Chapter 6

The visitor received a welcome which made him feel as if he had reached his own home. He had grown so weary of wandering aimlessly around the world, and had become so disgusted with conventional forms and ceremonies, that the peaceful home-like and simple, kindly manners of these unsophisticated people gave him an agreeable sense of rest and freedom from restraint.

He allowed himself to be prevailed on to stay until late in the afternoon; and before his visit ended he circumspectly inquired whether they would receive him as a boarder. The promptness and pleasure with which both the farmer and his wife agreed to his proposal showed him that his fear of giving offence had been entirely groundless.

When he returned to the inn, the professor informed him that on the succeeding day he was going on to the next county.

"I shall stay in this neighborhood some time longer," said Brent.

"So? What is the especial attraction? The young woman over there where the mountains stand?"

"Perhaps; but my own motives are about the last things I should attempt to analyze."

"Well, I expect to come back this way in three months, and, if I find you here and ready to depart, we can return to New York together."

"Like nearly all other imaginable things, what you state is not impossible."

Helfenstein went on his way the next morning, and Brent began his sojourn at the farm-house on the same day.

The burdens of Rena Reinfelter's life immediately became very much more numerous. The Englishman found an unfailing satisfaction in bewildering and horrifying her, and tried systematically to find out whether there was really any limit to her patience and gentleness. He induced her to go with him to the mountains near at hand, and took every opportunity to place himself in positions where he was in imminent danger of falling some hundreds of feet and being dashed to pieces on the rocks. Her dearly-beloved cat was suddenly lost to sight, and when it reappeared, uttering meek appeals for sympathy and help, its personal adornments were as striking as they were varied. He proved to her conclusively that all cats are utterly incapable of affection, and that their characters are vicious and treacherous to the last degree. His favorite method, however, was to begin by asking her some trivial question and then involve her in a net-work of apparent self-contradictions, which filled her conscientious soul with anguish and dismay at her own untruthfulness. Sometimes he felt a little ashamed of these amusements, and determined to forego them; but the temptation was too great for his powers of resistance, and he soon began transgressing again.

One morning Rena received a visit from her most intimate friend, Elsa Barndollar, who was only fifteen years old, but, having spent the preceding season at a city boarding-school, considered herself a grown woman with an unusually wide experience. Although passionately devoted to Rena, she was as fond of teasing her as Brent himself. Yet as soon as the latter began indulging himself with that diversion, she became highly indignant, and scornfully betook herself to the garden.

When Rena had followed her thither, she gave vent to her wrath without restraint.

"That's the most hateful man I ever saw!" she exclaimed.

"Oh, no, Elsa!" said Rena deprecatingly.

"Yes, he is. He's perfectly horrid! What does he mean by teasing you as if you were a little white kitten, or a green and yellow parrot, or some other ridiculous thing? I suppose he thinks country-people are all idiots. I never _did_ see the use of Englishmen, anyhow."

"Oh, he only does it for fun. He's always polite to father and mother, and little Casper thinks he's the nicest man he ever saw."

"Oh, yes! If he's good to your relations you don't care how he treats you. It's a shame, and he ought to be told so, too."

Rena tried to pacify her young friend, but the attempt was not successful. The latter made her visit a very short one, and when she reached home her anger and jealousy found expression in very vigorous terms.

Her brother visited the Reinfelters a short time afterward. His interest in the Englishman was evidently very strong, but if he shared his sister's feelings toward him they did not prevent his treating him with perfect courtesy.

"Helfenstein is right," thought Brent, as the young farmer rode away. "He's as handsome a fellow as I ever saw. I wonder whether he's Sister Rena's lover so bold."

But although Melchior Barndollar was far superior to the Reinfelters in culture and in knowledge of the world, he did not interest Brent as much as they did. The positiveness of their beliefs was a special source of wonder to him. From the father, who had no doubt about the existence of ghosts, to the little boy, who firmly believed in the reality of _Belsnickel_,--hides, horns, and all,--they were the most frankly credulous people he had ever known. But the superstition and anthropomorphism mingled with their faith did not make him think it less enviable. He would have been glad to believe anything as firmly as they did the traditions which had come down to them from their ancestors, unchallenged by doubt and unchanged by time.

One evening, after Rena had, as usual, sat beside her little brother's bed until he was sound asleep, she joined her parents and Brent, who were sitting in the garden behind the house.

The full moon was high above the mountains, and the whole landscape was almost as distinct as it had been before the sun went down. A whippoorwill's notes, mellowed by distance, resounded from the farthest part of the orchard, and a tinkling chorus arose from the leaves and blades of grass, where the myriads of nocturnal musicians were disporting themselves after the heat and glare of the day. But the sounds made by these performers were so regular and monotonous that they seemed merely a part of the calm summer night.

