Chapter 15

"He is a man ez hev got eddication, an' a place, an' a fine chance an' show in life--it's--it's--yer brother Walter."

Her aim was true that time. Her shaft struck in the very core of his heart: but the satisfaction of this knowledge was denied her. He looked very white, it is true, but the pale moonlight was on his face; and he only said in an undertone:

"Walter!"

She laughed aloud, a sort of mockery of glee. She had expected to enjoy the revelation, and her laughter was an incident of the scene as she had planned it.

"We war a-courtin' consider'ble o' the time whilst ye war off electioneerin'," she said, with the side glance of her old coquetry.

She saw his long shadow on the pavement bend forward and recoil suddenly. She did not look at him.

"An' so ter-night," she went on briskly,--she had truly thought it a very good joke,--"whilst you-uns war a-star-gazing an' sech, Wat an' me jes stepped inter the register's office thar, an' the Squair married us. We 'lowed ye didn't see nothin' of it through the tellingscope, did ye? So Wat said I must tell ye, ez _he_ didn't want ter tell ye."

She could not see his face, the light was dulling so, and he had replaced his wide hat. There was a moment's silence. Then his voice rang out quite strong and cheerful, "Why, then thar's no more to be said."

He stood motionless an instant longer. Then suddenly he turned with a wave of his hand that was like a gesture of farewell, and she marked how swiftly his shadow seemed to slink from before him as he walked away, and passed the corner of the house, and disappeared from view.

She gazed silently after him for a moment. Then, leaning against the column, she burst into a tumult of tears.

* * * * *

Daylight found Justus Hoxon far on the road to the mountains. In the many miles, as he fared along, his thoughts could hardly have been pleasant company. As he sought to discover fault or flaw in himself, search as he might, he could find naught that might palliate the flippant faithlessness of his beloved, or the treachery of his brother. His ambition might have been too worldly a thing, but not a pulse of that most vital emotion beat for himself. He realized it now--he realized his life in looking back upon this completed episode, as he might have done in the hour of death. He had so expended himself in the service of others that there was naught left for him. He had no gratulation in it, no sense of the virtue of unselfishness, no preception of achievement; it only seemed to him that his was the most flagrant folly that ever left a man in the world, but with no place in it. A sorry object for pride he seemed to himself, but he quivered, and scorched, and writhed in its hot flames. His one object was to take himself out of the sight and sound of Colbury, till he might have counsel within himself, and perfect his scheme of revenge--not upon the woman. Poor Theodosia, with her limitations, could hardly have conceived how she had shattered the ideal to which her image had conformed in his mind, as she had stood on the porch and vaunted her beauty, and her belief in its power, and her pitiful ambitions. The woman was heartily welcome to the lot she had chosen. But the treacherous man,--it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed, albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This, however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of assault and battery. But Walter had many a weak point in his armor, glaringly apparent now to the once fond brother.

Only a surly, bitter word he had for greeting to the few neighbors whom he met, and who went their way in the conviction that his brother had lost his election; for none ascribed any emotion of Justus Hoxon's to his own sake.

He reached in the evening the little cabin where the padlock hung on the door, and the heavy, untrodden dust of the drought lay without; and so it was that the old days when "Fambly" had struggled through their humble experiences came back to him with that incomparable sweetness of the irrevocable past. Hardships! How could there be, with fond faith in one another, and in all the world! Poverty--so rich they were in love! Life, after all, is more than meat, and there is no hunger like that of a famished heart. He reviewed that forlorn, anxious, struggling orphanage, transfigured in the subtle glow of regretful, loving memory, as one might gaze into the rich glamours of a promised land. Alas, that our promised land should be so often the land we made haste to leave! As he sat down on the step he saw the ragged cluster of children troop down the road from twenty years agone, almost as if he actually beheld them, himself at the head. He could still feel their plump palms clinging to his hand at the first suggestion of danger. He had led them a right thorny path, each to a successful goal. And now could he turn against "Fambly"? Should he denounce the treachery of one of the little group that he could see huddling together for warmth on the meagre hearthstone, while outside the snows of a long-vanished winter were a-whirl? Should he pull down the temple on Walter's success--the pride of them all? He remembered how his sisters, with that feminine necessity of hero-worship in their untaught little hearts, had clung about Walter. He remembered too that almost every thought of his own life had been given to this man, who had ruthlessly and secretly robbed him of all that was dear to him, and in such wise as to hold him up to ridicule, a scoffing jest, a very good joke! So Walter considered it, and so doubtless would all Colbury. It would have surprised Walter, but his sometime mentor's cheek burned with shame for him.

