Part 23

A sudden look of thought smote his face; his eyes narrowed, his teeth closed firmly, as he revolved the idea in his mind, and he turned abruptly to the window. The blasts had closed the batten shutter fast, and he shook it smartly before it would open in his hand. The slow wheeling of its edges against the sky revealed a change since last he had looked out. The stars still scintillated above in the clear spaces of the zenith, but a rain-cloud hung in the south, bulging low over the ranges, its blackness differing vastly in tone from the limpid darkness where the night was clear and serene. One summit below it was distinctly defined; there it had betaken a dusky brown color, and about its lower verge a fringe of fine straight lines of rain was suggested; a moon--a belated, waning moon--was rising in the melancholy dead hour of the night, its distorted, mist-barred disk showing between the bare eastern peaks, which were all silvered and clearly outlined above the massive wooded slopes darkling below. It shone full in the officer's eyes as for a moment he steadfastly gazed upon it. Then he laid his hand upon the window-sill and lightly sprang upon the ground below. The next moment he was standing in the door of the barn, and his stentorian halloo had roused all the slumbering mountaineers amongst the hay, and hailed the echoes in many a rocky gorge far away.

XVI.

In the deep obscurity of those dark hours before the moonrise, in the effacement of all the visible expressions of material nature, save the glitter of the stars and the glooming of the shadows, Felix Guthrie had been alone, as it were, with his own soul. He had never known, native of the wilderness though he was, so intense a sense of solitude. It was as if his spirit had gone forth from the familiar world into the vast voids of the uncreate. He took no heed of the dangerous way down the steeps, but gave the horse the rein, and trusted to the keener nocturnal sight of the animal. His dog ran on ahead pioneer-wise, retracing his way from time to time and gambolling about his master's stirrup irons, his presence only made known by a vague panting which Guthrie neither heard nor heeded. Even to the voice of the mountain torrent he was oblivious, although it seemed louder far by night than by day, assertive, unafraid, congener of the solitude, the darkness, and the melancholy isolations of the mountain woods. The rhododendron blooming all unseen by the way touched his cheek with a soft petal and a freshness of dew; now and again a brier clutched at his sleeve; sometimes a stone rolled beneath his horse's hoofs, and fell into the abyss at the side of the road, sonorously echoing and echoing as it smote upon the rocky walls of the chasm, the decisive final thud so long delayed that to judge thus of the unseen depths which lurked at either hand might have daunted him had he listened. The horse would hesitate at times, and send forth a whinnying plaint of doubt or fear when the rushing torrent crossed the way, plunging in presently, however, and, if need were, swimming gallantly, with the swimming dog in his wake.

Guthrie's thoughts made all the way heavy; deeper than the glooms of the night they shadowed his spirit.

"Though she may sing an' he may listen, I ain't a-goin' ter spy him out fur no sher'ff ez ever rid with spurs. I ain't a-goin' ter hound him an' track him, fur I ain't no dog; though I ain't got nuthin' agin dogs, nuther. But"--with a hardening of the face--"I'll hold him ter account ter me. I'll bring him ter jedgment. He'll 'low the law o' the lan' hev got a toler'ble feeble grip compared with the way I'll take holt o' him. He war warned. I told him ez I hed it in my heart ter kill the man ez kem atwixt Litt an' me."

When he reached the levels of the cove the springy turf served to add speed to the smooth, swinging, steady pace. He had hardly expected so soon to see before him the steep gables of the old Rhodes homestead. These were cut sharply against the sky, for the house stood in the midst of its open fields. One or two sycamore-trees swayed above its roof, and great overgrown bushes--lilac and snowball and roses--crowded the yard. A garden, overgrown too, extended down the slope at the side, and here as well were masses of shrubs blackly visible in contrast with the open spaces.

