X.

It was with a mild countenance and a chastened heart that Tubal Sims

rode up to his own door the next evening, and slowly dismounted, his

old brains, stiff with the limited uses of a narrow routine, dazed and

racked by the brisk pace which they had been fain to conserve in the

wide circuits which they had traveled in his absence. Never had the

cabin on the river-bank looked so like home; never had home seemed so

like heaven. For Tubal Cain Sims, in his secret soul, cared little

for the bedizenments of crowns, and the superfluities of harps, and

the extravagance of streets paved with gold, and the like celestial

scenery of his primitive hymnology. The sight of Jane Ann Sims on the

porch, her bulky arms akimbo, the flutter of Euphemia’s pink dress

with the dark red roses from the slope of the dell where the spring

lurked, could have been no dearer to him if they had had wings,--which

appurtenance, however, in his lack of spiritual imagination, would

have reduced them to a turkey-like standpoint or other gallinaceous

level. He hardly remembered to dread Jane Ann’s questionings; and

perhaps because of this beatific ease of mind, the humble works of

fiction, which the puritanical might denominate lies, that had

occupied his faculties during his return journey, were exploited with a

verisimilitude which received the meed of credulity. He stated that the

thought of Jerry Gryce, his brother-in-law, and a paralytic, dwelling

in Piomingo Cove, had weighed so on his mind, in wakeful hours of the

night, that he had felt obliged to rise betimes and journey thither to

see that all was well with him. And a cheerful report he was able to

give of that invalid,--for indeed he had stopped in Piomingo Cove on

the way back,--who had charged him with some asperity, however, being a

superstitious man, to have a care how he took the liberty of dreaming

about him, or nourishing presentiments in which he was concerned, or

viewing visions. “I kin do all my own dreamin’ an’ ghost-seein’ too,

thanky kindly,” he had said satirically.

Jane Ann Sims was the less penetrating as she herself had developments

of interest to detail. In a wheezy, husky whisper that had less the

elements of confidential relation than a shriek might have compassed,

she made plain the altered state of Euphemia’s affections and the

understanding which she and the juggler had reached.

It is wonderful how little mental capital a man need possess to deceive

the cleverest wife. Tubal Cain Sims, seated in the open passage, tilted

far back against the wall in his chair, his saddle on the floor beneath

his dangling feet and his mare cropping the grass beside the step,

sustained every appropriate pose of surprised interest as successfully

as if Mrs. Sims’s story were new to his ears. How could she, even

if infinitely more astute, have dreamed that it was the recital of

these same facts which he had overheard that had sent him straight to

Colbury with the instant determination to have his would-be son-in-law

incarcerated on a criminal charge, before more romance could come of

the juggler’s stay in Etowah Cove? She had expected opposition, having

divined Tubal Sims’s disapproval of his guest from his perturbed and

unwontedly crusty manner, and was scarcely prepared for the mildly

temporizing way in which he received the disclosure.

“Humph--a--waal, we-uns will hev ter gin it cornsideration, Jane Ann, a

power o’ cornsideration, an’”--he suddenly remembered his piety--“some

pray’r. Watch an’ pray, Jane Ann.”

“I’m ekal ter my prayin’ ’thout yer exhortin’s,” she retorted, with

proper spirit. “An’ ef ye don’t wan ter set Phemie agin ye, ye’d better

do yer own prayin’ powerful private.” She could not forbear this gibe,

albeit at the idol of them both. It was in graver and agitated mood

that she revealed how the idea of an elopement had seemed to appeal

to the young man’s mind,--so much, indeed, that she began to fear he

would welcome any parental opposition which would make it practicable.

And here she found Tubal Cain at one with her own thoughts, so

a-quiver with her own fears that she felt all at once bolder, as if

by communicating them they had mysteriously exhaled. Not so Tubal

Cain Sims. It is to be doubted whether in all his life he was ever

so earnestly and markedly benign and courteous as when he again met

the juggler. His whole manner was so charged with the sentiment of

placation that the young man’s quick discernment easily divined his

state of mind and his covert terrors. It eliminated for the present any

other course of action than drifting along the smooth tides of love’s

young dream, for no elopement was possible when there was naught from

which to flee.