No; the claims of "Fambly" were paramount. He gave it precedence, as in the old days he had denied himself when "Fambly" dined at the skillet, and the bone and the broken bit he took for his share. He could not bring discredit upon it. He would not lift his hand against it. It was the object of a lifelong allegiance, and he only marveled that, since the uses of the loyalty were at an end, the empty life should go on. He gazed mechanically at the padlock as he sat there with his dreary thoughts, remembering with what different heart he had turned the key. Ah, Happiness--to pass out from a door, and knock there never again!

He rose at last, his burden adjusted to his strength. He had never worked for thanks. It hardly mattered to him now how his efforts were requited. And though he encountered treachery at close quarters,--of his own household,--it was not in his heart to be a traitor to "Fambly" and its obvious interests. So he too went out from the door in the footprints of Happiness--likewise to return no more.

* * * * *

Walter Hoxon had not altogether ill-gauged the general proclivity to deem all fair in love or war. He was accounted to have performed something of a feat in the clever outwitting of his unsuspecting rival, and to the minds of the many there was an element of the romantic in this hasty wedding of the damsel of his choice almost under the eyes of the expectant bridegroom. He had added to the prestige of success in politics the lustre of valiance in the lists of love, and he encountered laughing congratulations from his friends and political supporters, which served much to reassure him and to banish a vague and subtle anxiety as to public opinion that had begun to gnaw at his heart. They all seemed to think he had done a very fine thing, and that it was a very good joke, and he was soon most jauntily of their persuasion. He could not know that here and there people were saying to one another, aside, the words he had feared to hear in reproach--that the swain whom he and his lady-love had conspired to dupe was his brother, who had done everything for him--had, as a mere child, encountered and vanquished poverty, had clothed and educated this man and his sisters, had served his every interest with a perfect self-abnegation all his life; that it was his brother who had won his election, being a man of much influence and untaught eloquence, and of great native tact and intelligence; that the secrecy, the conspiracy, and the publicity of the dramatic denouement, in lieu of an open rivalry, rendered it a case of the most flagrant ingratitude, and argued much unworthiness in the people's choice.

But suddenly a doubt began to prevail as to whether he were the people's choice. In the returns from the farthest districts, not heard from till quite late in the day, in which Walter Hoxon had felt secure, Quigley developed unexpected strength. In great perturbation Walter swiftly patrolled the town in search of Justus; unprecedented developments were imminent, and he hardly dared face the emergency without his valiant backer at hand. Justus had disappeared as utterly as if the night had swallowed him up.

"Consarn the tormentin' critter!" exclaimed Walter, mopping his brow as he stood at the little gate of Mrs. Elmer's yard, returning thither, after his fruitless searching, in the hope of finding his brother among the familiar faces. "Mad ez a hornet, I'll be bound, an' lef' me in the lurch. Beat arter all, I'll bet!"

Theodosia listened, tremulous, aghast. All the fine prospects that had seemed so near, into whose charming perspectives she might in another moment have stepped as actually as upon that path to the gate, were drawing away, dissolving, as tenuous, as intangible, as those morning sunlit mists shifting and rising from before the massive blue ranges of the Great Smoky Mountains, and dallying with the distances into invisibility.

