Part 13

Never in all his mental exercitations did he dream of difficulty in conveying to her intelligence an intimation of the supposed state of his heart. It had been his experience that such intimations are like spontaneous combustion: they take fire from no appreciable provocation. Nay, he had known of many wills-o’-the-wisp in this sort, suggesting flame where there was no fire, for it is a trait of the feminine creature to often overrate the power of her charms, and to predicate desolation therefrom in altogether thriving insensible hearts. But perhaps because of her absorption Euphemia took no notice of a certain change in his manner toward her, which had been heretofore incidental and non-committal and inexpressive. Mrs. Sims, however, with that alertness to which the meddler in other people’s love affairs is ever prone, marked it with inward perturbation, lest it should attract the attention of Tubal Cain Sims, whose evident antagonism to the juggler she had ascribed merely to a perverse humor. From the beginning, however, Royce had found especial favor in her eyes,--at first because he was so travel-worn and rain-soaked, and fevered and exhausted. Mrs. Sims had not experienced such solicitude since her only child was an ailing infant. Although he disproved her diagnosis of his illness and her arbitrary plans of treatment by appearing fresh and well the next morning, as if he had been newly created, she forgave him his recovery, and liked him because he was so strong and handsome and pleasant-spoken, and in some vague way, to her groping inexperienced realization of the various strata of human beings, so different, and so superior, and so capable of appreciating the wonderful Euphemia that he was really to be accounted worthy of the relenting of fate which permitted him to see her. After Euphemia’s return Mrs. Sims suffered a certain disappointment that the young people took such scant notice of each other in coming and going the household ways, and she was wont to console herself now and then by contemplating them furtively as they sat opposite, one on each side of the table, and fetching the fattest of her sighs to think what a handsome couple they would make! She remembered, however, as in duty bound, Owen Haines, and perhaps she drew from this consciousness deeper sighs than either of the young lovers could have furnished to any occasion. She was not so proud as Euphemia, and she thought that if the Lord visited no judgment on Owen Haines for his pertinacity in praying for the power, his fellow saints or fellow sinners--whichever they might be most appropriately called--ought to be able to endure the ten minutes wasted in the experiment to win the consent of Heaven. But she wished that her prospective son-in-law could be more practical of mind. She realized that Haines was dreamy, and that his spiritual aspirations were destined to be thwarted. They had sent deep roots into his nature, and she fancied that she could foresee the effect on his later years,--years pallid, listless, forever yearning after a spiritual fantasy always denied; forever reaching backward with regret for the past wasted in an unasked and seemingly a spurned service. Her motherly heart went out to Owen Haines, and she would fain have coddled him out of his--religion, was it? She did not know; she could not argue.

But Euphemia was her only child, and it is not necessary that the materials shall be ivory and gold and curious inlay to enable a zealous worshiper to set up an idol. Mrs. Sims looked into the juggler’s handsome face with its alert eyes and blithe mundane expression, and as proxy she loved him so heartily that she did not doubt his past, nor carp at his future, nor question his motives. The fact of his lingering here so long--for he had asked only a night’s lodging, and afterward had taken board by the week--occurred to her more than once as a symptom of a sentimental interest in Euphemia; for otherwise why did he not betake himself about his affairs? This theory had languished recently, since naught developed to support it.

Now when she began to suspect that this vicarious sentiment of hers on Euphemia’s account was about to meet a return, Mrs. Sims’s heart was all a-flutter with anxiety and pity and secret exultation. One moment she trembled lest Euphemia should mark the thoughtful silent scrutiny of which she was the subject, but when she chanced to lift her long-lashed eyes, the juggler reddened suddenly, averted his own, and drank his coffee scalding hot. Euphemia evidently was oblivious of him, and Mrs. Sims became wroth within her amiable-seeming mask, and said to herself that she would as soon have a dough child, since one could “take notice ez peart ez Phemie.” Perhaps because of Mrs. Sims’s superabundant flesh, which rendered her of a quiescent appearance, however active her interest, and perhaps because she did not appeal in any manner to the ungrateful juggler’s hypercritical and finical prepossessions, he had no subtle intimations that she was cognizant in a degree of his mental processes, and had noted the fact of the frequent serious dwelling of his eyes, and manifestly his thoughts, upon Euphemia.

The girl had never been so beautiful as now. In these later days, that saddened pride which at once subdued and sustained her added a dignity to her expression of which earlier it would have been incapable. It spiritualized her exquisite eyes; so often downcast they were and so slowly lifted that the length of the thick dark lashes affected the observer as a hitherto unnoted element of beauty. Her eyes always had a certain look of expectation,--now starlike as with the radiance of renewing hope, now pathetic and full of shadows. It seemed to the juggler, unconsciously sympathetic, that those incomparable eyes might have conjured the man bodily into the road where they looked so wistfully to see him, so vainly.

