Part 25
And Eudora forthwith came briskly out to investigate an egg which she was roasting in the ashes, the kind present of Mrs. Purvine. The hen that laid it was stalking about the room in unconscious bereavement. Now and then there was a shrill piping from a basket on the floor, from which overflowed, as it were, a downy collection of fall “deedies,” hatched too late to stand any chance of weathering the winter except by being reared into those obnoxious animals, house-chickens. A matronly feathered head would occasionally be thrust out with a remonstrant cluck, and the assemblage, miraculously escaping the heedless human foot, would climb into the basket, and there would ensue a soft sound of snuggling down and drowsy pipings. All of which excited sister Eudory almost to ecstasy.
Mrs. Purvine experienced less complacence. “Ef ennybody ain’t got no baby, an’ feels like adoptin’ one ter take trouble about, jes’ let ’em git ’em a settin’ o’ aigs an’ hatch out some fall deedies. They’ll be ez much trouble ez twins!”
“Whyn’t you-uns stay ter the meetin’ ter the church-house, Eudory?” demanded Alethea.
The little girl, kneeling on the hearth, anxiously adjusted a broom straw on the egg to see if it were done,—when, according to culinary tradition, the straw would turn; she glanced up with her charming smile showing her snaggled little teeth.
“’Gustus Tom wouldn’t bide,” she declared.
“Waal, now, ’Gustus Tom oughter begin ez early ez he kin,” said Mrs. Purvine. “Sech ez ’Gustus Tom hev a mighty wrastle with Satan ’fore they git grace. ’Gustus Tom hev got a long way o’ wickedness afore him. He oughter be among them in early youth convicted o’ sin an’ afeard o’ Satan.”
“Naw,” said the child, sitting upright and staring steadily at the straw. “He be ’feared o’ Pete Rood. An’ he won’t bide a-nigh the church-house.”
The light of the fire was on her face. Its breath stirred her bright hair. Her chubby hand hovered about the egg in the ashes. Surely the straw was turning at last.
“Pete Rood is dead, Eudory,” said Mrs. Purvine, rebukingly.
“In the groun’,” said Eudory unequivocally.
The mention of him recalled to Alethea that momentous day of drawing the jury, the mystery of Tad’s fate, the hardships of Mink’s duress, and finally the calamity which he had brought upon himself.
Alethea had taken off her bonnet, and sat down in the rocking-chair before the fire, her eyes fixed reflectively upon the great burning logs. The interior of Mrs. Purvine’s house always had a leisurely aspect; to-day it wore the added quiet and ease of Sunday stillness. It was evident that here no anxious female heart was “harried ter death,” in yearnings for the perfecting of a theory of housekeeping.
Mrs. Purvine, sitting with her empty hands in her lap, once more rebuked sister Eudory, the decorums of the day giving a more stringent interpretation to her code of manners.
“Ye mustn’t say ’Gustus Tom air ’feard o’ Pete Rood, ’kase he air dead.”
“That’s what ’Gustus Tom say—he say don’t talk ’bout’n it.” Eudora looked up gravely. “He be wusser ’feard now ’n he war when Pete Rood war ’live.”
There was a sudden hand on the latch, and ’Gustus Tom came hastily in.
“Look-a-hyar, sister Eudory!” he cried remonstrantly, seizing her by the arm, “what ails ye ter let yer tongue break loose that-a-way? Shet up! Ye promised ye wouldn’t tell.”
He had an excited, grave, frightened look that was incongruous with the roguish cast of his features; his torn old hat was jauntily askew; his clothes were ragged; a single suspender seemed quite adequate to support so many holes; his shoes were broken. There was a distinct deprecation and anxiety in his face more pitiable than poverty, as he looked from one to the other of the women. He was evidently wondering how much of his secrets the faithless sister Eudory had told. He could not control his fears. He broke out suddenly:
“Hev she tole ’bout’n what I done?”
Mrs. Purvine, who was jocose with children, and who could not appreciate at this stage of the disclosure that anything of moment impended, folded her arms slowly across her bosom, looked at him over her spectacles, a great deal of the whites of her blue eyes showing, and with mock solemnity nodded assent.
