Part 12

“Prayin’ in public--’fore the folks--I mean; in the church-house or at camp-meetin’. Oh, I can’t marry a man gin over ter sech prayin’ afore the congregations! but ye kin go off yander alone in the woods or on the mountings, an’ pray, ef so minded, till the skies fall, for all I’m keerin’.”

“Ye mind kase people laff,” he said slowly.

“Ef people laff at me kase I be foolish, I mind it. Ef people laff at me kase _they_ air fools, they air welcome ter thar laffin’ an’ thar folly too.” This discrimination was plain. But as he still looked dreamy and dazed, she made the application for him. “Ye can’t preach; ye can’t pray; ye make a idjit o’ yerself tryin’. I can’t marry no sech man ’thout ye gin up prayin’ ’fore folks.”

“Ye think mo’ o’ folks ’n the Lord?” Haines demanded, with a touch of that ministerial asperity expert in imputing sin.

But so widely diffused are the principles of Christianity that the well-grounded layman can rarely be silenced even by a minister with a call, much less poor uncommissioned tongue-tied Owen Haines.

“The Lord makes allowances which people can’t an’ won’t,” she retorted. “He hears the thought an’ the sigh, an’ even the voice of a tear.”

“He does! He does!” cried Owen Haines, fired by the very suggestion, his face, his eyes, his lips aflame. “An’ may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth an’ my right hand be withered an’ forget its cunning, may agues an’ anguish rack my body an’ may my mind dwindle ter the sense of a brute beastis, ef ever I promise ter put bonds on prayer or eschew the hope of my heart in the house of God. I’ll pray fur the power--I’ll pray fur the power ter preach till I lose the gift o’ speech--till I kin say no word but ‘the power!--the power!--the power’!”

Euphemia cowered before the enthusiasm her chance phrase had conjured up. She had not, in a certain sense, doubted the sincerity of her lover’s religious fervor. She secretly and unconsciously doubted the validity of any spiritual life. She could not postulate the sacrificial temperament. She could not realize how he would have embraced any votive opportunity. He was of the type akin to the anchorite, the monastic recluse,--who in default of aught else offers the kernel of life, if not its empty shell,--even the martyr. For he had within him that fiery exaltation which might have held him stanch at the stake, and lifted his voice in triumphant psalmody above the roar of the flames. But although he had had his spiritual sufferings of denial, and floutings, and painful patience, and hope that played the juggler with despair, he had anticipated no ordeal like this. He looked in her eyes for some token of relenting, his own full of tears above the hardly quenched brightness of his fervor of faith, a quiver on his lips.

Her face was set and stern. With a realization how deeply the fantasy had struck roots in his nature, she perceived that she must needs share it or flee it. She was hardly aware of what she did mechanically, but as she painstakingly tied the pink strings of her bonnet under her dimpled chin it was with an air of finality, of taking leave. She was not unconscious of a certain pathetic appeal in his life, seemingly unnoted by God, yet for God’s service, and rejected by love. But she thought that if he pitied himself without avail she need not reproach herself that she did not pity him more. And truly she had scant pity to spare. And so he stood there and said “Farewell” as in a dream, and as in a dream she left him.

VII.

It created something of a sensation, one morning, when the juggler--for the mountaineers as solemnly distinguished him by the name he had given them of his queer vocation as if it were the serious profession of law--appeared among the lime-burners on the slope of the mountain. With his sensitive perceptions, he could not fail to notice their paucity of courtesy, the look askance, the interchanged glances. Singularly obtuse, however, he must have seemed, for he presently ensconced himself, with a great show of consideration for his own comfort, as if for a stay of length, in the sheltered recess where the lime-burners were seated at some distance from the fire, for the heat was searching and oppressive. The heavy shadow of the cliff protected them from the sun. Below, the valley was spread out like a map. If one would have dreams, a sylvan ditty that an unseen stream, in a deep ravine hard by, was rippling out like a chime of silver bells swaying in the wayward wind came now to the ear, and now was silent, and somehow invited the fantasies of drowsing. Everything that grew betokened the spring. Even the great pines which knew no devastation of winter bore testimony to the vernal impulse, and stood bedecked with fair young shoots as with a thousand waxen tapers.

The juggler, lying at full length on the moss, his hands clasped under his head, watched their serried ranks all adown the slope, broken here and there by the high-tinted verdure of the deciduous trees. He conserved a silence that seemed unintentional and accidental, perhaps because of his unconstrained attitude and of his casual expression of countenance, since he apparently took no note of the cessation of conversation among the lime-burners which had supervened on his arrival.

Talk was soon resumed, however, curiosity becoming a factor.

“Who’s ’tendin’ the pertracted meetin’ down yander, from Sims’s?” demanded Peter Knowles, looking at Royce to intimate whom he addressed.