What wonderful days they were, as the full, strong pulses of June began

to beat with the fervors of July! The long, ripe hours from early

dawn to the late-lingering twilight held all the choicest flavors of

the year. Never was the sunset so gorgeously triumphal; never was the

dawn so dank with dew, so fresh of scent, so winged with zephyrs. The

wilderness rang to the song of the thrush and of the mocking-bird, not

less vocal now than with the impulse of spring. The brimming river

yet ran deep in its rocky channel, and the voice of the cascade below

the mill in the full-leaved joyous woods could be heard for miles on

a still night. And how still were these nights of silent splendor,

with the stars so whitely a-glitter in the deep blue spaces above,

and a romantic mystery on the mute purple mountains below, and the

great bespangled gossamer Galaxy, as if veiling some sanctity of

heaven, scintillating through all the darkness! Not till late--till

so late that no one was awake to heed or behold--a yellow waning moon

with a weird glamour would glide over the eastern summits, and in its

precarious hour before the flush of early dawn illumine the world with

some sad forecast, with slow troublous augury of change and decline and

darkness.

Flowers in myriads budded at night to blow in the morning. Everywhere

the strong, rich, vigorous growths unfolded to the sun. The leaves

were thick in the woods, the shadows were dark and cool, and rivulets

glanced in the midst of them like live leaping crystal. Anywhere

down deep ravines, did one look long enough, were to be seen all

the creatures of woodland poesy, evoked from the glamours of the

June,--hamadryads at their bosky ease, and oreads among the craggy

misty heights, and naiads dabbling at the margin of sheltered springs,

and elves listening alert with pointed ears to the piping of the wind

in the reeds.

These June days seemed to Royce as if he held them in perpetuity,--as

if there could be no change save for the slow enhancement of all

the charms of nature, bespeaking further perfections. The past was

so bitter; the present was so sweet; and he thought no more of the

future. He was content. He had developed a certain adaptability to the

uncouth conditions of the simple life here, or love had limited his

observation and had concentrated it. All the artificialities of his

wonted standards had fallen from him, and he was happy in the simplest

way. He wondered that he should ever have thought the girl beautiful

and charming hitherto, so embellished was her loveliness now; as if she

too shared the ineffable radiance and grace of the June, with the fair

and faintly tinted roses known as “the maiden’s-blush” that grew just

outside the door. He had told her that they were like her, and when he

learned the old-fashioned name he wore one always stuck in the clumsy,

ill-worked buttonhole of his blue-checked cotton shirt. So pervasive

was the sentiment of happiness in the house that it suffused even the

consciousness of the two old people; Jane Ann accepting it willingly

and with vicarious joy, and Tubal Cain yielding after many a qualm of

doubt and tremor of fear, and still experiencing strong twinges of

remorse. He had been led to believe, by the crafty sheriff’s show of

indifference to his disclosure, and repeated rejection as naught the

significant points of the suspicion he had entertained, that he had

been wrong from the first in his conclusion. He had begun to argue from

the officer’s standpoint, and he was amazed and somewhat dismayed to

perceive how slight were the grounds on which any reasonable charge

could be based. As this conviction grew more decided, he anticipated,

with an ever increasing terror, the possible visit of which the

sheriff had casually spoken. Although he was sure now that, officially

considered, it could but be a flash in the pan, still it would reveal

to the juggler his host’s hideous suspicions and flagrant breach of

hospitality, and from this Tubal Sims winced as from corporeal pain.

He thought that the sheriff already considered him a preposterous

fool; and albeit that judgment from so great a man--for Tubal Cain

Sims’s self-conceit had been much abated by his trip to Colbury--was

humiliating to his pride, it would be far more poignant, multiplied

by the number of inhabitants in the Cove, when published abroad and

entertained by every man who dwelt in its vicinity. Moreover, the

disclosure of his mission to Colbury would deliver the graceless

informer, bound hand and foot as it were, into the power of Jane Ann

Sims, and it might well alienate the juggler from them all and thus

wreck Euphemia’s happiness and prospects in life; and he had begun

of late to value these. Whenever he was not mulishly resistant, he

fell much under the influence of Jane Ann Sims, and her views of the

preëminent qualities of the juggler’s mind and manners and morals

affected his estimate. She laid great stress on the fact of the young

man’s elaborate education, and was wont to toss her large head with a

vertigo-provoking lightness as she averred, “Phemie warn’t a-spellin’

year in an’ year out ter marry one o’ these hyar Cove boys ez dunno B

from bull-foot!” And Tubal Cain would sneer in sympathetic scorn, as

if both he and his wife were not in precisely that sublime state of

ignorance themselves. He shared her pride in a plan which the juggler

had evolved to open a school in the little “church-house” when the

crops should be laid by, and in the fact that this suggestion had met

with the readiest acceptance for miles around, despite the prejudice

touching his feats of magic.