“Waal, waal—did she tell ’bout’n the—the mill, too?”
Aunt Dely shook her head in burlesque reproach. “She hev tole on ye, ’Gustus Tom. Yer wicked ways air made plain.”
His eyes were wildly starting from his head; he caught his breath in quick gasps. The little girl first detected the genuine terror which he was suffering, and as she held his hand she began to whimper and to lay her head against his ragged shirt-sleeve.
“Oh, Mis’ Purvine,” cried ’Gustus Tom, “I never knowed aforehand how ’twar goin’ ter turn out, else I’d never hev gone thar that night, an’ I wouldn’t hev knowed no mo’ ’bout who bust down the mill ’n nobody else!”
“Didn’t Mink bust the mill down?” asked Mrs. Purvine, staring.
“Naw,” said ’Gustus Tom, miserably, “Mink never.”
Aunt Dely suddenly sat upright, and took her spectacles from her astonished eyes. She was about to speak sharply, but met Alethea’s warning glance, and desisted.
XXII.
Conscience, the great moral inquisitor, whose sessions are held in secret, whose absolute justice is untempered by mercy, whose processes are unrelated and superior to the laws of the land, makes manifest its decrees only at such long intervals that we are prone to consider their results exceptional. Although its measures are invariably meted, they are seldom so plainly set forth as in Peter Rood’s fate. Alethea, listening to ’Gustus Tom’s story, saw in aghast dismay how he had been pursued by those terrible potencies of the right which he had sought to disregard. Many things that had been vague were made distinct. She understood suddenly the meaning of the strange words he had spoken at the camp-meeting, when his spiritual struggles had nearly betrayed him. She divined the mingled fear and self-reproach, and at the same time the cowardly gratulation he experienced because of his fancied security, when entrapped to serve on the jury. She remembered with a new comprehension his joyous excitement when it appeared that the idiot boy had not been drowned, and the pallid anguish on his face as the lawyer dexterously reversed the probabilities. It might seem that he had expiated his deed, but the extremest penalties were not abated. He had been a pillar in the church, renowned for a certain insistent piety, and zealous to foster good repute among men; and this last possession that he held dear upon earth, which may be maintained even by a dead man, who can carry naught out of the world, was wrested from him.
The truth which he had so feared, which he had so labored to hide, over which the grave had seemed to close, was at last brought to light by very simple means.
On the eventful morning, the miller’s erratic grandson, awaking early, he knew not why, had sought to utilize the occurrence by robbing an owl’s nest in the hollow of a tree beside the mill. The day had not yet dawned, and he hoped that one or the other of the great birds would be away on its nocturnal foragings, so that he might the more easily secure the owlet, which he had long wanted for a pet. It was very still, ’Gustus Tom said. The frogs by the water had ceased their croaking; the katydids were silenced long ago; he heard only the surging monotone of the gleaming cascade falling over the natural dam. He had climbed the tree to the lower limbs, and had perched on one of them to rest for a moment, when there broke upon the air the sound of the galloping of a horse far away, approaching at a tremendous rate of speed. Presently he came into view, his head stretched forward, his coat flecked with foam, his rider plying both heel and whip.
This rider was Peter Rood, whom ’Gustus Tom knew well, as he often came to the mill. He dismounted hastily, close to the water-side. He walked uncertainly, even pausing sometimes to steady himself by holding to the supports of the old mill. He was evidently very drunk, and thus it appeared to ’Gustus Tom the less surprising that he should drag two or three fence rails stranded on the margin of the river,—which was high and full of floating rubbish,—and laboriously place them in a position to cumber the wheel; an empty barrel, too, he found and put to this use, some poles, drift-wood. He paused after a careful survey of his work, and held up his head, looking away toward the east, as if he were listening. It seemed to ’Gustus Tom, all veiled by the dew-tipped chestnut leaves, that Rood was strangely intent of purpose for a drunken man. He heard, long before the boy did, some monition of approach in the distance, for he caught eagerly at his horse’s bridle. Yet he was drunk enough to find difficulty in mounting. As the animal swerved, he was obliged to grasp the stirrup with one hand in order to steady it, so that he could put his foot in it; then he flung his right leg over the saddle, and away he went along the grassy margin of the road,—noiseless, swift, dark, like some black shadow, some noxious exhalation of the night.
