Part 17
The pause that ensued was unbroken, while the thunder rolled anew, and the dashing of the water of the surly black creek at the foot of the hill came to their ears. The sunshine on the floor faded out suddenly and all at once, and the murky gray light was devoid of any lingering shimmer. If the deputy breathed, he did not hear the heaving of his own chest, so still he was.
The sheriff, having allowed in vain a goodly margin for continuance, went on abruptly: “That’s the way you fellows, with no sense of the obligations of the law, carry on. You have got no information to give. You have got some personal motive, an’ that’s the way to get an officer into trouble,--false arrests an’ charges of stirrin’ up of strife an’ such like,--an’ it’s personal motive always. I’ll bet this man o’ yourn ain’t committed no crime,” and he turned his calm gray eyes on Tubal Cain Sims, seated in the midst of his consciousness of a fool errand to the great county town. Mortified pride surged to his face in a scarlet flood, and vehement argument rose to his lips.
“Why can’t he sleep quiet nights in his bed, then?” he retorted. “Why do he holler out so pitiful, fit ter split yer heart, in his sleep. ‘What can I do? For his life!--his life!--his life! Oh, what can I do--for his life!--his life!--his life’?”
The wind came surging against the windows with a sudden burst of fury, and the sashes rattled. As the gust passed to the different angles of the house, the sound of other shaking casements came from the rooms above and across the hall, dulled with the distance, till a single remote vibration of glass and wood told that even in the furthest cells the inmates of this drear place might share the gloomy influences of the storm, though fair weather meant little to them, and naught the sweet o’ the year. A yellow flash, swift and sinister, illumined the dull, gray room, that reverted instantly into gloom, and, as if the lightning were resolved into rain, the windows received a fusillade of hurtling drops, and then their dusty, cobwebbed panes were streaked with coursing rivulets mingling together here and there as they ran.
The sheriff sat silently awaiting further disclosures, his eyes on the window, his guarded thoughts elsewhere. “The same words every night?” he asked at last.
“The same words every night,” repeated Tubal Cain reluctantly, as if making an admission.
“Oh, you can’t arrest a man for talking in his sleep,” put in the deputy, with the air of flouting the whole revelation as a triviality; and he yawned with much verisimilitude, showing a very red mouth inside and two rows of stanch white teeth. “I ain’t sech a fool ez that, Mr. Dep’ty,” snarled Tubal Sims raucously; “but puttin’ sech ez that tergether with a pale face an’ blue circles round the eyes, in the mornin’, o’ the stronges’, finest-built, heartiest young rooster I ever seen in my life,--he could fling you or the sher’ff from hyar clean acrost that creek,--an’ layin’ on the ruver-bank day arter day fishin’ with no bait on his hook”--
“What’d he catch?” queried the deputy, affecting anxious eagerness.
“All he expected, I reckon,” retorted Sims. “A-layin’ thar, with his hat over his eyes, day arter day; an’ his eyes looked ez tormented ez--ez a deer I shot wunst ez couldn’t git up ter run an’ couldn’t hurry up an’ die in time, an’ jes’ laid thar an’ watched me an’ the dogs come up. An’ this man’s eyes looked jes’ like that deer’s,--an’ I never let the dogs worry him, but jes’ whipped out my knife an’ cut his throat.”
The deputy’s eyes widened with pretended horror. He snatched a pair of handcuffs from the drawer at the side of the table, and, rising, exclaimed dramatically, “You say, in cold blood, you whipped out your knife and cut the man’s throat!”
“Ye think ye air powerful smart, Mr. Dep’ty,” sneered Sims, out of countenance, nevertheless. “But thar ain’t much credit in baitin’ an’ tormentin’ a man old enough ter be yer father,” remembering the sheriff’s rebuke on this score, and imputing to him a veneration for the aged.
