Part 32

“Kem on, bubby. Kem on, Bob. We-uns mus’ go home now.”

But the gleeful Bob, with distended ruddy cheeks, and two rows of snaggled white teeth, and gleaming eyes almost eclipsed in rolls of fat, continued his blithe circuit, finding a new joy in flapping his arms, in which he had an advantage over the lamb, who had no arms to flap, and who often paused with meditative lowered head to gaze at these gyrations.

“Kem on, Bob—or I’ll make ye! Ye’ll repent it, sir! Kem on!”

And once more Jepson approached the elusively whisking Bob. “Kem on! Like a good boy.” He resorted to entreaty.

But Bob evidently disbelieved in retribution from this source, and was hard-hearted enough to disregard softer suasion.

“He be a powerful obejient chile!” Marcella remarked, with a little satiric laugh.

“He’s young yit,” returned Jepson, flustered and mortified. “Whenst he gits a leetle older he’ll do better. Bob, I’ll let ye tote my shot-pouch, like ye love ter do.”

But Bob, with a soul above bribes, circled as before. Marcella, with an arch sidelong glance, turned from him to Jepson. “How mean ye must treat him! How ’feard o’ you-uns he do be!” she exclaimed with laughing irony.

A flush rose suddenly to his brow, and she saw anew how deeply wounded he had been by the ignoble and odious accusation. Little wonder, since he felt it so, that he had declared he would never forgive her.

“I furgot he hed a stepmother,” she faltered by way of excuse.

“I never said nuthin’ agin his stepmother,” he rejoined sternly, darkly frowning.

Bob was beginning to show signs of exhaustion. As Jepson turned toward him again Marcella gave a sudden start. She felt she had done him a grievous injustice and she repented it. With some vague apologetic intention she sought to detain him on some pretext,—on any pretext,—and she spoke upon the impulse of the moment.

“Mus’ I tell the folks at home ez ye never wunst thunk ter inquire arter them?” Her eyes were dewy and bright; a faint flush was in her cheek; the tender curves of her red lips wore a half-smiling sweetness; as she lifted her head upward to look at him, the hair curling on her shoulders fell still farther down over the dangling yellow sun-bonnet.

He turned a changed face. “I war ’feard ter ax, Marcelly,” he said, in his low melancholy drawl. “I know ye feel so hard ter me ’bout’n Eli—an’ I never kin forgive myself, though I never went ter do no harm. I hear ’bout Eli constant—’thout hevin’ ter harry yer feelin’s by axin’ ye arter him.”

The girl felt a certain reassurance, a satisfaction that in this at least he had not changed. Since he had wrought so grievous an injury to Eli Strobe, remorse was the meet sequence. But her alert intuition presently apprehended a tone not altogether applicable to the past.

“He air thrivin’ toler’ble, now,” she observed.

He glanced at her with the keen suspense of an unexpected hope shining in his eyes. “Then what they say at the Settlemint ain’t true!”

She felt a sudden fear clutch at her heart. Her face paled—her eyes dilated.

“What air they sayin’ agin him at the Settlemint?” she asked, trembling, yet roused into instant defiance.

“’Tain’t faultin’ Eli noways,” he explained anxiously. “They ’low, though, ez his ailment hev streck his brain, an’ he hev gone deranged.”

Her short, sudden scream rang out shrilly in the dull silence of the gray afternoon. She sprang to her feet. “Who hev tole that—who hev tole that on him? I’ll be bound them sly foxes at the Settlemint air plottin’ su’thin agin him. They won’t gin him time ter git well, an’ they don’t want ter let him be constable, what he hev done been ’lected ter be. Who hev tole it? Who hev tole it?” Her eyes flashed an insistent inquiry at him and he could only reply doubtfully,—

“I dunno, Marcelly. I jes’ hearn a whole pack of ’em at the store”—she winced visibly at the idea of this wide dissemination of the rumor—“a-talkin’ bout’n it. But I dunno who set it a-goin’ fust.”

