Part 16
The bellows ceased to sigh. Bereft of its breath, the riotous white flaring of the forge fire sank suddenly into a listless yellow flame and a dull tawny coal. The shop, transformed from the vividly illuminated interior presented but a moment ago, was a shadowy, cavernous place, suffused with a dusky red glow that barely served to show the anvil, the black hood, the sombre suggestions of wall and roof, and the figures of the two startled men. One still reached upward to the bellows; the other stood with the hammer in his hand, his figure alert and tense against the dim fire, that cast a fluctuating, feeble glimmer upon their faces. Outside the wind went howling by; the torrents were tossed hither and thither in its tempestuous, devious course, and drove heavily before it. Some freakish spirit of the air seemed to catch the shutter in Marcella’s grasp, striving to tear it from her; she vainly sought to tighten her hold, feeling like one in a dream, who tries to move, and finds in dismay a hopeless breach between the will and the muscles; but the next moment the fickle blast was gone, leaving the frail batten trembling but passive in her hand. She stared with dilated eyes into the ill-lighted place; her surprise was redoubled as she noticed the evident agitation of the men, and became impressed anew with the strangeness of their presence here at this hour,—their inexplicable intrusion upon the smith’s prerogative.
It was she who was first enabled to speak. “Whar’s Clem Sanders?” she demanded, in a tone of reprehension and accusation, her voice lifted that it might be heard above the iteration of the rain on the roof and the wild skirl of the wind as it came and went. So great was the repulsion which Jake Baintree inspired, and her shrinking from the knowledge of his dolorous record of suspicion and imprisonment and ostracism, which branded him with the shame and the cruelty of a crime of which the verdict of the jury declared him innocent, that it was not at his jail-bleached face, distinct amongst the shadows, that she looked, but at the stranger, still motionless beside the anvil, on which the hot metal had cooled to a dull tint, and still with the hammer in his hand, gazing silently at her.
He did not answer; he turned his head slightly and looked at Baintree, as if referring the question to him,—a well-shaped head, with the hair cut so close upon it that the light, striking upward, barely indicated its reddish-yellow tint. Marcella reluctantly followed his glance to Jake Baintree’s face, which was suddenly instinct with his wonted sly intelligence.
“Why, howdy, Marcelly,” he said, as casually as if they had met on the roadside in the summer sunshine. “War ye a-wantin’ ter see Clem?”
There seemed something sinister to her in this deliberate ignoring of the singular circumstances of the encounter: she could not account for it; she could only perceive the relief in the stranger’s manner, a covert reliance on Jake Baintree’s cleverness to possess the situation. He looked down, and mechanically turned the piece of iron on the anvil with the smith’s tongs, and she knew he thus hid a smile of relish of his coadjutor’s ready retort.
She was easily angered, and it was not in Eli Strobe’s daughter to be readily affrighted. She replied with that note of reproof and objection with which she had inaugurated the conversation. “I never would hev kem ter Clem Sanders’s forge a-sarchin’ fur you-uns,” she said. “I never would hev expected ter see ye hyar.”
Somehow, her faculties seemed extended in some sort. She was looking at Baintree’s sharp features, cut upon the darkling shadows about him, and yet she knew that the stranger, although his head was bent down, was gazing at her with fixed and curious eyes. She did not realize the interest awakened by her face, richly dim in the shadow, like an old painting, pale no longer, but with the dull flush of excitement and anger, her brilliant clear eyes and the curling tangles of the wind-tossed hair indefinite against the folds of the dark red shawl and the obscurity without. She was feeling baffled; her nerves were strained; somewhere the terrible heights gave forth a wild, sonorous, maddened voice, full of a frantic anguish, and she was reminded of her father, and his torturing frenzy, and her errand for help, which the surprise had effaced for the instant. She suddenly flung out her arms toward them through the window.
“He’s dyin’! He’s dyin’! An’ I mought ez well go ax the mountings fur holp ez you-uns!”
She fell half fainting against the window-frame, hardly noticing that, with a change of expression and an abrupt start, Jake Baintree came with his deft, light step toward her. But when he was near she shrank from him, with that aversion which one experiences from the propinquity of a cold-blooded animal, and she stood erect. His voice was, full of feeling, and she was sensible of an effort at self-reproach, as a duty which she owed him as reparation.