Suddenly another sound came down from the lower part of the mountains. It began with a deep, long-drawn, hollow cry, between a howl and a moan, and then broke into a wild, piercing shriek.

The farmer started to his feet, and stood gazing in the direction from which the cry had come.

"It's only a stray dog howling," said Brent.

Reinfelter turned toward his wife, and the moonlight showed that his face was white with terror.

"_De warnoong!_" he said, in a low voice. "_D'r geishter-shray foon de bairga!_"

The woman covered her face with her hands, and began trembling and sobbing. Rena put her arms around her mother's neck and tried to comfort her, as if _she_ had been the mother instead of the child.

The sound broke out again, and this time it was louder and more distinct than before. As the melancholy echoes died away, Rena rose, and, taking her mother's hand in hers, led her toward the house.

When they had gone, Brent said, "What do you think that sound is?"

"It's the warning still," said Reinfelter. "It's the warning of death."

"What is it made by?"

"A ghost. It goes up there in the mount'ins an' calls, an' the one it calls is soon in the graveyard already. It's called the mother, or Rena, or me, this night."

"Maybe I was the one it meant."

"No; it only calls the Reinfelters still. It's been so ever since the Injun massacree, a long time ago."

"Did that happen here?"

"Yes. My great-grandfather an' his oldest son was up in the mount'ins, and his wife was a-comin' back from there by herself once. Just as she got where she could see her little children a-playin' in the yard, three Injuns jumped out o' the woods that was nigh to the house then, an' run into the yard an' killed the children right before her eyes. The men up there heard her scream, an' they run down, an' found her a-layin' there where she fell, an' they thought she was dead already. She come to herself ag'in, but after that she just sort o' pined away, an' in less than two months she died. It's her ghost that goes up there an' calls us still."

"Did you ever hear the call before?"

"No; I never heard it myself. But the night my little girl died, nine years ago, she rose up in bed once, an' she says, 'Who is that a-cryin' up there in the mount'ins?' We couldn't hear nothin' still, but we knew what _she_ had heard, an' after that we didn't have no more hope."

Brent did not think of the banshee as a positive reality, but he would not have denied that its existence was possible, and he felt that it would be useless for him to try to shake the farmer's faith in the tradition which had such a strong hold on his mind.

After a brief silence, he said he would take a short walk before going to bed. Leaving the garden, he strolled toward the mountains, which rose like a vast wall above the foot-hills at their base.

As he drew near the rising ground which marked the verge of the valley, the strange sound once more fell on his ear, and he walked in the direction from which it came. Passing through a grove of chestnut-trees, he reached an elevated open space, where the moonlight shone on the almost level surface of large gray rocks. Near the middle of this clear space he saw a black, shaggy object moving slowly about, with its lowered head turned away from him. He stepped forward to get a closer view of this creature, and as he did so it turned its head and looked at him. The next instant it bounded away and disappeared among the nearest trees.

"Just as I thought," said Brent to himself. "It _was_ a dog, and a villanous-looking cur, too. Exactly the sort of brute to howl and shriek at the moon on a night like this."

But, as he sauntered back to the house, various doubts entered his mind. He reflected that he had seen the animal only for an instant, by moonlight and at some distance, and that he could not be sure it was really a dog. Neither could he be confident it had uttered the mysterious cry, for while it was within his sight it had made no sound of any kind. "Perhaps it went up there for the same reason I did,--to find out what was going on," he thought.

As usual, he ended by informing himself that he was under no responsibility to settle the question, and that, as far as he was concerned, it would probably remain unsettled.

The next morning he found the farmer and his wife very much depressed, but he had no hope of being able to convince them that they had heard nothing supernatural, and thought it best to avoid the subject. He passed the day in calling on some of the neighbors who had asked him to visit them, and returned to the farm-house just before nightfall.

He found Rena standing at the door, and, while talking to her, he mentioned his moonlight walk.

"I saw what I took to be a stray dog up there," he said. "Perhaps it made the sound we heard."

"Was it a black dog, with rough, curly hair?" asked Rena.

"I think it was; but I couldn't see it very well. Do you know whose it is?"

"No; but this morning when I came out of the dairy a dog that looked like that was standing in the path, a little way off, and I was thinking it might have been the same one."

As she looked away again, Brent said, "I didn't tell your father and mother about the dog I saw, because I thought it would be well for them to forget the whole matter as soon as possible."

"Thank you," said Rena, turning her face and looking at him gratefully.

He had lost the desire to tease her, and treated her as he had never done before. Thinking of this, not long afterward, he wondered whether a presentiment of what was coming had caused the change, or whether it merely arose from a consciousness of the gloom which had already settled on the household.