"I tole ye ag'in an' ag'in ye bes' not be _too sure_," she said, a sob in her throat, with an obvious disposition to wreak her disappointment upon him.

It was crushed in the moment.

He turned a frowning face full upon her. "Hold yer jaw!" he cried violently. "Ef 't warn't for you-uns I'd hev Justus hyar, an' I'll be bound _he_ could fix it. Ye miserable deceitful critter--settin' two own brothers at loggerheads! I'll take no word from _you-uns_--sure!"

He shook his head indignantly at her, clapped his hat upon it, and turned desperately away as a man came running up. "Have ye found Justus?" Wat exclaimed.

"Justus? No. But they say it's a tie--a tie!"

For the news was already bruited throughout the town--in a ferment of excitement, because of the closeness of the contest--that the two candidates, racing gallantly neck and neck, had come under the wire together with not so much as the point of a nose to distinguish the winner.

Walter stood still for a moment, his dark eyes dilated with eagerness and anxiety. Suddenly he leaned back against the gate-post with a deep sigh of relief and relaxation.

"Then it's all right," he exclaimed breathlessly. "The coroner's my frien', ef I ain't got another in the worl'. Old Beckett will stan' by me, _sure_!"

As the coroner held the election, the sheriff himself being a candidate, it was his duty to give the casting vote. This prolongation of the jeopardy of the result heightened the popular interest, the more as the officer did not immediately decide upon his action in the matter.

"I want a leetle time ter think it over--a leetle time fur the casting vote," he said, as he gnawed at a plug of tobacco, then crossed his ponderous legs while he leaned back in a splint-bottomed chair in the register's office.

He was a tall, portly man, with a large, round imperious face, thatched heavily with iron-gray hair. He wore no beard, and was dressed in brown jeans, which imparted a certain sallowness to his dark complexion. He had small gray eyes, at once shrewd and good-natured, but his manner was bluff, imperative, and all the judiciary of the State could hardly have compassed an expression of a greater sense of importance.

He was observed with much interest by a number of men who lounged about the room. A tense sub-current of curiosity underlay the suspense natural to the occasion, for it was well known to the gossips about the court-house that he and the sheriff had not been on the best of terms; when their official functions had happened to bring them into contact they had clashed smartly, and the county rang with their feuds. His course was obvious to all--his hesitation only an affectation, lest a too vehement animosity be imputed to him.

"Poor Quigley's cake is dough," observed one of the incumbent's friends in an undertone, standing with his hands in his pockets, and gazing through the long dark vista of the hall out of the door into the sunlight's glow, as it fell upon the few houses and the great stretch of arable land beyond. A horizontal shadow of a cloud lay at its extremity, as definite as a material barrier, and far above it rose tiers of green and bronze hills like a moulding to the base of the lapis-lazuli-tinted mountains.

"This never happened in this county before," said the register, glancing up from a big book in which he was copying the doings of "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part"--the familiar spirits of his den.

"Why, no!" exclaimed the coroner, with a pleased laugh. "To me the castin' vote is ez _phee_-nomenal an' ez astonishin' ez the comet." He chuckled--the fat man's unctuous laugh. "Something like the comet, too: it has its place in the legal firmament, but 't ain't often necessary to use it."

"That war a toler'ble funny tale 'bout the comet they air a-tellin' roun' town," observed a young countryman pausing in front of the two, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his red head, a wide grin of enjoyment on his freckled face,--"about the feller that hed his sweetheart a-courtin' out hyar in the yard last night, an' tuk ter lookin' at the comet through the spy-glass, an' whilst he war busy a-star-gazin' the comet, another feller stepped up with the Squair, an' married his gal--ha! ha! ha!"

Beckett looked up interested. Incongruously enough a vein of romance ran through the massive strata of conceit, and intolerance, and vainglory, and pertinacity, and pugnacity that made up the very definite structure of his nature. He dearly loved a lover. He was as sentimental as a girl of eighteen, and he melted instantly into suavest amenities at the first intimation of a love-story in abeyance.

