Part 18

Parson Tynes no longer dwelt on marrying and giving in marriage. Ambition had been his theme. It seemed that once, not long ago, being in Colbury when a great revival--a union meeting of various denominations--was held, he had had the opportunity to preach there through some wild rumor of his celebrity as a mountain orator; and afterward a certain visiting elderly minister had taken him aside and urged him to study and to cultivate his gifts, and above all to acquire a delivery. The visiting city minister, being a man who appreciated the Great Smoky Mountains as a large and impressive element of scenery, and having never seen them except gracing the horizon, did not realize that in all their commodiousness they had scant accommodations for learning. On his part, Tynes did not appreciate any especial superiority in the delivery of the men he had heard. His slow drawl and his mispronunciations were, of course, unperceived by him, and, speaking from a worldly point of view, he was chiefly refreshed at the meeting by the consciousness that there were many more ideas in his sermon than in that of the visiting city minister. He wondered satirically how the good man would have received the converse of this charge, had he dared to exhort him in turn to cultivate thought and acquire ideas. The meeting had done Tynes no good. It had only hurt his pride, and roused a certain animosity toward the larger world outside his life and the round of his work, and caused him to contemn as spurious the pretensions of the luckier clergy. He did not accord the advice he had received a single thought, so much more important it seemed to him what a preacher says than how he says it. But Jane Ann Sims had talked much and pridefully to her cronies in the Cove about the juggler’s “readin’s,” and their fame had reached the parson’s ears. Shortly after, he chanced to encounter Royce at the mill, and for the first time was impressed by the charm of a cultured enunciation in a naturally beautiful voice. “I’d like powerful well ter speak like _that_, now,” he said to himself, with a sudden discrimination of superiority. And this afternoon he had come to say that he had heard of the projected school, and that he would like to know whether the juggler had ever been taught elocution and was qualified to impart his knowledge. Royce had read for him,--or rather, had recited from memory,--and Tynes had been surprised and delighted, and had averred that he read “better’n all the men at the union meeting shook up in a bag together, the city minister at the bottom.”

“But ye would hev been s’prised, Tubal,” said Mrs. Sims, her fat face clouding and her dimples turning to creases, “ter hev viewed the gamesome an’ jokified way ez John Leonard conducted hisself ter the pa’son--plumb scandalous--made a puffeck laffin’-match o’ the whole consarn; though arter a while the pa’son seemed some less serious, too. But he an’ John Leonard air a-goin’ ter meet every day, beginnin’ day arter ter-morrer, in the schoolhouse, ter take lessons in readin’. An’ the pa’son pays him fur it. Jes’ think o’ that!” Her hand with the limp dish-cloth in it extended itself impressively. “Teachin’ the pa’son--the pa’son, mind ye--ter read!”

Tubal Cain Sims sat electrified by the honor. Now and again his stiff old visage relaxed with a broad smile, but this some grave thought suddenly puckered up. In the midst of his satisfaction and his appropriation of the honor that had descended upon his house, ever and anon a secret thought of his earlier distrust of the juggler intruded with a vaguely haunting fear of the promised visit from the sheriff. This he had latterly put from him, for the long silence and the passage of time warranted him in the conclusion that it had been merely a device of the officer to satisfy a meddlesome old fool, and was from the beginning devoid of intention. He hardly dared to wonder what Jane Ann Sims would have thought of his suspicion, as he remembered that from the moment of the juggler’s entrance on that stormy evening she had rated the young guest as highly as now. But then, it had never been her chance to hear those strange, mysterious utterances from the turmoils of midnight dreams.

“Jane Ann,” Tubal Sims said, with quavering solemnity, “I know this hyar young man be powerful peart, an’ thar’s nobody in the kentry ter ekal him, not even Pa’son Tynes; but what would you-uns think ef ye war ter hear him call out, like I hev done, in the night,--’way late, ’bout the darkest hour,--‘But the one who lives!--fur whose life!--his life!--fur his life!--what can I do!--fur his life!--his life!--it must be!--his life!’”