One night, Jane Ann Sims, with the dish-cloth in her hand, was

alternately wiping the supper dishes in the shed-room and cheerfully

wheezing breathless snatches of a most lugubrious hymn, while Royce and

Euphemia sat on the steps of the passage, where the moon, now in her

first quarter, drew outlines of the vines on the floor,--with here the

similitude of a nest, whence now a wakeful, watching head protruded,

and now a lifted wing, and now a downy, ball-like bulk; and here,

with indistinct verges, a cluster of quivering trumpet-flowers, all

dusky and blurring, like the smudging black-and-white study of some

impressionist artist. Tubal Cain Sims, seeking company, was aware, as

he entered his domicile, that he would find no welcome here, so he

betook himself, with his pipe in hand, to the leisurely scene of his

help-meet’s labors. There triumph awaited him, for Jane Ann Sims left

the table and the dishes to the tallow dip and the candle-flies, to

sink down in a chair and detail the fact that while he was gone to the

blacksmith’s shop to get his team shod a wonderful event had happened.

Parson Tynes had been here again!

Tubal Cain Sims’s lower jaw dropped. Parson Tynes figured in his

mind only as the troublous advocate of a dead-and-gone love, and he

thought it a breach of the peace, in effect, to seek to disinter

and resuscitate this ill-starred attachment. He growled adversely,

but he did not reach the point of articulate remonstrance, for Jane

Ann Sims majestically waved her limp dish-cloth at him as a signal

to desist, and opened her mouth very wide to emit the cause of her

prideful satisfaction in a loud and wheezy whisper,--which discreet

demonstration came sibilantly to the ears of the young people outside,

the only other human creatures within a mile, and occasioned them much

unfilial merriment.

Parson Tynes no longer dwelt on marrying and giving in marriage.

Ambition had been his theme. It seemed that once, not long ago,

being in Colbury when a great revival--a union meeting of various

denominations--was held, he had had the opportunity to preach there

through some wild rumor of his celebrity as a mountain orator; and

afterward a certain visiting elderly minister had taken him aside

and urged him to study and to cultivate his gifts, and above all

to acquire a delivery. The visiting city minister, being a man who

appreciated the Great Smoky Mountains as a large and impressive element

of scenery, and having never seen them except gracing the horizon,

did not realize that in all their commodiousness they had scant

accommodations for learning. On his part, Tynes did not appreciate any

especial superiority in the delivery of the men he had heard. His slow

drawl and his mispronunciations were, of course, unperceived by him,

and, speaking from a worldly point of view, he was chiefly refreshed

at the meeting by the consciousness that there were many more ideas

in his sermon than in that of the visiting city minister. He wondered

satirically how the good man would have received the converse of this

charge, had he dared to exhort him in turn to cultivate thought and

acquire ideas. The meeting had done Tynes no good. It had only hurt

his pride, and roused a certain animosity toward the larger world

outside his life and the round of his work, and caused him to contemn

as spurious the pretensions of the luckier clergy. He did not accord

the advice he had received a single thought, so much more important it

seemed to him what a preacher says than how he says it. But Jane Ann

Sims had talked much and pridefully to her cronies in the Cove about

the juggler’s “readin’s,” and their fame had reached the parson’s ears.

Shortly after, he chanced to encounter Royce at the mill, and for the

first time was impressed by the charm of a cultured enunciation in

a naturally beautiful voice. “I’d like powerful well ter speak like

_that_, now,” he said to himself, with a sudden discrimination of

superiority. And this afternoon he had come to say that he had heard

of the projected school, and that he would like to know whether the

juggler had ever been taught elocution and was qualified to impart

his knowledge. Royce had read for him,--or rather, had recited from

memory,--and Tynes had been surprised and delighted, and had averred

that he read “better’n all the men at the union meeting shook up in a

bag together, the city minister at the bottom.”

“But ye would hev been s’prised, Tubal,” said Mrs. Sims, her fat face

clouding and her dimples turning to creases, “ter hev viewed the

gamesome an’ jokified way ez John Leonard conducted hisself ter the

pa’son--plumb scandalous--made a puffeck laffin’-match o’ the whole

consarn; though arter a while the pa’son seemed some less serious,

too. But he an’ John Leonard air a-goin’ ter meet every day, beginnin’

day arter ter-morrer, in the schoolhouse, ter take lessons in readin’.

An’ the pa’son pays him fur it. Jes’ think o’ that!” Her hand with

the limp dish-cloth in it extended itself impressively. “Teachin’ the

pa’son--the pa’son, mind ye--ter read!”