“Confound the fellow!” he said to himself. “Why doesn’t he come? I’d like to hale him here by the long hair of that tow-head of his--if she wants to see him.” And his heart glowed with resentment against poor Owen Haines, who thought in his folly that a woman’s “No” is to be classed among the recognized forms of negation, and was realizing on far Chilhowee all the bitterness of rejected love and denied prayers.

After a while Royce despaired of drawing her attention to himself,--he who had been in his own circle the cynosure of all youthful eyes. “There’s nothing in the world so stupid as a girl in love,” he moralized, irritated at last.

This state of unwilling obscurity developed in him a degree of perversity. He was prepared to assume an attitude of lowly admiration, of humble subservience, the kiss-the-hem-of-your-robe-save-for-the- foolishness-of-it sort of look which might impress her and the rest of the Sims family and all admiring spectators with the fact of how stuck full of Cupid’s arrows he had now become. But no man can play the rôle of lover, however lamely, when the lady of his adoration notices him no more than a piece of furniture.

As he went through the passage one day, she happened to be there alone, tilted back in her chair against the wall, her small feet upon one of the rungs, her curls stirring in the breeze, droning laboriously aloud from the Third Reader, the pride and limit of her achievement.

“Here,” he said cavalierly, reaching out and taking the book quickly from her hand, “let me show you how _I_ read that.”

Now elocution had been one of the versatile juggler’s chief accomplishments. He read the simple stanzas in a style of much finish. His voice was of a quality smooth as velvet, and his power of enunciation had been trained to that degree that its cultivation was apparent only in the results, and might have seemed a natural endowment, so scantily was the idea of effort suggested. His special and individual capacity lay in the subtle inflections of tone, which elicited from the verses meanings hitherto undreamed-of by her. It was as if a stone had been flung into still water. Above these suddenly interjected new interpretations the circles of thought widened from one elastic remove to another, and Euphemia sat dazed in the contemplation of these diverse whorls and concentric convolutions of the obvious idea. She said nothing as he handed back the book with an elaborate ballroom bow, but gazed up at him with an absorbed, serious face, all softened and gently appealing like a bewildered child’s, and then fixed her eyes intently upon the page, as if seeking to find and hold those transient illusions of fickle fancy that had glimmered so alluringly through the plain, manifest text. He left her thus as he put on his hat and stepped out upon the path leading down the slope. He glanced back once, to see her still sitting there, motionless but for the wind which swayed the fair loosely curled hair of her bent head and the folds of her faint green dress as it did the sprays of the vines on the opposite side of the passage, which grew so thick that they formed a dark background for her figure in the cool shadowy green dusk; otherwise he might not have been able to distinguish it from out the glare and glister of the open sunny space where he stood. He gazed unobserved for a moment; then he turned and went on in much dissatisfaction of spirit. It was no way, he argued within himself, to assume the character of a lovesick swain by demonstrating his superiority to the fair maiden,--to flout her poor and painful efforts by the exhibition of his glib accomplishment. “I must needs always have an audience,--be always exhibiting my various feats and knacks. I was born a juggler,” he said ruefully.

But that evening when they sat at supper,--much later than usual, since the favorite Spot had wandered far into the forest, and did not return till she was sought and found and driven reluctantly home, with many pauses by the way,--the furtive glances across the table did not emigrate from his side of it. The meal was served in the main room of the cabin, to avoid the cloud of moths which the light outside in the passage would attract. In the white, languid, dispirited glow of the tallow dip the furnishings of the apartment were but dimly visible. Now and again the flicker of the wind set astir the pendent strings of pepper and bunches of dried herbs and various indiscriminate gear that swung from the beams. The red embers where the supper had been cooked were spread apart on the hearth that the heat might be lessened, and here and there through the white efflorescence of the ash only a tinge of the vermilion hues of the coals could be discerned. Despite its subdued red glare the failing fire had little irradiating effect, and added scantily to the cheer of the apartment. The batten shutter flapped back and forth with a wooden clamor; the wind had brought clouds and rain impended, and Tubal Cain Sims’s corn was not yet all planted, and the ground would probably be too wet to plough for a week or more. Grum and indignant because of this possible dispensation of Providence, he sat in his shirt-sleeves, with his shock head bent, only looking up from under his grizzled shaggy eyebrows to discern in the glimmer of the candle the food he wanted, and only speaking to growl for it. The one crumb of comfort he coveted was denied him. A certain johnny-cake had burnt up “bodaciously” on its board as it baked before the fire, and it would seem that Tubal Cain Sims, from his youth up, had subsisted solely on the hope of this most dainty of rural cates, so surlily did he receive the news, and so solemnly did he demand to be told how in the name of Moses a cake that never was put near the fire, but baked by the heat thrown on the hearth, could be reduced to cinders.

