his threats. What mischief might a chance word work!

The dusky red of the last of the evening glow was creeping across the floor. All the metallic yellow glare was tarnished in the sky. Instead were strata of vaporous gray and slate tints alternating with lines of many-hued crimson, graduated till the ethereal hue of faintest rose ended the ascending scale of color. Still the frogs chorused and still the bird sang, but shadows had fallen, and they were not all of the night. Something of melancholy intimations drew his eyes to the purple heights without as Jasper Larrabee spoke.

"Waal, I'm her friend, ef she ain't got nare nother." And then, as if he felt he were arrogating unduly to his purpose, "An' I s'pose I'm a friend o' my own, too, an' I know _I_ ain't got nare nother. I kem hyar ter-night fur yer advices, Cap'n Tems; but ez ye don't 'pear ter have none ter gimme, I b'lieve I'll take my own. I'll settle this thing for myse'f. I'll find Jack Espey! I'll track him out. I'll run him down. I'll arrest him myse'f, an' I'll deliver him ter the law. An' let the door o' the jail that he opened fur me be shut an' barred on him!" There was a concentrated fury in his face as he said this. "I won't hide no mo' like a beast o' the yearth in a den in the ground, consortin' with wuss'n wolves an' bar an' painters. I won't skulk homeless like a harnt no mo' through the woods. I won't shirk the sher'ff no mo' fur Jack Espey's crimes, an' 'kase I done him nuthin' but good an' kindness! I'll find him,--the yearth can't kiver him so I can't find him,--an' I'll deliver him ter the law!"

He stood for one moment more, and then he strode across the room to the door, his shadow blotting out the last red light of the day, leaving the circle about the fire gazing wistfully and aggrieved after him, except Luther, who was picking up the borrowed coat which Larrabee had tossed aside as he passed.

Outside the night had fallen suddenly. The west was clouded, despite the lingering red strata, and the twilight curtailed. He looked through purple tissues of mists that appeared to have the consistency of a veil, to where yellow lights already gleamed through the shadows. They came from the shanties of the workmen beneath the cliffs, on which the ruins of the hotel had at last ceased to smoke. He hardly knew whither to turn. What pressure for explanations, what unbearable inquisitive insistence, would meet him at home, where Henrietta Timson reigned in the stead of his mother, he could well forecast; to venture near the Lost Time mine, within reach of Taft, was, he knew, as much as his life was worth. He hesitated now and again, as he went aimlessly up the road; regretting his outbreak at the Tems cabin; coveting its shelter, its fireside, the companionship of the home group; half minded to return thither; but resentment because of their half-hearted friendship, as he deemed it, pride and anger and shame, conspired to withhold him. Once again, as he ascended the mountain, he turned and looked down at the cluster of orange-tinted lights from the workmen's shanties that clung so close together in the depths of the purple valley, and he hesitated anew. White mists were abroad on their stealthy ways; a brooding stillness held the clouds; the mountains loomed sombre, melancholy, against them, indistinguishable and blent with them toward the west, save when the far-away lightnings of the past storm fluctuated through their dense gray folds, and showed the differing immovable outline of the purple heights. In the invisible pools below these transient flashes were glassed, shining through the gloom. The reflection of stars failed midway, because of the mist. There were few as yet in the sky, but as he lifted his eyes he beheld again, immeasurably splendid in the purple dusk, that sudden kindling of ethereal, palpitating, white fire which he had marked once before,--that new and supernal star, strange to all familiar ways of night hitherto, shining serene, aloof, infinitely fair above the melancholy piping mountain wilds and the troublous toils of the world.

XVI.

Jasper Larrabee stood transfixed, gazing at that tremulous, luminous astral presence with a strange superstitious thrill at his heart. It hardly seemed merely a star, so alien to his mind was its aspect in the erst untenanted spaces whence it blazed, so freighted with occult significance. Had the moment been charged with some wonderful apotheosis, some amplification of its pure white lustre into the benignant splendors of a vision of angels, the transformation could scarcely have exceeded the capacities of that breathless, insistent expectation which the ignorant mountaineer lifted toward it. For his was a simple faith, and his untaught mind had learned no doubts. And had never these nights of ours communion with celestial pursuivants? Did never the flutter of an angel's wing illumine far perspectives that darkle heavily over the earth? Was this rare fluid, which we call the air, so dense; were its sensitive searching vibrations, known as waves of light and sound, so dull, that it should feel naught, reveal naught, when the angel of the Lord flashed through the stars and the wind, through blossoming woods or bleak snows of deserts, and into the haunts and the homes of men?