Tubal Cain Sims sat electrified by the honor. Now and again his stiff

old visage relaxed with a broad smile, but this some grave thought

suddenly puckered up. In the midst of his satisfaction and his

appropriation of the honor that had descended upon his house, ever and

anon a secret thought of his earlier distrust of the juggler intruded

with a vaguely haunting fear of the promised visit from the sheriff.

This he had latterly put from him, for the long silence and the passage

of time warranted him in the conclusion that it had been merely a

device of the officer to satisfy a meddlesome old fool, and was from

the beginning devoid of intention. He hardly dared to wonder what

Jane Ann Sims would have thought of his suspicion, as he remembered

that from the moment of the juggler’s entrance on that stormy evening

she had rated the young guest as highly as now. But then, it had never

been her chance to hear those strange, mysterious utterances from the

turmoils of midnight dreams.

“Jane Ann,” Tubal Sims said, with quavering solemnity, “I know this

hyar young man be powerful peart, an’ thar’s nobody in the kentry ter

ekal him, not even Pa’son Tynes; but what would you-uns think ef ye

war ter hear him call out, like I hev done, in the night,--’way late,

’bout the darkest hour,--‘But the one who lives!--fur whose life!--his

life!--fur his life!--what can I do!--fur his life!--his life!--it must

be!--his life!’”

As he mimicked the cabalistic phrases that had so strongly laid hold

upon his imagination, the very inflections of the agonized voice were

duplicated. The sentiment of mystery, of awe, with which the air

was wont to vibrate was imparted anew. The despair, the remorse of

the tones, sent a responsive thrill like a fang into the listener’s

heart. Jane Ann Sims, her face blank and white, sat staring dumbly

as she hearkened. The leaves darkly rustled close to the window. Dim

moonlight flecked the ground on the slope beyond with shadow and a dull

suffusive sheen. The wind, rushing gustily past, bowed the flame of

the guttering tallow dip, feebly flaring, in the centre of the table.

As she put out her hand mechanically to shield it from extinction, the

motion and the trifling care seemed to restore her mental equilibrium.

“That sounds powerful cur’ous, Tubal,” she said gravely, and his heart

sank in disappointment with the words and tone. He had expected Jane

Ann Sims to flout the matter aside loftily, and indignantly decline to

consider aught that might reflect on her much-admired guest. It was he

himself who began to feel that it was of slight moment and hardly worth

detailing; the sheriff had barely listened to it, without lifting an

eyelash of tired and drowsy eyes. He was sorry he had told Jane Ann.

What a pother women are wont to stir up over a trifle!

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

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

tentatively.

Jane Ann sniffed contemptuously. “Waal, I ain’t been ’quainted with

no men so powerful puffeck in all thar ways ez I kin be sot agin a

youngster, what eats a hearty supper, fur talkin’ in his sleep. I’d be

a powerful admirer of the ‘sterner sex,’ ez Pa’son Greenought calls

’em, ef I knowed no wuss of ’em ’n that.”

“Wha--wha--what ye goin’ ter do ’bout’n it, Jane Ann?” sputtered Tubal

Cain, seeing her ponderously rising, determination on her strong

features.

“I be goin’ ter ax him what he means by it, that’s what,” said Jane

Ann. And before Tubal Cain could protest, she was leaning out of the

window and wheezily calling to the young people slowly strolling along

the slope before the door.

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

She met him at the entrance of the passage, the tallow dip in her hand,

glowing with a divergent aureola of white rays against the dusky brown

shadows and green leaves of the vines opposite. He paused, expectant,

while Euphemia, in her green dress, stood on the sill amongst the

swaying vines, hardly distinguishable from them save for her fair

ethereal face, looking in as if from elf-land, so subtly sweet was its

reminiscent expression. But he was intent of attitude, with a question

in his waiting eyes; not dallying mentally with the thoughts he had had

in contemplation, but altogether receptive to a new theme.

His face changed subtly as Jane Ann Sims, watching him narrowly,

repeated the words of his somnolent speech. “What air ye talkin’ ’bout,

John Leonard, whenst ye say them words agin an’ agin an’ agin, night

arter night?” she asked him inquisitively.

He did not hesitate. Still, he had a strange look on his face, as

if summoned many and many a mile thence. “I dream that I am dead,

sometimes, and others need me back again, and I cannot go. I can do

nothing. I often dream that I am dead.”

