It was indeed before the dawn that Teck Jepson set forth on his journey.
Upon the ultimate heights of the zenith midnight had poised, and had
thence flitted away into those unrealized spaces whither all that has
been goes at last. Constellations that he lately knew as familiars of the
meridian hung low, in this unaccustomed hour, about the western horizon.
Unwonted influences were astir in the brain. A sense of spiritual
freshness, of bodily renewal, of aloofness from the world, possessed the
hour,—a freedom from the dominant mundane spirit that had swayed the day
before. The dark earth lay, as it were, uncreated in the immense voids
of the night. The soul seemed nearer its nativity, fresh from the hands
of the Creator. In this isolation of identity, this perfect poise, this
reverent cognizance of high solemnities, it seemed that one’s lips might
be opened, that one might prophesy or sing some psalmodic inspiration, so
replete with the sense of fine bestowals was the time.
The day was still afar off. The cattle slept as he went out to the
pinfold by the light of the stars, but the patient creatures roused
themselves, and came forth with quiescent obedience; a calf bleated,
running to overtake its dam, the dominant sound in the stillness, and
the sheep huddled together in chilly guise as they went. There was a
light presently in the windows of the house, yellow and lucent, but
Jepson did not go back when once he had quitted the cabin; the farewell
to the children would be rather pain than pleasure; there was even a
pang in parting with the old dog, who persisted in following him for a
time, driven back at last with harsh words and a purposely ill-aimed
stone. Jepson could not see, but he knew how the creature crouched in
the darkness, with its reproachful and surprised eyes; then turning, and
coweringly running back to the doorstep. The half-grown puppy watched
the departure with the intense interest naturally elicited by so unusual
a proceeding, then affecting to misconstrue the whole incident, and
with an elaborate ignoring of old acquaintance, he barked furiously
into the darkness, not desisting when a shrill interpolated yelp
betokened a reproving kick from Bowles, but continuing his clamors of
threatening distrust after he had sought a refuge under the house, where
no interference could reach him. Far down the mountain his callow tones
could be heard, as Jepson rode at the rear of the little group of cattle
and sheep.
The wind was awake, inconceivably fresh, albeit hardly a leaf stirred,
so light of foot it was. A fragrance like some fine elixir was distilled
from the wayside flower hidden in the gloom. The morning star, so
luminously still, so splendid, looked over the mountains as he journeyed
with his flocks. A vague illumination was in the spaces surrounding it;
one might see that this sky wore an ineffably poetic tint, did it but
care to doff its sombre cloak. How massive the mountains,—how glooming
and austere their summit lines, against the dark instarred skies! And
suddenly a bird is moved to sing,—a note of supreme gladness, of joyous
augury? For what does the night signify but that the morning is on the
way? So close was Jepson to the tree whence this herald proclaimed the
day that he could hear the rustle of the wings as the creature plumed
them, and anon a low twittering as it settled down upon the bough for a
little waiting,—a little waiting yet. And lo! the light comes, gray with
vapor, and pale, and pensive, only won to flushes and to smiles when the
great sun, riding hard upon the first glimmer, shows its vermilion disk,
hung about with amber and violet vapors, in the gap of the mountains,
urgent to look upon the world before their utmost heights are scaled.
