The juggler was hardly disposed to felicitate himself upon this feat
of simulation which had served to deceive the whole of his native
city, and to bury a stranger, as it were, in his own grave. He began
to pity the plight of the dead if they could so yearningly remember
the life they had left. Return for him was impossible. Glimpses of the
moon might shadow forth spirits revenant, but for him memory only must
serve. He wondered that he could not accept conclusions so evidently
final, for over and again, in the deep watches of the night, he would
argue anew within himself the chances _pro_ and _con_ of transforming
these immutable fictions into fact, of overcoming the appearance of
crime by his previous high character, of relying on the good feeling
of the firm, and the futility of the proceeding, to save him from
prosecution. Then always, when he would reach this point, and his heart
would begin to beat fast with the hope of restoration to life, it would
stand still with a sudden paralysis and sink like lead; for there were
interests other than those of revenge or justice, or preserving the
public morals by enforcing penalties for the infringement of the law
to be served by his incarceration in a good strong safe prison. There
existed a certain corporation, the Gerault Bonley Marble Company,
that he knew would give much money to be able to lay hands upon him
now, and that had doubtless grieved for his demise like unto Rachel
mourning for her children. The Gerault Bonley Marble Company had, in
the past few years, been greatly enriched by the discovery of beds
of a very fine marble in a large body of Tennessee land, in which,
however, they merely held an estate _per autre vie_,--limited to the
duration of Lucien Royce’s natural existence. In this unique position
of a _cestui que vie_ he had at first felt a certain glow of pride. It
was characteristic of his knack of achieving importance and prominence
with so slight effort that he seemed, as it were, born to a certain
preëminence. He recollected the prestige it added to his personality at
the time when it was discovered that there were great beds of marble in
the almost worthless tract, and the sensation of pleased notoriety he
had experienced when Mr. Gerault Bonley, the president of the company,
a well-known broker, had dropped in at the office to look at him--he
had never taken the trouble before--and have a word with him. “Remember
your business is to _live_, young man,” he had said in leaving, flushed
and elated with success. “That’s all you have to do. And if you ever
find any hitch about doing it pleasantly, come to us, and we will help
you eke it out. You are the one who lives, you understand.” And he
walked out, portly and rubicund, his eye kindling as he went.
Lucien Royce had ridden up town on the cable car one evening, a day or
two afterward, and he had noticed with new interest a man, forlorn,
shabby, chewing the end of a five-cent cigar so hard between his teeth
as he talked that he was unaware that its light had died out, who
railed at life and his luck in unmeasured terms that astonished the
passengers precariously perched on the platform of the rear car. This
was the unsuccessful speculator who, some years earlier, had sought to
mortgage the land in question to Mr. Gerault Bonley, the broker, who
had bought up his paper and was disposed toward thumbscrews. It was not
a good day for mortgages, somehow, but, with the desperation of a man
already pressed to the wall, about as badly broken as he was likely to
be, the debtor would not consent to an absolute transfer of the title.
“The land will be sold under execution, then,” he of the thumbscrews
had said.
“The law allows two years for redemption, in Tennessee,” the owner had
retorted, with the expectation of better times in his face.
Perhaps because of the resistance,--the broker always said he did
not know why he had wanted the land, for although he was aware that
a little marble quarry had once been worked there, it had been
abandoned as not worth the labor,--still protesting that he could not
avail himself of the property unless for a term of years, at least,
he finally offered the bait of enough ready money to extricate the
speculator, and give him another show amongst the bulls and bears, and
the conveyance was made for the uncertain term of the life of another.
Lucien Royce had chanced to drop in on some business for Greenhalge,
Gould & Fife, the cotton commission firm, a lithe, muscular young
fellow, the ideal of an athlete, and the thought suggested itself to
the broker that the estate should be limited to the duration of his
life. The proposition was carelessly acceded to by the young man,
attracted for the moment by the novelty of the proceeding, apprehending
in the matter the merest formality. This was the conclusion.
