Part 6

The moon came out from under the cloud with a great flare of golden glory. Somewhere a cock's crow sounded--clear, mellow tones, delivered with the precision and aplomb of the blast of a bugle. The wind of dawn was coming over the eastern summits, and suddenly the moonlight was all superfluous above the dark, rugged western mountains, for the gray day was on the land. The little house stood distinct and forlorn, all its windows flaring to show its denuded state within; here, and there a tallow dip still sputtered. And if by moonlight and half distinguished the loom and the warping bars had looked disconsolate in their evicted estate under the trees, by daylight they wore so sorry and so consciously distraught an air that such definite expressiveness seemed oddly incongruous with their inanimate condition. All atilt and unsteady they stood on the uneven ground, and about them were many other objects of the household gear which the night had served to obscure. Pots and pans were scattered about or congregated in heaps. Chests and bedsteads, bags and bundles, quilting-frames and churns and tubs--all bore token how the behests of hospitality had stripped the house to make room for the dancing and the exigent demands of the extensive supper-tables. The dogs seemed to take much note of this unprecedented dislocation of the domestic administration, and they went about with inquisitive, exploring noses, and tails stilled and drooped in suspended judgment, amongst the various objects which they snuffingly recognized. One old fellow, the evening of his days much racked by rheumatism, seemed to discern an adequate reason in all the confusion, as he curled himself to doze on the plumpest of the feather-beds, with a large bone disposed within easy reach, to which he might refer as inclination prompted. The spinning-wheels all teetered unsteadily on the uneven chips about the wood-pile; now and again the wheels revolved with precipitate, erratic action as the wind stirred them. Letitia no longer looked at the moon--a mere pallid simulacrum of itself, worn thin and gauzy against the pale west; one might hardly know if it still hung there when the first red dart of the sun, yet below the horizon, was aimed at the flushing zenith. Her dress was blue again, not white; her face had something of the flush of the sky upon it, half seen though it was. She had bent forward to the little flax wheel, and had drawn out a thread, breaking and tangling it, only affecting to spin, while the whimseys of the wind turned the wheel. The light was distinct enough to show even the pistol ball in Felix Guthrie's hand as he held it up and gazed at it speculatively.

"I wisht it war in Rhodes's heart," he observed, slowly. "That's whar I wisht 'twar."

The spinning-wheel stopped suddenly; the blue eyes were bent upon him; her lips curved in laughter. "Thar ye go ter heaven!" she cried, waving her hand as if to point the way, "repentin' by the half-hour."

IV.

All day the slow process of the restoration of the household gods went on. For many a year thereafter all manner of losses dated from this period. "Hain't been seen nor hearn tell on sence 'fore the infair," was a formula that sufficiently accounted for any deficit in domestic accoutrement. There was no one in the Pettingill family so lost to the appreciation of hospitality and the necessity of equalling the entertainment given by the bride's relatives as to opine that the game was not worth the candle. But more than once Mrs. Pettingill, with a deep sigh, demanded, "Who would hev thunk it would hev been so much more trouble ter kerry in things agin 'n ter kerry 'em out!" She did not accurately gauge the force of enthusiastic anticipation as a motive power. Nevertheless she bore up with wonderful fortitude, considering that the triumph of the supper had been eclipsed. The inanimate members of the household were exhibiting a sort of wooden sulks as they were conveyed to their respective places--now becoming stiffly immovable, despite the straining muscles of the "men folks;" then suddenly, without the application of appreciably stronger force, bouncing forward so unexpectedly that the danger of being overrun was imminent, and cries of "Stiddy, thar! Ketch that eend! Holp up, thar!" resounded even through Rhodes's dreams in the roof-room, as he drowsed peacefully under the narcotic influences of hop tea. The loom might have seemed to entertain a savage resentment for its supersedure, and was some two hours journeying back to its place in the shed-room, the scene alike of the blighted supper and its old industrial pursuits. After that the "men folks" took a vacation, and applied themselves with some zest to apparently incidental slumber; old Zack Pettingill nodded in his chair on the porch; the others, chiefly volunteering neighbors, fell asleep in the hay at the barn while ostensibly feeding the cattle, leaving the great skeleton of the warping bars staring its reflection in the river out of countenance as it leaned against the fence, with its skeins of carefully sized party-colored yarn the prey of two nimble kittens, who expressly climbed the gaunt frame to tangle them. Even Mrs. Pettingill, sitting on an inverted basket in the yard amongst her gear, looking a trifle forlorn, bareheaded, with her gray hair tucked in a small knot at the nape of her neck, her spectacles poised upon her nose, her hands on her knees, lost herself while gazing at her possessions in the effort to decide at which end she had best begin to rehabilitate the confusion; her eyelids presently drooped, and scant speculation looked through those spectacles. The great shady trees waved above her head. Bees robbed the clover at her feet, and flew, laden and drowsily droning, away; the light shifted on the river; the sun grew hot; the far blue mountains were like some land of dreams, so fair, so transfigured, that they hardly seemed real and akin to these rugged, craggy, darksome heights which loomed beside the little cottage. Everywhere were sleeping dogs; now and then one roused himself to recollections of the infair and the supper, and invaded the shed-room, standing in the door and with drooping tail gazing upon the simple domestic apparition of the loom in its accustomed place, evidently having believed, in his optimistic simplicity, that the good things and the splendor and the delightful bustle of the past evening were to continue indefinitely, and infinitely disappointed to find them already abolished, the fleeting show of a single occasion.