How purple the slopes; how the pearly mists slipped down; and what
long, burnished, yellow slanting rays shot athwart the world to touch
Chilhowee,—nay, the far-away dim summit of Walden’s Ridge,—while the
vast stretches of country beneath, in a still amethystine shadow, lay
motionless and waited! And here, alack, was his own old identity, full of
perplexed thoughts, and troublous forecasting, and vain regrets. Here,
too, as if the sun had brought it with the sight of the familiar world,
was the sense of vicinage, close, imperative, not to be evaded, with
the events of yesterday, the one coercive factor of to-day. Mrs. Bowles
might have wondered to know the direction he took,—not, in fulfillment of
her disparaging prophecy, across the line into North Carolina. Straight
down the mountain he was going,—straight into Broomsedge Cove. How fast
those coursers of the sun did speed, already there, betimes! Albeit so
far away as the miles counted, Jepson could see from the great heights of
the slopes the red gold flare in the deep gulf of the purple range, where
the lucent fresh light struck upon the long-abandoned spaces usurped by
the tawny-tinted growths of Broomsedge Cove. His face wore no longer that
wide-eyed, uplifted, meditative look it had in the earlier plastic poetic
hours. It was introspective, pondering; it bore anew the inscrutable
script of experience, of emotion. Once or twice only the cattle called
for his attention; with a turn of the mare on the flank of the column,
and the loud remonstrant barking of his dog harassing the stragglers,
they were once more jogging along the accustomed way. At length, however
the foremost of the company came almost to a stand with a suppressed low
of surprise, and then, insistently burly, the animals occupied the whole
path, leaving a man they had met to stand and wait by the wayside. He
held one palm over his eyes, for the sun came directly into his face, and
gazed doubtfully at the equestrian figure at the rear of the column. But
Jepson had noted him, and the recognition became mutual as he drew rein
beneath the great ledge of the rocks where Baintree stood. As he looked
up at the horseman, there was so shocked a disappointment on his face
that it seemed wonderful that an emotion could be so definitely expressed
without words.
Jepson waited a moment for him to speak. But Baintree, still silent,
gazed at him. “Ye ’lowed up yander ter Bowles’s yestiddy,” said Jepson at
last, “ez ye be powerful glad I war arrested, —I ain’t been yit, —an’ ez
ye’d like ter see how I’d look in a cage like Dan’l.”
Baintree made a feint of denial. “Did Mis’ Bowles ’low I said sech?” he
demanded. “Waal, I jes’ tole her the fust thing ez kem ter the tip o’ my
tongue. She ’peared so sharp set fur the news.”
Jepson looked casually down at him, then away at the far blue horizon.
“I’m goin’ ter Brumsaidge now, an’ ef they wanter arrest me they kin an’
welcome; an’ though I ain’t yit got the Lord so ez he sets ez much store
by me ez he done by Dan’l, I ain’t no mo’ ’feared o’ nuthin’ ’n him. I be
ekal ter answerin’ fur all I done, an’ I be more ’n willin’.”
There was something splendid and imposing in his boldness, and in his
stalwart pride in his courage. He turned his unflinching gaze down to
meet the intelligent and crafty albeit vacillating eyes of Jake Baintree,
in which there was a sort of reluctant envy, despite the rancorous enmity
they intimated.
“Ye hev got ter try it fust,” he said significantly, remembering
the stress of his own ordeals, and that this was but the valor of
prognostication. The facts would probably soon alter the outlook. He
nodded his head convincingly.
“Sech ez I do,” said the valorous saint, “air done afore the Lord! An’ I
ain’t keerin’ what men say ahint my back, so long ez they take powerful
keerful heed o’ thar words afore my face; ef they don’t, I know how ter
make ’em wish they hed.”
Jake Baintree failed, apparently, to comprehend the spirit of this
challenge. He looked absently at the red cow cropping the grass in the
niches at the base of the cliff that towered above their heads, and then
his restless eye followed the silver-tipped wings of a bird, flying in
the sunshine, upward, upward, with open beak and a joyous matutinal cry,
cleaving the mists with a glancing line of light, and seeming bound for
some haven in the splendid placidity of the blue sky, so serene and so
high. The dew exhaled incense. Far away a fawn bleated, where doubtless
it lay with its dam in the thick coverts of the laurel. The balsam firs,
all a-glitter, gave out a sense of strength and infinite freshness, and
of all the finer values of respiration; in such air it was a definite
joy to be endowed with the sheer capacity to breathe. As his wandering
glance came back he caught Jepson’s eyes upon him, and he was vaguely
embarrassed for the moment. He put one foot on the blade of the spade
that he had in his hand, and leaning upon the handle he looked up, his
inscrutable eyes narrowing and full of close and guarded thought.
