Part 15

The young man looked uneasily out of the window. Could time really work such metamorphoses as these? Had she ever been young and lissome and soft-eyed and fair, and was Euphemia to grow old thus?

Perhaps it was well for the broken snatch of Love’s young dream that there against the darkness he suddenly saw the bending boughs of an elder bush all whitely abloom, and among them, the fairest blossom of all, Euphemia’s face, half touched with the moonlight, yet distinct in the radiance that came from the candle within, smiling upon him as she played the eavesdropper, her dimpled elbows on the window-sill and her fair hair blown back in the wind.

“Nothing was said about it till this evening,” he went on, his satisfaction restored in an instant, “and I thought it was only the fair thing to let you and Mr. Sims know; you have both been so kind since I have been here.”

Mrs. Sims’s preliminary apprehension, which she seemed to have forgotten, was once more aghast upon her face. She raised a warning forefinger, and she spoke in her husky penetrating whisper: “Don’t you-uns say nare word ter Tubal Cain Sims. Leave him ter _me_. I’ll settle him.”

“Why not?” asked the young man, alert to any menace, however remote.

Mrs. Sims knitted her brows in embarrassment. “Waal,” she said, composing herself to divulge the truth so far as she knew it, since no polite subterfuge was handy, “he air cantankerous, an’ quar’lsome, an’ hard-headed, an’ powerful perverse. An’ he ’pears ter be sot agin ye, kase, I reckon, I like ye,--me an’ Phemie, though Phemie never tuk no notice o’ ye in this worl’ till ’bout three weeks ago whenst ye ondertook ter set up ter her so constant. Ye hev witched that gal; ye jes’ _made_ her fall in love with ye, whether or no.”

The juggler laughed at this, casting a bright glance at the dusky aperture of the window where the white blossoms all stirred by the wind seemed to be leaning on the sill and eavesdropping too. They might not have all been so happily at ease had they known that, close by the door, still slightly ajar, and awakened by the bang which the juggler had dealt it, lay old Tubal Cain Sims, grimly listening to this conversation.

“I can’t agree to that,” said Royce, after a moment’s reflection. He was certainly nothing of a prig, but he had his own views of honor, and they controlled him. “This is Mr. Sims’s house; and I was received into it first as a guest, and it is as a privilege that I have been allowed to remain. I can’t make love to any man’s daughter, under these circumstances, on the sly.”

“But s’pose he won’t agree--an’ the critter is ez _con_trary ez--ez”--Comparisons failed Mrs. Sims, and she could only shake her head warningly.

“Oh well, everything having been aboveboard, I’d take the girl and elope!” cried the juggler, his eyes alight at the mere prospective fanning of the breeze of adventure. “Being an educated man, Mrs. Sims, I could make a living for myself and my wife in a dozen different ways, in any of these little towns about here. Why--what”--

Mrs. Sims, bulkily rising, had almost overturned the table and the crockery upon him. Her fat face was pallid and flabby, and it shook as she gazed, speechless and wild-eyed, at him. Her puffy hand besought him in mute entreaty before she could find words to blurt out, “Good Gawd A’mighty, John Leonard, don’t lay yer tongue ter sech ez that! Don’t s’picion the word ez ye’d steal my darter away from me. It would kill me--an’ I hev stood yer frien’ from the fust, even whenst they all made out ez ye war in league with Satan an’ gin over ter witchments. It would kill me, bodaciously! Don’t ye steal my one leetle lamb--thar’s plenty o’ gals in the worl’, ready an’ willin’--steal them--steal them! I want my darter ter live hyar with me, married an’ single,--ter live hyar with me. We ain’t got but the one lone, lorn leetle chile. Don’t--don’t”--The tears stood in all her dimples and she was speechless.