Shattuck would hardly have acknowledged it to himself, but he certainly felt relieved of an irksome prospect by this succumbing of the Pettingills to the influence of excitement and fatigue. Conversation with his host would necessarily be somewhat hampered by the events of the preceding evening. He could not well resent the old man's indignation, and yet a hospitable forbearance and courtesy would be of even more poignant intimations. He had winced when the bridegroom had taken leave of him with a punctilious show of cordiality and a hearty handshake, as assurance that he bore no malice for those insinuations. For these reasons the guest was not sorry to note the solemn preoccupation in his host's open-mouthed countenance as he passed out from the porch to the shade of the trees, where he came presently upon Mrs. Pettingill, sitting as motionless as a monument amongst her distorted and dislocated "truck," as in her waking moments she would have phrased her belongings. He lighted his cigar as he strolled down to the river, pausing to strike the match upon the white bark of an aspen-tree. The ferns gave out a sweet woodland odor, faint and delicate, overpowered presently by the pungent fragrance of the mint as his feet crushed the thick-growing herb. The crystal river murmured as it went, and seemed to draw reflective, half-breathed sighs, as in the pauses of a story that is told. Now and again, when the banks were high on either side, the rocks duplicated the sound of the lapsing currents with a more sonorous, cavernous emphasis, as if they sought to enter into the spirit of this sentient-seeming life. The sky, looking down from its blue placidities, only here and there smote the water to azure emulations of its tint; for the shadows predominated, and the gravel gave the stream that fine brown, lucent tone, impossible to imitate, broken occasionally where some high boulder incited the impetuosity of the current to bold leaps. Then it was crested with snow-white foam, and shoaled away with glassy-green waves to the same restfully tinted brown and amber swirls. The overhanging rocks were gray and splintered and full of crevices, with moss and lichen. Where they lay in great fractured masses under a giant oak, a spring gushed forth. He heard its tinkling tremor, more delicately crystalline and keyed far higher than the low continuous monotone of the river. He mechanically turned toward the sound, and saw Letitia in her light-blue dress sitting upon the gaunt gray rocks at the foot of the craggy masses, a brown gourd in her hand and an empty cedar pail at her feet. Her eyes were fixed gravely upon him, her face was fresh as the wild roses amongst the crevices of the rocks. She looked not more wilted by the excitements and heat and turmoil of the dancing at the infair than the flower blooming with the break of day. He strolled toward her, and spoke at the distance:

"You're the only member of the family awake now, I believe." He smiled, and flicked off the ash of his cigar.