’Gustus Tom explained at this point, with tears and many anxious twistings of the button on his shirt front,—which was quite useless, the correlative button-hole being torn out,—that he understood so little of what all this meant at the time that it seemed to him the only important point involved was to remember to tell his grandfather early in the day of Pete Rood’s drunken freak of clogging the mill-wheel. He did not call out and make his presence known, because he was frightened by the man’s strange conduct and terrible look. As he still sat meditating on the limb of the tree, the sound which had aroused Peter Rood again broke upon the silence. Once more the regular thud of hoofs—of many hoofs. The pace was far slower than the rattling gallop at which Pete Rood had come. There were several men in the group that presently appeared. ’Gustus Tom knew some of them,—he couldn’t help knowing Mink Lorey from far off; he looked so wild and gamesome; the moonlight was on his face and all his hair was flying. He knew Mink well. Mink it was who climbed the timbers of the race and lifted the gate. And once more ’Gustus Tom, with quivering lips and twisting the futile button on his shirt front, began to exculpate himself. He did not understand what Mink was about to do until the gate was lifted and the water surged through. The wheel, turning with its curiously contrived clogs, jerked spasmodically, gave sudden violent wrenches, finally breaking and crashing against the shanty, that itself tottered and careened and fell. He heard Tad scream, for the idiot, having incurred the miller’s displeasure during the day, had been locked in the mill, supperless, to sleep. ’Gustus Tom did not see the boy in the river, because of the falling timbers, the clouds of dust and flour and meal, and the commotion of the water. The men galloped away, Mink among them. For the house had been alarmed by the noise; old Griff ran out, wringing his hands and crying aloud, first for the loss of the mill, then for the fate of the idiot. The others of the family came, too. ’Gustus Tom easily slipped down unobserved from the tree, in the midst of the excitement, and no one was aware, except sister Eudory, that he knew more than the rest. Lately she had noticed that he was afraid of the dark and would not sit alone; and she had begun to say so much of this that he was alarmed lest she might excite the suspicions of others. And so, thinking she would keep his secret,—he would have divulged it to no one else,—he told her that he was afraid of Peter Rood, who was dead, and who perhaps had found out in the other world that he knew the secret, and would come and haunt him to make sure that he did not reveal it. And at the renewal of these ghastly terrors ’Gustus Tom bent his head upon his arm, and began to sob afresh.
“Why didn’t ye tell at fust, ’Gustus Tom?” asked Alethea, her mind futilely reviewing the complications that circumstance had woven about Mink Lorey.
’Gustus Tom lifted his head, a gleam of this world’s acumen shining through the tears in his eyes.
“He’d hev walloped the life out’n me, ef I hed told. He kem nigh every day ter the mill arterward, whenst they war a-s’archin’ fur the body. An’ his eyes looked so black an’ mad an’ cur’ous whenst he cut ’em round at me, I ’lowed he knowed what I knowed. An’ I war afeard o’ him.”
Aunt Dely could not be altogether repressed. “Waal, ’Gustus Tom, ye air a bad aig,” she remarked, politely. “Ye ter know all that whenst ye war down thar at Shaftesville, along o’ yer gran’dad, an’ seen them men a-talkin’ by the yard-medjure, an’ a-cavortin’ ’bout in the court, ez prideful ez ef thar brains war ez nimble ez thar tongues; an’ ye look at ’em try Mink fur bustin’ down the mill an’ drowndin’ Tad, an’ ye ter know ez Pete Rood done it,—an’ ye say nuthin’!”
“Waal,” said ’Gustus Tom, sorely beset, “he war a-settin’ thar in the cheer; he could hev told hisself.”
“Whyn’t ye tell arter he drapped dead?” suggested the politic Mrs. Purvine.