"I ain't heard 'bout that," he said in a mellifluous voice. "Ye know I was tucked up in yonder"--he jerked his thumb over his shoulder--"tendin' to the countin' of the votes, bein' returnin'-officer. Who married?"

"Why this hyar Walter Hoxon--him ez is candidate fur sher'ff," said the red-haired interlocutor, widening his grin.

Beckett elevated his heavy, grizzled eyebrows. A sudden, secret, important look, as if he were colloguing with some one vanquished in argument, crossed his face. He nodded once or twice, but only said acquiescently: "Ah--ha! Ah--ha! Toler'ble enterprisin'. Run fur office an git married 'lection day."

He smiled broadly. Any innovation on the stereotyped methods appealed to him with the grace and relish of a new metre to a neophytic rhymester.

"Wat's a nice boy, a mighty good boy, too," he went on, with his oily voice quite soft. "Run mighty well in this 'lection, too. He's a mighty smart, good boy."

He nodded his big head approvingly. "I don't wonder he cut the t'other feller out. Mighty fine feller Wat is."

"Well, now," said the register, suddenly putting his pen behind his ear, and leaving the party of the first part and the party of the second part to their own devices, "I'm blest if I don't think Justus is worth a hundred of Wat, lock, stock, an' barrel."

Once more the grizzled eyebrows went up toward the iron-gray thatch of the coroner's forehead. "_Justus!_ I'm free ter say I dunno nobody equal ter Justus. I hev known Justus sence he war knee-high ter a pa'tridge--the way he did keer fur them chil'n, an' brung 'em up ter be equal ter anybody in the lan'! An' smart--_smart_ ain't the word fur him! Ef he hed education he could do anything; but he hed ter stan' back an' let the t'other chil'n git it. Whar would Wat be ef 't warn't fur Justus?"

"That's what makes me say 't was a mighty mean trick he played on Justus," the register broke in.

"Who? How?" demanded the coroner.

"Why, Justus was the t'other feller. Wat an' the girl never let _him_ have an inklin' of it. They just fooled him along, believin' she was goin' ter marry _him_. An' las' night when it was reported all over town that Wat was elected, an' Justus took time from electioneerin' fur his brother to breathe, they tolled him out to look at the comet, an' slipped off an' married."

The man of sentiment, with the election in his hand, sat looking loweringly about him. His satisfaction was wilted; his fat hung flabbily on his big bones; his small eyes were hard and cold.

"Waal," he said, rising at last, "these extry an' occasional opportunities like comets an' castin' votes oughter be took full advantage of--full advantage of; no doubt about that."

And thus it was that the casting vote tipped the scale in favor of the incumbent.

"He's ez hard-headed, an' _ty_rannical, an' _per_verse, an' cantankerous a critter ez ever lived, with no feelin's, nor softness, nor perliteness in him--but he's a square man. He'll do the _fair_ thing--every time," the coroner said in explanation.

And so he braced himself for another term of official wrangling.

* * * * *

Poor Theodosia! She never forgot that return home, through all the dust of the drought and the glare of the midsummer sun. Even to herself her nature seemed too small for the magnitude of the various anguish which she was called upon to endure. The sharp alternations of certainty and doubt which she had undergone seemed slight, seemed naught, in comparison with the desolate finality of despair, the fang of hopeless regret, and the dread of the veiled future with which she had made no covenant of expectation or preparation, that preyed upon every plodding step as she went. Her anxiety as to the wisdom of her course was not assuaged by the aghast dismay of her mother's face, when she reached the little house overlooking the encircling mountains,--as still, as meditative, as majestically unmoved, as if no more troublous world existed,--and unfolded the story of her visit to Colbury. She felt for the first time in her life how Justus Hoxon's friend merited his confidence. Her mother had no reproaches, no sarcasms, no outbursts of grief. She addressed herself to the support and the comforting of her daughter, but with so evident a hopelessness and an expectation of bitter things to come that the girl burst out sobbing afresh.