“And now you’ll live forever!” cried the disappointed speculator,
suddenly recognizing, in the uncertain light on the platform of the
car, the features of the stalwart _cestui que vie_. Once more he was
chewing hard on his cigar, once more inveighing against his accursed
luck, as he stretched the newspaper toward the dull lamp of the car,
indicating with a trembling hand the big head-lines chronicling the
discovery, while the cumbrous vehicle went gliding along through the
blue haze of the dusk and the smoke and the dust,--the medium through
which the looming blocks of buildings and the long double file of
electric lights were visible down the avenue. “You’ll live forever,
while those men make millions on the tract they euchred me out of at
ten dollars an acre! It would be a charity for you to fall off the
car and break your backbone. They tell me concussion of the brain is
painless. I’ll swear I’d feel justified if I should hide in a dark
alley, some night, and garrote you as you go by to the club.”
“There’s another case of garroting in the paper,” observed a mutual
acquaintance by way of diversion.
“I noticed it. That’s what reminded me of it. It’s like lassoing. I
lived a long time in Texas,” he said, as he swung himself off at a
side-street, and disappeared in the closing haze that baffled the
incandescent lights showing upon its density in yellow blurs without
illuminating it.
“You’d better look out for that man, sure enough,” the literal-minded
mutual acquaintance warned Lucien Royce. “He feels mighty sore. This
company is going to make ‘big money’ on his land.”
But Royce laughed it off. “I am the one who lives,” he boasted.
He found it not altogether so careless an existence since it was
worth so much financially. His acute sensibilities realized a sort of
espionage before he was definitely aware of it. He came to know that
he was reckoned up. What he did, where he went, how he felt, were
matters in which other people were concerning themselves. He resented
the irksome experience as an attack on his liberty. He felt no longer
a free man. And this impression grew as the yield from the property
promised more and more. The Bonley Company had gone to heavy expenses.
They had put in costly machinery. They had hired gangs and gangs of
men. They had built miles of narrow-gauge railroad, to convey the
stone by land as well as by water. It had become a gigantic venture.
The jocose “Take care!” “Live for _my_ sake!” “Be good to yourself!”
which had at first formed the staple of the injunctions to him when
he chanced to encounter any member of the company, changed to serious
solicitous inquiry which affronted him. More than once Mr. Bonley
called upon him to remonstrate about late hours, heavy suppers, and
the disastrous effects upon the constitution of drinking wine and
strong waters. Thus the rubicund Mr. Gerault Bonley, whose countenance
was brilliant with the glow of old Rye! In one instance, when Royce’s
somewhat cavalier and scornful reception of these kind attentions
served to rouse Mr. Bonley to the realization that the _cestui que
vie_ claimed the right to have other objects in existence than merely
to live for the corporation’s sake, the president of the company
apologized, but urged him to consider, for the justification of this
anxiety, what large financial interests and liabilities hung upon the
thread of his life. There was a panic among the company whenever he
went to the seashore for a short vacation, and once he allowed himself
to be persuaded out of a trip to Europe, of which acquiescence he was
afterward ashamed,--so much so that when a place in the office of the
Bonley Company was offered him, with a large increase of salary, but
with the unavowed purpose of keeping him under surveillance, that
he might always be at hand and easily reckoned up, he declined it
with such peremptoriness as to cause the company to relax this unwise
exhibition of solicitude for the time, and greatly to please his own
firm, Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, who had not relished the effort to
decoy a confidential clerk from their employ. On one occasion when, in
training for a boat-race, he was suddenly prostrated by the heat, the
anxiety of the Gerault Bonley Marble Company knew no bounds, and its
manifestation more than verged upon the ridiculous; it was the joke
of the whole town. The claims of his own personal friends--he had no
near relatives--were set at naught. The company took possession of
him. He came to himself in one of the well-appointed guest-chambers
of Mr. Bonley’s own house; and when he rallied, which he did almost
immediately, with the recuperative powers of youth and his great
strength, he was detained there several days longer than was necessary
by his host’s insistence, until indeed the physician in charge laughed
in the face of Mr. Gerault Bonley, the broker.
“Take care you don’t do anything eccentric,” the doctor said in parting
at last from his patient. “That company might shut you up in a lunatic
asylum or a sanitarium, where you would be ready for inspection at all
hours,--just to make sure you are alive, you see.”