The boy winced at the recollection. “He looked so awful!” he said, putting up his hand to his eyes as if to shut out the image presented. “I war ’feared he’d harnt me.”
It occurred to sister Eudora that this investigation was degenerating into a persecution of ’Gustus Tom. She had looked from one to the other in grave excitement and with a flushing face, as she stood on the hearth, the breath from the fire waving her flaxen hair, hanging upon her shoulders.
Suddenly, with an accession of color, she stepped across the broad, ill-joined stones, and, fixing a threatening eye on Mrs. Purvine’s moon-face, she lifted her fat hand, and retributively smote that lady on the knee.
’Gustus Tom had never manifested any special desire to suit his own conduct to a high standard of deportment, but he appeared to entertain the most sedulous solicitude concerning sister Eudory’s manners, and to be jealous that she should be esteemed the pink of juvenile propriety. His mortification at the present lapse was very great. It expressed itself in such unequivocal phrase, such energetic shakings of his tow-head, which seemed communicated, with diminished rigor, however, to her plump little shoulders,—for he went through all the motions of discipline,—that Mrs. Purvine, beaming with injudicious laughter, was forced to interfere. Her indulgence did not serve to reassure sister Eudory, who stood dismayed at the fullness of fraternal displeasure. She presently put her hands before her eyes, although she did not shed tears, and thus she was led toward the door, to be taken home as unfit for polite society. Mrs. Purvine hurried after her, carrying the roasted egg—which was very hot, in its shell—between two chips, and further pressing upon her a present of a sweet-potato, an ear of pop-corn, and a young kitten, all of which sister Eudory, regardless of the animate and the inanimate, the hot and the cold, carried together in her apron. The affront was but a slight matter to aunt Dely, whose lenient temperament precluded her from viewing it as an enormity; but as the brother and sister went away in humiliation, one could well guess that sister Eudora would be a woman grown before she would be allowed to contemplate with indifference the dreadful day when she “hit Mis’ Purvine.”
In whatever manner it might have seemed judicious to make use, in Mink’s interest, of the disclosures of Peter Rood’s agency in the destruction of the mill, anything like caution, or reserve, or secrecy was rendered impossible by the circumstance that it was Mrs. Purvine who shared in the discovery of the fact. For weeks no one passed the house, going or coming on the winding road, whom she did not descry through the worldly glass windows,—which thus demonstrated an additional justification for their existence,—and whom she did not hail with a loud outcry from the unsteady flight of steps, and bring to a not unwilling pause as she hurried out to the fence, with her glib tongue full of words. There was no weather too cold for the indulgence of this gossip. Sometimes aunt Dely would merely fling her apron over her head, if the exigency suggested haste; or she would hood herself with her shawl, like a cowled friar, and stand in the snow, defiant of the rigors of the temperature. More often, however, the passer-by would suffer himself to be persuaded to come in and sit down by aunt Dely’s fire, and discuss with her all the details so tardily elicited. Pete Rood’s death, considered as a judgment upon him, was a favorite point of contemplation, offering that symmetrical exposition of cause and effect, sin and retribution, peculiarly edifying to the obdurate in heart and acceptable to the literalist in religion. So much was said on this subject at the store, and the blacksmith-shop, and the saw-mill,—those places where the mountain cronies most congregated,—that it came to the ear of Rood’s relatives with all the added poignancy of comment. They indignantly maintained that only the ingenuity of malice could feign to attach any special meaning to the moment or manner of his death, for it was widely known that he had for years suffered from a serious affection of the heart; they stigmatized the whole story as an effort to blacken his name in order to clear Mink Lorey. Their attitude and sentiment enlisted a certain sympathy, and it was only when they were not of the company that the counter-replication was made that it was a supremely significant moment when Peter Rood’s doom fell upon him, and that it behooves those who sit in the shadow of death to be not easily diverted from the true interpretation of the darkling signs of the wrath of God.
