It created something of a sensation, one morning, when the juggler--for
the mountaineers as solemnly distinguished him by the name he had given
them of his queer vocation as if it were the serious profession of
law--appeared among the lime-burners on the slope of the mountain. With
his sensitive perceptions, he could not fail to notice their paucity
of courtesy, the look askance, the interchanged glances. Singularly
obtuse, however, he must have seemed, for he presently ensconced
himself, with a great show of consideration for his own comfort, as if
for a stay of length, in the sheltered recess where the lime-burners
were seated at some distance from the fire, for the heat was searching
and oppressive. The heavy shadow of the cliff protected them from the
sun. Below, the valley was spread out like a map. If one would have
dreams, a sylvan ditty that an unseen stream, in a deep ravine hard by,
was rippling out like a chime of silver bells swaying in the wayward
wind came now to the ear, and now was silent, and somehow invited the
fantasies of drowsing. Everything that grew betokened the spring. Even
the great pines which knew no devastation of winter bore testimony to
the vernal impulse, and stood bedecked with fair young shoots as with
a thousand waxen tapers.
The juggler, lying at full length on the moss, his hands clasped under
his head, watched their serried ranks all adown the slope, broken
here and there by the high-tinted verdure of the deciduous trees. He
conserved a silence that seemed unintentional and accidental, perhaps
because of his unconstrained attitude and of his casual expression
of countenance, since he apparently took no note of the cessation of
conversation among the lime-burners which had supervened on his arrival.
Talk was soon resumed, however, curiosity becoming a factor.
“Who’s ’tendin’ the pertracted meetin’ down yander, from Sims’s?”
demanded Peter Knowles, looking at Royce to intimate whom he addressed.
“Only the head of the house,” responded the juggler: “Tubal Cain, the
man of might, himself.”
Peter Knowles still gazed at him with frowning fixity. “That thar Jane
Ann Sims ain’t got no mo’ religion ’n a Dominicky hen,” he observed.
“Well,” the juggler was fain to contend in a sentiment of loyalty to
the roof that sheltered him, “she is busy; she has her household duties
to look after.”
“Shucks, ye young buzzard! ye can’t fool me!” exclaimed Tip Wrothers,
in half-jocular triumph. “Don’t all the Cove know ez Jane Ann Sims
don’t turn a hand ef Phemie’s thar ter do it fur her?”
“Yaas,” drawled Gideon Beck, “an’ Phemie ain’t got much mo’ religion ’n
her mammy. Jes’ wunst hev she been ’tendin’ on the meetin’,--an’ this
air Thursday, an’ the mourners constant, an’ a great awakenin’. Phemie
Sims would set the nangel Gabriel down ter wait in the passage whilst
she war a-polishin’ of her milk-crocks, ef he hed been sent ter fetch
her ter heaven, an’ she warn’t through her dairy worship.”
“If Mrs. Sims doesn’t turn her hand, there’s obliged to be somebody
there to turn one. We don’t have any rations of manna served out these
days,” argued the juggler. “It’s well that somebody stays at home.
Tubal Cain and I are enough church-goers for one house.”
“Air you-uns a mourner?” demanded Beck, with a sudden accession of
interest.
“No,” answered the juggler, “though I’ve lots and cords to mourn over.”
He shifted his position with a sigh.
Wrothers and Knowles exchanged a significant glance which Beck did not
observe. With a distinct bridling he said, “_I_ be a perfesser. _I_ hev
been a perfesser fur the past ten year.”
“It must be a great satisfaction,” responded the juggler.
It was something, however, which he did not envy, and this fact was so
patent that it roused the rancor of Beck. One of the dearest delights
of possession is often the impotent grudging of him who hath not.