“What war ye a-layin’ off ter say ter me? Jes’ that?” he demanded.
“I never laid off ter say nuthin’ ter you-uns,” said Jepson, loftily. “Ye
happen ter be in my road. I ain’t keerin’ ef ye onderstan’ or no sech
ez I am mindin’ ter say an’ act. I render an account ter the Lord, an’
I walk afore him! I be goin’ down ter Brumsaidge ter meet the days ter
come. I feel ekal ter ’em,—ter what the Lord mought send.”
A sudden anxiety flickered over Baintree’s face; for the first time he
noted the household gear, packed in a tiny wagon that was drawn by an
old ox, guided only by his master’s voice as he rode alongside, and the
number of cattle and sheep. This was evidently a permanent removal.
“Whar be ye a-goin’ ter live in the Cove?” he demanded suddenly.
“Whar do ye reckon?” retorted Jepson, resenting the supposed curiosity
impelling the question. “Ye may be sure in the fear o’ the Lord, an’ in
the light o’ his face, ef he will turn it on me.”
He lifted his head with a most mundane pride and called aloud to his
cattle, his robust, mellow voice echoing along the savage steeps. Then,
with the whole pastoral train once more in motion, he rode on down the
rugged mountain ways, sitting with a proud erectness,—the lingering
influence of his arrogations in the conversation,—his broad hat pushed
back from his brow, his spirited face full of resolution and confidence
again, and with that imaginative, meditative look once more in his eyes;
for, urged by his contempt for the man from whom he had just parted,
it cost him no effort to discharge his flexible mind, almost his very
memory, of the conversation and of the existence of his late companion.
But he could not keep his thoughts upon congenial themes. Over and again,
to be sure, he reverted to the trend of his habitual meditations. It was
thus, he reflected, that they of old had journeyed with their flocks
under the open sky. He saw Jacob’s cattle instead of his own slowly
tending down the defiles; now and again he passed a bubbling spring,
full of tinkling tremors of sound stealing out into the silence of this
richly luxuriant land, and to him it was a “well of springing water in
a desert place;” sheep they had of old, and kine, and horses, and he
marveled much what a camel might be. Then suddenly, with a deep sigh, he
was again striving with the pursuing pack of remorseful, sharp-fanged
regrets, falling upon him anew, with a freshened capacity to tear and
mangle, recruited in that short respite. With the veiled future before,
that no prescient eye might even vaguely discern; with an urgent sense of
justification, that nevertheless could not justify his deed to himself;
with a self-effacing desire to atone for what he felt was no fault of
his, as if the sacrifice could restore all as it was at this hour of
yesterday, he reviewed the scene, burnt as it was into his brain, and
shrank once more in every sensitive fibre from the barbed reproaches of
Marcella’s soft voice, and again turned aghast from what might perchance
befall Eli Strobe.
And then he vibrated to that other mood, his splendid physique rebounding
from the harassments that sought to fix upon his strong nerves. His
habit of robustly ignoring aught that did not jump with his humor; his
imperious and independent poise; his impassivity to argument and the
opinion of others; his arrogant arbitration of all matters according to
his own absolute judgment, that recognized no alternative, no higher
appeal, save his tyrannical interpretations of the Lord’s will, all
renewed their tenure, and he was open anew to the influences of the
present. Here and there his receptive fancy was struck by a great cairn
of stones, fragments of rock split from the crags above by the riving
frosts of immemorial winters, and he was reminded afresh of the altar
that Jacob piled, and of the resting-places—which surely the Lord
frequented—of this journeying man of eld.
“Jacob hed powerful strange ’speriences,” he broke out. “He did dream
s’prisin’. An’ the Lord’s voice mus’ hev sounded in his ears, wakin’ an’
sleepin’, arter he once hearn it. I couldn’t holp feelin’ sorry fur Esau,
though.”
He mechanically noted how the golden-rod showered its yellow hoard, as
his stirrup-irons struck into the thick wayside growth, how the blooming
“mountain snow” brushed his mare’s fine coat.