“Laws-a-massy, Marcelly, air Eli wuss? I kin do ennythin’ fur him ez Clem Sanders kin.”
She glanced quickly at the stranger, to judge if he had smiled again, perchance, at her outburst, so alert was her pride to take cognizance of ridicule even at the moment that she was sobbing out her errand. His face was grave, so far as the shadows would reveal it. Then her attention reverted to Jake Baintree, and she looked at him with a wondering distrust and curiosity as he suddenly exclaimed, “The Lord’s hand is in it!” So pious he was, to be sure, for a man who had renounced religion, and who had no other use for a river than a wild fowl might find. “The Lord’s hand is in it! No use ter ride fourteen mile; this hyar man’s a doctor, Marcelly, an’ he’ll physic Eli.”
He laid his hand on the shoulder of the man at the anvil, who turned and stared at him in palpable amazement. The fire was so low she could barely see his face, but his whole attitude was expressive of surprise and objection.
“He’s a valley man, Marcelly, an’ he be a powerful smart man,” Jake Baintree said, with less the air of introduction than of a showman commending a work of art. “He’s the doctor ez physicked me whilst in jail, an’ he brung me through wonderful; an’ that’s how I kem ter be ’quainted with him. He’ll kem right straight, Marcelly,” he continued, with an assurance as of a proprietor. “Ye jes’ run home out’n the rain; we’ll kem ez soon ez we kin. I dunno what ailed me ter let ye stan’ out thar in the rain an’ under them drippin’ eaves all this time. Ye jes’ g’long, an’ we’ll foller ye.”
Marcella hesitated for a moment; then turned away from the window, and the dull red scene within disappeared as if it had been caught up into the black night. Outside it seemed darker, if that were possible, than before; the lightnings had ceased their delirious quiver; the winds were steadier; the rain was a continuous down-pour. She kept her hand on the wall of the forge, as she slowly made the circuit around it, still trembling with the excitements of the evening, and anxiously malcontent with the result of the interview. What strange man was this, that lent himself to these curious midnight labors, these unwarranted intrusions? What could he be doing in that forge, with the smith’s tongs, and swage, and bellows, that he wielded as his own? And why was he secret about it, and easily startled and affrighted? And how amazing was it that he, a physician, should be at the disposal of Jake Baintree, and accept his guidance! Then she recollected the astonishment of the stranger, plainly shown, upon Jake Baintree’s proposal that he should act in the place of the distant physician. Was he a doctor at all? she wondered; and suddenly she remembered his evident reluctance, and was chilled with the contradictory fear that after all he might not come. More than once she paused, as she stumbled along in the darkness, to judge if perchance, amidst the clamors of the elements, she might hear their footsteps splashing in the muddy road behind her. No sound save the march of the legions of the rain down and down the valley; the wind wailed afar off, under sentence of exile. An utter darkness overspread all the world. She might not have kept the road, save for that strange yet familiar phenomenon of the independence of the muscles, by which one mechanically performs actions, the processes of which have no recognized correlative consciousness in the brain. Her feet found the way which her intelligence could not discern. She presently felt the wet blades of the cornstalks in her face, and knew that she was in the turn-row, walking as one blind or asleep along the straight, narrow space, and turning when the gate was reached. Again she paused to listen if any footfall followed: only the turmoils of the rain sobbing in the half-spent passion of the storm, and the melancholy stirring of the forests, until suddenly an alien sound smote her ear, a high, cracked, exhausted voice, now talking incoherently, now seeking to scream with muscles that failed midway, all betokening the continued delirium within the cabin. The proximity of the dwelling was further suggested by the feeble flicker through the crevices of the batten shutter. Once more she reflected how powerless they within were to succor or subdue this strange, distraught spirit that seemed to have invaded their home; how far away that entity whom they knew as Eli Strobe had journeyed, unconscious of their efforts, unresponsive to their appeals. When she reached the porch she lingered, peering into the darkness; the rain had