It was meant for a joke, but it grated on the nerves of the _cestui
que vie_. And now it came back as he lay under the dark roof of Tubal
Cain Sims’s house, staring into the unresponsive night, with the
thought that a good strong state prison would serve the purpose of
the Marble Company, looking toward his safekeeping, more effectually
still. He could well understand their despair upon the supposed
determination of the life estate, for since they had secured the land
at slight cost, the vast profits of the industry were to the ordinary
business mind all the dearer, being the favor, as it were, of chance,
or the uncovenanted mercy of Providence,--“clean make.” How could they
survive the reversion of the property, with all its present wealth and
its future prospects, to the original grantor? His imagination, alert
as it was, failed to respond to so heavy a demand upon its resources.
Should they find that the death of the _cestui que vie_ was spurious,
their tenancy not yet expired, should they be restored to their
former status, what a warning this untoward alarm would seem, what
restraints upon his liberty might not be attempted! The idea bereft
him of his last hope. Could he reasonably expect to escape prosecution
when his custody in the clutches of the law was so obviously to the
interests of a powerful corporation like this? Even if his own firm
of Greenhalge, Gould & Fife should be averse to it to avenge their
losses, what powerful influence would be brought to bear upon them by
the Gerault Bonley Marble Company; what substantial values were to be
dangled before the eyes of a broken firm in the friendship and backing
of a strong financial association like this! The Marble Company would
move heaven and earth to place him behind the bars. There could Mr.
Bonley come and look at him any fine day, as he sat making shoes and
saddles,--he had heard that at the penitentiary they put their swell
guests to such occupations, and his deft fingers might commend their
utility in this service to the commonwealth,--or perhaps busied in
some clerical capacity to which his long experience in counting-rooms
rendered him apt. Mr. Bonley’s scarlet countenance and bristly white
mustache were of a calmer aspect as they appeared in this vision than
they had worn in reality for many a long day! The menu would contain
naught to destroy the digestion of the _cestui que vie_ or affright the
Marble Company in the way of midnight suppers and unlimited champagne.
There would be no wild uproarious companions, no gambling escapades,
no perilous activities on the horizontal bar,--what war had Mr. Bonley
waged against his attachment to the gymnasium!--no swimming-matches,
no boat-races, no encounters with gloves or foils. Truly Mr. Bonley’s
estate would be gracious indeed!
No; Lucien Royce felt that his escape was a crowning mercy vouchsafed.
His most imperative care should be to make it good, or he might
well spend a decade of the best years of his life behind the bars
for a crime he had not committed. His incarceration would easily
be compassed, were his defense far more complete than perverse
circumstance rendered possible, by the craft and persistence of men
who had such large interests at stake on the life and well-being of a
wild, adventurous, hairbrained boy. His supposititious death had saved
his name, his commercial honor, which he held dear. John Grayson, with
the theft of the belt and its treasure, had also taken his life--for he
had no life left! He was dead! He was very dead! And let the Gerault
Bonley Marble Company mourn him. With a laughing sneer on his face, he
cursed again, as he had cursed a thousand times, the plastic folly,
or the vagary of chance, or whatever fate it was that induced him to
lend himself to the broker’s scheme; for although he had thought it a
mere formality, it had in effect sold him into a species of slavery
for the rest of his natural life. “But is not my advice good advice?”
Mr. Bonley had more than once urged upon his recalcitrant mood. “Is it
not in your _own_ interests as well as in ours? Is it not exactly the
advice I would give to my own son?”
“He needs it. Give it to _him_,” the _cestui que vie_ would reply in
flippant despair. But Mr. Bonley’s son was not worth so much money to
the company, and he went his own ways with some celerity, all unchecked.
The continually administered cautions, the sense of sustaining
anxiety, espionage, criticism, of thus sharing his life, had
made it in some sort a burden to the merry _cestui que vie_; and
therefore, in the first days of his escape, the realization of the
petty persecutions, the irksome advice of the ill-advised Mr. Bonley,
shaken off and forever thwarted, seemed to the young man only matter
for self-gratulation. In the accumulation of these trifles in his
thoughts, he had lost sight of the far-reaching significance of the
event until he had reached the haven of Etowah Cove, and his bodily
fatigue and distress of mind were somewhat allayed. Then he began to
perceive that in this fictitious death a great property had changed
hands, a definite right was subverted; a terrible fraud had been
practiced on the tenants _per autre vie_, in that the life estate was
not yet terminated. Mr. Gerault Bonley was mulcted of his prominence
as a ludicrous, pertinacious, troublous bore, and the personality of
the company was asserted as possessors of certain rights and large
interests of which they were to be bereft through his agency. He was
offered his choice,--to stay dead, or to go back and serve a term in
the penitentiary for a crime he had never committed, to benefit the
financial interests of Mr. Gerault Bonley and his associates. He sought
now and again some solace in reflecting upon the hard bargain that Mr.