The juggler, despite his assured demeanor, had reverted to that sense
of discomfort which had earlier beset him when he went abroad in the
Cove. In the church he had marked a certain agitated curiosity as
members of the congregation who had been at the “show” recognized
the man who was deemed so indisputably in league with Satan. But
this was merged in the fast accumulating interest of the meetings,
and upon a second attendance, barring that he was here and there
covertly pointed out to wide-eyed newcomers, denizens of further
heights and more retired dells, his entrance scarcely made a ripple
of excitement. This he accounted eminently satisfactory. It had been
his intention to accustom the mountaineers to the sight of him, to
have his accomplishments as a prestidigitator grow stale as a story
that is told, to be looked upon as a familiar and a member of the Sims
household; all this favored his disguise and his escape from notoriety
and question. He had been prepared for the surprise and curiosity
which the presence of a stranger in so secluded a region naturally
excites. Since learning somewhat of the superstitions and distorted
religious ideas which prevailed among so ignorant and sequestered a
people, he could even understand their fear of his simple feats of
legerdemain, and the referring of the capacity to work these seeming
miracles to collusion with the devil. But altogether different,
mysterious, threatening, unnerving, was the keen inimical vigilance
which he discerned in Peter Knowles’s eye; the sense of some withheld
thought, some unimagined expectation, which might be apprehended yet
not divined, roused afresh the terror of detection which had begun to
slumber in the security of this haven with its new life and absolute
death to the old world. As the juggler lay on his back, with his eyes
fixed on that deep blue sky of May, fringed about with the fibrous
pines above his head, he tried to elucidate the problem. Something
alien, something dangerous, something removed it was from the fantasies
of the ignorant mountaineers. But for all his keenness and his long
training in the haunts of men, for all his close observation and his
habit of just deduction, that thin-lipped, narrow, ascetic visage gave
him no inkling what this withheld thought might be,--how it could be
elicited, met, thwarted. Only one gleam of significance from the eye he
interpreted, a distinct note of interrogation. Whatever the expectation
might be, to whatever it might be leading, it was not devoid of
uncertainty and of involuntary inquiry.
He attempted to reassure himself. He tried to argue that it was only
his consciousness surcharged with its weighty secret which made him
flinch when any questioning eye was turned upon him. What could
this mountaineer, ignorant and inexperienced as the rest, divine or
suspect,--how could he dream of the truth?
And yet, so much was at stake: his liberty, his name, his honor,--nay,
the sheerest commercial honesty. And so far all had gone well! He
clung now to his fictitious death as if the prospect of this existence
in the Cove had not well-nigh made it real, so had his heart sunk
within him at the thought of the future. He said to himself sharply
that he would not be brought to bay by this clumsy schemer. Surely he
could meet craft with craft. The old habit of transacting business had
no doubt sufficed to keep his countenance impassive, and he would set
himself to add to the little they knew circumstances of which they did
not dream, well calculated to baffle preconceived theories.
“No, I’m not a mourner,” he replied to Beck’s sanctimonious gaze,--“not
much! The kind of sinner I am goes to meeting to see the girls.”
A momentary silence ensued. Not that this pernicious motive for seeking
the house of worship was unheard of in Etowah Cove. There as elsewhere
it was a very usual symptom of original sin. Few saints, however
indurated by holiness against such perversion of the obvious uses of
the sanctuary, but could remember certain soft and callow days when the
theme of salvation held forth no greater reward than the occupancy of
crowded back benches and the unrestricted gaze of round young eyes. It
was, nevertheless, a motive so contrary to the suspicion which Knowles
and Sims himself had entertained of the juggler’s sojourn here and had
grafted on the credulity of their cronies,--a lightsome motive, so
incompatible with the grisly suggestions of murder, and flight from
justice, and the expectation of capture and condign punishment,--that
it could not be at first assimilated with his supposed identity as a
fugitive and criminal. His sudden unaccounted-for presence here, the
unexplained prolonged stay, the report of the silent preoccupied hours
which he spent on the ledges over the river, fishing with an unbaited
hook, the troubled silence, the answers at haphazard, the pallid
languid apparition after sleepless nights, and, more than all, the
agonized cries from out the feigned miseries of dreams, all tallied
fairly and justified the theory built upon them. But this new element
interjected so abruptly had a disintegrating subversive effect.
“Waal, ain’t all the gals in the kentry mighty nigh down yander at the
meetin’ now?” demanded Beck.
He spoke mechanically, for he had lost sight of his effort to induce
the juggler to attend upon the means of grace, if ever he had seriously
entertained it, and he would not, on sober reflection, have offered
this frivolous inducement as a loadstone to draw the reluctant
heavenward,--let perdition seize him first!