“Well, upon my word!” exclaimed Royce indignantly, but pausing, with that care which he bestowed upon all manner of possessions representing property, however meagre, to right the table and restore the imperiled crockery. “What sort of a frenzy is this, Mrs. Sims? Am I going to run away with your daughter? Have I shown any symptoms of decamping? Strikes me I have come to stay. I make a point of telling you--because I know that I am not here under your roof for any small profit to you, but as a matter of kindness and courtesy--of telling you all about it within the hour that I know it myself, and this is my reward!”

Poor Mrs. Sims, having sunk back in her chair, and the young man still remaining standing, could only look up at him with piteous contrition and anxious appeal.

“I hope Mr. Sims won’t give me any reason to contemplate elopement. Wasn’t he willing for his daughter to marry Owen Haines, they having been ‘keepin’ comp’ny,’ as I understand?”

She silently nodded.

“My Lord! what have I come to!” Royce cried, lifting his hands, then letting them fall to his sides, as if calling on heaven and earth to witness the absurdity of the situation. “I think I might be considered at least as desirable a _parti_ as that pious monkey praying for the power!” He gave that short laugh of his which so expressed ridicule, turned, secured the end of tallow candle placed for him on the shelf, and, lighting it, ascended the rickety stairs to the roof-room.

The suggestion of an elopement was not altogether unacceptable to him. If there should be any objection urged against him,--and he could hardly restrain his mirth at the idea,--an elopement into some other retired cove in these regions of nowhere would result not infelicitously, affording still further disguise and an adequate reason for both him and his wife to be strangers in a strange land. “A runaway match would account for everything: so bring on your veto and welcome!” he said to himself.

Next morning, however, he found his disclosure to Tubal Cain Sims postponed. His host had left the house before dawn, and although he did not return for any of the three meals Mrs. Sims felt no uneasiness, it being a practice of Tubal Cain Sims’s, in order to assert his independence of petticoat government, to deal much in small mysteries about his affairs. All day--her equanimity restored by the half-jocular, half-affectionate raillery of Royce, who had roused himself to the realization that it was well to continue friends with her--she canvassed her husband’s errand, and guessed at the time of his probable return, and speculated upon his reasons for secrecy. Night did not bring him, and Royce, who had been now laughing at Mrs. Sims’s various theories, and now wearying of their futile inconsistencies, began to share her curiosity.

It was the merest curiosity. He did not dream that he was the chief factor in his host’s schemes and absence.

IX.

Tubal Cain Sims still continued to harbor the theory that the juggler’s unexplained and lingering stay in Etowah Cove betokened that he sought immunity here from the consequences of crime, and that he was a fugitive from justice. In no other way could he interpret those strange words, “--But the one who lives--for his life!--his life!--his life!” cried out from troubled dreams in the silence of the dark midnight. Although this view had been shared by the lime-burners when first he had sought to enlist their prejudice, for he would fain rid his house of this ill-flavored association, of late their antagonism had flagged. Only Peter Knowles seemed to abide by their earlier impression, but Peter Knowles was now absorbed heart and soul in burning lime, as the time for its use was drawing near. Sims began to understand the luke-warmness of the others when he noted the interest of the young man in his beautiful daughter: they deemed him now merely a lover. This discovery had come but lately to Sims, for he was of a slow and plodding intelligence, and hard upon it followed the revelations he had overheard through the open door the previous evening. It was evidently an occasion for haste. While he loitered, this stranger, encouraged by the vicarious coquetry of Jane Ann Sims, might marry Euphemia; and when the juggler should be haled to the bar of justice for his crimes, the Cove would probably perceive in the dispensation only a judgment upon her parents for having made an idol of their own flesh and blood.