Bonley had driven with the original owner, the poetic justice that
his lands should revert to him in his lifetime, their value enhanced
a thousandfold by their own inherent natural wealth, which had been
merely developed, not bestowed, by the Marble Company. “I have made
one poor soul happy, anyhow! It’s just as well that he should get
the land before they have sold and shipped all the rock in it. He
would have nothing left except a hole in the ground but for this,”
he muttered to his pillow. For the Marble Company had been exempted
by the terms of the grant from “any impeachment of waste,” and had
successfully defended a suit brought by the reversioner, who sought to
restrain their operations by showing that not even the surface of his
tract would be left to him upon the determination of the estate _per
autre vie_. “He never seemed to have any grudge against me, and I can’t
say I blame him for being glad I am dead,” said Royce, seeking to gauge
the sentiments of the joyful reversioner.
Nevertheless, all his commercial instincts revolted. They would not
support this arbitrary dispensing of justice. The Gerault Bonley
Marble Company’s right was definite and indefeasible, and unlawfully
he had divested them of it. The idea was abhorrent to his commercial
conscience. All the depth of character which he possessed lay in this
endowment. He had no religious convictions, no spiritual estimate of
the abstractions of right and wrong. To him the thought of religion
was like a capitulation. It had never occurred to him as a thing to
live by. It seemed of the nature of mortuaries, akin to last wills and
testaments, of the very essence of finality. His moral structure was
the creation of correct commercial principles,--sound enough, but
limited. It was an impenetrable external shell, at once an asset, a
protection, and a virtue, but it had no intimate inner tissues. His
soul languished inert within it. As far as his financial integrity
was concerned, there had been no leanings to the wrong, no struggles
against temptation, not even temptation; he was proof against it. His
integrity diminished even his capacity for repentance. He had never
felt himself a sinner. On the contrary, he thought he had done mighty
well. He had been for years in touch with the markets at home and
abroad, but he could quote no spiritual values. For the first time in
his life, he groped for a knowledge of the right, he strove with the
definite sense of wrong-doing. His supposed death had all the taint
of dishonor; it affected him as a false entry might have done. The
indirect good that it wrought, the natural justice that it meted out,
appealed to him no more than the success of speculating with the funds
of the firm that employed him might serve to commend this peculation to
his incorruptible commercial honor.
He fared better when he sought to protest an irresponsibility. It was
the Marble Company’s affair to disprove his death if they could, to
maintain themselves in continual assurance of his life. “I’ve seen old
Bonley perform so long like a hen with one chicken that I imitate him
instinctively. I assume a sort of guardianship of the Gerault Bonley
Marble Company as they assumed it of me, and one is as absurd as the
other. The company’s counsel ought to be equal to the situation. I have
nothing to do with them. Their property is held for a term of years,
which happens to be the duration of my life. I take on as if a _cestui
que vie_ was a salaried officer of the Bonley Company,--as if I were
paid for drawing the breath of life. It is no part of my duty to report
continually for observation. I forfeit no pledge. I violate no trust.
And self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
With these vacillations he had struggled in throes of mental agony
as he lay on the ledges of the rocks above the river and affected to
angle; or as he wandered alone through the woods; or when he sat,
unheeding the drawling talk of his host, in the open passage where
they lighted their pipes together, his evident preoccupation shrewdly
noted by the suspicious mountaineer; or, more than all, in the silent
watches of the night, before physical fatigue could coerce sleep to his
aid,--always arguing the wrong that his silence and absence wrought
to others, yet the false suspicion on the part of Greenhalge, Gould &
Fife, and the consequent terrible fate that his return would bring upon
himself; the intrinsic justice in the restoration to the reversioner
of his plundered lands, and yet the positive legal rights which the
Gerault Bonley Marble Company held in their unexpired tenancy _per
autre vie_; the lies that thus conspired in their masquerade as truth,
yet the fact that the truth unmasked would prove the falsest of them
all. He had never in all the exercitations of his various problems
seemed so near a definite and final decision as now. Never had he
reverted so often to one basis of action. He determined that he would
not return to the certainty of an ignominious imprisonment on a false
suspicion for the sole benefit of a strong corporation of financial
sharks, who, on the pretext of a tenancy _per autre vie_, were tearing
the estate of their grantor from off the face of the earth; the
reversioner would have nothing left but literally a hole in the ground!