“Plenty there, no doubt,” said the juggler uncommunicatively, as if
having taken counsel within himself.
Old Josiah Cobbs chuckled knowingly, as he sat on the stump of the tree
which he most affected and nursed his knee. “The _right one_ ain’t
thar,--that’s the hitch! All the gals but one, an’ that one wuth all
the rest, hey?” He chuckled once more, thinking he was peculiarly
keen-witted to spy out the secret of the juggler’s indifference to
prayer and praise. He perceived naught of the subtler significance of
the disclosure, and easily quitting the subject he turned his head as
if to listen.
The sound of the hymning rose suddenly on the breeze. From far away
it was, if one must mete out the distance by the windings of the red
clay road and the miles of fragrant springtide woods that intervened.
But the music came straight through the air like the winged thing
it is. And now it soared in solemn jubilance, and now it sank with
soft fluctuations, and presently he recognized the tune and fell to
humming it in unison with that far-away worship and with that air of
soft pleasure in the religious cadences which one may often see in the
aged, and which suggests the idea that in growing old hymns become as
folk-song on the lips of the returning exile, and in every inflection
is the rapture of going home.
The others neither heard nor heeded. They reminded Lucien Royce, as
they were grouped around him,--some standing, some sitting or reclining
on the mossy rocks in the flickering shade, but every eye fixed
speculatively on him,--of that fable in many tongues wherein the beasts
of the field find a sleeping man and hold a congress to determine
the genus of the animal, his capacities and utilities. He looked as
inadvertent as he could, and but for the jeopardy of all he held dear
he might have discovered in the situation food for mirth.
Jack Ormsby, who had not spoken heretofore, sat with a great
clasp-knife in his hand whittling into thin slivers a bit of the
bird’s-eye maple that lay prone on the ground as if it had no better
uses in manufacture than to furnish fuel to burn lime. He suddenly
said, regardless of the possible inference and with a certain surly
emphasis, “I hev hearn tell ez Euphemia Sims air a-goin’ ter marry Owen
Haines.”
“I don’t believe it!” cried the juggler.
Swift significant glances were exchanged among the others as he pulled
himself into a sitting posture and looked with challenging controversy
at Ormsby. The young mountaineer seemed surprised at this direct
demonstration.
“They hev been keepin’ comp’ny cornsider’ble, ennyhow,” he persisted.
“Let bygones be bygones,” the juggler said, with his wonted easy
flippancy.
Old Cobbs rejoiced in the idea of love-making in the abstract. He had
not realized who was the girl whose absence apparently rendered the
crowded church but a barren desert. He only apprehended that one of
the disputants advanced the possibility of a future marriage which the
other denied. He sided at once with conjugal bliss.
“I reckon it must be true,” he urged. “Thar ain’t nuthin’ ter be said
agin it.”
“Except he’s a fool!” exclaimed the juggler, with rancor.
“Ye mean ’bout prayin’ fur the power?” asked Beck.
“A tremendous fool! He can’t preach. He hasn’t the endowment, the gift
of the gab. He has no call from above or below.”
Royce felt no antagonism toward the man, and he realized that they all
shared his standpoint, but he was not ill pleased that he should seem
to be jealously decrying Euphemia’s lover.
“Phemie don’t ’low he be a fool, I’ll be bound,” said old Cobbs. “I hev
viewed a many a man ’counted a puffick idjit, mighty nigh, at the sto’
an’ the blacksmith shop, yit at home ’mongst his wimminfolks he be a
mo’ splendugious pusson ’n the President o’ the Nunited States.”
“I reckon Jack’s right,” remarked Beck. “I reckon they’ll marry.” This
stroke, he reflected with satisfaction, cut not only the juggler, but
Ormsby also, notwithstanding the fact that it was the theory advanced
by the young mountaineer himself.
“I’ll bet my hat they don’t,” declared the juggler eagerly.
This suggestion of superior knowledge, of certainty, on the part of a
stranger angered Jack Ormsby, who vibrated between his red-hot jealousy
of the juggler on one side and of Owen Haines on the other.
“We-uns know Phemie Sims better’n ye do!” he said, as if this were an
argument despite the chameleon-hued changes of the feminine mind. “Ye
never seen her till ye kem ter Etowah Cove.”