The expression of her eyes changed as they still rested upon him. "Dun'no' whether I be awake or no," she observed. "I kem down hyar arter a pail o' water, an' 'pears like I can't git away agin. Disabled somehows. Asleep, mebbe, though' I moughtn't look like it."

Her uncouth garb and dialect were somehow softened by the delicacy of her proportions and the perfect profile and chiselling of her face. Her speech was hardly more grating upon him, precisian though he was, than the careless, untutored lapses of a child might have been; all the senses of comparison as readily ignored them. She looked so sprite-like as she sat in a drooping, relaxed posture by the spring in the niche of the rocks, one hand behind her head, the other holding the gourd against her blue dress; and the idea of an oread or a naiad suggested to his mind was suddenly on his lips.

Her reply instantly reminded him of her limitations and her ignorance.

"Witched an' bound ter the spot!" she exclaimed, with widening eyes and breathless tone. She lowered her voice: "Did you-uns ever _see_ one?"

Her literal interpretation embarrassed and threw him off his guard.

"Never till now," he said. He was not intentionally flirting with Zack Pettingill's daughter; but elsewhere and to another of her sex the speech would have impressed him as a pretty compliment. In her quality of woman, in her possession of a heart, she was no more represented in his mind than if she had been the flower above her.

She either did not comprehend the flattery or she ignored it. Her mind seemed fixed upon the water-nymph and the oread. "Bound ter the spot!" she reiterated, with a sceptical air. "Thar's a heap o' ways o' bein' bound ter the spot. Laziness kin hinder ez totally ez a block an' chain. Mebbe they war 'flicted that-a-way, sorter like me." She stretched both arms upward in an attitude that might have been grotesque in another, but with her was a charming and childish expression of fatigue.

He sat down on the ledge of the rock, took out his watch, and looked at it. "I wish I knew whether the doctor wouldn't come or would," he said, the harassment of the earlier hours recurring to his mind. "I am sorry they ever sent for him. Doesn't he seem a long time coming?"

"Fee Guthrie axed me that question fourteen hundred an' fifty times this mornin'. I don't set my mind on doctor men whenst folks air well, only whenst ailin'. 'Pears ter me like Mr. Rhodes's main complaint air foolishness."

Shattuck flushed with a sort of loyal resentment for his friend's sake. "You think he is foolish because he wanted to dance with you?" he said, tartly.

She cast a rallying side glance down upon him. "Mr. Rhodes warn't particular 'bout dancin' with me," she protested. "I ain't in no wise a favor_ite_ 'mongst the boys. That's what makes me 'low I be so smart!" She turned her head with a bird-like coquetry, more formidable for being so natural.

"Too smart for them?" he said, placated in spite of himself by her naïve arrogations.

She nodded the wise little head that she so boldly vaunted. "They all ax me, 'Hey? hey?'"--she raucously thickened her voice in drawling mimicry--"ter every word I say--every one I ever see but you-uns."

If he could compliment, she could return the courtesy. He was silent for a moment, remembering the criticisms that he had heard last night on her unexpected and contrariwise conversation. She was doubtless far too clever for her compeers and her sphere--even clever enough to know it.

"You don't think it worth while to be a favorite amongst fools. But how is poor Mr. Rhodes a fool?"

"Foolish," she corrected him, as if she made a distinction. "'Kase he wants ter git 'lected ter office, an' he kerns 'round sa-aft-sawderin' folks ez laffs, 'an laffs at him, ahint his back. An' he dassent say his soul's his own! An' he hev ter take sass off'n everybody. He talks 'bout the _kentry_, an' ennybody kin see he don't keer nuthin' 'bout the _kentry_. I'd ruther be a wild dog down thar by the ruver-bank, an' feed off'n the bones the wolf leaves, an' be free ter hev a mind o' my own."

Shattuck seemed to revolve this caustic characterization of his friend the politician. He did not care to press her further as to her opinions. He only said, presently, once more looking at his watch, "I think it so strange that the doctor doesn't come."

"Fee Guthrie waited a considerable time ter make sure ez Mr. Rhodes wouldn't die, an' 'twouldn't be desirable ter hang nobody ter-day."