almost ceased near at hand; farther away she could hear the pattering of the long files of drops into the valley below, but it had a fitful, discursive effect, and betokened that this verge of the rain-cloud had followed into the vasty vagueness wherein the great vaporous masses were expended. The vines close at hand were all dripping, dripping; more than once the iteration of the drops beguiled into hopeful credulity her anxious desire to hear a step close at hand. Although a comparative silence, or rather a sense of spent sound, made the air null, there was some vague stir in the upper atmosphere; for once or twice the rifts rent in the black, overhanging clouds showed the palpitating splendors of a white star. A raucous sound made her start,—only a frog croaking in a pool by the fence. And once more that wild, strange voice within rang out, with all its suggested lapses of identity to make her shrink and wince. She burst into tears, and turned again toward the gate. She would not go in and tell the frantic grandmother and sister how her mission had failed, how she had been mocked and derided with fantastic misrepresentations and promises. A physician, was he, forsooth, a “mighty smart man,” who would haunt the little mountain forge in company with Jake Baintree, in the secret midnight, for some inexplicable purpose, and wield the hammer at the anvil! She knew little of the habitudes of this world, but she sneered with contempt of her own credulity as she sought to imagine the only medical man within her ken, the old country doctor, at such escapades,—he of the big spectacles, and the rickety buggy, and the bald head, and the black store-clothes. Conventionality, reliability, and respectability could not have been more expressively impersonated.
Again that wild, exhausted wail from within, the vague sound of the troubled comments of the watchers, and she started anew upon her mission to arouse the neighbors; weeping that so much time had been wasted, and her heart throbbing with anger and resentment that she had been so ready a dupe. She had reached the turn-row, when suddenly the galloping of horses invaded the silence, the hoof-beats resonant, as they splashed into the pools of the red clay road. She stood still amongst the leaning stalks, listening, hoping, doubting. Her heart sank in an interval of silence; then that turbulent sound of swift equestrians was again upon the air, and she knew that the horsemen were coming in single file down the turn-row. She faced about precipitately, and ran like a frightened deer. She would be there first; they should never know that she had doubted them, and had come forth to search for others. She was half laughing and half crying, in the intensity of her relief, in her relish of her own quick resource. Nevertheless, she had barely reached the gate, so swift was their progress, when they reined up beside it; she silently ran through it in the darkness, and in the interval while they dismounted and hitched their horses she made her way to the porch. The shaft of light that fell out into the night, as Mrs. Strobe, hearing their approach, cautiously opened the door, revealed Marcella, her tall figure swathed in her clinging wet garments, her red shawl twisted about her throat, her dense hair weighted with rain hanging upon her shoulders, her eyes soft and dewy, her lips all tenderly smiling upon the advancing shadows.
“I fetched him, Marcelly!” Jake Baintree exclaimed, as he came up the steps of the porch, and the light from the room showed his keen, clearly-cut face, shiny with the rain, and his eyes, all eager with interest and excitement, sharply glancing out from under his hat-brim. “He ’lowed he couldn’t do nuthin’ ’thout his physic, so he an’ me hed ter take time ter go—yander,”—he hesitated suddenly and spoke with embarrassment, jerking his thumb vaguely over his shoulder,—“ter git his med’cine-chist. Good-evenin’, Mis’ Strobe,” he went on, his voice the very essence of oily propitiation, as he caught sight of the little dame, seeming forlorn, and smaller and more wrinkled than ever, as she peered out of the door. The long-legged Isabel could easily look over her shoulder, and she did. “Powerful sorry ter hear from Marcelly how Eli hev been tuk. I hev brung a doctor-man, ez hev been abidin’ with me, ter see ef he can’t settle him somehows.”
Mrs. Strobe’s head was cocked askew in inquiry. What kind of a “doctor-man” was this who abode with Jake Baintree? Then, as a strange, angry mutter came from the room within, she looked over her shoulder with a frightened gesture.