As he mimicked the cabalistic phrases that had so strongly laid hold upon his imagination, the very inflections of the agonized voice were duplicated. The sentiment of mystery, of awe, with which the air was wont to vibrate was imparted anew. The despair, the remorse of the tones, sent a responsive thrill like a fang into the listener’s heart. Jane Ann Sims, her face blank and white, sat staring dumbly as she hearkened. The leaves darkly rustled close to the window. Dim moonlight flecked the ground on the slope beyond with shadow and a dull suffusive sheen. The wind, rushing gustily past, bowed the flame of the guttering tallow dip, feebly flaring, in the centre of the table. As she put out her hand mechanically to shield it from extinction, the motion and the trifling care seemed to restore her mental equilibrium.

“That sounds powerful cur’ous, Tubal,” she said gravely, and his heart sank in disappointment with the words and tone. He had expected Jane Ann Sims to flout the matter aside loftily, and indignantly decline to consider aught that might reflect on her much-admired guest. It was he himself who began to feel that it was of slight moment and hardly worth detailing; the sheriff had barely listened to it, without lifting an eyelash of tired and drowsy eyes. He was sorry he had told Jane Ann. What a pother women are wont to stir up over a trifle!

“Why ain’t you-uns never spoke of it afore?” she demanded.

“Kase I ’lowed ’twould set you-uns agin him,” said the specious Tubal tentatively.

Jane Ann sniffed contemptuously. “Waal, I ain’t been ’quainted with no men so powerful puffeck in all thar ways ez I kin be sot agin a youngster, what eats a hearty supper, fur talkin’ in his sleep. I’d be a powerful admirer of the ‘sterner sex,’ ez Pa’son Greenought calls ’em, ef I knowed no wuss of ’em ’n that.”

“Wha--wha--what ye goin’ ter do ’bout’n it, Jane Ann?” sputtered Tubal Cain, seeing her ponderously rising, determination on her strong features.

“I be goin’ ter ax him what he means by it, that’s what,” said Jane Ann. And before Tubal Cain could protest, she was leaning out of the window and wheezily calling to the young people slowly strolling along the slope before the door.

“Kem in, chil’n. I want ter ax John Leonard a kestion.”

She met him at the entrance of the passage, the tallow dip in her hand, glowing with a divergent aureola of white rays against the dusky brown shadows and green leaves of the vines opposite. He paused, expectant, while Euphemia, in her green dress, stood on the sill amongst the swaying vines, hardly distinguishable from them save for her fair ethereal face, looking in as if from elf-land, so subtly sweet was its reminiscent expression. But he was intent of attitude, with a question in his waiting eyes; not dallying mentally with the thoughts he had had in contemplation, but altogether receptive to a new theme.

His face changed subtly as Jane Ann Sims, watching him narrowly, repeated the words of his somnolent speech. “What air ye talkin’ ’bout, John Leonard, whenst ye say them words agin an’ agin an’ agin, night arter night?” she asked him inquisitively.

He did not hesitate. Still, he had a strange look on his face, as if summoned many and many a mile thence. “I dream that I am dead, sometimes, and others need me back again, and I cannot go. I can do nothing. I often dream that I am dead.”

It so fell out the next day that this seemed no dream. He was so surely dead that he walked the ways of this world an alien. He was not more of it than if the turf in the far cemetery, beside the marble that bore his name, grew green and lush with its first summer veritably above his breast. He had no premonition of the deterioration of the spurious animation which had of late informed the days. The dawn came early, as was its wont in these slow diurnal measures of July, and cheer came with it. The explanation he had given of his strange words was more than satisfactory, and all about him was instinct with a sort of radiant pleasure in him which diffused its glow into his own heart.

As he stood in the passage lighting his pipe, after breakfast, he noticed a salient change in the landscape. No smoke was rising from the high promontory where was situated the primitive kiln of the lime-burners.