Her interlocutor winced a trifle, remembering his threats last night. Her placid face, however, intimated nothing of any intention that might animate her words; it expressed only its own unique beauty.

He was charmed by it in some sort. He could see by that mentor, his watch, how long it had been that he had sat here listening alternately to the river's song and her low vibrant drawl. But he fancied that reluctance to meet the mountaineers at the house had detained him, or eagerness to descry the first approach of the superfluous physician, rather than the fascination of this rustic little creature, whose words so combined bitterness and honey. He hastened to divert her attention from the last suggestion.

"Where _is_ Guthrie now, anyhow?" he said, affecting to look around as if expecting to see him somewhere at hand amongst the black vertical shadows of the noon and the still golden sunshine.

"Off in the woods somewhere, I reckon," she said; "prayin', mebbe."

"Praying?" he repeated, in astonishment.

"Lawsy-massy, yes! He's a mighty survigrous han' at prayin' an' repentin'. He repents some every day--whenst he don't furgit it."

She laughed in a languid way, once more stretching up her tired arms, the brown gourd in one of her lifted hands, and then she relapsed into silence, her eyes fixed upon the swift flow of the stream. He too was silent, gazing upon the gliding waters. Naught so unobtrusively, so sufficiently fills an interval of quiet as this watching the continual movement of a current. They neither knew nor cared how the time went by. Ceaselessly the swift swirling lines made out to the centre of the stream, and further down swept once more close in to the banks as the conformation of the unseen channel directed the volume and the force. The spring gurgled; its sunlit branch, wherein might be seen now and again a darting minnow, with its _svelte_ shadow beneath it, flowed timorously down to join the river till a sudden widening and a quicker motion showed that its pulses felt the impetus of the stronger current. A kill-deer, flying so low as to dip its wings, ever and anon alighted on the margin, its stilt-like legs half submerged as it ran hither and thither, now and then bending to dig in the sand with its long slender bill. Suddenly there was a darker shadow in the water. A young woman had abruptly emerged from the undergrowth on the opposite bank, and was crossing the stream on the rickety little foot-bridge, consisting of but one log, the upper side hewn; her balance was a trifle difficult to maintain, as she carried a child in her arms. She looked eagerly toward the two as they sat by the spring, thus essentially differing from "leetle Mose," who, upon perceiving them, turned the back of his pink sun-bonnet upon them with an air of sullen rejection, unaware how the dignity of his demonstration was impaired by the diminutiveness of his head-gear, and, sooth to say, of the head within it. If he had expected to thus formidably crush the two spectators, he was mistaken; but he could not observe how it affected them, for he buried his face upon his mother's shoulder. She seemed fatigued and travel-worn as she came near, and her face bore traces of recent weeping in the pathetic drooping lips, the heavily lidded eyes, and her pallor. She strove gallantly for a smile and to speak in a casual tone, as she said, "Howdy, Litt?" Then, although nodding to Shattuck, for introductions are not in vogue in this region, she went on, eagerly: "Did Steve kem ter the infair? He 'lowed he would." She paused, biting her lips hard to keep back the tears. Letitia looked uncertainly at Shattuck, as if expecting him to reply. The benedict, drearily superfluous to the festivities, had hardly been noticed by her as he lurked about the walls and sought what entertainment was possible to one under the social disabilities of matrimony.

"Who? Stephen Yates? Oh, yes," said Shattuck. "He talked to me a long time. You were uneasy because he didn't come home?" he asked, with facile sympathy. At the kind tones her self-control melted, and the tears began to flow afresh. "The infair broke up with a row, and Mr. Rhodes was hurt," he explained, holding out his cigar with a delicate gesture, and touching off the long ash against a verge of the rock. "Steve Yates went for the doctor on one of Mr. Pettingill's horses. It seems to me that it is time for him to be back, too," he added, his mind recurring to his own interest in the matter, and once more he looked across the river and up the section of the road which became visible for a little way along the side of a corn-field, expecting to see the dust rise beneath the hoof-beats of the messenger's horse or the doctor's buggy wheels. But all was still and silent; only the air shimmered in the heat, and from amidst the blue-green expanse of the corn he saw a mocking-bird rise in the ecstasy of its redundant song, its wing-feathers a dazzling white in the sun, and drop back quivering and still singing upon the unstable perch of a waving tassel.