"D' ye think Wat air so wuthless ez all that!"

The discipline of life began for her here. As the price of his political defeat, Walter had scant relish for the triumph he had scored in love. He was surly, taciturn, or else loud with reproaches and criminations, which grew more vehement and contumelious if she answered, seeking to exculpate or justify herself; and if she were silent, her submission seemed to exasperate him and to develop a crafty ingenuity in finding fault. He brooded grimly on his brother's probable exultation when he should return and hear the news of the casting vote. To fortify himself for the encounter he spent much time at the still, and his drunken, reasonless wrath was even more formidable to the object of his displeasure than his sober, surly resentment against her as the cause of all his disasters. But Justus did not come. Walter began to doubt if the news of the untoward result of the election, in which he had spent all his energies, had reached him. He also began to desire, contradictorily enough, that his brother should know it. For although Justus must needs recognize it as a mortal blow to his dearest foe, it had the capacity of doing much execution in its recoil. Justus had had the election so greatly at heart; he had struggled, and planned, and managed with such preternatural activity and tact and energy from the first, that it would smite him hard to know that it was all in vain. And then his vicarious ambitions, his pride, his pleasure, in the elevation of "Fambly"! Walter cast about futilely for an assurance that he might have the satisfaction of reducing all this. He knew that Justus, in his mistaken certainty of the result of the election, would not ask for information, and that he could not read the newspapers. A letter--even if there were any remote presumption as to his address--would lie indefinitely in the mail, and find its way at last to the Dead Letter Office.

Walter realized after a time that Justus intended to return no more--the woman he loved was his brother's wife. Justus had probably put the breadth of the State between them, Walter sneeringly concluded.

He made haste to quarrel with his wife's mother, in his perverse relish of aught that might give Theodosia pain, and they quitted her home and took up their residence in the house in which Theodosia had once expected to live, the scene of the early struggles of "Fambly."

Theodosia's beauty could hardly be said to fade; it disappeared in the overblowing. She grew very fat and unwieldy as the years wore on; her face broadened, her florid complexion degenerated into a mottled red and purple. She was no prettier than her mother had been when she ridiculed her lover's eulogy of her mother's spiritual beauty. She had a hard life with her drunken, idle, slothful husband, who habitually imputed to her agency every evil that had ever befallen him, holding it to excuse him from all exertion to better their very poor estate, and whose affection had been easily kindled by her beauty and as easily extinguished.

* * * * *

Justus, self-exiled from the mountains, tramped the valley roads, hardly caring whither, and drifted finally to the outskirts of one of the large manufacturing towns of Tennessee. He worked for some seasons doggedly, drudgingly, on a farm near by, but found a sort of entertainment in the sights and sounds within the city limits, as having no association with the past which his memory dreaded. He prospered in some sort, for although he was ignorant of all methods of skilled labor, fidelity is an art with so few proficients that friends and opportunities were not lacking. His progress was somewhat hampered, however, despite his evident intelligence, by a doubt which prevailed concerning his mental balance. He was often observed to stand and gaze smilingly, fondly, after any group of ragged, dirty children; he, although of the poorest, was profuse in gratuities to any callow beggar who did not know enough of the world's ways to expect nothing of such as he, as did the older ones. He could not read, but he bought newspapers from the smallest of the guild of newsboys, and meditatively turned the sheets in his hand, and then softly and slowly tore them to bits. And these things created a doubt of his sanity, for who could know how "Fambly" looked at him from the pinched face of every poor, and cold, and hungry child?

At last, despite this unsuspected drawback, a congenial occupation came to him. He was night watchman at a great factory, and as he paced, all solitary, back and forth in the yard, he was wont to note the stars as the infallible seasons brought them into place; and he began to remember their names, and to trace the strange configuration of the constellations, and to con again the stories woven into their shining meshes which he heard at the time that the great comet blazed among them.