“Yes, stop that monkeyin’, Jeemes,” Blake solemnly admonished his junior. Then, after silently eying the rain still turbulently dashing against the windows, he said reflectively, “Don’t ye think, Mr.--Mr.--I disremember your name?”
“Sims,--Tubal Cain Sims,” replied the owner of that appellation.
“Oh yes; Mr. Sims. Don’t you think the feller’s jest a leetle lazy? There’s no law against laziness, though it needs legislation, being a deal more like the tap-root of evil than what money is,--though I don’t set up my views against the Good Book.”
“’Pears like ’twarn’t laziness, which may be a sin, but makes men fat, an’ ez long ez the pot holds out ter bile, happy. This man warn’t happy nor fat, an’ he looked like the devils hed thar home with him.”
“Where did he come from, and what’s his name?”
“He ’lowed, one day, from Happy Valley, but he didn’t know whar Happy Valley war. An’ he talks like a town man, an’ reads a power, an’ tells tales ez Phemie say air out o’ books; an’ he gin a show”--
“A show?” the sheriff interrupted.
“A juggling show,” pursued Tubal Sims, in higher feather since they no longer dissimulated their absorption in these details. “He calls hisse’f a juggler, though his name is John Leonard.”
“What’s he live on?” demanded the sheriff.
“The money he made at his show. He ’lowed ter gin more shows, but the church folks gin it out ez he war in league with Satan, an’ threatened ter dump him in the ruver, so he quit jugglin’.”
The deputy with difficulty repressed a guffaw, but asked, with a keen curiosity, “Was it a pretty good show?”
“Ye never seen nuthin’ like it in yer life. He jes’”--
“What sort of lookin’ man is he?” interrupted the sheriff. He cast a glance at the deputy, who unobtrusively began to busy himself with pen, ink, and paper, and was presently scribbling briskly as Tubal Cain Sims sought to describe the stranger.
“He looks some like a mountain feller now,” he said. “He paid my wife ter make him some clothes; but shucks!” his eye kindling with the glow of discursive reminiscence, “the clothes he kem thar in war a sight fur the jay-birds,--leetle pants ez kem down no furder’n that, an’ long stockin’s like a gal’s, an’ no mo’ ’shamed of ’em ’n I am o’ my coat-collar; a striped black-an’-red coat he hed on, an’ long, p’inted reddish shoes.” He paused to laugh, while a glance of fiery excitement and significance shot from the eyes of one officer into those of the other.
Far better than Tubal Sims they knew how to place the wearer of this sophisticated costume. For although their bailiwick was the compass of the county, their official duties carried them occasionally to neighboring cities and their suburbs; and while rolling so rapidly was not conducive to gathering moss for personal embellishment, it afforded opportunity for observation not altogether thrown away. This man was out of place,--a wanderer, evidently; but whether a fugitive from justice remained to be proved.
And while Tubal Cain Sims talked convulsively on, hardly realizing whither his reminiscences led, the expert penman was quietly noting down all the personal traits of poor Lucien Royce,--his height, his weight, his size, the color of his hair and eyes, the quality of his complexion, the method of his enunciation, and the polish of his manner,--all in the due and accepted form of advertisement for criminals, minus the alluring sum offered for their apprehension by the governor of the State.
Tubal Cain Sims did not note the cessation of the scraping of the pen, but the sheriff did, and it was within a few moments that he said, “Well, Mr. Sims, this offers no ground for arrestin’ the man. But I’ll give you a piece of advice,--don’t let him know of your errand here, or he’ll take French leave of you and take the girl with him. I can’t arrest him for you”--
“Courtin’ ’s the inalienable right of man, and, in leap year, of woman too,” sputtered the deputy, with his pen in his mouth and his laugh crowding it.
“But,” continued the sheriff, “as I have some business up that way, I may come over soon an’ look after him, myself. Say nothin’, though, about that, or you’ll lose your daughter,--just one daughter.”
“One darter,” echoed Tubal Sims, his eyes absorbed and docile as he followed the crafty officer’s speech.