During his call on the Barndollars that morning, he had partly overcome Elsa's unfavorable impression of him by treating her, to some extent, "like a grown-up woman" and showing by his manner that he was not unconscious of the handsome young brunette's personal attractions. On her next visit, a little more than two weeks later, she noticed that he had entirely given up the objectionable teasings; and this removed the last obstacle in the way of her considering him extremely "nice." She had mentally admitted, even at the first view, that he possessed the degree of good looks and stylishness rigorously exacted from the male sex by the canons of boarding school taste, and she now candidly acknowledged to herself that his being an Englishman was, strictly speaking, not his own fault.

When she was ready to go, she made her adieux with an agreeable sense of having been both entertaining and instructive. She forgot to take leave of her friend the aged and decrepit mastiff, which was sitting just inside the hall; but he called attention to his presence by three raps of his tail on the floor. Elsa laughed, and went through the form of shaking his huge paw,--an attention which he acknowledged by a prolonged caudal tattoo.

"Oh, Rena!" said Elsa, stopping on the topmost step, "I forgot to tell you what happened to our Scotch shepherd-dog, Macbeth. You know Melker and I made friends with him the first day, but we were the only ones he'd be intimate with. Well, about two weeks ago an ugly old black dog came prowling around the house, and when Mac went up to it it bit him and then ran away to the mountains. Soon after that, we heard that a black dog with the hydrophobia had been killed up there, and Derrick and Jake said they believed it was the same one. Melker was in Philadelphia, and before he came home Mac went mad. Derrick shot at him out of the barn, and scared him so much that he ran off down the road, and we haven't heard anything about him since."

Rena was bending over one of the jessamine-bushes, and seemed to be absorbed in removing some dead leaves.

"Did your dog come this way, Elsa?" asked Mrs. Reinfelter nervously.

"No, indeed," replied Elsa. "He ran up the road to the village. Good-by, Kuno. I won't forget you again."

Brent followed her down the steps to assist her in mounting, but she sprang into the saddle without waiting for his help, and rode away at a brisk canter.

The farmer and his wife conferred together anxiously about the two mad dogs, while their little son stood near them, listening intently to all they said. Unnoticed by them, Rena walked across the yard and passed around the corner of the house in the direction of the garden.

Something in her manner caught Brent's attention, and in a little while he followed her. He found her sitting in the garden; and, though she tried to keep her face turned away from him, its death like pallor did not escape his sight. He sat down at her side and asked her to tell him what had happened. The sympathy in his voice went straight to her heart and won her whole confidence.

"The warning was for me," she answered, "I'm not afraid to die; but father and mother and my little brother--"

She did not sob or make any sound, but great tears welled from her eyes, and she was unable to go on.

When she could speak again, she told him that on the day after the warning, when she found a black, shaggy-haired dog standing near the dairy door, she put out her hand, intending to stroke its head, but it caught her hand with its teeth, and left a wound from which the blood fell in large drops. The dog ran away in the direction of the Barndollar farm, and she bound up her hand and managed to keep the wound from being noticed while it was healing, for she was anxious to avoid increasing the anxiety her parents already felt. Only a slight scar now remained; but Elsa's account of the mad dogs left no doubt in her mind that she was in imminent danger of a frightful death.

Brent had once witnessed a sight which rose before his eyes many times afterward and would not be blotted from his memory. It all came back to him now once more,--the agonized, horribly glaring eyes, the clinched hands and quivering throat, and the convulsive sobbing and gasping which would not cease tearing the wasted frame until death should bring the only possible help. It made him sick at heart to think that the gentle unselfish girl who was even then forgetting herself in her care for others would be seized by those paroxysms of frightful madness.

He knew that many people who are bitten by mad dogs escape hydrophobia entirely, but he could not doubt that when the teeth have entered the bare flesh, and strong remedies are not instantly applied, there is very little ground for hope.

"Was your hand entirely uncovered?" he asked.

"Yes; I never wear gloves."

With a desperate impulse to do something, he said, "I'll go to Philadelphia and bring a physician. We can be here to-morrow."

"I'm afraid it's too late for that now," said Rena. "It would only frighten father and mother. I want to keep them from knowing it as long as I can."

"I won't bring anybody back with me if you are unwilling; but I must go and find out what I can do to help you."

"Do you think anything can be done to keep me from hurting anybody else?"

"I'm sure of that. I'll find out the best way to do it."

"Oh, thank you. You're so good to me!"

The earnestness of her gratitude made him think with sorrow and shame of the time when his chief pleasure had been to make her unhappy. He could hardly believe he had really been as selfish and heartless as he appeared in the picture rising before him now out of the unchangeable past. His dormant human interest was awakening, and his soul was beginning to resist the tyranny of his mind.

He was so impatient to begin his journey that he proposed setting off immediately and riding to the nearest railroad-station. But Rena was afraid this would alarm her parents: so he agreed to wait until the next morning and take the stage in the village.

That night Rena stayed longer than usual in the room with her little brother after he had sunk into peaceful slumber in the midst of his small confidences and grave interrogations.