“Ye jes’ f’und that out?” said Tubal Cain, with a chuckle, as, tilted against the wall in his chair, he listlessly dangled his feet. “Thar ain’t been no lime bu’nt thar fur six weeks.” He chuckled anew, so cordially did he accept the sentimental cause of the juggler’s lapse of observation. “I reckon that thar lime is made up inter morter an’ air settin’ up prideful ez plaister now, an’ hev done furgot it ever war rock.”

The young man placidly endured the raillery; in fact he relished it, for it was proof how genuine had been his absorption, and he was deprecatory of self-deception. That alert commercial interest never quite moribund prompted his next question.

“I don’t see that lime is used in the Cove,” he said, reflecting on the stick-and-clay chimneys, and the clay daubing in the chinking between the logs of the walls of the houses. “What was the purpose of that extensive burning of lime, Mr. Sims?”

“Ain’t you-uns hearn?” demanded the host, with another cheerful grin expanding his corrugated leathern-textured countenance. “Pete Knowles wouldn’t tell a-fust; he got the job somehows.”

“Afraid of underbidding.” The juggler nodded comprehension of the motive.

“So he bu’nt, an’ bu’nt, an’ bu’nt, an’ the lime it piled up in heaps in that thar dry rock-house what ’minds me powerful o’ the sepulturs o’ the Bible. But it air six weeks sence they bar’led it up an’ wagoned it off ’bout ten mile or mo’.”

“What did they want it for, and who are ‘they’?” inquired Royce, still interested.

“‘They’ is them hotel men over yander at New Helveshy Springs, an’ they wanted the lime ter plaister the old hotel what hev hed ter be repaired an’ nigh made over. They ’lowed ’twar cheaper ter git the lime bu’nt at the nearest limestun rocks ’n ter buy it bar’led an’ haul it fifty mile from a railroad.”

This was a proposition of a kind that might well secure the juggler’s business-like consideration. But his eyes were fixed with a sudden untranslated thought. His pipe had turned unheeded in his hand, fire, tobacco, and ashes falling from it into the dewy weeds below the step, as he stood on the verge of the passage. His expressive face had altered. It was smitten with some prophetic thought, and had grown set and rigid.

“New Helvetia Springs! Summer resort, of course. I didn’t know there was anything of the sort in the vicinity,” he said at last. “What kind of place is it?”

“I dunno!” exclaimed Sims, dangling his feet briskly back and forth in an accession of contempt. “_I_ never tuk the trouble ter ride over thar in my life, though I hev knowed the hotel ter be a-runnin’, ez they call it, fur forty year an’ more.”

Royce stood in silence for a time, moodily leaning his shoulder against the wall of the house, one hand thrust in his leather belt, the other holding the pipe at an angle and a poise which would seem to precede an immediate return of the stem to his mouth. But he did not smoke. Presently he put the pipe into his pocket, drew his hat over his eyes, and wandered down the road; then climbing a fence or two, he was off in the woods, as safe from interruption as if in the midst of a trackless ocean. He walked far and fast with the constraint of nervous energy, but hardly realizing the instinct of flight which informed his muscles. When at last he flung himself down at the foot of great rocks that stood high above a shelving slope in woods so dense that he could not see farther than a yard or two in any direction, for the flutter of the multitudinous leaves and the shimmer of the interfulgent sunshine, he was saying to himself that he was well quit of all the associations of his old world; that he had found safety here, a measure of content, a means of livelihood, and the prospect of a certain degree of simple happiness when he should be married to a girl whom he had learned to love and who loved him,--a beautiful girl of innate refinement, who had mind enough to understand him and to acquire an education. He would do well to still resolutely that sudden plunging of the heart which had beset him upon the knowledge that his old world was so near at hand, with all those endearing glamours as for the thing that is native. What avail for him to hover around them, to court the fate of the moth? He remembered with a sort of terror the pangs of nostalgia which at first had so preyed upon him, and should he deliberately risk the renewal of these poignant throes, now possibly spent forever? Regret, danger, despair, lay in the way thither; why should he long to look in upon scenes that were now as reminiscences, so well could he predicate them on experiences elsewhere? He wondered, fretfully, however, and with a rising doubt of himself, that when he and Euphemia had climbed the mountain and looked down at the shimmer of the small towns in the furthest valley, and he had felt no stir of wistfulness, he should have interpreted his tranquillity as a willing renunciation of the life he had left,--as if the treadmill limitations and deprivations and mental stagnation of a village were the life he had left. And suddenly--although he had chosen this spot because it shut him in, because naught could be seen to deflect his errant mind, in order that he might realize and earnestly grapple with this wild and troublous lure--the illusions of a sophistry glimmered even in these scant spaces. He was definitely reconciled, he told himself, to his destiny. It was only his imagination that vaguely yearned for the status he had left. With a touch of reality the prismatic charms of this bubble of fancy would collapse,--or the glimpse of conditions native to him, the sound of familiar speech as of his mother tongue, the sight of men and women as compatriots in this long exile as of a foreign land, would prove a refreshment, a tonic, an elixir, renewing his strength to endure. He was a coward to deprive himself--for fear of discontent--of something to enjoy in the present, to remember, and to look forward to, in recurrent years.