Guthrie was a stranger here. He had never before seen so great a house as the rambling old brick dwelling. When he had dismounted at the fence he was for a moment at a loss how to enter. A porch was at the front and another at the side, and while he hesitated a vague glimmer of yellow light came through the masses of the foliage that clustered about one of the windows. He opened the gate; his foot fell noiselessly upon the weed-grown path. A great white lily was waving in the gloom close by--he saw it glimmer--another, and another; and as the file stood close in the border, the heavy rich perfume seemed to make the air dense. The window glared forth suddenly--the light in every tiny pane--when he had passed a great arbor-vitæ that stood near it, trailing its branches on the ground. Within, unconscious, at ease, unprescient, a man sat by a lamp, a book in his hand, his chair tilted back, a pipe between his teeth. Save the light, vaporous curling of the smoke above his head, there was no motion. The fire dwindled in the chimney-place; the clock had stopped as if it fell a-drowsing on the midnight hour. The wind had ceased even its vague stir, and the vines that hung about the window were still. Guthrie stood for a moment as if the inertia of the scene had fallen upon him, staring at the face that he had learned to know rather in meditating upon it in its absence than in the study of its traits. It was softer than he had thought, younger; but he recognized anew, with an infinite change of sentiment, that indefinable quality of expression, to which glance, contour, pose, all contributed, which made it so likable. And if this had been patent to him, why not to others--to Letitia? A new standpoint had wrought a radical difference. The vague fascination that had once commended Shattuck kindled Guthrie's hatred now. His eyes glowed like a panther's from out of the darkness, and when Shattuck abruptly put up his hand with the quick, decisive motion of keen interest and turned a page of the volume, it broke the lethargic spell that seemed to have fallen upon the mountaineer. Guthrie moved up suddenly close to the window, his very touch upon the pane. There was an imperious look upon his face. It seemed to hail the unconscious reader within, who with his quick deft gesture presently turned another leaf. Guthrie could see his intent eyes, full of light, shifting from side to side of the page as they scanned the lines. He made no effort to attract Shattuck's attention beyond that long steady, glowering look, albeit he wondered that its effect should be so belated. He had noted often that strange mesmeric influence of the eye; a wild beast in the woods would not remain oblivious of the presence of his natural enemy were a human being's gaze steadily fixed for some space upon him. Shattuck suddenly put up his hand with a vaguely impatient air of interruption, and passed it over his cheek; then he rose abruptly to his feet, crossed the hearth with his quick, sure step, and reached up to the high mantel-piece, dusky in the shadow. There was a sharp metallic click outside amongst the honeysuckle vines--Guthrie had cocked his pistol.

But it was no weapon which Shattuck had grasped from the mantel-piece. His train of thought was evidently still unbroken, for he came slowly back into the circumference of the light of the lamp, as it stood on the table, turning in his careful deft hands a curiously decorated jar. Then, still standing, with the other hand he whirled over the leaves of the book, and seemed to compare the jar which he held to an engraving upon the page. That serene light of a purely intellectual pleasure was upon his face, and its peculiar charm, its alertness, its mobility, its sympathetic intimations, its clear candor, its courage, had never been more individual, more marked. The man outside, with his pistol cocked in his hand, keenly alive to all impressions that mutually concerned them, sought to see him as once he had seemed. Jealousy had tampered with Guthrie's vision, and he could no longer read these patent characters; they were like a language that one has half forgotten--a vague suggestion here and there, a broken association, a dull misconception. The next moment their eyes met.

For one instant the sudden sight of that white cheek pressed close to the glass drove the blood from Shattuck's face. He stood, the jar still in his hand, his head bent down, his questioning, searching eye intent. Then, still without recognizing the features of the man outside, he placed the jar on the table, and walked slowly to the window, unarmed as he was. He laid both hands on the sash to lift it; it was thrown creakingly up, and the light fell full on the face without, its square contour, its austere, sullen expression, its long yellow ringlets, all framed by the big brim of the broad hat thrust far back.

"Is that you, Fee?" Shattuck said, in surprise. "You nearly scared me to death. Why don't you come in?"

His tone was untroubled and casual. It implied a conscience void of offence.

"He thinks I hain't fund him out," Guthrie commented to himself. Aloud he replied, grimly: "'Tain't wuth while ter kem in. I kin say what I hev got ter say right hyar."