So many had come! He did not know that they were alien to the nineteenth century, and that the most spiritual-minded of to-day would account for their sudden vision as from prosaic natural causes,--as mental aberration, or the distortions of a diseased fancy, or the meaningless phantasmagoria of somnolent cerebration. To him it seemed that they had been with man from the very beginning; and why should their presence here be stranger than his own? Their very numbers served to coerce credibility. So many had come! To kings, to wanderers in the wilderness, to prophets, to shepherds, in dreams and in the broad daylight, they came: to stand with a gleaming sword before the gates of Paradise, and to sing in the starry advent of a new day,--On earth peace, good will toward men; to bring the immortal lilies of the Annunciation, and to tread the ways of the fiery furnace; to touch the bursting bonds of saints in prison, and to roll away the stone from the sepulchre of all the world; to minister to the Christ alike in the shadows of Gethsemane and amongst the splendors of the Mount of the Transfiguration!

Larrabee was trembling in every limb, as the scenes trooped out before him in the vivid actuality of his recollections of the pages of the much-thumbed volume which he had left behind him when he had fled from the still in the Lost Time mine. He sank down upon the rocky verge of the precipice, amongst the clinging verdure of its jagged crevices. Some sweet-scented herb sent out its delicate incense under the pressure of his hands. A drowsy twitter of half-awakened nestlings came from the feathery boughs of a cedar-tree that a niche in the cliff hard by half nourished, half starved. The melancholy antiphony of the voices of the wilderness rose and fell in alternating strains, and at long intervals in a vague undiscriminated susurrus the night seemed to sigh.

He heard naught; he heeded naught. His unwinking gaze was fixed upon the wondrous star in the heavens, with that thronging association of angelic ministrants so definitely in his mind that he might have thought to see an amaranthine crown expanding from the rayonnant sidereal points, or the outline of a nearing pinion stretched strongly to cleave the ether. For so many had come!

But no! His imagination could compass no such apotheosis. The star remained a star. The exaltation of that moment of wild, vague, and breathless expectation exhaled slowly. A poignant sense of loss succeeded it. The prosaic details of the actual outer life pressed once more on his realization. He looked about him on the sombre wilderness, the black surly mountains, the itinerant mists, heedless whither, the steely glimmer here and there of the ponds where the water made shift to catch the reflection of the sky amidst the dun shadows, and sighed drearily with the sighing night.

He was penniless, shelterless, his life at the mercy of any chance that might favor his crafty enemy, his confidence betrayed by the fugitive whom he had succored, his liberty endangered, already a criminal in the eyes of the law,--an outcast, in truth, within a league of his home. From the nullity of the begloomed landscape the glance naturally rebounded, and the very obscuration of the earth lent glister and definiteness to the wonderful precision of the march of the constellations, as, phalanx after phalanx, they deployed, each in its allotted space and sequence, toward the west. And again his eyes dwelt upon that new splendor in the midst of them. How strange that it should suddenly blossom whitely forth among these old, old stars that had lighted the bosky ways of the garden of Eden! How strange that the sight of it should be vouchsafed to him--and why!

His pulses were tumultuously astir. All at once the thought that had been slowly framing itself in his mind took definite form. He wondered if it could be a sign for him, and of what!

In the arrogations of poor humanity of the higher things, in the infinite breadth of the claim of an immortal soul, vast incongruities meet. The extreme might seem reached in the ignorant mountaineer, the moonshiner obnoxious to the law, the poverty-stricken laborer, seeing with the wild preëmptions of fancy this star, all newly and miraculously alight in the sky, as charged with some mysterious relation to his infinitesimally petty and restricted life. But once admit the idea of an immortal spirit, heir of all knowledge, made a little lower than the angels, to be crowned with glory and honor, the climax of development, and even the splendors of the star are as naught.

Larrabee had no cultivated sense of comparison. His tenacious nature laid hold upon the idea of an intimate personal intention, a sign in the heavens, with a blunt and stalwart appropriation.