“Say nothin’ to nobody, and I’ll see you before long.” Then suddenly leaving the subject, with a briskening style he turned to the deputy. “Jeemes, take Mr. Sims before a magistrate,--Squair Purdy, I’d recommend,--on a charge of carrying weepons with the intent o’ goin’ armed. Let him know, though, Mr. Sims, ’twas in ignorance of the law, and a-travelin’. Remind him that the code says the statute is to be liberally construed. And remember that Jeemes can’t swear that old army pistol was _concealed_ on _no account_. _I_ don’t b’lieve Jeemes kin make out a case agin ye. Squair Purdy is mighty lenient.”
“Ain’t you-uns goin’?” quavered Mr. Sims, distrusting the tender mercies of the facetious Jeemes.
“No, sir,” replied the sheriff, now far away in the contemplation of other matters. “Jeemes, go to the telephone and ring up the cap’n in Knoxville. I want to speak to him.”
It only seemed a great babbling of a little bell in the grim twilight of the hall of the jail as the deputy piloted Tubal Cain Sims out of the door which had so obdurately closed on him. And how should his ignorance conceive that within three minutes the chief of police in Knoxville was listening to the description of poor Lucien Royce, given by the sheriff of Kildeer County, and trying for his life to reconcile its dissimilarities with the physical traits of various missing malefactors sadly wanted by the police in divers localities?
X.
It was with a mild countenance and a chastened heart that Tubal Sims rode up to his own door the next evening, and slowly dismounted, his old brains, stiff with the limited uses of a narrow routine, dazed and racked by the brisk pace which they had been fain to conserve in the wide circuits which they had traveled in his absence. Never had the cabin on the river-bank looked so like home; never had home seemed so like heaven. For Tubal Cain Sims, in his secret soul, cared little for the bedizenments of crowns, and the superfluities of harps, and the extravagance of streets paved with gold, and the like celestial scenery of his primitive hymnology. The sight of Jane Ann Sims on the porch, her bulky arms akimbo, the flutter of Euphemia’s pink dress with the dark red roses from the slope of the dell where the spring lurked, could have been no dearer to him if they had had wings,--which appurtenance, however, in his lack of spiritual imagination, would have reduced them to a turkey-like standpoint or other gallinaceous level. He hardly remembered to dread Jane Ann’s questionings; and perhaps because of this beatific ease of mind, the humble works of fiction, which the puritanical might denominate lies, that had occupied his faculties during his return journey, were exploited with a verisimilitude which received the meed of credulity. He stated that the thought of Jerry Gryce, his brother-in-law, and a paralytic, dwelling in Piomingo Cove, had weighed so on his mind, in wakeful hours of the night, that he had felt obliged to rise betimes and journey thither to see that all was well with him. And a cheerful report he was able to give of that invalid,--for indeed he had stopped in Piomingo Cove on the way back,--who had charged him with some asperity, however, being a superstitious man, to have a care how he took the liberty of dreaming about him, or nourishing presentiments in which he was concerned, or viewing visions. “I kin do all my own dreamin’ an’ ghost-seein’ too, thanky kindly,” he had said satirically.
Jane Ann Sims was the less penetrating as she herself had developments of interest to detail. In a wheezy, husky whisper that had less the elements of confidential relation than a shriek might have compassed, she made plain the altered state of Euphemia’s affections and the understanding which she and the juggler had reached.
It is wonderful how little mental capital a man need possess to deceive the cleverest wife. Tubal Cain Sims, seated in the open passage, tilted far back against the wall in his chair, his saddle on the floor beneath his dangling feet and his mare cropping the grass beside the step, sustained every appropriate pose of surprised interest as successfully as if Mrs. Sims’s story were new to his ears. How could she, even if infinitely more astute, have dreamed that it was the recital of these same facts which he had overheard that had sent him straight to Colbury with the instant determination to have his would-be son-in-law incarcerated on a criminal charge, before more romance could come of the juggler’s stay in Etowah Cove? She had expected opposition, having divined Tubal Sims’s disapproval of his guest from his perturbed and unwontedly crusty manner, and was scarcely prepared for the mildly temporizing way in which he received the disclosure.