Shattuck, all unnoting the pistol in his interlocutor's hand, sat down upon the window-sill, leaning almost against its muzzle. He held one of the cables of the many-stranded honeysuckle vine in his hand, by way of assisting his equilibrium, as he looked down at his guest. There was no more serious thought in his mind at the moment than the wish that he could paint, or even sketch. It seemed a pity that so massive and impressive an embodiment of the idea of manhood, of force, as that which Felix Guthrie's face and figure presented should be known only to his few and unappreciative neighbors as a "tarrifyin' critter, full o' grudges, who shot mighty straight."

Guthrie was a trifle thrown off his balance by this serene unconsciousness. He hesitated, expecting that Shattuck would ask him what had brought him hither, unaware that the etiquette in which the townsman was reared forbade him to inquire or to manifest curiosity concerning the mission of even an untimely visitor. As Guthrie said nothing, Shattuck essayed to break the pause.

"See my prehistoric jug?" he smilingly asked, pointing with the stem of his empty pipe toward the quaint jar upon the table. "I dug that out of Mr. Rhodes's mound. It's mightily like the cut of a Malay water-cooler I came across in that book on the table--surprisingly."

Before the unsuspicious suavity of his face and manner Guthrie felt a vague faltering, such as no ferocity or danger could have induced. So conscious of this was he that he sought, with a sort of indignant protest, to throw it off. He seized upon the first pretext to express his enmity, albeit his judgment failed to approve it. He felt it all inadequate to the passion which shook him, and far from what he had intended to say.

"Content yerse'f with that," he exclaimed; "fur ye shall hev nuthin' from the Leetle People. They hev tuk up thar rest on my lan', an' thar shell they sleep in peace till the last trump sounds."

The hand that trifled with the heavily twisted vine was still for a moment, and Shattuck looked down seriously into Guthrie's eyes--seriously, but without anger.

"It shall be just as you say," he replied. "I don't wonder you feel strongly about it. At first I was furious at being shot at in a way that I can't resent, by a woman"--his eyes flashed, and his lips trembled--"and I declared I would try it again. But afterward I felt we were fortunate indeed that no one was killed except the colt. It might have been your brother or Mr. Rhodes as well as myself. You see?" He turned his head toward the light. Where the hair had been clipped to the skin a red line showed that the rifle ball had grazed the flesh. "Pretty good aim in the twilight. And perhaps since there is so strong a feeling against disturbing the 'pygmies,' so called"--his second nature of scientific exactitude unconsciously qualified the phrase--"I ought to let them alone. Still, I am sorry about the little colt; and as the disaster happened in my errand, I should like to offer some indemnity." He made a motion toward his pocket.

"I hev a mind ter take ye by the nape o' yer neck an' break it across the winder-sill!" cried Guthrie, his eyes blazing. "Ye think I keer 'bout the wuth o' the leetle critter!" He snapped his fingers scornfully in the air, holding his arm aloft with a fine free gesture. "I be sorry he is dead, 'kase he hev got no hereafter, an' he war a frisky beastis, an' loved ter live, an' we-uns will miss seein' him so gayly prancin' in the pastur'. Ye think I kem hyar ter git a leetle pay fur him?" He would not wait for Shattuck's protest that both eyes and gesture preluded. "Naw!" he thundered. "I kem hyar ter-night ter take yer life"--for the first time Shattuck marked the burnished glimmer on the barrel of the pistol that he held in his hand--"an' ter do what I hev never demeaned myself ter do afore--ter take back my promise."

"What promise?" Shattuck interjected.

"Ah, ye know! Ye know full well!" Guthrie shook his head, and in his voice was a quaver of poignant reproach. "The promise ye got by talkin' round me, 'kase ye 'lowed I war a ignorant cuss, and not able ter see through yer deceit with all yer school l'arnin'--by praisin' her looks, an' tellin' me ter keep up my courage, an' how I mought make out ter git her ter marry me, arter all. 'Twon't make no difference takin' back the promise, fur I mean ter take yer life with it. Ye surely remember the word I said ter you-uns, ez 'twar in my heart ter kill the man ez kem betwixt me an' Litt; an', by God! it is."

A sudden comprehension was dawning in Shattuck's eyes. He leaned forward, and laid his hand on Guthrie's shoulder. "Now go slow, Fee," he said, soothingly. "Who is this man? Not _I_, and this I swear!"