“Only the head of the house,” responded the juggler: “Tubal Cain, the man of might, himself.”

Peter Knowles still gazed at him with frowning fixity. “That thar Jane Ann Sims ain’t got no mo’ religion ’n a Dominicky hen,” he observed.

“Well,” the juggler was fain to contend in a sentiment of loyalty to the roof that sheltered him, “she is busy; she has her household duties to look after.”

“Shucks, ye young buzzard! ye can’t fool me!” exclaimed Tip Wrothers, in half-jocular triumph. “Don’t all the Cove know ez Jane Ann Sims don’t turn a hand ef Phemie’s thar ter do it fur her?”

“Yaas,” drawled Gideon Beck, “an’ Phemie ain’t got much mo’ religion ’n her mammy. Jes’ wunst hev she been ’tendin’ on the meetin’,--an’ this air Thursday, an’ the mourners constant, an’ a great awakenin’. Phemie Sims would set the nangel Gabriel down ter wait in the passage whilst she war a-polishin’ of her milk-crocks, ef he hed been sent ter fetch her ter heaven, an’ she warn’t through her dairy worship.”

“If Mrs. Sims doesn’t turn her hand, there’s obliged to be somebody there to turn one. We don’t have any rations of manna served out these days,” argued the juggler. “It’s well that somebody stays at home. Tubal Cain and I are enough church-goers for one house.”

“Air you-uns a mourner?” demanded Beck, with a sudden accession of interest.

“No,” answered the juggler, “though I’ve lots and cords to mourn over.” He shifted his position with a sigh.

Wrothers and Knowles exchanged a significant glance which Beck did not observe. With a distinct bridling he said, “_I_ be a perfesser. _I_ hev been a perfesser fur the past ten year.”

“It must be a great satisfaction,” responded the juggler.

It was something, however, which he did not envy, and this fact was so patent that it roused the rancor of Beck. One of the dearest delights of possession is often the impotent grudging of him who hath not.

The juggler, despite his assured demeanor, had reverted to that sense of discomfort which had earlier beset him when he went abroad in the Cove. In the church he had marked a certain agitated curiosity as members of the congregation who had been at the “show” recognized the man who was deemed so indisputably in league with Satan. But this was merged in the fast accumulating interest of the meetings, and upon a second attendance, barring that he was here and there covertly pointed out to wide-eyed newcomers, denizens of further heights and more retired dells, his entrance scarcely made a ripple of excitement. This he accounted eminently satisfactory. It had been his intention to accustom the mountaineers to the sight of him, to have his accomplishments as a prestidigitator grow stale as a story that is told, to be looked upon as a familiar and a member of the Sims household; all this favored his disguise and his escape from notoriety and question. He had been prepared for the surprise and curiosity which the presence of a stranger in so secluded a region naturally excites. Since learning somewhat of the superstitions and distorted religious ideas which prevailed among so ignorant and sequestered a people, he could even understand their fear of his simple feats of legerdemain, and the referring of the capacity to work these seeming miracles to collusion with the devil. But altogether different, mysterious, threatening, unnerving, was the keen inimical vigilance which he discerned in Peter Knowles’s eye; the sense of some withheld thought, some unimagined expectation, which might be apprehended yet not divined, roused afresh the terror of detection which had begun to slumber in the security of this haven with its new life and absolute death to the old world. As the juggler lay on his back, with his eyes fixed on that deep blue sky of May, fringed about with the fibrous pines above his head, he tried to elucidate the problem. Something alien, something dangerous, something removed it was from the fantasies of the ignorant mountaineers. But for all his keenness and his long training in the haunts of men, for all his close observation and his habit of just deduction, that thin-lipped, narrow, ascetic visage gave him no inkling what this withheld thought might be,--how it could be elicited, met, thwarted. Only one gleam of significance from the eye he interpreted, a distinct note of interrogation. Whatever the expectation might be, to whatever it might be leading, it was not devoid of uncertainty and of involuntary inquiry.

He attempted to reassure himself. He tried to argue that it was only his consciousness surcharged with its weighty secret which made him flinch when any questioning eye was turned upon him. What could this mountaineer, ignorant and inexperienced as the rest, divine or suspect,--how could he dream of the truth?

And yet, so much was at stake: his liberty, his name, his honor,--nay, the sheerest commercial honesty. And so far all had gone well! He clung now to his fictitious death as if the prospect of this existence in the Cove had not well-nigh made it real, so had his heart sunk within him at the thought of the future. He said to himself sharply that he would not be brought to bay by this clumsy schemer. Surely he could meet craft with craft. The old habit of transacting business had no doubt sufficed to keep his countenance impassive, and he would set himself to add to the little they knew circumstances of which they did not dream, well calculated to baffle preconceived theories.