“Humph--a--waal, we-uns will hev ter gin it cornsideration, Jane Ann, a power o’ cornsideration, an’”--he suddenly remembered his piety--“some pray’r. Watch an’ pray, Jane Ann.”
“I’m ekal ter my prayin’ ’thout yer exhortin’s,” she retorted, with proper spirit. “An’ ef ye don’t wan ter set Phemie agin ye, ye’d better do yer own prayin’ powerful private.” She could not forbear this gibe, albeit at the idol of them both. It was in graver and agitated mood that she revealed how the idea of an elopement had seemed to appeal to the young man’s mind,--so much, indeed, that she began to fear he would welcome any parental opposition which would make it practicable. And here she found Tubal Cain at one with her own thoughts, so a-quiver with her own fears that she felt all at once bolder, as if by communicating them they had mysteriously exhaled. Not so Tubal Cain Sims. It is to be doubted whether in all his life he was ever so earnestly and markedly benign and courteous as when he again met the juggler. His whole manner was so charged with the sentiment of placation that the young man’s quick discernment easily divined his state of mind and his covert terrors. It eliminated for the present any other course of action than drifting along the smooth tides of love’s young dream, for no elopement was possible when there was naught from which to flee.
What wonderful days they were, as the full, strong pulses of June began to beat with the fervors of July! The long, ripe hours from early dawn to the late-lingering twilight held all the choicest flavors of the year. Never was the sunset so gorgeously triumphal; never was the dawn so dank with dew, so fresh of scent, so winged with zephyrs. The wilderness rang to the song of the thrush and of the mocking-bird, not less vocal now than with the impulse of spring. The brimming river yet ran deep in its rocky channel, and the voice of the cascade below the mill in the full-leaved joyous woods could be heard for miles on a still night. And how still were these nights of silent splendor, with the stars so whitely a-glitter in the deep blue spaces above, and a romantic mystery on the mute purple mountains below, and the great bespangled gossamer Galaxy, as if veiling some sanctity of heaven, scintillating through all the darkness! Not till late--till so late that no one was awake to heed or behold--a yellow waning moon with a weird glamour would glide over the eastern summits, and in its precarious hour before the flush of early dawn illumine the world with some sad forecast, with slow troublous augury of change and decline and darkness.
Flowers in myriads budded at night to blow in the morning. Everywhere the strong, rich, vigorous growths unfolded to the sun. The leaves were thick in the woods, the shadows were dark and cool, and rivulets glanced in the midst of them like live leaping crystal. Anywhere down deep ravines, did one look long enough, were to be seen all the creatures of woodland poesy, evoked from the glamours of the June,--hamadryads at their bosky ease, and oreads among the craggy misty heights, and naiads dabbling at the margin of sheltered springs, and elves listening alert with pointed ears to the piping of the wind in the reeds.