“I do!” she exclaimed frantically. “That stranger—he ’peared tickled ter death whenst he fust noticed it. Never seen a man so streck by nuthin’ in yer life. Tuk an’ felt his pulse, sir, an’ ’peared like he’d ruther hear sech foolishness talked ’n the sober wisdom o’ Sol’mon! I war mad then—but what though bein’ called a n’angel”—She broke off suddenly. “’Twar him—’twar him—kase nobody else knowed it. Dad hain’t seen nobody else ’ceptin’ him an’ Andy Longwood one day,—but Andy hain’t got larnin’ enough ter feel folkses pulses an’ sense thar shortcomin’s an’ sech. ’Twar him! ’Twar him! Oh, ye air all alike. I never see nobody ez I take a notion air mighty good an’ fine, an’ I go round like a fool studyin’ ’bout ’em all day, but what—ef I know ’em long enough—I find out they air jes’ plain common men-folks sech ez hev been sence the worl’ began,—jes’ like Adam, rather guzzle a apple ’n bide in Paradise.” She smiled reflectively, a scornful retrospection, as if the thought of some past folly were both bitter and ludicrous.

“Waal,” she resumed, turning upon him, “what war they ’lowin’ at the store they war goin’ ter do ’bout’n it?”

He shifted his weight to the other foot, then leaned heavily on his gun. “I hate ter tell ye, Marcelly,” he said with a low-spirited cadence. “I hoped ’twarn’t true.”

“I mus’ know,” she asserted insistently.

“Waal,” he reluctantly began, “they ’lowed ez some o’ them ‘smart Alecks’ of politicians an’ sech hed gin information ez thar war a crazy in the county ez oughter be restrained o’ his liberty.” A short exclamation, little less than a scream, came from her with an accent as if it were wrung forth by physical pain. “Ef the county court app’ints the sher’ff ter summons a jury fur a inquisition o’ lunacy, an’ they see Eli an’ ’low he air insane, they think they kin git up perceedin’s ez will take away his office.”

She listened silently as she stood holding the empty gourd in her hand. He felt as if he were pronouncing a sentence of some terrible doom, in thus destroying her pride. She esteemed the humble office so high and noble an estate, its shattered incumbent the chief of men!

“Marcelly,” he said, “look here. No matter what ye want ter do ’bout’n it, ef ye kin do ennything, I stand ready ter help. Promise me ye’ll let me know. Promise me ye’ll let me help.”

She looked up at him. Her lips were compressed. Her eyes were dry and steady. “Help!” she echoed bitterly. “It’s you-uns ez hev brung all this torment on dad. An’ now ye talk about ‘help.’ It’s too late—too late ter help.” Then she turned away.

He stood watching her as she went; her dull greenish-brown dress was long visible against the tawny tints of the broomsedge; her head was bare, the yellow sun-bonnet still hanging upon her shoulders. A leaden cloud was coming down the opposite mountain side, rapidly advancing across the valley; she seemed to be going to meet the storm, and suddenly it was as if she had been caught up in it. The sombre vapors enfolded her; there was a swift, transient, ocherous gleam, then she was seen no more, and the dreary sound of the invisible rain, falling, falling in the beclouded valley, filled all the air.

XXII.

While hardly a tuft of the broomsedge stirred on the red clay slopes of the hill, the fitful gusts were rioting in the valley, and Teck Jepson, standing in the midst of the tawny growth, absently watched the cloud approaching in the air, and the dead leaves all set a-whirling in devious routes along the brown ground. He heard in the voice of the wind the first bated threatenings of the storm, though but a murmur, full of latent strength, and with a steadily increasing volume that bespoke the prescient elation of the liberated element, free to come and to go as it listed. There were occasionally black boughs—dead, doubtless, brittle, and easily wrenched from the tree, for the wind had not yet stretched its muscle—to be seen thrashing along clumsily for a little way, then falling to the earth, harried up again presently by the boisterous blast, and set a-going anew in their simulated flight.