Adelaide's tears continued to flow, although she sought to stanch them now and again with the curtain of her sun-bonnet, which she pressed to her eyes. She had seated herself upon one of the rocks on the opposite side of the spring, and the "leetle Moses," whom she held upon her knee, one arm passed about his sufficiently burly waist, seeing that he was not noticed, indulged his own curiosity, and from the interior of his pink sun-bonnet bent a stare of frowning severity first upon Letitia, and then transferred his callow speculation to Shattuck. Perhaps it was far less Adelaide's natural embarrassment at thus meeting in tears a stranger than her divination of the young girl's mental attitude toward her that roused her pride and the resources of her fortitude. She sought to put away the recollection, hardly less poignant than the reality, of the long sad hours of the wakeful night--spent in reviewing the quarrel, repenting her hasty words to her husband, and anon inconsistently angered anew because of the memory of his own bitter sayings--the keen expectancy of the lagging morning, and the terrible morbid fear that had grown upon her jarred and shaken nerves that he would come back no more. Far, far was all her feeling from the girl's comprehension, and she deprecated that, with that half-scoffing face, Letitia should look in upon her sorrows--disproportionate and fantastic though they might be, but none the less piercing--and seek to gauge them by the narrow measure of her own experience and her own untried, undeveloped gamut of emotions.

"I ain't a-goin' ter git married," remarked the fancy-free scoffer from her perch, "till I kin find a man ez I kin trust wunst in a while ter take keer o' hisself, a-goin' an' a-comin' from a neighbor's house. Mus' be powerful sorrowful ter set at home an' shed tears lest he mought hev stumped his toe on the road. Mighty oncommon kind o' man I want, I know, but"--with resolution--"I be a-goin' ter s'arch the mountings, far an' nigh, till I find him. I'd like ter marry a man ez could be trusted ter take keer o' hisself, an' mought even, on a pinch, take keer o' me."

Shattuck, with a smile, glanced across at the weeping wife, who laughed a trifle hysterically amidst her tears, and said:

"Oh, _don't_, Litt!" Then, regaining her composure, she once more pressed the curtain of her calico sun-bonnet to her eyes. It seemed that her dignity required some explanation. "I wouldn't hev minded it so," she said, "ef me an' Steve hedn't hed words. He wanted me ter kem with him ter the infair, but I war 'feared ter bring leetle Mose, fur he mought hev cotched the measles or the whoopin'-cough."

"He's safe now," remarked Letitia. "I be the youngest o' the fambly. I hed the measles thirteen year ago, an' I never _did_ demean myself so fur ez ter hev the whoopin'-cough."

Somehow the tone of raillery, the sense of the freedom and the irresponsibility of the young girl, roused a vague sort of protest in the other, only a few years older, but upon whose heart were so many clamorous demands, all the dearer for their exactions. She felt bound to set herself right. Who had ever a happier married life than she and Stephen, a more contented home? And then the supreme unanimity of their worship of the domestic god Dagon--the extraordinary "leetle Mose!"

"I 'low I wouldn't hev been sech a fool ef 'twarn't so uncommon fur me an' Steve ter fall out," she said, her face resuming its serene curves, her full, luminous dark eyes fixed with a sort of recognition on Shattuck, which his quick senses apprehended as identification from description. "I oughtn't ter hev set up my 'pinion 'gin his, I reckon. He war mightily tuk up with a man--I reckon 'twar you-uns--ez hed been a-diggin' in the Injun mounds."

Shattuck nodded in response to this unique introduction.

"An'--an'"--she faltered a trifle--"ez hed a mind ter go a-diggin' up the bones o' them Leetle Stranger People o' ourn, ter--ter sati'fy hisse'f what sort'n nation they used to be, an' ter git thar pearls off'n thar necks."