“No, I’m not a mourner,” he replied to Beck’s sanctimonious gaze,--“not much! The kind of sinner I am goes to meeting to see the girls.”

A momentary silence ensued. Not that this pernicious motive for seeking the house of worship was unheard of in Etowah Cove. There as elsewhere it was a very usual symptom of original sin. Few saints, however indurated by holiness against such perversion of the obvious uses of the sanctuary, but could remember certain soft and callow days when the theme of salvation held forth no greater reward than the occupancy of crowded back benches and the unrestricted gaze of round young eyes. It was, nevertheless, a motive so contrary to the suspicion which Knowles and Sims himself had entertained of the juggler’s sojourn here and had grafted on the credulity of their cronies,--a lightsome motive, so incompatible with the grisly suggestions of murder, and flight from justice, and the expectation of capture and condign punishment,--that it could not be at first assimilated with his supposed identity as a fugitive and criminal. His sudden unaccounted-for presence here, the unexplained prolonged stay, the report of the silent preoccupied hours which he spent on the ledges over the river, fishing with an unbaited hook, the troubled silence, the answers at haphazard, the pallid languid apparition after sleepless nights, and, more than all, the agonized cries from out the feigned miseries of dreams, all tallied fairly and justified the theory built upon them. But this new element interjected so abruptly had a disintegrating subversive effect.

“Waal, ain’t all the gals in the kentry mighty nigh down yander at the meetin’ now?” demanded Beck.

He spoke mechanically, for he had lost sight of his effort to induce the juggler to attend upon the means of grace, if ever he had seriously entertained it, and he would not, on sober reflection, have offered this frivolous inducement as a loadstone to draw the reluctant heavenward,--let perdition seize him first!

“Plenty there, no doubt,” said the juggler uncommunicatively, as if having taken counsel within himself.

Old Josiah Cobbs chuckled knowingly, as he sat on the stump of the tree which he most affected and nursed his knee. “The _right one_ ain’t thar,--that’s the hitch! All the gals but one, an’ that one wuth all the rest, hey?” He chuckled once more, thinking he was peculiarly keen-witted to spy out the secret of the juggler’s indifference to prayer and praise. He perceived naught of the subtler significance of the disclosure, and easily quitting the subject he turned his head as if to listen.

The sound of the hymning rose suddenly on the breeze. From far away it was, if one must mete out the distance by the windings of the red clay road and the miles of fragrant springtide woods that intervened. But the music came straight through the air like the winged thing it is. And now it soared in solemn jubilance, and now it sank with soft fluctuations, and presently he recognized the tune and fell to humming it in unison with that far-away worship and with that air of soft pleasure in the religious cadences which one may often see in the aged, and which suggests the idea that in growing old hymns become as folk-song on the lips of the returning exile, and in every inflection is the rapture of going home.

The others neither heard nor heeded. They reminded Lucien Royce, as they were grouped around him,--some standing, some sitting or reclining on the mossy rocks in the flickering shade, but every eye fixed speculatively on him,--of that fable in many tongues wherein the beasts of the field find a sleeping man and hold a congress to determine the genus of the animal, his capacities and utilities. He looked as inadvertent as he could, and but for the jeopardy of all he held dear he might have discovered in the situation food for mirth.

Jack Ormsby, who had not spoken heretofore, sat with a great clasp-knife in his hand whittling into thin slivers a bit of the bird’s-eye maple that lay prone on the ground as if it had no better uses in manufacture than to furnish fuel to burn lime. He suddenly said, regardless of the possible inference and with a certain surly emphasis, “I hev hearn tell ez Euphemia Sims air a-goin’ ter marry Owen Haines.”

“I don’t believe it!” cried the juggler.

Swift significant glances were exchanged among the others as he pulled himself into a sitting posture and looked with challenging controversy at Ormsby. The young mountaineer seemed surprised at this direct demonstration.

“They hev been keepin’ comp’ny cornsider’ble, ennyhow,” he persisted.

“Let bygones be bygones,” the juggler said, with his wonted easy flippancy.

Old Cobbs rejoiced in the idea of love-making in the abstract. He had not realized who was the girl whose absence apparently rendered the crowded church but a barren desert. He only apprehended that one of the disputants advanced the possibility of a future marriage which the other denied. He sided at once with conjugal bliss.

“I reckon it must be true,” he urged. “Thar ain’t nuthin’ ter be said agin it.”

“Except he’s a fool!” exclaimed the juggler, with rancor.

“Ye mean ’bout prayin’ fur the power?” asked Beck.

“A tremendous fool! He can’t preach. He hasn’t the endowment, the gift of the gab. He has no call from above or below.”

Royce felt no antagonism toward the man, and he realized that they all shared his standpoint, but he was not ill pleased that he should seem to be jealously decrying Euphemia’s lover.