This awful sacrificial surrender would serve no moral right, but one of
those legalized robberies which arise from a fault of the law through
its constitutional deficiencies, being at last only of human device.
And if, he argued, it was not his function to remodel the laws, and
administer them according to the moral basis of evident right, it was
in this instance his privilege to dispense even-handed justice.
But when he fell asleep, and his will lay dormant, and his reasoning
faculties were blunted, and only his conscience vaguely throbbed with
an unassuaged wound, the sense of the commercial wrong that he did,
the realization of the definite legal right that he extinguished, the
weight of responsibility with which his mere breathing the breath of
life had burdened him, all were reasserted without the connivance of
volition, and over and over again that poignant cry, “But the one who
lives--the one for whose life--his life--his life--his life!” rang
through the house with all the pent-up agony of his days of doubt and
strivings and distress in its tone.
It was a silent house. No wind stirred. Not a leaf rustled. One
might hear the ash crumble covering the embers on the hearth. A
vague monotone came from the river. Outside, the still radiance of a
late-risen moon lay pallid and lonely on the newly ploughed fields.
Here and there crevices in the chinking between the logs of the walls
made shift to admit a ray, sending its slight shaft through the brown
gloom of the interior, visible itself and luminous in its filar
tenuity, yet dispensing no light. One of these rays glimmered through
the clapboards of the roof on the face of the sleeper, which showed in
the dusk, with all its wan trouble on it, with the distinctness of some
sharply cut cameo, to Tubal Cain Sims, who, half dressed and with shock
head and bare feet, had climbed the stair, and lurked there listening,
that perchance he might hear more to convey to the sharp-set curiosity
of the magisterial lime-burner.
This involuntary lapse of his resolution left no trace on the juggler’s
consciousness when he awoke the next morning. He was not aware that he
had dreamed, that in sleeping he had swerved from his intention, far
less that he had cried out in his unrealized mental anguish. He took
comfort from his stanch mental poise. The fact that he held fast to
his conclusion seemed to confirm the validity of his judgment. Here
he was to begin life anew, and it behooved him to make the most and
the best of it. For one moment the recollection of the world he had
left almost overcame him,--the contrast it bore to his sorry future!
Even its workaday aspect,--the office, his high desk by the window,
the thunder of the cotton-laden wagons in the streets and the clamor
of voices impinging so slightly on his absorption in his work as to
be ignored,--even this wrung a pang from him now. How much more the
thought of the club, with its brilliant lights, and its luxury of
furnishing, and its delectable cuisine, and the pretensions of its
elder members, and the countenance they were pleased to show him; of
the fraternity halls where he was so prime a favorite; of the gymnasium
he affected, and the boating and swimming clubs; of his choice social
circle, with its germans and musicales, its little dinners and tally-ho
drives, its private theatricals, its decorous parlors of refined and
elegant suggestions, of which he valued the _entrée_ in proportion as
he had once felt it jeopardized by the bruiting abroad of that wild
gambling escapade, which he feared, in the estimation of the severe
and straight-laced matrons and delicate-minded young girls, ill became
a member of so elevated a coterie. They seemed, in his recollection,
of an embellished beauty and aloof majesty infinitely removed from
his sordid plight and maimed estate. He faltered as he thought of his
hopeless alienation from it all, his dreary exile.
And then, with a sudden bracing of the nerves, he reflected on the view
which this refined society would entertain of the alternative that fate
presented; the disgrace which he would sustain in his return was hardly
to be mentioned to ears so polite! Was he farther from his friends here
than he would be there? Was he more definitely banished from his wonted
sphere? He was dead to them,--forever dead,--and the sooner forgotten
the better!