He realized, as many another man has done, that in extreme crises, involving risk, quondam friendships are but as broken reeds, and he was leaning stoutly only upon his own fealty to his own best interests, as he jogged along on his old brown mare, with her frisky colt at her heels, down the red clay roads of the cove, and through rugged mountain passes into still other coves, on his way to Colbury, the county town. His heart burned hot within him against Jane Ann Sims when he recalled her advice to the man to say nothing to him, the head of the house and the father of the girl! She’d settle _him_! Would she, indeed? And he relished with a grim zest, as a sort of reparation, the fright she had suffered at the bare possibility of an elopement. Then this recollection, reacting on his own heart, set it all a-plunging, as he toiled on wearily in the hot sun, lest this disaster might chance during his absence, and he found himself leaning appealingly, forlornly, on the honor of the very man whom his mission was to ruin if he could. It was he who had refused to dispense with the father’s consent could it be obtained, and the perfidious Jane Ann Sims had counseled otherwise; he who had taken note of hospitality and courtesy,--much of which, in truth, had been mere seeming. More than once it almost gave Sims pause to reflect to whom he was indebted for any show of consideration. He had, however, but one daughter. This plea, he felt, might serve to excuse unfounded suspicion, and make righteous a breach of hospitality, and even justify cruelty. “One darter!” he often said to himself as he went along, all unaware that if he had had six his cares, his solicitude, his paternal affection, would have been meted out six-fold, so elastic is the heart to the strain upon its resources.

For this cause, despite his softened judgment toward the juggler, he did not flinch when he reached Colbury, and made his way across the “Square,” where every eye seemed to his anxious consciousness fixed upon him, as if attributing to him some nefarious designs on the liberty of an innocent man. But in reality the town folks of Colbury were far too sophisticated in their own esteem to accord the slightest note to an old codger from the mountains,--a region as remote to the majority, save now and then for a glimpse of an awe-stricken visitor from the backwoods, as the mythical island of Atlantis. For such explorations into the world at large as the ambitious citizens of Colbury adventured led them not into the scorned rural wilds comprehensively known to them as “’way up in the Cove.”

Tubal Cain Sims had been here but twice before: once when there was a political rally early after the war, and later as a witness for the defense in a case of murder. The crowded, confused, jostling political experience still thronged unintelligibly the retina of his mind’s eye, but order and quiet distinguished the glimpse vouchsafed him of the workings of justice. He had evolved a great respect for judicial methods, and he felt something like a glow of pride to see the court-house still standing so spacious and stately, as it seemed to him, within its inclosures, the surrounding grass green and new, and the oak boughs clustering above the columns of the porch. He was not aware how long he stood and gazed at it, his eyes alight, his cheek flushed. If the question had been raised, he would have known, of course, that the Juggernaut car of justice had held steadily on its inexorable way through all the years that had since intervened, and that his individual lack of a use for it had not banished it from the earth; but Tubal Cain was not a man of speculation, and it smote him with a sort of gratified surprise to see the court-house on its stanch stone foundations as it was in the days when he and it conserved so intimate a relation. There were two or three lawyers on the steps or passing in at the gate, but he eyed these members of the tribe askance. The value which he placed on counsel was such confidence as he might repose in a shooting-iron with a muzzle at both ends,--as liable to go off in one direction as in the other; and thus it was that, with a hitch of the reins, he reminded himself anew of his errand, and took his way down the declivity of a straggling little street, where presently the houses grew few and small, dwindling first to shabby tumble-down old cottages, then to sundry dilapidated blacksmith shops, beyond which stretched a rocky untenanted space, as if all habitation shrunk from neighboring the little jail which stood alone between the outer confines of the town and the creek.

Here also he came to a halt, looking at the surly building with recognizing eyes. And to it too these years had not been vacant. All the time of his absence, in the far-away liberties of the mountains, with the unshackled wind and the free clouds and the spontaneous growths of the earth out of its own untrammeled impulse, this grim place had been making its record of constraints, and captives, and limits, and locks, and longing bursting hearts, and baffled denied eyes, and yearning covetings of freedom, the bitterness of which perhaps no free creature can know. Surely, surely, these darkening elements of the moral atmosphere had turned the bricks to their dingy hue. The barred windows gave on vague black interiors. A cloud was in the air above, with now and then a mutter of thunder, and the sullen jail lay in a shadow, and the water ran black in the green-fringed creek at the foot of the hill, while behind him at its summit, where the street intersected the open square, the sunlight fell in such golden suffusions that a clay-bank horse with his rider motionless against the blue sky beyond might have seemed an equestrian statue in bronze, commemorating the valiance of some bold cavalry leader. Tubal Cain wondered to see the jail so still and solitary; and where could be the man whom he had pictured sitting in all the luxury of possession on the front doorsteps, smoking his pipe?