It was a scene of pathetic interest when his aged mother, resolved upon forcing a recantation, came herself to the miller’s home. A dark, withered, white-haired crone she was, with a hooked nose and a keen, fierce, intent eye that suggested strength of mind and purpose defying age and ailments. She shrewdly questioned the boy, and sought to involve him in discrepancies and to elicit some admission that the story had been prompted by Alethea Sayles. Her dark-browed sons stood about the great white-covered ox-wagon, their bemired boots drawn high over their trousers, their broad hats pulled down to their lowering eyes, maintaining a sedulous silence. So strong a family resemblance existed between them and the dead man that ’Gustus Tom was greatly perturbed as from time to time he glanced at them; looking away instantly with a resolution to see them no more, and yet again with a morbid fascination turning his eyes to meet theirs, before whose dark and solemn anger he quailed. Now and then the sobs would burst from him, and he would lay his head on his arm against the rails, as he cowered in the fence corner; for the old woman would not enter the miller’s house, but stood upon the frozen crust of snow by the roadside, and looked upon the denuded site of the mill, and the turbulent river, and the austere bleak bluffs on the opposite bank. The miller peered out from his door, himself the impersonation of winter, his snowy locks and beard falling about his rugged face; the desolate little shanty was plainly to be seen among the naked and writhen boughs of the orchard, that bore only snow and icicles in the stead of the bloom and fruit they had known.
Cross-questioning, threats, all the devices of suggestion, availed naught. The terrible story once told, ’Gustus Tom found the pluck somehow to stand by it without other support than the uncognizant affection of sister Eudory; for the shallow Sophy cared for none of it. She came to the door once to lead the old man within from the piercing wind, and she lingered for a moment, her golden hair flying in the blast; her placid blue eyes and superficial smile underwent no change when the old woman turned away, baffled and hopeless and stricken.
“I ’lowed my son war dead,” she said to the cluster of gossips who had assisted at the colloquy. She shook her head as she leaned upon her stick, and hobbled down across the frozen ruts of the road toward the wagon. “I ’lowed my son war dead, an’ I mourned him. But I said the words of a fool, for he war alive; the best part of him, his good name, war lef’ ter me. An’ now he air beset, an’ druv, an’ run down ter death,—fur ye air a-murderin’ of him in takin’ his good name. Lemme know, neighbors,”—she turned, with her hand upon the wheel,—“when the deed air fairly done, so ez I kin gin myself ter mournin’ my son, fur then he’ll be plumb dead.”
The two dark-browed brothers said never a word; the slow oxen started; the wagon moved creaking down the road toward the snowy mountains, with their whitened slopes and black trees, and gray shadows.
The public sentiment excited in favor of Mink Lorey by the developments during his trial, and which had expressed itself in the riot and attempt at a rescue, had sustained a rebuff consequent upon his assault on Judge Gwinnan. Nevertheless, it is difficult to nullify a popular prepossession, and the discovery that the young mountaineer had been the victim of the machinations of the true criminal, that he had been placed in jeopardy, had suffered many months’ imprisonment, had still longer duress in prospect, served to justify him in some sort, and reinstated him in the feelings of the people, never very logical. All the details of the trial were canvassed anew with reviviscent interest. Now that the veil of mystery was torn from it, there seemed still other inculpations involved. It would appear to imply some gross negligence, some intentional spite, some grotesque perversion of justice, that the criminal should have been one of the jury impaneled to try an innocent man. The fact itself was shocking. It was significant that only through accident had it come to light, and it augured grievous insecurity of liberty, life and property.
Mr. Harshaw, who had returned to Shaftesville upon the adjournment, for a few days, of the Legislature, was not slow to note the direction and progress of popular favor. In the state of his feelings toward Gwinnan, he had no great impulse to combat the position taken by the unlearned that it was a grave dereliction on the part of the court that Pete Rood had been admitted to the panel. Why should he expound the theory of judicial challenges, the conclusiveness of the _voir dire_, in instances of general eligibility? He truly believed that in the incarceration of the jury Gwinnan had sacrificed the interests of the defense and a favorable verdict, and as he felt much reminiscent interest in the details of his cases, he could listen with all the relish of mental affirmation to the denunciations of the stranger judge, who was often profanely apostrophized and warned to show his head no more in Cherokee County.