The imperious face, its pallor distinct in the lamplight falling upon it from within, the rest of the figure shadowy in the black darkness without, looked up at him with a scathing contempt wrought in every feature.

"An' so I swear that I'd be justified ef I war ter put a bullet through yer heart, an' let yer soul go down ter hell with that word ter damn ye ter all eternity!"

Shattuck withdrew his hand, frowning heavily. "Look here, my fine fellow, this is strong language. If I didn't believe you are under some strange mistake, I'd make you eat your words syllable by syllable. What do you mean?"

"But I don't want ter murder ye," Guthrie went on, as if Shattuck had not spoken. "I can't shoot ye down without a weepon in yer han', like Mis' Yates tried ter do, though ye richly desarve it. Git yer shootin'-iron an' come out--come out an' stan' up fur yerse'f." He waved his hand with the pistol in it toward the more open space beyond the shrubbery. "Come out, or I'll shoot ye ez ye set thar."

"Not one step will I stir until you tell me why you say that I have come between you and Letitia."

"Bekase _she_ told me so."

Shattuck's unconscious reliance upon his mental supremacy, his equipment of delicate tact, his assurance of a pleasing personality, which was half his courage, began to give way. He had yet that physical self-respect which would enable him to meet his enemy without a pusillanimous shrinking, but he no longer hoped to command the adroitness to evade the event. Still he strove to be calm.

"Impossible! Now, what did she say?" he demanded, in a reasonable voice. Somehow, he had the key to Guthrie's confidence. Even now it opened to him.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, in a voice of despair, throwing up the arm that still grasped the weapon, "I knowed it ez much from what she _didn't_ say ez what she _did_. I seen it in her face. I hearn it in her voice. I ain't blind! I ain't deef! An' then"--every line in his face hardened--"she tole me how ye kem an' stood outside the winder ter listen whilst she sung, an' seein' yer face suddint, lookin' in through the batten shutter, she didn't know ye a-fust--not till arterward, whenst hearin' yer pickaxe in the Leetle People's graveyard, did she know 'twar you-uns. An' ye war waitin' fur the moon ter rise. An', damn ye! what d'ye want ter hear her sing fur?"

Shattuck's face, with a startled astonishment upon it, had grown more deeply grave. Every intimation of anger had fallen from his manner. "Guthrie," he said, in a tone so coercive, so serious, that the other looked up, newly intent, "is there no way to convince you? I never heard her sing. I never was in the pygmy burying-ground but that one time with your brother. Now, think! Is there no one else who might loiter about that house; who might venture--I should never take such a liberty--to look through the crevices of a closed window?"

Perhaps it was Shattuck's influence over Guthrie; perhaps the anxiety of a lover to believe his despair unfounded, to hope against hope--at all events, his long reflective pause indicated a change of mental attitude.

"Mrs. Yates's husband," suggested Shattuck, plying his advantage; "has nothing been heard about him lately?"

"Lord, yes!" exclaimed Guthrie, his mind reverting to the sensation of the day. "I seen him myself yestiddy 'mongst a gang o' horse-thieves a-hidin' out in the woods. I hed ter run fur my life, ez they set on me, six ter one. An' the sher'ff overhauled thar den jes ter-day."

His voice faltered a trifle. He looked shamefaced and downcast. The sheriff's suspicion concerning Shattuck had recurred to him, and he could not meet the man's eyes with this thought in his mind.

"Now, don't you see, Fee," argued Shattuck, "how likely a thing it is that Steve Yates should hang around his own cabin, and peer through the window to take a look at his own wife and child, whom he probably will never see again, unless in some such way?"

Guthrie nodded, more than half convinced. Still, with his hidden consciousness of that insult to Shattuck which he carried in his recollection of the sheriff's menace, of the mission of espionage which he had refused, he could not look up.

In some subtle way he knew that when Shattuck next spoke it was not to him alone that he addressed the information, but that the fact might be made manifest.

"Now I am going to give you a reason why I do not stand between you and Letitia." At the name Guthrie lifted a listening face. "I am engaged to be married to a lady in my own city. So Letitia may sing like an oread and look like a flower, but she is nothing to me."