“It never did ’pear ter me so scandalous redic’lous ez Esau war hongry
arter he kem from huntin’. This air a powerful rough kentry, an’ the air
is brief,—I fund the diff’ence out whenst I went down yander ter them
valley towns, time Jake Baintree war tried. The Bible ’lowed Esau war a
powerful cunning hunter, but never said nuthin’ ’bout what sorter dogs he
hed,—moughtn’t hev been trained to trail, an’ time he hed pulled ’bout’n
the mountings with a pack o’ wuthless hounds arter deer or b’ar he war
’bleeged ter been hongry; but he oughtn’t ter hev sold his birthright fur
a pot o’ soup.”
He shook his head reprehensively over this ancient transaction. “Esau
oughtn’t ter hev done that,” he said, as if it had happened yesterday.
The mare suddenly shied from a pallid, lightning-scathed tree showing
abruptly close at hand as the path curved. He paused for a moment, but
the interruption did not divert the current of his reflections. “Jacob,”
he said, “served seven year fur Rachel, an’ ’lowed ’twar like one day.
He b’lieved in Rachel. The Bible ’lows she war plumb beautiful,—but I’ll
be bound she warn’t nowhar compared ter Marcelly”—He broke off with a
bitter sigh; his face clouded; the far-away look in his blue eyes, that
was so inconsonant with the force and boldness of his features, was gone
with the effect of a sudden metamorphosis,—absolutely unrecognizable. He
gathered up the reins that he had suffered to lie loose on the mare’s
neck, and lifted his voice in a melancholy hymn, and sang aloud as he
rode. Now and again the tones rose to Jake Baintree’s ears, and once as
Jepson emerged below the wealth of foliage into a rocky space he saw
him and his flock and herd again; the animals running at speed down the
declivities, the mare cantering after, while the rider sang aloud, the
sound vibrating back and forth in swinging vigor of rhythm, and with the
multitudinous echoes seeming as if the whole morning were voicing the
solemn measure of an anthem.
Baintree, as he leaned on his spade, his hat pulled low over his
uncertain and lowering eyes, had an expression altogether at variance
with his humble rustic garb, so crafty, so keen, it was. His face was
lined with anxiety for a moment. Once he started impulsively after the
horseman, then checked himself abruptly, “He’ll git thar ’fore I kin,”
he remarked. “It’s down hill all the way, an’ they’ll keep that gait, I
reckon.”
Already the song was faint; already the echoes were fitful. The wind was
harping in the pines above his head; he glanced up to see them gently
stirring; a great buzzard majestically circled in the blue sky; a mist
on the mountain side vanished, as the broad flare of the sun encountered
its ethereal pallors, like some belated ghost that in these solitudes had
braved the monitory cock-crow.
“He’ll be powerful s’prised when he does get thar,” he muttered, “an’
that’s all!” He spoke aloud, his anxious canvassing resulting in
reassurance. He laughed a little, his thin lips curving. “He’s a mos’
survigrous fool;” he shook his head in contemplating the strength of the
folly that Jepson harbored. “He ain’t goin’ ter sense nuthin’. He’ll
bound round hyar an’ talk ’bout the Lord, when he air so fur from heaven
ez the Lord hisself can’t hear him. An’ ennyhow, he’ll git ’rested so
soon that he won’t hev much chance ter wonder an’ talk. An’ I’ll light
out ter let the folks in Brumsaidge know ez he be a-travelin’ round an’
a-purtendin’ ter be a-goin’ thar, fur mebbe he won’t go ter his cabin
arter all.”