He had not thought to notice the dwindling shadows that betokened noon and the waiting dinner which Euphemia had made ready with many a remembrance of his preferences. The sun was westering apace when, as if impelled by a force beyond his control, he found himself in the country road, forging ahead with that long swift stride, the envy of his comrades of the pedestrian club of his urban days. His heart seemed to divine the way, for he scarcely paused to debate which fork to pursue when the road diverged; he gave no heed to the laurel jungles on either hand, or, further on, to the shady vistas under the towering trees; he only perceived at last that the density of the woods had diminished. Soon peaked and turreted roofs appeared among the thinning boughs, and as he crossed an elaborately rustic foot-bridge, coquettishly picturesque, flung across a chasm where deep in the brown damp shadows a silver rill trickled, he recognized this as an outpost of artificiality. A burst of music from a band thrilled his unaccustomed ears; a vast panorama of purple and azure mountains, a vermilion sun, a flaring amber sky, great looming gray crags, and the bronze-green sunlit woods beyond were asserted in an unfolding landscape; he heard the laughter cadenced to express the tempered mirth of polite society, and the stir of talk. The verandas of the two-storied hotel were full of well-dressed people. His swiftly glancing eye marked the dowagers; their very costumes were familiar,--black grenadines or silks with a subdued inclination toward a touch of lavender decoration, and some expert softening of the ravages of time by the sparing use of white chiffon or lace, with always something choice in the selection of dainty shawls on the back of a chair near at hand (how often had he resignedly borne such a wrap over his arm in the meek train of a pretty girl’s chaperon!): he knew the type,--clever, discreet, discerning. On the lawn two games of tennis were in progress, the white of the flannel suits of the men enhanced in the sun against the green grass. Along the road beyond, two or three smart little carts were coming in with the jauntiest of maidens in daintily tinted summer attire and sailor hats. An equestrian couple--the young man of a splendid physique and elegantly mounted--went by him like a flash, as he stood, dazed and staring, by the rail of the bridge. He retained barely enough presence of mind to dodge aside out of the way, and he received a volley of sand, covering him from head to foot, from the heels of the horses as they disappeared in the woods at the steady hand-gallop. On the crag at the verge of the bluff were groups of young people, strolling about or seated on the ledges of the cliff, the young men dangling their feet over the abysses beneath, such being the accepted fad; now and then, one not emerged from the hobbledehoy chrysalis would, by means of grotesque affectations of falling, elicit small complimentary shrieks, half terror, half mirth, from the extremely young ladies whom he favored with his improving society. At one side there was a meeting of fir boughs, a dank and cool dark vista, a great piling of fractured and splintered rocks, a sudden descent, and down this bosky way was so constant a going and coming that Lucien Royce divined that it led to the hidden spring.