This man of his imagination was the sheriff of the county, who did not avail himself of his privilege to appoint a jailer, but turned the keys himself and dwelt in his stronghold. He was of an over-exacting cast of mind. He could never believe a prisoner secure unless with his own hands he had drawn the bolts. On account of the great vogue attained by various crimes at this period, and the consequent overcrowding of the prisons throughout the State, a considerable number of captured moonshiners had been billeted on the Kildeer County jail while awaiting trial in the Federal Court, and by reason of this addition to his charge his vigilance was redoubled. In all the details of his office he carried the traits of a precisian, and was in some sort a thorn in the side of the more easy-going county officers with whom his official duties brought him into contact. Even the judge in his high estate on the bench was now and again nettled by the difficult questions of punctilio with which this servant of the court could contrive to invest some trifling matter, and was known to incline favorably to the salutary theory of rotation in office,--barring, of course, the judicial office. But the sheriff had three minie balls in him which he had collected on various battlefields in the South; and although he had fought on a side not altogether popular in this region, they counted for him at the polls in successive elections, without the formalities of statutory qualifications and with a wondrous power of reduplication in the number of resulting votes. He was reputed of an extraordinary valor on those hard-contested fields where he had found his bullets, but there were advanced occasionally caviling criticisms of his record on the score that, being incapable of originating a course of action, it never occurred to him to run away when his command was ordered to advance, and that his bravery was simply the fixed stolidity of adhering to another man’s idea in default of any ideas of his own. In proof of this it was cited that when he was among a guard detailed to hold a gin-house full of cotton, and the enemy surprised the sentinel and captured the building, he alone stood like a stock with his rifle still at a serene “shoulder-arms,” where it was ordered to be, while his comrades undertook a deploying evolution of their own invention at a mad double-quick, without a word of command, showing the cleanest of nimble heels across the country. But he was esteemed by these depreciators a lucky fool, for since the war, having an affinity for the office of sheriff, he had more than once been obliged to decline to make the race, and lie off a term or two, because of the law which will not permit the office to be held by the same person eight years without an interval. His fad for being in the direct line of the enemy’s fire had not resulted more disastrously than to give him some painful hospital experience; the balls had come to stay, and apparently the hard metal of his constitution served to assimilate them easily enough, for he was hale and hearty, and bade fair to live to a green old age, and they never made themselves heard of save at election times, when in effect they stuffed the ballot-box.

Having voted for him so often, and with that immense estimate of the value of a single ballot common to the backwoodsman little conversant with the power of numbers, Tubal Cain Sims felt a possessory claim on the sheriff as having made him such. He stood in dismay and doubt for a moment, gazing at the stout closed door that opened, when it opened at all, directly on the descending flight of steps, without any ceremonial porch or other introduction to entrance; then, after the manner of Etowah Cove, he lifted up his voice in a stentorian halloo and hailed the grim and silent house.