Suddenly the broomsedge bowed down to the ground; he heard the forest quake; the clouds were closing in, and, with an abrupt realization that the storm was upon him, he caught the small Bob up on his shoulder and ran for home. It was a swift, short dash over the broken ground against the buffeting wind, so uncertain of mood, now rollicking, now fierce. The little mountaineer’s gay laughter and shrieks of exhilaration from his lofty perch mingled with its sound, as he clutched Jepson’s collar and looked back at the wild rout behind them; the clouds seeming to roll on the ground, and tossed by the turbulent wind; the erratic flight of leaves and sticks; the disheveled woods, all their boughs turning from the blast as if holding out deprecating, quivering arms in plea for mercy. Even after they had reached the haven of the porch, they heard once and again a wild aerial hilarity echoing along the deep chasm, in which the river was locked as in the isolation of a lake, and anon a low, menacing roar. But the storm was definitely angry when it fairly burst, and they were housed none to soon. The thunder’s peal was augmented to even alien ferocity by the reverberations in the rocky abysses, above the deeply sunken channel of the river; the lightning flashed, tracing sinister characters across the black clouds, fading out before one might read this terrible script; the slopes below and the crags above had disappeared in the multiplicity of the interposing lines of rain; the garden, sere and faded, save for a forlorn prince’s feather here and there clinging to the stalk, was gradually effaced from the world, and presently the mists were in the porch, and beginning to sift in at the open door. Jepson rose from before the fire which he had kindled, and shut them out, to stand shivering there, or to press pallid and white against the door, like some forlorn spectral outcasts, forbidden to haunt the place which that human love, which even death cannot kill, makes them fain to tread once more.

The white flames of the pine knots leaped with glad elastic bounds up the chimney; the shadows in the dark corners shifted continuously with the glancing shafts of light. The little house had many tokens of its previous occupants: a spinning-wheel, where now only the spiders drew out long, shining threads, stood in the corner; sundry gowns, all of rich, gay colors, despite their homely material, garnet, or orange, or dark blue, hung on the wall, as if Jepson’s mother had just placed them there. Her yarn, in dusty hanks, swung from the rafters, and the quilts she had “pieced,” folded somewhat eccentrically, were piled high on the “corner-shelf” which they had burdened of yore. Against the jamb of the chimney, on a slight out-jutting of the clay and sticks, serving as shelf, was a great brown gourd, half filled with bright-tinted scraps, and buttons, and the bulbs of plants that would never bloom now, but should lie idle and fall to dust, with all the further possibilities of life unfulfilled. In a splint basket at one side of the fire lay a rough coat, worn and torn: her needle had rusted in the patch; the coarse waxed thread would never be drawn through and her last stitch completed.

It was for these vagaries, the preservation of the tokens of the old home-life, that Mrs. Bowles esteemed Teck Jepson somewhat “teched in the head.” Could she have beheld the dust which plentifully covered them all, the sentiment which she contemned would have impressed her as but a distraught trifle in comparison with the rank madness which she would have deemed his system of housekeeping. Bob, however, gazed about with undisturbed serenity, as he stood sturdily on his fat legs in the middle of the floor. Only when he turned about in search of a seat did his countenance fall.

“This air the bes’ ez I kin do fur ye, bubby,” Jepson remarked, tendering him a full-grown chair. “I hev got no leetle cheers hyar.”

But when Bob’s plump bulk had scaled the heights of the chair, the soles of his feet reaching but little beyond its verge, and his aspect presenting a singular study of foreshortening as he sat and gazed at the fire, content descended upon him as before, and occasionally he glanced at Jepson with a lively little grin, all his snaggled teeth on parade, confident of sympathy in his satisfaction and unaffrighted freedom. But Jepson could not unreservedly share this placidity. As he sat opposite, smoking his pipe, his reflective face lighted by the fire, he observed: “Ye’re cornsider’ble of a puzzle, Bob. I dunno what I oughter do with ye. I reckon, ef the truth war knowed, I oughter take ye up the mounting ter yer mam. Likely ez not they air sarchin’ fur ye now.”

“No-o,” returned Bob, with a resolute rising inflection. “I be a-goin’ ter live in de Cove! Right hyar!” And he looked about him with a pleased, adoptive gaze. He had heard Mrs. Bowles bemoan her sad fate in being wrested away from the Cove, but the naturally high opinion of the locality which this fostered was hardly adequate to the reality, in his estimation, as for the first time in his memory he was within its charmed limits, resting in the security of Jepson’s coveted companionship.

The big man would not argue so unpleasing a subject with the little man; he still meditatively smoked, heedless of the discursive, juvenile babble, and answering only at random when a direct appeal was made to him. Presently these queries grew fewer; intervals of absolute silence ensued; a drowsy mutter, and Bob succumbed finally to the influences of warmth and quiet, and the fatigue of his long jaunt down the mountain before he had met Jepson in the road. He sat, or rather lay, in the armchair, his flushed round face with its happiness still upon it, as if the sweetness of security, of kindness, of the sense of being held of value, had pervaded his dreams. It would have been long, long, before the faces of Sim and A’minty could have learned those serene curves. But Bob’s adaptability had stood him in good stead hitherto, and one need hardly have wished him more retentively sensitive that his little life might have been still more dismal than it was.