This cabin of Jepson’s was well out of sight from the Settlement, and was
in fact some miles distant. It stood on the slope of the deep trough in
the mighty range which was called Broomsedge Cove, but the characteristic
topography of the locality had given way, and the torrent that, long and
sinuous, was a feature of the broader spaces, lay here in a chasm-like
valley and wore the semblance of a lakelet in the abyss below, so
completely did jutting spurs of the mountain conceal its further vagrant
course. It was a wild spot, with its rocky bit of pasture, its “gyarden,”
its slanting fields. Above the little log cabin the great, wooded, gray,
craggy steeps towered immutably; below, the abrupt declivity slanted to
the clifty banks of the simulated lake in the gorge. In certain states of
the atmosphere, one standing in the weed-grown garden might think to put
forth a hand and touch that purple-bronze mountain opposite. And again
the neighboring heights sought a sophistry of distance, and were blue
and vague, and shimmered elusive through a fluctuating haze. The water in
the chasm had too its variant guise; at times it was a burnished yellow
with the emblazonment of the sun, or beneath a dull sky it glittered with
a steely lustre, like some keen blade that, finely tempered, can be bent
and writhen into an unwonted sinuosity; under a lunar spell it trembled
and shoaled with violet tints, and glancing pearly shafts, and anon a
silver gleam. On dark nights the stars registered one by one in these
lucent currents, sequestered by the forest and the rocks, and held in the
deep, deep heart of the mountain.
Jepson felt a sudden poignant pang when first he caught sight of the
crystal depths, of the little gray cabin, of the weed-grown wastes about
it, and of the mountains opposite and those that clustered round. Ah,
what does an old home house! Such troops of memories, gay and grave;
such palpable fancies arrayed in the guise of those that once it knew,
endowed with voices that speak no more,—morning, noon, and night, these
tenants flit in and out of its portals and busy themselves as of yore,
despite whomsoever it shelters now, and find no lack of space. Hospitable
roof-tree! He could not enter at first; he did not even have the heart to
meditate on the policy of its desertion and of his return. He unsaddled
his mare, and watched the cattle take their way to the old pasture and
into the tumbling shanty of a barn, noting indications of their dumb
recognition of the locality. He wondered if they were aware of the
change, and how in their dull and half-developed reasoning processes
they accounted for it. Old griefs, seared over by time and distance,
began to ache again in conscious bereavement. It smote him like a blow
in the face to note the weed-grown spaces of the garden,—how bravely
the prince’s-feathers flaunted, how the tiger-lilies flared! All of the
utilitarian growths had succumbed; there might be “volunteer potatoes,”
perchance, under the fennel, and the broad-leafed mullein, and the long
tangled crab-grass, but naught showed of the old-time grace and plenty
but the flowers that his mother had planted, still keeping tryst with the
seasons as of yore.
“How she did love ennything ez hed a strong color onto it!” he thought
wistfully, remembering this primitive half-realized relish of beauty of
contour and of tint, and watching a row of tall hollyhocks, all their
straight, shaft-like stalks studded with blossoms as they waved back and
forth in the wind, by the doorstep, where she used to sit and watch them,
while she listened to the deep, musical flow of the stream in the abyss
below, or the blare of the wind in the pines, or the heart-felt lay of a
bird singing from the orchard bough. “Waal, waal,” he sighed as he lay at
length amongst the clover, his hat upon the ground and his hands clasped
under his head, gazing at the little gray cabin, “she hev got a better
house ’n that one now,—a house not made with hands.”
For all his imagination he could not see it, and so he sighed again.
It was nearing noonday; the scent of the clover was dry and warm; a bee
went droning by; the shadows of a few scrubby fruit trees, by courtesy
an orchard, had almost collapsed about the roots, far different from
their long, slanting matutinal habit. Autumn was on the way, although its
signs were scant. On the great slope behind the house a single sour-wood
tree on a bold crag flaunted, a deep, rich crimson color; it contrasted
sharply with its own white tassels, and with the gray of the rugged rock,
with the green of the pines hard by, with the delicate, indefinable blue
of that slow up-wreathing smoke.
Smoke? Whence should it come? He lifted himself upon his elbow and
stared, his eyes startled and intent, as if he scarcely believed their
testimony. For this vague and vagrant tissue was curling up from the old
stick-and-clay chimney of the deserted house.