The sound seemed a spell to waken it into life. The echo of his shouts came back from the brick walls so promptly as to simulate two imperative voices rather than acoustic mimicry. Sudden pale faces showed at the bars, wearing the inquiring startled mien of alarm and surprise. The rattle of a chain heralded the approach of a great guard-dog dragging a block from around the corner. With his big bull-like head lowered and his fangs showing between his elastic lips, he stood fiercely surveying the stranger for a short time; then--and Tubal Cain Sims could have more readily forgiven a frantic assault, for he had his pistol in his hand--the sagacious brute sat down abruptly, and continued to contemplate the visitor, but with a certain air of non-committal curiosity, evidently realizing that his vocation was not to deter people from getting into jail, but to prevent them from getting out. The pallid faces at the windows were laughing, despite the bars; and although nettled by the ridicule they expressed, Tubal Sims made bold to lift up his voice again: “Hello, Enott! Enott Blake! Lemme in! Lemme in, I say! Hello, Enott!”

The faces of the spectators were distended anew. At those windows where there was more than one, they were turned toward each other for the luxury of an exchange of winks and leers. When a face was alone it grinned jocular satisfaction to itself, and one man, with a large red and facetious countenance, now and again showed a lifted hand smiting an unseen leg, in the extremity of solitary joy. The dog, with his big head still lowered and his drooping lips a-quiver, gave a surly growl of displeasure, when the colt, having somewhat recovered from the fatigues of its long journey, began to frisk nimbly, and to curvet and caracole; the mare turned her head anxiously about as she watched these gyrations. Tubal Cain glared at the men at the windows. They had little to laugh at, doubtless, but why should they so gratuitously laugh at him? A tide of abashed mortification carried the blood to his head. His stanch self-respect had heretofore precluded the suspicion that he was ever the object of ridicule, and now his pride revolted at his plight; but since he could not get at his mockers and inflict condign punishment, naught remained but to manfully persist in his course as if they were not. He dismounted, threw the reins over a hitching-post, advanced through the gate of the narrow yard, his pistol in his hand for fear of the formidable dog, and ascended the steps with a resolute tread. He dealt a resounding double-knock with the butt end of his shooting-iron, crying as he did so upon Enott Blake as a “dad-burned buzzard” to unlock the door or he would break it down. Suddenly it opened, and by the force of his expectant blow he fell forward into the hall; then it closed behind him with a bang that shook the house.

“What does this mean?” exclaimed an irate voice. “Jeemes, take his weepon.”

And albeit Tubal Sims stoutly held on to it, a scientific crack on the knuckles administered by a dapper light-haired young man caused the stiff old fingers to relax and yield the pistol to the custody of the law.

Tubal Sims confronted a tall, spare, vigorous man about fifty-five years of age, with iron-gray hair worn with a certain straight lank effect and parted far on the side, a florid complexion, and a bright yellowish-gray eye which delivered the kind of glance popularly held to resemble an eagle’s. His look was very intent as he gazed in the twilight of the grimy hall at Tubal Cain Sims, who began to feel a quiver at the lack of recognition it expressed. To be sure, Tubal Sims knew that he had no acquaintance with the man, but somehow he had not counted on this total unresponsiveness to his claim upon the officer.

“I hev voted fur you-uns fur sher’ff nine time out’n ten,” he said, with the rancor of reproach for benefits conferred unworthily.

He stood with a very large majority of the enlightened citizens of the county. Enott Blake had been but recently reëlected, but if his canvass were to be made anew it is barely possible that he would have fancied he might have weathered it without the support of this ancient adherent. His office was of the sort which is not compatible with any show of personal favor, and he resented the reminder of political services as an imputation.

“Well, ye have got a sheriff that knows what attempted house-breaking is,” he said severely. “And unless ye can show a good reason for tryin’ to break into that door, ye’ll find ye have got a sheriff that will take a power o’ pains ye don’t break out again soon.”

Tubal Cain’s face, all wind-blown and red with the sun, and rugged with hard grooved wrinkles, and nervous with the untoward complications of achieving an audience with the man he had ridden so far to see, was shattered from the congruity of his gravity into a sort of fragmentary laughter out of keeping with the light of anxiety in his eyes.

“Did ye ever hear of a man tryin’ ter break inter a jail?” he demanded.

“I caught you doin’ it to the best of your ability,” returned the literal-minded sheriff.