The rain fell with dull monotony; only at long intervals a sudden acceleration betokened a down-pour in sheets, and the increased volume of the torrents washed with a heavy splashing from the eaves. The sound was melancholy, full of intimations of the waning year, of the killing frosts to come. Even the thunder, ceasing to roll, left an unwelcome void, having been as an incident to vary the dreary sameness of sounds and suggestions. The lightnings were quenched. The world was given over to the sobbing wind and the sad-voiced rain. Jepson had no cheerful thoughts to beguile the idle hour. His heart was heavy, and the further perspectives of the days gloomed full of shadows. He did not upbraid himself; he was spared that keenest edge of regret, so complete was his proud sense of rectitude, his unswerving faith in himself and his own motives. Nor did he resent Marcella’s anger. He admitted with a deep sigh its justification. He accepted it as a retribution, in some sort, not for his own sins, but for his unintentional contributive share, as he construed it, in the untoward circumstances that had resulted in Eli Strobe’s injuries. He rebelled, however, against his fate, this shipwreck of his love, more, indeed, than he was definitely conscious of doing, for he often boasted to himself, in the illusions of his piety that he meekly submitted to the Lord’s will, according to the example of the saints; then he would walk the floor all night in mental anguish, or wander forth in the dark, autumnal woods till dawn, in all the throes of despair. Of late, there had often come into his mind a bitterness with the thought of her which it had seldom before known. The image of the young stranger at the forge was continually associated with hers. His jealous eyes had been quick to note the changing expressions on her face, full of fear for Rathburn’s sake, when his strange absence had been mentioned. Oddly enough, Jepson was sensible of the glow of anger that the man she loved, if indeed she loved him, should fail in aught of homage; he took no satisfaction in the thought that it was a possibility—nay, a probability—that Rathburn did not love her. He deprecated the pangs she might feel, and still he sighed for his own.

So absorbed was he in these sombre meditations, as he sat, his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin in his hand, his contemplative eyes upon the fire, that he took no heed of a step on the porch without, although he might have heard it, even through the long-drawn sighing of the wind and the fresh outburst of the tumultuous rain, for no caution restrained its demonstrations. The heavy stamping was obviously designed to free first one boot and then the other from the persistent clinging of the red clay mire. Only when the door was unceremoniously flung open from without did Jepson rouse himself with a start, and lift his head, seeing at first merely the white mist with the lines of rain all aslant across it, and imposed upon it the figure of a man at the threshold, the wind tossing the loose ends of his garments, and the water streaming from his bent old hat. For a moment his face was invisible, for the dull gray light of the beclouded landscape was behind him; but the draught from the opening door rekindled the coals of the dying fire, and sent the ashes scattering about the hearth, and as the flames flared up they revealed the familiar features of Jake Baintree. Jepson, rising slowly from his chair, experienced the odd doubting sensation that sometimes besets one in a dream, when its vagaries so transcend the probabilities as to rouse a skeptical application of verisimilitude to these airy fantasies. The next moment a definite appreciation of the reality of his visitor asserted itself. Jake Baintree had evidently been drinking heavily. But for that, what he said in response to Jepson’s query might have seemed stranger than it did.

“What did ye kem hyar fur?” sternly demanded the master of the house.

His manner evidently affected Baintree, who did not bear himself with the swaggering freedom with which he had flung open the door. He had looked threatening. He was cowed in an instant,—cowed, but very crafty.

“A-beggin’,” he said, with a sudden light in his eyes. “I want a hunk o’ bread.”

Jepson stood uncertain, reluctant, a frown knitting his brow, fairly coerced for once in his life. It was the only plea that could have restrained him from taking the intruder by the shoulders and turning him out of the door,—the only plea, and Baintree knew it. He could not accord his hospitality as ungraciously, perhaps, as he might have desired, and thus he was forced into more of a suave insincerity than had ever before been able to adjust itself to his face and manner. He turned toward a pine table, pushed aside in one corner, and indicated certain dishes beneath an inverted wooden bowl.