Soon after she came down, her mother said, "Rena, sing us one of the nice German songs Mr. Brent learned you once. Sing the one about the lady that set up on the high rock an' combed her hair with a golden comb. What did they call her still? 'De Lower Liar'?"

As Rena turned toward Brent and the lamplight fell on her face, he was sure that if she tried to sing her voice would tell what she was trying to keep unknown.

"I don't think 'Die Lorelei' is a very lively song, Mrs. Reinfelter," said he. "Maybe I can find some prettier ones in Philadelphia to-morrow, if I have time. I must be sure to bring Casper something. What do you think he would like best?"

This question introduced a topic which banished all others; and when Brent looked at Rena again he saw he had come to the rescue in good time. He was glad to think he could at least do this, and he determined to be on the watch for such opportunities.

The result of his consultations the next day gave him very little ground for hope. All he could depend on doing was to save Rena from suffering and prevent what she feared most by making her insensible as soon as the madness showed signs of taking an active form.

When he had gotten what was needed for this purpose and had been fully advised as to his course of action, he went back with a heavy heart to the farm among the mountains.

At the first opportunity he repeated to Rena all he had learned in the city, and told her what he proposed doing. The prospect that was so dispiriting to him removed her greatest care; but her eager thanks humiliated him as he felt his utter helplessness in the hands of fate. A sudden fear that she might hurt him before he could make her unconscious brought back her anxiety; but he reassured her by promising to be constantly on his guard and take every possible means to insure his own safety.

Watching her closely as the days went by, he saw the full extent of her calm and steadfast courage. She made no effort to hide from him her grief at the prospect of separation from those she loved so dearly; but of anguish or terror on her own account there was never any sign. He did not doubt that this came from her perfect faith and trust in a higher power, and, though he could not share her feeling, it comforted him to know that she had such a strong support as she drew near to death.

Near the close of the fifth day after his return he and Rena were standing together at the gate in front of the house. Deep shadows were advancing up the sides of the mountains, but their summits were still bright with the evening glow. Both of them watched the narrowing line of light without speaking. Their minds were full of the same thoughts, and there was a sympathetic communion between them which did not need to be expressed in words.

Hearing footsteps on the road, they looked around, and saw Melchior Barndollar coming toward them. A large and very handsome dog of the Scotch shepherd breed was running along before him, and when he stopped at the gate it came back and stood near him, with its intelligent brown eyes fixed on his face.

"You have got another collie, I see," said Brent.

"No; this is the only one I've ever owned," replied Barndollar.

He had been surprised at the Englishman's remark, and he was entirely unable to account for the effect of his answer on both the others. They turned quickly toward each other with a look of eager interest, mingled with something else which he could not understand.

"I thought your collie went mad," said Brent.

"Oh, you heard that report, then?"

"Yes. The last time your sister was here she mentioned it. Was there nothing in it?"

"It wasn't even founded on an apparent fact," said the young farmer, smiling and looking down at the dog, which immediately began wagging its tail so forcibly that at least one-third of its body partook of the motion. "The men on my mother's farm have regaled themselves so often with stories about mad dogs that they have become their pet horror. When I came home I found that their fire from behind intrenchments had driven poor Mac off the place; though if he had been better acquainted with their marksmanship he would probably have gone to sleep while they were shooting at him. I went out to hunt for him, and found him at a house near the village, as free from hydrophobia as I am. To make sure, I traced the dog that bit him back to its owner's hut in the mountains, and found it there, sneaking around the lot and looking as vicious and mean-spirited as ever. Its master said the dog that was shot came from the other side of the mountains, and was worth a dozen such curs as his."

Rena stepped into the road and began stroking the dog's head and neck. As she did so, her father came out of the house, and, seeing Barndollar at the gate, he came down to speak to him.

While the two farmers were talking, Brent walked away to a grove of oaks near the road and a short distance below the gate. Standing among the trees as the twilight came on, he thought over the episode which had just come to a close, and wondered at its effect on him. Instead of pondering over the uncertainties of the case until it lost all reality to him, he had been too much concerned to think of probabilities at all. Sensibility had overcome his agnosticism, and he had forgotten that it was possible to doubt. He knew he had not acted philosophically; but he felt that philosophy, compared with sympathy and self-forgetfulness, is of very slight account.

* * * * *

Professor Helfenstein returned to the little Pennsylvania village at the time he had indicated, which was about the middle of October. The innkeeper told him his friend had not yet left the farm-house, and the next morning he set out on foot to visit him there.

The mountain-woods, all arrayed in their autumn foliage, were glowing with rich, warm color. Silvery cloud-banks heightened the deep blue of the sky, and their slowly-floating shadows intensified the brightness of the sunlight. "_Ueberall Sonnenschein!_" said the nature-loving German. "_Ach, 's ist ein wunderschönes Land!_"