In pursuance of his determination, he went downstairs arrayed in the
blue-checked homespun shirt and gray jeans trousers which Mrs. Sims
with so great and dilatory labor had contrived. He thought he looked
the typical mountaineer in this attire, with a pair of long cowhide
boots, purchased at the cross-roads store, drawn up to his knees over
the legs of the trousers, and a white wool hat of broad brim set far
back on his dark red-brown hair. He could hardly have deceived even an
unpracticed eye. The texture of his skin, shielded by his vocation from
wind and weather; the careful grooming which was the habit of years;
the trained step and pose and manner, unconscious though they were;
the hand, delicate, however muscular, and white, and with well-tended
nails; the silken quality of his smooth hair and mustache; the
expression of the eye;--he looked like a young “society swell” dressed
for a rural rôle in private theatricals.
Mrs. Sims, who was languidly setting the table in the passage, while
Euphemia, clashing the pots and pans and kettles in the room to the
left, was “dishin’ up” breakfast, paused in her wheezing hymn, catching
sight of him, to survey her handiwork.
“Waal!” she exclaimed in delighted pride, appropriating to her own
skill the credit of the effect of his symmetry. “Now don’t them clothes
jes’ set! I’ll be boun’ nobody kin say ez I ain’t a plumb special hand
fur the needle an’ shears! I jes’ want Tubal Cain Sims ter view them
‘vain trappin’s,’ ez the hyme calls ’em,--though ez we ain’t endowed
by Providence with feathers, thar ain’t no use in makin’ a sin out’n
hevin’ the bes’ clothes what we kin git.”
The juggler was as vain as a young man can well be. But he had seldom
encountered such outspoken admiration, and was a trifle out of
countenance; for what Mrs. Sims conceived to be the excellence of her
own proficiency as a tailor he apprehended was due to the graces of his
personal endowment. He made her a flourishing bow of mock courtesy, and
then stood leaning against the jamb of the door, one hand in the pocket
of the gray trousers, the other readjusting the wide low shirt-collar
about his throat.
“I’d like ter know what Tubal Cain Sims _will_ say now!” exclaimed
Mrs. Sims, pursuing corollaries of the main proposition of triumph.
“He ’lows, whenst I make him ennythin’ ter wear, ez he kin sca’cely
find his way inter sech shapen gear. An’ whenst in ’em, he ’lows he’ll
never git out no mo’, an’ air clad in his grave-clothes--goin’ ’bout
workin’ an’ sech--in his grave-clothes! It’s a plumb sin, the way he
talks!”
Her face clouded for an instant, remembering the ungrateful flouts;
then as her gaze returned to her guest, she dimpled anew.
“But laws-a-massy!” she cried, “how peart ye do ’pear in them clothes,
to be sure! A heap more like sure enough folks than in them comical
little pantees ye hev been a-wearin’.”
He could not forbear a laugh at her criticism of the spruce
knickerbockers; but with the thought of the varying standards of a
different status of life the realization of his exile came to him anew,
and imbittered the decoction called coffee which Mrs. Sims handed to
him, and although his eyes were dry, as he gulped it down, he tasted
tears.
It was difficult for him to resent any admiration of himself as too
redundant, but she could not quit the subject, and pointed out to Tubal
Cain Sims, when he entered, the excellence of the fit of the shirt
about the shoulders and its flatness in the back; apparently arguing
that if this shirt fitted the juggler, it was only Tubal Cain Sims’s
rugged temper and finical fancy that _his_ shirt did not fit. The old
man’s prominent shoulder-blades were not long destined to be concealed
by the worn cloth drawn taut across their recurved arches as he leaned
slouchingly forward, and the loose amplitudes over his narrow bent
chest might well have been economized for a supplement across the
shoulders. It never seemed to occur to either of them that the cloth
should be cut to suit the figure, or at all events the bearing, of
the wearer. She only tortured her helpless partner with her adherence
to a pattern at least fifty years old, and which had fitted him well
enough twenty-five years ago; but as seam, gusset, and band burst under
the stress of his crookedness and increasing slouch, he considered
that the hand of Jane Ann Sims had utterly forgotten its cunning, and
talked as if his clothes were a trap requiring a certain diligence of
investigation to get into, and from which there was no escape.