“How do you know I didn’t?” retorted the juggler warily. He sat leaning
forward, his hat in his hand; his hair, grown longer than its wont, was
crumpled on his forehead; he looked at Ormsby with a glitter of triumph
in his red-brown eyes.
“Whar’d ye kem from jes’ afore ye got hyar?” demanded Ormsby huskily.
“I don’t know why you are so inquisitive, my son,” returned the
juggler, airily flouting, “but since you wish to know--from Piomingo
Cove.”
This was true in a literal sense. Since he had been here, and had
sought, with that instinct natural to civilized people, to grasp the
details of the surrounding country,--some specimens of the genus not
being able to sleep until the points of the compass are satisfactorily
indicated and arranged in their well-regulated minds,--he had learned
that the rugged valley which he had traversed, with only another cove
intervening before he reached Etowah, was Piomingo Cove. They all
remembered Euphemia’s recent visit there. The inference was but too
plain. He had doubtless seen her at her grandmother’s house down in
Piomingo Cove, and, fascinated by her beauty and charm, he had followed
her here. And here he lingered,--what so natural! A proud, headstrong
maiden like Euphemia was not to be won in a day; and should he leave
her, with Jack Ormsby and Owen Haines inciting each other to haste and
urgency, were matters likely to remain until his return as they were
now? Most of the lime-burners’ clique never hereafter believed aught
but that this was the solution of the mystery of the juggler’s sojourn
in Etowah Cove.
Royce went down the mountain flushed with victory. He had descried a
strong and favorable revolution in popular sentiment toward him, and
the duty nearest at hand was to make the illusion true and lay siege to
the heart of Euphemia.
He was not concerned as to how his wooing should speed. It was only
essential that it should be a demonstration sufficiently marked to
justify his lingering presence here and sustain the impression which
he had made on the lime-burners. He said this again and again to
himself, to appease a certain repugnance which he began to experience
when the idea with which he had lightly played became a definite and
constraining course of action. He remembered that in reverie he had
even gone so far as to canvass the disguise which marriage might
afford, settling him here permanently as if he were a native, and, as
time should pass, lessening daily the chance of the detection of his
identity and of his life heretofore. He realized that for the next
twenty years this discovery would be impending at any moment. He had
a great respect for the truth as truth, and its inherent capacity for
prevailing; and this led him to fear it the more. A lie has so fatal a
proclivity to collapse. He had often told himself that it was the part
of policy to accept life here as one of the mountaineers, content with
their portion of the good things vouchsafed, the brand of undeserved
shame evaded, the hardship of ignominious imprisonment eluded, the
struggle of poverty reduced to its minimum in this Arcadian existence;
for sometimes he realized anew, with a half-dazed sense, that the old
life was indeed gone forever,--if for naught else, by reason of his
financial losses in the collapse of the firm of Greenhalge, Gould &
Fife.
He now stipulated within himself, however, that this was to be only a
feint of love-making,--a flirtation, he would have termed it, were it
to be illumined by wax candles, or the electric light, or gas, in lieu
of the guttering tallow dip. He adduced with a sense of protection--and
he could not forbear a laugh at himself and his sudden terrors--the
certainty with which he had cause to know that the heart of the fair
daughter of the miller was already bestowed on the young “crank,” as he
called the man “who was fool enough to pray for what he wanted.” Yet
for all it was to be only a mere semblance of capture, he could but be
dubious of these chains with which he was about to invest himself of
deliberate intention; heretofore he had fallen headlong in love and
headlong out, and would not have shackled himself of his own volition.
Thus he rattled Cupid’s fetters tentatively, timorously, judging of
their weight, and with a wish to be safely out of them as well as
swiftly into them.
It was but a feint, he reassured himself. On her part, she would have
an additional conquest to boast of; and as to him, all the world--of
Etowah Cove--would see with what grace he would “wear the willow-tree.”
“Since Phyllis hath forsaken me!” he sang airily, as he made his way
down the sharp declivity.
Never in all his mental exercitations did he dream of difficulty in
conveying to her intelligence an intimation of the supposed state of
his heart. It had been his experience that such intimations are like
spontaneous combustion: they take fire from no appreciable provocation.