“Thar’s all in the house. He’p yerse’f, he’p yerse’f.” For his life he could not have hindered the heartiness of the intonation, or the unreserve of the invitation. The habits of a lifetime, the traditions of kith and kin and all the country-side, constrained him. He did not credit for an instant the sincerity of Baintree’s demand, but none could ask bread or shelter of him in vain. It was the first time that the unruly and absolute temper had been thus helplessly in the control of circumstances, and he was irked by a sense of feigning, as he turned about and threw a pile of pine knots on the fire,—for had he care for his guest’s cheer or warmth?

Baintree had possessed himself of a corn-dodger, and as he sat down before the fire, the rain still trickling from his garments, Jepson read in his thin, clear-cut face, the elation because of the success of his clever ruse. He had not come with the intention to ask for bread,—his manner at first had betokened a far more formidable errand; and as he sat there munching, with a mimetic show of hunger, Jepson was moved to marvel anew what had brought him into the house of a man whom he held his enemy, and who certainly was no friend.

“The fodder gins out wunst in a while up on the mounting,” Baintree observed presently, the whiskey that he had drunk imparting to him, despite his reticent habit, its characteristic loquacious glow. He cast a glance of thinly veiled antagonism upon his entertainer. Then he said, with a low chuckle of derision, in which he would hardly have ventured to indulge at a calmer moment, “I s’pose things never git ter sech a pass ez that in this house. Ye mus’ hev a bar’l o’ meal constant ez never gits empty, no matter how high ye feed, an’ a can o’ coal-ile ez hain’t got no bottom ez ye kin reach. Surely the Lord faviors a man ez views sech visions o’ yourn ez much ez he done ’Lijah.” He hesitated for a moment, staring with bloodshot eyes into the fire, then snapped his fingers. “’Twarn’t ’Lijah!” he exclaimed, with an air of discovery,—“’twarn’t ’Lijah! ’Twar the widder woman ez hed that mighty desirable brand o’ meal an’ ile. Now, Teck,” with mock persuasiveness, “ye ain’t goin’ ter tell me that, survigrous ez ye be, plumb captain o’ all Brumsaidge Cove, ye hev let that thar widder woman git ahead o’ ye? Whar’s yer everlastin’ meal an yer eternal coal-ile?”

He turned about, and affected to anxiously survey the culinary stores, scanty enough, arrayed on a hanging shelf suspended from the rafters, and, thus isolated, protected from the rats and the mice.

He enjoyed the immunity from retort or retaliation which men accord to the drunken, and which is incomprehensible to the more intolerant temperament of women. Jepson steadfastly regarded him in silence, and as Baintree turned again to the fire he seemed, in shifting his position, to have forgotten his jeer and the prospective joy with which he had thought to pursue it. A realization of the situation came upon him anew, and he made haste to gnaw at his corn-dodger with an affectation of great hunger.

“I’m mighty glad ter git it,” he mumbled.

Jepson had resumed his seat, and, with the white glow of the blazing pine knots irradiating his serious face, he demanded, “Whar’s the man ez war bidin’ with ye? That corn-dodger ez ye air eatin’ ain’t goin’ ter holp him.”

“He’ll make out. He ain’t one o’ the lackin’ kind,” Baintree responded cavalierly.

The heat of the fire perhaps aided the heady effect of his potations, for he was presently more definitely intoxicated than before. Few people had ever seen him thus affected; for though he drank deeply at times, the quantity that would set another man reeling hardly disturbed his equilibrium. The fiery courage distilled from the corn was in his veins now, and showed with a sturdy bravado.

“I’m leavin’ the kentry, Teck,” he exclaimed suddenly. “I’m leavin’ this hyar twisted an’ turmoiled e-end o’ the world ye call the mountings. I hope never ter see a mound o’ groun’ agin higher ’n this hat. I fund out what pore shakes the mountings air jes’ through goin ter—ter”—his voice faltered; his eyes were fixed intently on the empty space before them, as if he beheld something there invisible to others; he made a détour around the word “jail,” and went on with an air of triumphant inspiration in this obvious device—“through _visitin’_ a sure-enough town. An’ I never want ter see a mound o’ groun’ more ’n two inches high agin—’thout it air yer grave.”

He paused abruptly, turning his bloodshot eyes instantly upon Jepson to observe the effect of his words.