“Ennybody ez be named ‘doctor’ mought ez well try thar hand on Eli, kase ef they can’t make him no better, I reckon they can’t make him no wuss,” she assented, not too graciously. Her sharp eyes strove to pierce the gloom that hung about the dusky shadow that followed Jake Baintree toward the door. There was still suggested in the manner of the figure that reluctance which Marcella had noted at the forge. It angered her in some sort and it excited her curiosity. She felt an antagonism toward him, despite the anxious, absorbing emotions that might have been supposed to crowd out every other sentiment. The next moment she had forgotten all except that she had brought help where it was so sorely needed. In the necessity for exertion during the last hour and the hardships of the storm, she had been spared something of the full realization of the calamity that had befallen them. But as Mrs. Strobe opened the door, and Marcella caught sight of her father anew, she winced from the strange metamorphosis that delirium had wrought; the alien spirit that possessed the accustomed face and figure almost thwarted recognition. He had risen, wrapped in the sheets, still clinging to his spectral delusion; and as the flicker of the fire rose and fell, and the tallow dip flared and sputtered, his sheeted figure, with its bandaged bloody head, was dim and ghostly in the dusky corner of the cabin where he stood, fantastically gesticulating, unnoting the new-comers even while his burning eyes were riveted upon them, still muttering his threats of vengeance on the man who he declared had slain him.
“Scot-free! Scot-free,” he exclaimed. “I’ll walk! I’ll walk!”
Jake Baintree’s hat fell from his nerveless hand, as he stood gazing, open-mouthed, at the phenomenon of frenzy for the first time presented to his scanty experience. Mrs. Strobe and Isabel, somewhat accustomed to their terrors, took heed of it with a certain painful curiosity as to its further developments.
“He ’lows he air a harnt,” said Mrs. Strobe in a low voice to Baintree. “An’ ef that air the way he air goin’ ter behave whenst he air dead, a body oughter take a power o’ pains ter keep him alive. I hope he’ll last out my time, the Lord knows.”
Marcella blessed the tears that crowded out the sight, and as she turned to the stranger, who was entering last of all, and wiped her eyes with the fringed end of the wet shawl, all her heart was in the words, as she adjured him, “Fur the Lord’s sake! Fur the Lord’s sake!” and fell to sobbing anew.
He made no reply, and it seemed to her—and she could have smitten him for it—a most casual glance that he cast toward the master of the house, now striding about, unintelligibly calling aloud in a raucous voice; now shrinking into the corner and standing close against the wall, muttering in sinister fashion. And surely, surely nothing could have been more deliberate and unexcited than the manner with which the doctor divested himself of his hat and a long shiny black overcoat, a strange garment in this locality, where waterproof luxuries had never prevailed. She looked loweringly at him as he quietly drew off his gloves. Now that he stood revealed, she saw that he was a young man, —as young as Jake Baintree himself; he had a fair complexion, retaining its distinctive characteristic, despite the temporary sunburn. His mustache, of the reddish-yellow tint of his hair, was long and silky; but the growth about the lower part of his face was in that unbecoming stage known as “turning out a beard.” His attire was different from that of the men of the region, although it vied with theirs in its simplicity. He wore blue flannel trousers, with long rubber boots drawn to the knees, and a blue flannel shirt. He was singularly trim and light despite the suggestions of sinew and strength about him, and he had long, soft white hands. She noted their deft certainty of touch as he took the little black medicine-chest to the table and opened it slowly, showing its rows of tiny vials, on which Mrs. Strobe and Isabel gazed with dilated eyes.
He was not slow when he had selected what he wanted: he crossed the room with a quick, sure step, and laid his hand upon his patient’s arm.
“Come, Jake,” he said in a low voice to Baintree; and as the mountaineer slouched heavily across the floor, Marcella sank into a chair, putting her hands over her eyes that she might not see the doughty Eli Strobe overpowered in this painfully unequal struggle.
She could not have believed that it would be so soon over. A succession of hoarse screams; the sound of ineffectual, ill-aimed blows; the dragging of heavy feet across the puncheons; wild, half-articulate curses, growing now disjointed and again only a broken word, subsiding at last to a drowsy mutter, and Eli Strobe was silent and asleep.