Nay, he had known of many wills-o’-the-wisp in this sort, suggesting
flame where there was no fire, for it is a trait of the feminine
creature to often overrate the power of her charms, and to predicate
desolation therefrom in altogether thriving insensible hearts. But
perhaps because of her absorption Euphemia took no notice of a certain
change in his manner toward her, which had been heretofore incidental
and non-committal and inexpressive. Mrs. Sims, however, with that
alertness to which the meddler in other people’s love affairs is ever
prone, marked it with inward perturbation, lest it should attract the
attention of Tubal Cain Sims, whose evident antagonism to the juggler
she had ascribed merely to a perverse humor. From the beginning,
however, Royce had found especial favor in her eyes,--at first because
he was so travel-worn and rain-soaked, and fevered and exhausted. Mrs.
Sims had not experienced such solicitude since her only child was
an ailing infant. Although he disproved her diagnosis of his illness
and her arbitrary plans of treatment by appearing fresh and well the
next morning, as if he had been newly created, she forgave him his
recovery, and liked him because he was so strong and handsome and
pleasant-spoken, and in some vague way, to her groping inexperienced
realization of the various strata of human beings, so different, and
so superior, and so capable of appreciating the wonderful Euphemia
that he was really to be accounted worthy of the relenting of fate
which permitted him to see her. After Euphemia’s return Mrs. Sims
suffered a certain disappointment that the young people took such
scant notice of each other in coming and going the household ways, and
she was wont to console herself now and then by contemplating them
furtively as they sat opposite, one on each side of the table, and
fetching the fattest of her sighs to think what a handsome couple they
would make! She remembered, however, as in duty bound, Owen Haines,
and perhaps she drew from this consciousness deeper sighs than either
of the young lovers could have furnished to any occasion. She was
not so proud as Euphemia, and she thought that if the Lord visited
no judgment on Owen Haines for his pertinacity in praying for the
power, his fellow saints or fellow sinners--whichever they might be
most appropriately called--ought to be able to endure the ten minutes
wasted in the experiment to win the consent of Heaven. But she wished
that her prospective son-in-law could be more practical of mind. She
realized that Haines was dreamy, and that his spiritual aspirations
were destined to be thwarted. They had sent deep roots into his
nature, and she fancied that she could foresee the effect on his later
years,--years pallid, listless, forever yearning after a spiritual
fantasy always denied; forever reaching backward with regret for the
past wasted in an unasked and seemingly a spurned service. Her motherly
heart went out to Owen Haines, and she would fain have coddled him out
of his--religion, was it? She did not know; she could not argue.
But Euphemia was her only child, and it is not necessary that the
materials shall be ivory and gold and curious inlay to enable a zealous
worshiper to set up an idol. Mrs. Sims looked into the juggler’s
handsome face with its alert eyes and blithe mundane expression, and
as proxy she loved him so heartily that she did not doubt his past,
nor carp at his future, nor question his motives. The fact of his
lingering here so long--for he had asked only a night’s lodging, and
afterward had taken board by the week--occurred to her more than once
as a symptom of a sentimental interest in Euphemia; for otherwise why
did he not betake himself about his affairs? This theory had languished
recently, since naught developed to support it.
Now when she began to suspect that this vicarious sentiment of hers
on Euphemia’s account was about to meet a return, Mrs. Sims’s heart
was all a-flutter with anxiety and pity and secret exultation. One
moment she trembled lest Euphemia should mark the thoughtful silent
scrutiny of which she was the subject, but when she chanced to lift
her long-lashed eyes, the juggler reddened suddenly, averted his own,
and drank his coffee scalding hot. Euphemia evidently was oblivious of
him, and Mrs. Sims became wroth within her amiable-seeming mask, and
said to herself that she would as soon have a dough child, since one
could “take notice ez peart ez Phemie.” Perhaps because of Mrs. Sims’s
superabundant flesh, which rendered her of a quiescent appearance,
however active her interest, and perhaps because she did not appeal
in any manner to the ungrateful juggler’s hypercritical and finical
prepossessions, he had no subtle intimations that she was cognizant
in a degree of his mental processes, and had noted the fact of the
frequent serious dwelling of his eyes, and manifestly his thoughts,
upon Euphemia.