He said the words with a clear conscience, for if she had fixed her affection upon him--somehow the idea aroused a vague sweet thrill in that mortgaged heart of his--it had been unsought.

Guthrie, eager for his own peace of mind to believe him, drew a long sigh of relief. "I reckon I take up sech notions jes 'kase I am so all-fired jealous," he said. Then, with a half-laugh, "Litt never actially said nuthin' nohow--though she air ekal ter sayin' anything jes ter make me mo' jealous 'n I naterally be."

A mental mutiny possessed Shattuck. Was not this the conclusion that he had labored in all good faith to precipitate? Where, then, was his satisfaction in the logical result? Why should he cling in tenacious triumph to another inference, drawn from her fancy that it was he who had lingered outside her window to hear her sing? His pulses quickened with the thought that the very fallacy wore the reflected hues of her hope. There were other recollections pressing fast upon him--that she had remembered his words, had recounted his strange stories, the look in her eyes when she had caught down from the rack the rifle which she believed had endangered his life. Her dream had in some sort fulfilled itself. He had long appreciated the charm of her unique beauty, her sprite-like individuality. His feeling suddenly expanded, glowing like a bud into the rose at the first warm touch of the sun.

He looked down at Guthrie all oblivious of him, save for weariness of the importunity of his threats, his constancy of woe, his confidences. Shattuck was absorbed for the moment in his own emotion, and the world had suddenly slipped away.

Abstractions befitted the hour. One might hardly think to see it again--that sordid, dusty, daylight world, full of commerce and hard bargains, and rigorous conventions of wealth and standing, prosaic requisites of well-equipped happiness. It had rolled far away out of consciousness. Upon the low summits of the thick growths of the orchard gleamed the lustre of the dew and the yellow suffusions of the rising moon. The shadows had become dense, symmetrical, sharply outlined. The lilies, their chalices all pearl and gold, were so white and stately and tall as they stood where the moonbeams conjured them from out the darkness of the old-fashioned borders. The light drifted through the fringes of the pines, dark themselves as ever; and between their boughs, looking to the east, one could see a field of millet, glistening with all the charmed illusions of a silver lake. And how the mocking-bird loves the light! From out the midnight his jubilant song went up to meet it.

Shattuck remembered the moment, the scene, many a year afterward, the absorption that mulcted Guthrie's words of half their meaning, and more than half their weight.

"I hev got suthin' else ter say," he began, uneasily. "I dun'no' how ter tell it ter ye, nor whether I oughter tell it at all. Ef the sher'ff hed ever seen ye he'd know he war a fool; but thar war a man robbed an' kilt on the road that night whenst Steve Yates vamosed, an' folks b'lieve he done it."

The superficial attention with which Shattuck hearkened to this deepened the next moment.

"An' ez Steve Yates hed no idee o' goin' till ye sent him, the sher'ff thinks ye might hev sent him on that yerrand."

An inarticulate exclamation of amazement, of indignation, broke from Shattuck's lips. It was not Guthrie's intention to assuage his fears, but he felt constrained to be the apologist of the suspicion.

"Ef he hed ever seen ye wunst," he observed, "he'd know better. Of course he ain't never seen ye."

"Of course not," Shattuck assented, shortly, his confidence renewed. The suspicion touching himself was not the kind of thing that a man would willingly consider, even in its most hypothetical and tenuous guise. That it should be seriously entertained was too terrifying, too odious an idea to be gratuitously harbored. To seek to throw it off was the instinct of self-respect, of self-preservation. His nerves were still sensible of the shock, but his effort was to make light of it, to treat it as the coarse pleasantry of the officer, perpetrated concerning the only stranger within the vast circuit of mountainous country. He felt no gratitude to Guthrie for his warning, as the mountaineer had expected his revelation to be construed. He looked down at him with repugnance and indignation in his eyes, and albeit Guthrie was not skilled in deciphering subtle facial indications, he understood the sentiment and deprecated it. He did not pursue the subject further. He cast about in his clumsy way to make amends for his offence, for thus it seemed to him now, of repeating the obnoxious suggestion.