“Witched somehows, I reckon,” suggested Mrs. Sims easily; and since argument could not move that massive lady, Tubal Cain resorted to silent sulks, not in the vain hope of shaking her equilibrium, but for the sake of their own solace to the affronted spirit.

Although this disaster chanced within Euphemia’s own jurisdiction and beneath her presidial care, she took no part in the spirited colloquy on the subject, but seemed absorbed in thought, ever and anon casting a covert look at the young man. As of late he had fallen into the habit, with the opportunity afforded at meal-times, of contemplating her with swift and furtive glances, more than once their eyes met, to the visible embarrassment of both; the juggler, to his astonishment, coloring furiously as might any country boy, and a touch of surprise and almost inquiry becoming visible in the eyes of Euphemia. Strange that so poor and primitive a contrivance as a pallid tallow dip could set such stars of radiant beauty in those long-lashed pensive orbs. They looked bewilderingly lovely to the young man as they were suddenly fixed upon him, intent with the first intimation of personal interest which he had ever discerned in their depths.

“How long hev you-uns hed schoolin’?” she demanded abruptly.

“Schooling? I? Oh yes. From the time I was six years old till I was twenty-two,” he replied.

Her face was a study of amazement. “Did school keep reg’lar all them years in the cove whar you-uns lived?” she asked.

“Oh yes, school kept as regular as taxes.” He had half a mind to explain that it was not always the same institution which had the honor of training his youthful faculties, and to enumerate the various gradations which had their share in his proficiency, from the kindergarten, and the grammar school, to the academic and collegiate career; but he stopped short, reflecting that this might result in self-betrayal in some sort.

Her mind was at work. Her eyes and face were troubled. “We-uns hev hed school in the Cove two years consider’ble time ago,” she remarked. “They ’low the money air short, somehows.”

“That ain’t no differ ter we-uns,” said Mrs. Sims cheerily. “Phemie l’arned all thar is ter know.”

Even old Tubal Cain threw off dull care for a moment and vouchsafed a prideful refrain: “I ’lowed the chile would put out her eyes studyin’ an’ readin’ so constant, but she hev got her eyesight and her l’arnin’ too.”

But Phemie’s face was flushed with a sudden painful glow. “I ain’t got ez much ez some,” she faltered, her head drooping slightly.

In the midst of the clamor of denial of any greater possible proficiency, from the two old people, who had not heard the juggler’s reading during the afternoon, she involuntarily cast upon him so appealing, so disarming a glance that for once he was ashamed to even secretly laugh at them.

“If it’s erudition that goes,” he said afterward, lighting his pipe under the stars and finding the grace to laugh instead at himself, “I am the learned man to suit the occasion.”

VIII.

Euphemia’s interest did not relax. What strange perversity of fate was it that this little clod of humanity, so humbly placed, upon the very ground of existence, as it were, should have been instinct with that high, keen, fine appreciation of learning for its own sake?--for she knew naught of its more sordid rewards, and could not have dreamed that the relative estimation of these values, even by those of happiest opportunities, is often reversed, the reward making the worth of the learning. She did not realize an aspiration. Her wings simply fluttered because she felt the impulse to rise. Royce could not have conceived of aught more densely ignorant. He had known no mind more naturally intelligent. Its acquisitiveness hardly differentiated its objects; it only grasped them. The Third Reader bade fair to become a burden. He could scarcely put his foot on the sill of the passage before he heard the flutter of its leaves, and the much-thumbed, dog-eared old volume was offered to his hand with the restrained enthusiasm of the remark, “Ye’ll hev time ter read a piece afore dinner,” or supper, or bedtime, as the case might be. There was a certain embarrassment in these symposia. Mrs. Sims, it is true, looked on smilingly, with her vicarious affection shining in her eyes, but a chance question developed the fact that she understood hardly one word out of ten, the vocabulary of ignorance being of most constricting limitations; while Tubal Sims openly and gruffly sneered down the performance, tossing his shock head at every conclusion, and protesting that the young man read so fast, an’ with so many ups an’ downs, an’ with such a clippin’ an’ bob-tailin’ of his words that it was plumb ridic’lous. For him, give him good Scriptur’ readin’, slow an’ percise, like the l’arned men in the pul-_pit_. Did Pa’son Tynes read in that flibberty-gibberty way? He reckoned not. And he wagged his head as if he would fain take his oath on that, the spirit of affirmation so possessed him. Moreover, Royce did not consider this Third Reader a particularly meritorious compilation; he often flung its pages back and forth in vain search of a satisfactory selection, and doubtless would have declined to waste the merits of his rendering on the least vapid had it not been for the submissive, expectant face of Euphemia, as she sat waiting in her chair, bolt upright, school-wise, with her hands clasped in her lap, the subdued radiance of her eyes capable of making a much wiser man do a more foolish thing. For his own sake--he did not dream of the possibility of the development of her taste--he would fain have had a wider choice that his delicate perceptions might suffer no despite, and one day he bethought himself of the resources of memory. The young people were both down at the mill. Some domestic errand had brought Euphemia there, and he chanced to be on a ledge near at hand languidly essaying to fish. He asked her a question touching the further course of the stream and the locality of a notable fishing-ground further down. As she replied, she paused and stood expectantly in the doorway, dangling her green sunbonnet by the string.