The girl had never been so beautiful as now. In these later days, that
saddened pride which at once subdued and sustained her added a dignity
to her expression of which earlier it would have been incapable. It
spiritualized her exquisite eyes; so often downcast they were and so
slowly lifted that the length of the thick dark lashes affected the
observer as a hitherto unnoted element of beauty. Her eyes always had
a certain look of expectation,--now starlike as with the radiance
of renewing hope, now pathetic and full of shadows. It seemed to the
juggler, unconsciously sympathetic, that those incomparable eyes
might have conjured the man bodily into the road where they looked so
wistfully to see him, so vainly.
“Confound the fellow!” he said to himself. “Why doesn’t he come? I’d
like to hale him here by the long hair of that tow-head of his--if she
wants to see him.” And his heart glowed with resentment against poor
Owen Haines, who thought in his folly that a woman’s “No” is to be
classed among the recognized forms of negation, and was realizing on
far Chilhowee all the bitterness of rejected love and denied prayers.
After a while Royce despaired of drawing her attention to himself,--he
who had been in his own circle the cynosure of all youthful eyes.
“There’s nothing in the world so stupid as a girl in love,” he
moralized, irritated at last.
This state of unwilling obscurity developed in him a degree of
perversity. He was prepared to assume an attitude of lowly admiration,
of humble subservience, the kiss-the-hem-of-your-robe-save-for-the-
foolishness-of-it sort of look which might impress her and the rest of
the Sims family and all admiring spectators with the fact of how stuck
full of Cupid’s arrows he had now become. But no man can play the rôle
of lover, however lamely, when the lady of his adoration notices him no
more than a piece of furniture.
As he went through the passage one day, she happened to be there alone,
tilted back in her chair against the wall, her small feet upon one of
the rungs, her curls stirring in the breeze, droning laboriously aloud
from the Third Reader, the pride and limit of her achievement.
“Here,” he said cavalierly, reaching out and taking the book quickly
from her hand, “let me show you how _I_ read that.”
Now elocution had been one of the versatile juggler’s chief
accomplishments. He read the simple stanzas in a style of much
finish. His voice was of a quality smooth as velvet, and his power
of enunciation had been trained to that degree that its cultivation
was apparent only in the results, and might have seemed a natural
endowment, so scantily was the idea of effort suggested. His special
and individual capacity lay in the subtle inflections of tone, which
elicited from the verses meanings hitherto undreamed-of by her. It was
as if a stone had been flung into still water. Above these suddenly
interjected new interpretations the circles of thought widened from one
elastic remove to another, and Euphemia sat dazed in the contemplation
of these diverse whorls and concentric convolutions of the obvious
idea. She said nothing as he handed back the book with an elaborate
ballroom bow, but gazed up at him with an absorbed, serious face, all
softened and gently appealing like a bewildered child’s, and then fixed
her eyes intently upon the page, as if seeking to find and hold those
transient illusions of fickle fancy that had glimmered so alluringly
through the plain, manifest text. He left her thus as he put on his hat
and stepped out upon the path leading down the slope. He glanced back
once, to see her still sitting there, motionless but for the wind which
swayed the fair loosely curled hair of her bent head and the folds of
her faint green dress as it did the sprays of the vines on the opposite
side of the passage, which grew so thick that they formed a dark
background for her figure in the cool shadowy green dusk; otherwise
he might not have been able to distinguish it from out the glare and
glister of the open sunny space where he stood. He gazed unobserved for
a moment; then he turned and went on in much dissatisfaction of spirit.
It was no way, he argued within himself, to assume the character of a
lovesick swain by demonstrating his superiority to the fair maiden,--to
flout her poor and painful efforts by the exhibition of his glib
accomplishment. “I must needs always have an audience,--be always
exhibiting my various feats and knacks. I was born a juggler,” he said
ruefully.
But that evening when they sat at supper,--much later than usual,
since the favorite Spot had wandered far into the forest, and did not
return till she was sought and found and driven reluctantly home, with
many pauses by the way,--the furtive glances across the table did not
emigrate from his side of it. The meal was served in the main room of
the cabin, to avoid the cloud of moths which the light outside in the
passage would attract. In the white, languid, dispirited glow of the
tallow dip the furnishings of the apartment were but dimly visible.