“Phemie don’t ’low he be a fool, I’ll be bound,” said old Cobbs. “I hev viewed a many a man ’counted a puffick idjit, mighty nigh, at the sto’ an’ the blacksmith shop, yit at home ’mongst his wimminfolks he be a mo’ splendugious pusson ’n the President o’ the Nunited States.”

“I reckon Jack’s right,” remarked Beck. “I reckon they’ll marry.” This stroke, he reflected with satisfaction, cut not only the juggler, but Ormsby also, notwithstanding the fact that it was the theory advanced by the young mountaineer himself.

“I’ll bet my hat they don’t,” declared the juggler eagerly.

This suggestion of superior knowledge, of certainty, on the part of a stranger angered Jack Ormsby, who vibrated between his red-hot jealousy of the juggler on one side and of Owen Haines on the other.

“We-uns know Phemie Sims better’n ye do!” he said, as if this were an argument despite the chameleon-hued changes of the feminine mind. “Ye never seen her till ye kem ter Etowah Cove.”

“How do you know I didn’t?” retorted the juggler warily. He sat leaning forward, his hat in his hand; his hair, grown longer than its wont, was crumpled on his forehead; he looked at Ormsby with a glitter of triumph in his red-brown eyes.

“Whar’d ye kem from jes’ afore ye got hyar?” demanded Ormsby huskily.

“I don’t know why you are so inquisitive, my son,” returned the juggler, airily flouting, “but since you wish to know--from Piomingo Cove.”

This was true in a literal sense. Since he had been here, and had sought, with that instinct natural to civilized people, to grasp the details of the surrounding country,--some specimens of the genus not being able to sleep until the points of the compass are satisfactorily indicated and arranged in their well-regulated minds,--he had learned that the rugged valley which he had traversed, with only another cove intervening before he reached Etowah, was Piomingo Cove. They all remembered Euphemia’s recent visit there. The inference was but too plain. He had doubtless seen her at her grandmother’s house down in Piomingo Cove, and, fascinated by her beauty and charm, he had followed her here. And here he lingered,--what so natural! A proud, headstrong maiden like Euphemia was not to be won in a day; and should he leave her, with Jack Ormsby and Owen Haines inciting each other to haste and urgency, were matters likely to remain until his return as they were now? Most of the lime-burners’ clique never hereafter believed aught but that this was the solution of the mystery of the juggler’s sojourn in Etowah Cove.

Royce went down the mountain flushed with victory. He had descried a strong and favorable revolution in popular sentiment toward him, and the duty nearest at hand was to make the illusion true and lay siege to the heart of Euphemia.

He was not concerned as to how his wooing should speed. It was only essential that it should be a demonstration sufficiently marked to justify his lingering presence here and sustain the impression which he had made on the lime-burners. He said this again and again to himself, to appease a certain repugnance which he began to experience when the idea with which he had lightly played became a definite and constraining course of action. He remembered that in reverie he had even gone so far as to canvass the disguise which marriage might afford, settling him here permanently as if he were a native, and, as time should pass, lessening daily the chance of the detection of his identity and of his life heretofore. He realized that for the next twenty years this discovery would be impending at any moment. He had a great respect for the truth as truth, and its inherent capacity for prevailing; and this led him to fear it the more. A lie has so fatal a proclivity to collapse. He had often told himself that it was the part of policy to accept life here as one of the mountaineers, content with their portion of the good things vouchsafed, the brand of undeserved shame evaded, the hardship of ignominious imprisonment eluded, the struggle of poverty reduced to its minimum in this Arcadian existence; for sometimes he realized anew, with a half-dazed sense, that the old life was indeed gone forever,--if for naught else, by reason of his financial losses in the collapse of the firm of Greenhalge, Gould & Fife.

He now stipulated within himself, however, that this was to be only a feint of love-making,--a flirtation, he would have termed it, were it to be illumined by wax candles, or the electric light, or gas, in lieu of the guttering tallow dip. He adduced with a sense of protection--and he could not forbear a laugh at himself and his sudden terrors--the certainty with which he had cause to know that the heart of the fair daughter of the miller was already bestowed on the young “crank,” as he called the man “who was fool enough to pray for what he wanted.” Yet for all it was to be only a mere semblance of capture, he could but be dubious of these chains with which he was about to invest himself of deliberate intention; heretofore he had fallen headlong in love and headlong out, and would not have shackled himself of his own volition. Thus he rattled Cupid’s fetters tentatively, timorously, judging of their weight, and with a wish to be safely out of them as well as swiftly into them.

It was but a feint, he reassured himself. On her part, she would have an additional conquest to boast of; and as to him, all the world--of Etowah Cove--would see with what grace he would “wear the willow-tree.”

“Since Phyllis hath forsaken me!” he sang airily, as he made his way down the sharp declivity.