The juggler grew restive lest Euphemia should enter while he was a
bone of contention between the two, for Mrs. Sims was still disposed
to call on all who might behold to note the beauty of the fit of his
shirt, and Tubal Cain Sims as resolutely refused to admire. Royce was
ready to laugh at himself that he should thus desire to shirk these
personalities in Euphemia’s presence, and that he should assume for her
a delicacy in the discussion which he was very sure Mrs. Sims would not
appreciate. Yet he was not so coxcombical as to preëmpt for her Mrs.
Sims’s standpoint; he realized that she might be as stolidly unadmiring
as Tubal Cain himself. He finished his breakfast with a hasty swallow
or two, and was about to take himself off with his fishing-rod down to
the river, hearing Mrs. Sims remarking after him, “Ye oughter thank
the Lord on your bended knees, young man, fur the fit o’ them clothes,”
and Tubal Cain Sims’s growl of objurgation that “folks oughter have
better manners an’ sense ’n ter be thankin’ the Lord for the set o’
thar clothes on the blessed Sabbath day.”
“Is this Sunday?” asked the juggler, and stood stock-still.
“It air the blessed Sabbath,” said Tubal Cain, his eyes still full of
the misfit rancor and his mouth full of corn dodger.
Ah, how Lucien Royce heard across the silent Cove the bells ringing
from the church towers of St. Louis, hundreds of miles away! He
distinguished even the melody that the chimes were rippling out,--he
would have sworn to it amongst a thousand,--and the booming of heavier
metal sounding from neighboring steeples. He knew just how a certain
dissonance impinged upon the melodious tumult,--the bell of an old
church below Seventeenth Street that had a crack in it and rang false.
The raucous voices of newsboys were calling the Sunday papers, much
further up town than on week-days. The clanging of the cable cars
sounded here, there, everywhere; the sunlit streets were full of
people. And then, as his heart was throbbing near to breaking for
this his world, his home, of which he was bereft, he realized how his
imagination had cheated him. Across the Cove the slanting sun-rays had
not yet reached the levels of the basin; the red hue of the dawning
still tinged them. The mists of the night clung yet in purple shadowy
ravines. The dew was in the air. Away--away--the far city of the mirage
lay sluggard and asleep. No bell rang there save the Angelus. Now and
again a figure slipped along to early mass. The rumbling wheels of a
baker’s wagon or the tinkle of a milkman’s bell might sound,--a phase
of the town, an hour of the day he did not know and for which he did
not care. And so he was admonished to beware of fancies. This--_this_
was his home, and here he was to spend his life.
He hardly knew how he might contrive to spend the day, he said, as
he flung himself down on a ledge of the rock overlooking the river.
He appreciated how he would value the rest, had a week of hard work
preceded it. He was no Sabbatarian on religious principles, but
adhered to the theory as physically economical. As he lay smoking, he
argued that much of his tendency to revert to the troubles that had
whelmed him, to pine for even the minutiæ of his old life,--aught that
suggested it was dear!--to forget that it had gone forever and could
never be conjured back, and that a far different fate awaited him in
his familiar world, was only an indication of the morbid influence
of idleness and mental solitude. The persistence of the activities
of the human mind is but scantily realized. Given adequate subjects
to work upon, to engross it,--a stent, so to speak,--and its powers
seem rarely greater than its task; but remove the objective point of
occupation, and the complications of the engine, its normal strength
yet its perilous fragility, its inherent tendencies to dislocation, its
perpetual uncontrollable subjection to any idea, evolved at haphazard,
clutched with a tenacity as of the muscles of a galvanized grasp,
result in a chaos of disaster, the mere contemplation of which is
wonderfully conducive to energy and the embellishment of toil.
Blessed are the hard workers, for their minds and their hearts shall
be sound. This truth was most deeply felt by the young exile from the
business world as well as the world of pleasure.
“I must get at something,” he said to himself. “I must realize
that I am here to stay. This juggling money”--he rattled in his
pocket the silver that he had earned the evening of his ill-starred
entertainment--“won’t last forever, even at the rates of board and
lodging in Etowah Cove. It would be the part of wisdom to ingratiate
myself with the miller,--cross-grained old donkey,--help him with the
mill, marry the miller’s daughter, and succeed to the throne.”
He laughed, with a mocking relish of the incongruity of the idea.