He did not move. He lay watching this illusion, as it were, this guise
of former days, wondering that the little cabin, gray and aged and
trembling on the verge of dissolution, should lend itself to this fraud
of vision, spuriously advertising itself a habitation, when he recalled
how gaunt and bare it was within; how dark were the corners, where the
spiders wove their time-thickened webs; how dilapidated a rift was in the
flooring, where a puncheon had rotted and fallen through. Ah, looking
at the graves in the little forlorn burying-plot among the crags, high
on the slope in a square inclosure of gray palings, and remembering
those who had quitted the cabin and the humble home ways forever, to
lie out there in the silence of the mountains,—with the rain, and the
mist, and the wind, and the snow to come and to go unheeded, while they
waited the sound of the promised trump, which even the dull ear of death
shall heed,—he felt how well it behooved that hearth-stone to be dark,
and silent, and solitary; how strange a freak it was that this vaporous
attestation of warmth and glow should deceive his senses.
The smoke bent before the wind; it wafted toward him.
He rose suddenly, with a changed face.
“Somebody air in thar,” he said, with mustering indignation; “they hev
got a fire, an’ they air a-burnin’ of green wood.”
The smell of the smoke from the green wood, with the pungent, aromatic
suggestions of its sap, was still stronger as he stood by the door.
He hesitated for a moment; then with a muttered “I hev got manners,
ef ye ain’t,” the owner of the house knocked, rousing such a sound in
the cavernous stillness that his heart gave a great throb as he heard.
Precipitate feet seemed to hastily plod to the door, failing somehow when
reaching it, and waiting in silence, while fainter footfalls followed and
paused also. It was only when he knocked once more that he realized that
this was but the echo of his summons on the frail battens. There seemed
no one inside, but as he tried the hitch he discovered, to his infinite
surprise, that the door was barred within.
“A body would ’low fur sartain ez thar war folks inside,” he said in
doubt.
His eyes, with a certain freedom characteristic of the proprietary
glance, turned with a canvassing attention now to the walls and chimney,
and again to the closed batten shutter. The hollyhocks that his mother
had planted—how they had grown!—rapped against it with peremptory
iteration, as if insistently summoning her forth to see how they throve
and rewarded her early care.
“Jes’ ez ye say!” he remarked loudly, for the benefit of the supposed
occupants. “Ef ye don’t let me in, I’ll let myself in.”
Still there was no response save the striking back of the tones of his
voice from the walls, seeming intrusive and strident in the utter silence.
He began to feel as if he were dreaming. He looked over his shoulder
to see the scattered kine in the clover; his clay-bank mare standing
unsaddled by the old rail fence, her bronze flanks glistening in the
sun, her black mane tossing as she thrust her head over the high topmost
rail, gazing with full, lustrous eyes down the slope, and snuffing with
satisfaction the fresh breeze. He was awake,—very wide awake indeed,
one might have thought, to see him take his pistol from the holster of
the saddle on the ground and slip it into the long leg of his boot;
for his faith in the efficacy of a “shootin’-iron” was hardly less
pronounced than his faith in the efficacy of prayer. He walked in with
a gingerly step amongst the tall, slim rods of the hollyhocks. “I hev
ter be powerful partic’lar ’bout tromplin’ these hyar high weeds ez mam
sets sech store by,” he said, repeating an old formula, familiar to him
of yore, and distinguishing in the words, only after they were spoken,
the sarcasm of the present and the past. Even in that urgent moment of
action and of caution he sought to reflect that for her flowered the
unfading splendors of the gardens of heaven, and he had a sudden close
realization of the solace she must have found in that bloomful Paradise.