These June days seemed to Royce as if he held them in perpetuity,--as if there could be no change save for the slow enhancement of all the charms of nature, bespeaking further perfections. The past was so bitter; the present was so sweet; and he thought no more of the future. He was content. He had developed a certain adaptability to the uncouth conditions of the simple life here, or love had limited his observation and had concentrated it. All the artificialities of his wonted standards had fallen from him, and he was happy in the simplest way. He wondered that he should ever have thought the girl beautiful and charming hitherto, so embellished was her loveliness now; as if she too shared the ineffable radiance and grace of the June, with the fair and faintly tinted roses known as “the maiden’s-blush” that grew just outside the door. He had told her that they were like her, and when he learned the old-fashioned name he wore one always stuck in the clumsy, ill-worked buttonhole of his blue-checked cotton shirt. So pervasive was the sentiment of happiness in the house that it suffused even the consciousness of the two old people; Jane Ann accepting it willingly and with vicarious joy, and Tubal Cain yielding after many a qualm of doubt and tremor of fear, and still experiencing strong twinges of remorse. He had been led to believe, by the crafty sheriff’s show of indifference to his disclosure, and repeated rejection as naught the significant points of the suspicion he had entertained, that he had been wrong from the first in his conclusion. He had begun to argue from the officer’s standpoint, and he was amazed and somewhat dismayed to perceive how slight were the grounds on which any reasonable charge could be based. As this conviction grew more decided, he anticipated, with an ever increasing terror, the possible visit of which the sheriff had casually spoken. Although he was sure now that, officially considered, it could but be a flash in the pan, still it would reveal to the juggler his host’s hideous suspicions and flagrant breach of hospitality, and from this Tubal Sims winced as from corporeal pain. He thought that the sheriff already considered him a preposterous fool; and albeit that judgment from so great a man--for Tubal Cain Sims’s self-conceit had been much abated by his trip to Colbury--was humiliating to his pride, it would be far more poignant, multiplied by the number of inhabitants in the Cove, when published abroad and entertained by every man who dwelt in its vicinity. Moreover, the disclosure of his mission to Colbury would deliver the graceless informer, bound hand and foot as it were, into the power of Jane Ann Sims, and it might well alienate the juggler from them all and thus wreck Euphemia’s happiness and prospects in life; and he had begun of late to value these. Whenever he was not mulishly resistant, he fell much under the influence of Jane Ann Sims, and her views of the preëminent qualities of the juggler’s mind and manners and morals affected his estimate. She laid great stress on the fact of the young man’s elaborate education, and was wont to toss her large head with a vertigo-provoking lightness as she averred, “Phemie warn’t a-spellin’ year in an’ year out ter marry one o’ these hyar Cove boys ez dunno B from bull-foot!” And Tubal Cain would sneer in sympathetic scorn, as if both he and his wife were not in precisely that sublime state of ignorance themselves. He shared her pride in a plan which the juggler had evolved to open a school in the little “church-house” when the crops should be laid by, and in the fact that this suggestion had met with the readiest acceptance for miles around, despite the prejudice touching his feats of magic.
One night, Jane Ann Sims, with the dish-cloth in her hand, was alternately wiping the supper dishes in the shed-room and cheerfully wheezing breathless snatches of a most lugubrious hymn, while Royce and Euphemia sat on the steps of the passage, where the moon, now in her first quarter, drew outlines of the vines on the floor,--with here the similitude of a nest, whence now a wakeful, watching head protruded, and now a lifted wing, and now a downy, ball-like bulk; and here, with indistinct verges, a cluster of quivering trumpet-flowers, all dusky and blurring, like the smudging black-and-white study of some impressionist artist. Tubal Cain Sims, seeking company, was aware, as he entered his domicile, that he would find no welcome here, so he betook himself, with his pipe in hand, to the leisurely scene of his help-meet’s labors. There triumph awaited him, for Jane Ann Sims left the table and the dishes to the tallow dip and the candle-flies, to sink down in a chair and detail the fact that while he was gone to the blacksmith’s shop to get his team shod a wonderful event had happened. Parson Tynes had been here again!
Tubal Cain Sims’s lower jaw dropped. Parson Tynes figured in his mind only as the troublous advocate of a dead-and-gone love, and he thought it a breach of the peace, in effect, to seek to disinter and resuscitate this ill-starred attachment. He growled adversely, but he did not reach the point of articulate remonstrance, for Jane Ann Sims majestically waved her limp dish-cloth at him as a signal to desist, and opened her mouth very wide to emit the cause of her prideful satisfaction in a loud and wheezy whisper,--which discreet demonstration came sibilantly to the ears of the young people outside, the only other human creatures within a mile, and occasioned them much unfilial merriment.