Then, as he thought of the miller’s daughter, a vague perception came
to him that he had never before encountered a woman apparently so
indifferent to him; for indifference was not the sentiment which he
was wont to excite. He remembered, too, his hasty retreat from the
table, lest her delicacy be offended if his garments were descanted
upon in her presence. “Am I going to persuade myself that I am in love
with this rural Napoleon in petticoats?” he asked himself scornfully.
Then he argued that it was merely because he was not used to such
critical scrutiny of his vestments except by his tailor. “All the
same, I got out of there before the lady Euphemia appeared.” He thus
took as dispassionate note of the fact as if he were discussing the
state of mind of another person. “I might meet a worse fate. She could
be trusted to keep me extremely straight from now till the Judgment
Day. She is so pretty--that--if she were a trifle softer--a trifle
different, it wouldn’t be such hard lines to make love to her.”
Perhaps it did not seem such “hard lines” when she suddenly came out of
the house, later in the day; for as he glanced up the slope and beheld
her, he rose promptly and went to meet her.
It was a tortuous way up the slope; the outcropping ledges here and
there projected so heavily that it was easier to skirt around than to
climb over them. Brambles grew in shaggy patches; trees intervened;
more than once, gnarled roots, struck but half in the ground, the bole
rising at a sharp angle with the incline, threw him out of the line
of a direct approach. He saw, in drawing near, that he was as yet
unperceived, as she made her way slowly along the road. Her wonderful
eyes were fixed meditatively, softly, upon the blue mountains beyond
the Cove, showing through the gap of the nearer purple ranges. Her
lips had a drooping curve. The golden glimmers of her brown hair,
rising in dense fairness above her white brow, had never seemed to him
so distinct. She carried her pink sunbonnet in her hand; the large
loose curls floated on the shoulders of her calico dress. It was of a
sleazy texture, and the skirt fell in starchless folds from a short
waist to the tops of her low-cut shoes. The color was a rose pink, and
on it was scattered a pattern of great roses of the darkest red hue,
and she looked as fantastic as if she were attired for a fancy-dress
ball. Somehow, this accorded better with his humor than the sombre
homespun attire which the mountain women as a rule affected. Her
costume, regarded as a fad, did not so diminish her beauty. He could
judge better of it, as he paused, still unperceived because of the
intervening brambles, hardly ten feet from her. She looked like some
old picture, as, swinging the bonnet by one string, she stood still for
a moment, with an intent expression in her lovely eyes.
“Ef he speaks so agin,” she said slowly, “ef he speaks so agin afore
them all, I dunno _how_ I kin abide it.”
There was a look of pain on her face which, however, did not promise
tears. He realized that tears were scarce with her and came hard. It
was the look of one whose heart is pierced, and whose pride is bent,
and whose endurance flags. Then, with an access of resolution visible
in her soft face, she suddenly moved onward, and the swaying sprays of
the brambles painted the picture out.
He had hardly time to take stock of his impressions, or note his own
surprise, or marvel of what or of whom she spoke, when Mrs. Sims
issued, waddling, from the house. She perceived him readily enough,
having him in mind, perhaps, and called to him to hurry up, “for we-uns
air all goin’ ter meetin’ over yander at the church-house, whar ye gin
that show o’ yourn,” displaying a fat dimply smile too jolly for the
occasion, and all un-meet to companion the Sabbath-day expression on
the sour visage of old Tubal Cain Sims, who was shuffling out with high
shoulders and hollow chest and bent knees to join the family procession.
Lucien Royce welcomed the summons with the half-bewildered delight of
one unexpectedly rescued from the extremest griefs of ennui. His first
instinct was to run and dress. Then remembering that he wore the best
clothes he had, he composed himself with the reflection that he was in
the fashion as it prevailed here. He was consoled, too, as he strolled
along beside Mrs. Sims, for the lack of a younger companion, by
reflecting that he wanted to make no mischief among any possible lovers
of Euphemia, which his public appearance walking with her to church was
well calculated to do.
“I think I am safe with Mrs. Sims,” he said to himself. “I suppose
nobody is in love with her,--not even old Tubal Cain, whatever he may
once have been.”
He cast a glance at the lean and active partner of Mrs. Sims’s joys and
sorrows, forging along at a brisk pace which was certain to land him in
church before the rest of the household had achieved half the distance.