He stared at the scene through the tears in his eyes. To him who had never had a home it was home, who had never dreamed of heaven it was bliss. He would have given all he could imagine--but, poor fellow, he had naught to give!--to be able to communicate in some mysterious way the knowledge of his quality to one of those high-nosed, keen-eyed elder women, of composed features and fine position and long social experience and much discrimination in the world’s ways, and to have her commend his course, and counsel prudence, and pity his plight. He looked at the elder men, whose type he also knew,--men of weight in the business world, lawyers, bankers, brokers,--and he thought what a boon might be even the slightest impersonal conversation with one of his own sphere, his equal in breeding, in culture, in social standing. He was starved,--he had not realized it; he was dying of mental inanition; he was starved.

The next moment, two of the tennis-players, ending the diversions of the afternoon with a walk, approached the bridge: the man in his immaculate white flannels, his racket carried over his shoulder; the girl in her picturesque tennis toggery. Royce, dusty, besprinkled with sand, conscious of his coarse ill-made jeans clothes and his great cowhide boots, colored to the roots of his hair as their eyes fell upon him. In adaptation to the custom of the mountaineers, who never fail to speak to a stranger in passing, they both murmured a “Good-evening” as they went by. Royce, rousing with a galvanic start, lifted his hat, hardly realizing why they should glance at him in obvious surprise and with elevated eyebrows. For one moment he pondered fruitlessly on the significance of this trifling incident. The solution of the mystery came to him with a monition of added caution. The social training of the mountaineer does not comprise the ceremony of lifting the hat in salutation. If he would sustain the rural character he must needs have heed, since so slight a deflection was marked. He heard them laughing as they went, and he thought, with all the sensitiveness incident to a false position, that he was the cause of their mirth, the incongruity of this “million of manners” with such a subject. With an aversion to a repetition of this scene he betook himself out of the way of further excursionists, noticing that several couples were slowly strolling in the direction of the bridge. But as he moved forward from under the shadows of the fir and into the clear space of the lawn, he could scarcely sustain the observation which he felt leveled at him, Argus-eyed, from the verandas, the lawn, the tennis-court, the crags. His pride was in arms against his humble plight. His face burned with shame for his coarse garments, the dust, the very clumsiness of his rough boots, the length of his overgrown silky red-brown hair, his great awkward hat, the uncouth figure he cut in respectable society. But despite the flush on his cheek, and a thrill hot and tingling ever starting with each searing thought to his eyes, as if tears were to be shed but for the sheer shame of it, he laughed scornfully at his pride, and despised himself to be so poor, so forlorn, so outcast from his native world, yet so yearning for it. “What does it matter?” he said to himself. “They don’t know me. Lucien Royce is dead,--dead forever.” He walked on for a few minutes, the trained gait of an athlete, his graceful bearing, the individuality and distinction of his manner, all at their best, mechanically asserted as an unrealized protest in some sort that those lorgnettes on the verandas should not conceive too meanly of him. “I suppose I thought the ghost of a dude like Lucien Royce would be a mighty well-set-up affair, with a sort of spectral style about him and an unearthly chic. But what does it matter what they think of a nonentity of a stray mountaineer like this? Lucien Royce is dead,--dead forever!”

He had merely ventured to partially skirt the lawn, bending his steps toward the shelter of a small two-storied building at the nearest corner of it, and somewhat down the road. The lower portion of this structure, he perceived, was used as a store, containing a few dry goods, but dispensing chiefly needles and pins, especially hairpins, and such other commodities of toilet as the guests might have forgotten or exhausted or could be induced to buy. He paused in the doorway: even the sight of the limited stock ranged decorously on the shelves, the orderly counters, the smooth countenance of the salesman, seemed pleasing to him, as reminiscent of the privileges of civilization.

“Can we do anything for you, sir?” asked the clerk suavely.

Royce caught himself with a start. Then speaking with his teeth half closed to disguise his voice, and drawling like a mountaineer, he said, shaking his head, “Jes’ viewin’ the folks some.”