The stillness seemed to Marcella sinister. She lifted her head slowly, and gazed fearfully up. The two men had placed the insensible constable on the bed. The stranger was flushed with exertion, his lips parted in a triumphant smile, showing his strong white shining teeth beneath his yellow mustache. He wiped his brow with a white handkerchief; the same office was performed by Jake Baintree with his handy coat-sleeve.
“Whew-w!” the mountaineer commented. “Eli be ez survigrous ez a yoke o’ steers.”
“Waal, sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Strobe, with a deep sigh of relief and content, the sparkle again in her little bird-like eye, the parchment-like tint of her visage disappearing under a flush of pleasure. “Did enny mortal ever see ennythin’ done like that! I’d like ter hev some o’ that thar stuff, doctor,” she declared. “Ye mought leave we-uns a bottle.”
The powerful odor of a strange drug was diffused through the room, and the physician turned and placed the door a trifle ajar before he approached the fire, where Jake Baintree was already seated.
“Set down, doctor,—set down, doctor,” said Mrs. Strobe, pushing a chair toward him. “Yes, sir, I’d like ter hev a bottle. What a thing that physic would be fur fractious chil’n!—put ’em ter sleep off thar meanness. I never hed but one chile,—that thar big buffalo, Eli, thar.” She had resumed her wonted note toward her son, now that he had relapsed into his old familiar self, lacking the dreadful dignity of one about to be summoned to a new and untried world, and no longer exciting the painful tenderness and prescient grief that hang upon a possible loss. “But I hev seen him a many a time whenst it would hev brung a heap o’ peace in the house ef he could hev been put ter sleep that-a-way, in the midst o’ his tantrums. Can’t ye leave a bottle o’ it, doctor?”
Isabel looked up apprehensively, thinking herself the possible candidate for this new and unique method of discipline.
But the stranger said he had none to spare for the subjugation of domestic insurgents, and no more than he needed himself; and although Marcella observed that, as he put the bottle into its groove in the case and shut the lid with a snap, his face wore a smile of relish or of ridicule, she did not resent it, so grateful was she, so ready to fall at his feet. Still, terrors beset her; it seemed too good to be true.
“He ain’t dead, doctor?” she asked, in a tone of expostulation, glancing at the motionless figure on the bed.
“Not at all,” he rejoined, showing his fine teeth.
“Shet up, Marcelly; ye hev got no sense,” urged her grandmother; for the natty Mrs. Strobe was all herself again. “Set down, doctor, an’ rest yer bones. Won’t ye hev a toddy ter sorter hearten ye up? I hev got some apple-jack hyar strong enough ter climb a tree. Jake,” she continued, turning toward Baintree, “jes’ ketch a-holt o’ the handle o’ that thar jimmy-john in the corner, an’ haul it hyar. I’d ax Marcelly, ’ceptin’ she looks ’bout broke in two; an’ I’d git it myself, ’ceptin’ the jimmy-john’s too nigh my size.”
The apology was needless, for Jake Baintree seemed complimented to be permitted to make himself useful, and brought out the demijohn with much glad alacrity. Marcella marveled in self-reproachful dismay that she should have such strange thoughts, but as Jake Baintree poured the fluid into a glass she noted how sinewy and thin his hands were, and white as the doctor’s own,—so long had they been idle and listless in jail; and she wondered with which of them he had killed Samuel Keale,—with both, perchance,—and if handcuffs had been put on those long, bony wrists while he languished in prison. And when he offered her a glass, she shuddered and drew back, and shook her head without a word. Mrs. Strobe also declined to join in the potations. “Sperits air all well enough fur men,” she observed,—“they hev got so little sense ennyhow, it don’t matter ef they gits foolisher ’n nat’ral wunst in a while; but ef the Lord’ll spare my reason, I’ll ondertake ter holp him.”
As the stranger sat drinking the athletic apple-jack so graphically described by Mrs. Strobe, he seemed less reluctant, less doubtful, than before. He said almost nothing, however, leaving the conversation to Jake Baintree, watching him with interest, and in the intervals of silence meditatively eying the smouldering fire. He had the air of holding himself in abeyance, and quietly awaiting developments. He seemed to indorse all that Baintree said, who talked eagerly, and was by no means averse to giving an account of his friend.