The mill was silent, as was its wont; the afternoon sunlight glinted through the dense laurel and the sparse spring foliage of the deciduous trees; the great cliff on a ledge of which Royce was standing beetled above the smooth flow of the stream. Many a fissure broke the massive walls of stone; here herbage grew and vines swung, and the mould was moist and fragrant; the perfume of the wild cherry tree in a niche on the summit filled all the air. Close by, a great sycamore which had fallen in a storm stretched from one bank to the other: its white bark and bare branches were reflected in the clear water with wondrous fidelity; even a redbird with his tufted crest, as he fluttered and strutted up and down the white boughs, now and again uttering sharp cries of alarm; and even a nest in a crotch, and his sober-hued little brown-feathered mate with her head, devoid of any decoration in the way of unnecessary and vainglorious tufts, stretched far out in anxiety and trembling.

Euphemia pointed out these reflections in the water, and after another long pause, “Ef we-uns hed the book now, ye could read,” she sighed regretfully.

He played his line negligently; he cast his eyes to the far, far sky, as if his memory dwelt on high. Then he began to recite. The wind stirred in the trees; on the dark lustrous water a shimmer of sunshine fluctuated like some ethereal golden mesh. Once, the joy of spring and the bliss of love and the buoyancy of life overcame the fear in the redbird’s heart, and he sang out suddenly, as if he too would have to do with the poetry of thought and the melody of utterance, and the little brown bird in the nest listened in admiring silence. All the time Royce was conscious of Euphemia’s amazed eyes on his face; when he had finished he could scarce trust himself to meet the mute rapture of her gaze. He looked down at his futile line dragging on the water, and among the sounds of the sibilantly lapsing currents and the leaves wafted by the wind he heard her long-drawn sigh of the relaxing of the tension of delight, and he turned and met her eyes with a laugh in his own in which there was only a gentle mirth.

After this he had no peace. He was reminded of the importunacy of juvenile consumers of stories, whose interest seems whetted by the incapacity to read and thus purvey romance for their own delectation. He found it conducive to his entertainment to relapse into prose, and he rehearsed many a work of fiction from memory, failing seldom of the details, but in such lapses as must needs come boldly supplying the deficit by invention. It is true that in these recitals Euphemia was debarred the graces of the style of the authors, but then the juggler thought he had a very good style of his own. All this involved long digressions, historical, geographical, astronomical, political, to explain the status of the personnel or the _locus in quo_; and while he talked her eyes never left his face. He had a habit of looking straight at his interlocutor, whoever this might be, and it was thus, perhaps, that he could with such distinctness conjure the image of those eyes of hers upon the retina of his mind at moments of darkness or absence or reverie, as he would. Much that he said she could not at first comprehend, and again he was reminded of the inquisitors of the nursery in the multitude and unsparingness of her questions; only, so searching and keen and apt were these that sometimes there was an experience of surprise and pleasure on his part.

“I tell you, Phemie,” he said one day, “you are most awfully clever to have seen that.”

The blood rushed to her cheeks in the joy, the triumph, of his commendation. Pride, the love of preëminence, the possession of worthy endowment,--these sentiments were her soul, the ethereal essence of her life. She had no definite ambition; she had no definite mental paths. She had groped in the primeval wildernesses of mind, as if there had been no splendid line of pioneers who had blazed out a road for all the centuries to come.