Now and again the flicker of the wind set astir the pendent strings
of pepper and bunches of dried herbs and various indiscriminate gear
that swung from the beams. The red embers where the supper had been
cooked were spread apart on the hearth that the heat might be lessened,
and here and there through the white efflorescence of the ash only a
tinge of the vermilion hues of the coals could be discerned. Despite
its subdued red glare the failing fire had little irradiating effect,
and added scantily to the cheer of the apartment. The batten shutter
flapped back and forth with a wooden clamor; the wind had brought
clouds and rain impended, and Tubal Cain Sims’s corn was not yet all
planted, and the ground would probably be too wet to plough for a week
or more. Grum and indignant because of this possible dispensation of
Providence, he sat in his shirt-sleeves, with his shock head bent, only
looking up from under his grizzled shaggy eyebrows to discern in the
glimmer of the candle the food he wanted, and only speaking to growl
for it. The one crumb of comfort he coveted was denied him. A certain
johnny-cake had burnt up “bodaciously” on its board as it baked before
the fire, and it would seem that Tubal Cain Sims, from his youth up,
had subsisted solely on the hope of this most dainty of rural cates, so
surlily did he receive the news, and so solemnly did he demand to be
told how in the name of Moses a cake that never was put near the fire,
but baked by the heat thrown on the hearth, could be reduced to cinders.
“Witched somehows, I reckon,” suggested Mrs. Sims easily; and since
argument could not move that massive lady, Tubal Cain resorted to
silent sulks, not in the vain hope of shaking her equilibrium, but for
the sake of their own solace to the affronted spirit.
Although this disaster chanced within Euphemia’s own jurisdiction and
beneath her presidial care, she took no part in the spirited colloquy
on the subject, but seemed absorbed in thought, ever and anon casting
a covert look at the young man. As of late he had fallen into the
habit, with the opportunity afforded at meal-times, of contemplating
her with swift and furtive glances, more than once their eyes met, to
the visible embarrassment of both; the juggler, to his astonishment,
coloring furiously as might any country boy, and a touch of surprise
and almost inquiry becoming visible in the eyes of Euphemia. Strange
that so poor and primitive a contrivance as a pallid tallow dip could
set such stars of radiant beauty in those long-lashed pensive orbs.
They looked bewilderingly lovely to the young man as they were suddenly
fixed upon him, intent with the first intimation of personal interest
which he had ever discerned in their depths.
“How long hev you-uns hed schoolin’?” she demanded abruptly.
“Schooling? I? Oh yes. From the time I was six years old till I was
twenty-two,” he replied.
Her face was a study of amazement. “Did school keep reg’lar all them
years in the cove whar you-uns lived?” she asked.
“Oh yes, school kept as regular as taxes.” He had half a mind to
explain that it was not always the same institution which had the
honor of training his youthful faculties, and to enumerate the
various gradations which had their share in his proficiency, from the
kindergarten, and the grammar school, to the academic and collegiate
career; but he stopped short, reflecting that this might result in
self-betrayal in some sort.
Her mind was at work. Her eyes and face were troubled. “We-uns hev hed
school in the Cove two years consider’ble time ago,” she remarked.
“They ’low the money air short, somehows.”
“That ain’t no differ ter we-uns,” said Mrs. Sims cheerily. “Phemie
l’arned all thar is ter know.”
Even old Tubal Cain threw off dull care for a moment and vouchsafed a
prideful refrain: “I ’lowed the chile would put out her eyes studyin’
an’ readin’ so constant, but she hev got her eyesight and her l’arnin’
too.”
But Phemie’s face was flushed with a sudden painful glow. “I ain’t got
ez much ez some,” she faltered, her head drooping slightly.
In the midst of the clamor of denial of any greater possible
proficiency, from the two old people, who had not heard the juggler’s
reading during the afternoon, she involuntarily cast upon him so
appealing, so disarming a glance that for once he was ashamed to even
secretly laugh at them.
“If it’s erudition that goes,” he said afterward, lighting his pipe
under the stars and finding the grace to laugh instead at himself, “I
am the learned man to suit the occasion.”