A vague vision of vast multiplied fields of the Chilhowee lily was before
his eyes: of these white ethereal glories were the heavenly borders, he
knew. He paused as he stood; the white hollyhocks, with their garnet
centres, touched his cheek. He laid his hand on the shutter, breast-high
from the ground. One sudden violent wrench, and it swung open. The next
instant, with the supple agility of a mountain panther, he sprang through
the narrow aperture, and landed on his feet in the middle of the square,
low-ceiled room. Empty,—quite empty. He stood amidst the clustering
shadows, and gazed about with a dilated, excited eye. A square of yellow
sunlight lay on the floor beneath the window, and in the slanting rays
the motes were dancing. A new puncheon had replaced the rift in the
floor; in the chimney-place were heaps of ashes, and amidst them red
coals smouldered. The fire had been providently covered to last, but the
task had not been well done, or the draught was stronger than usual, the
wind being favorable; for a remnant of the green-wood log had begun to
burn afresh, although only a timorous blaze now and then showed itself,
flickering out in the steady column of smoke slowly tending up the
chimney. There were pipes on the shelf that served as mantel, a rough
pallet in the corner, and a few rude cooking utensils on a bench. As he
looked about in increasing surprise, he noted a variety of fragments of
rock, systematically ranged on the floor beside the walls. A strong spade
and a pickaxe with its point broken off stood in the corner. With a mind
void of even a speculation, he investigated the shed-room; then ascended
to the roof-room, where the window by the chimney was open to the air. It
looked out above the low branches of the orchard, where the sunshine and
the shadows still alternated in the old vogue known amongst the leaves
since light first dawned upon the world. It showed, too, the great dark
mountains hard by, with the deeper shades amongst them that betokened
ravine and chasm below the level of his eye; and there was a range afar
off, appearing above their massive summits, faintly blue, known by sight
only, as it were, for its name was unfamiliar, and its relative position
to the other steeps was such that it could be seen only from the window
of his old room. A dead tree close at hand, denuded of leaves and bark,
tall and blanched to a silver tint, showed its dendritic symmetry in
pallid glistening lines against the soft blue of those far slopes,
and the sense of distance between the two, the leagues of sunshine,
was immeasurable. The sight of the mountain, so long unseen, with the
overpowering recollection of the past, had an indescribable effect upon
him. His face was wistful, his nerves grew tense, his hand trembled as
he leaned upon its palm on the window-sill. Another man, feeling thus,
would have wished that he had not come, and would have upbraided himself,
perchance, that he had been so ill content, placed as he was of late.
Jepson rarely, indeed, questioned the wisdom and the policy of his own
decrees. He turned himself about with a long-drawn sigh, quivering,
it seemed, through the very flesh of his heart that ached physically,
tramped heavily down the stairs, and without a moment’s hesitation
addressed himself to removing the stranger’s effects; piling them all in
a heap outside of the boundary fence, where the owner might come and take
them or leave them, as he saw fit.
“Ef he hed kem an’ axed me, whoever he be, he’d hev been welcome ter bide
ez long ez he wanted ter,” he observed, the sentiment of the proprietor
strong within him and affronted by this lack of formality. “I hain’t been
outer reach noways ez I knows on. An’ ef my kin be dead, _I_ ain’t.”
As he proceeded to put his own household effects into that perfunctory
and curious disarray which the masculine mind accounts order, he glanced
out of the window now and again, thinking to see the evicted tenant
returning to find his household gods thus upset, and heaped together and
cast out.
So bent was he upon this that after his expeditious settlement of his
household affairs he seated himself on the step of the little porch, and
smoked, as he leaned, with his hands behind his head, against the post,
and watched the meagre treasure with intent eyes. He did not recognize
his resolution in any sense as softening, but when the unknown intruder
should come back, and thus learn this pointed lesson of the absolute
rights of ownership, he held in contemplation the return of the cast-out
gear to the house, and an invitation to abide for a time.
As he sat there the river sang,—sang aloud to the listening, silent
mountains, an archaic lay, so full of a sentiment of a vital
individuality, an undying spirit, that it must have been voiced by some
finer essences than are known to our dull modern density. He could hear
the woods declaiming in vibrant periods, although he could translate none
of these dryadic tones that came from the trees. The bees droned around
his mother’s flowers; a butterfly, more splendidly caparisoned than any
blossom, dandered about the old neglected garden and took to wing. And
as he watched, naught came down the path but the reddening sunlight,
loitering along to its home in the west.