It so fell out the next day that this seemed no dream. He was so surely

dead that he walked the ways of this world an alien. He was not more of

it than if the turf in the far cemetery, beside the marble that bore

his name, grew green and lush with its first summer veritably above

his breast. He had no premonition of the deterioration of the spurious

animation which had of late informed the days. The dawn came early,

as was its wont in these slow diurnal measures of July, and cheer

came with it. The explanation he had given of his strange words was

more than satisfactory, and all about him was instinct with a sort of

radiant pleasure in him which diffused its glow into his own heart.

As he stood in the passage lighting his pipe, after breakfast, he

noticed a salient change in the landscape. No smoke was rising from

the high promontory where was situated the primitive kiln of the

lime-burners.

“Ye jes’ f’und that out?” said Tubal Cain, with a chuckle, as, tilted

against the wall in his chair, he listlessly dangled his feet. “Thar

ain’t been no lime bu’nt thar fur six weeks.” He chuckled anew, so

cordially did he accept the sentimental cause of the juggler’s lapse of

observation. “I reckon that thar lime is made up inter morter an’ air

settin’ up prideful ez plaister now, an’ hev done furgot it ever war

rock.”

The young man placidly endured the raillery; in fact he relished it,

for it was proof how genuine had been his absorption, and he was

deprecatory of self-deception. That alert commercial interest never

quite moribund prompted his next question.

“I don’t see that lime is used in the Cove,” he said, reflecting on the

stick-and-clay chimneys, and the clay daubing in the chinking between

the logs of the walls of the houses. “What was the purpose of that

extensive burning of lime, Mr. Sims?”

“Ain’t you-uns hearn?” demanded the host, with another cheerful grin

expanding his corrugated leathern-textured countenance. “Pete Knowles

wouldn’t tell a-fust; he got the job somehows.”

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

motive.

“So he bu’nt, an’ bu’nt, an’ bu’nt, an’ the lime it piled up in heaps

in that thar dry rock-house what ’minds me powerful o’ the sepulturs o’

the Bible. But it air six weeks sence they bar’led it up an’ wagoned it

off ’bout ten mile or mo’.”

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

interested.

“‘They’ is them hotel men over yander at New Helveshy Springs, an’ they

wanted the lime ter plaister the old hotel what hev hed ter be repaired

an’ nigh made over. They ’lowed ’twar cheaper ter git the lime bu’nt at

the nearest limestun rocks ’n ter buy it bar’led an’ haul it fifty mile

from a railroad.”

This was a proposition of a kind that might well secure the juggler’s

business-like consideration. But his eyes were fixed with a sudden

untranslated thought. His pipe had turned unheeded in his hand, fire,

tobacco, and ashes falling from it into the dewy weeds below the step,

as he stood on the verge of the passage. His expressive face had

altered. It was smitten with some prophetic thought, and had grown set

and rigid.

“New Helvetia Springs! Summer resort, of course. I didn’t know there

was anything of the sort in the vicinity,” he said at last. “What kind

of place is it?”

“I dunno!” exclaimed Sims, dangling his feet briskly back and forth in

an accession of contempt. “_I_ never tuk the trouble ter ride over thar

in my life, though I hev knowed the hotel ter be a-runnin’, ez they

call it, fur forty year an’ more.”

Royce stood in silence for a time, moodily leaning his shoulder against

the wall of the house, one hand thrust in his leather belt, the other

holding the pipe at an angle and a poise which would seem to precede

an immediate return of the stem to his mouth. But he did not smoke.

Presently he put the pipe into his pocket, drew his hat over his eyes,

and wandered down the road; then climbing a fence or two, he was off in

the woods, as safe from interruption as if in the midst of a trackless

ocean. He walked far and fast with the constraint of nervous energy,

but hardly realizing the instinct of flight which informed his muscles.

When at last he flung himself down at the foot of great rocks that

stood high above a shelving slope in woods so dense that he could not

see farther than a yard or two in any direction, for the flutter of

the multitudinous leaves and the shimmer of the interfulgent sunshine,

he was saying to himself that he was well quit of all the associations

of his old world; that he had found safety here, a measure of content,

a means of livelihood, and the prospect of a certain degree of simple

happiness when he should be married to a girl whom he had learned to

love and who loved him,--a beautiful girl of innate refinement, who had

mind enough to understand him and to acquire an education. He would do

well to still resolutely that sudden plunging of the heart which had

beset him upon the knowledge that his old world was so near at hand,

with all those endearing glamours as for the thing that is native. What

avail for him to hover around them, to court the fate of the moth? He

remembered with a sort of terror the pangs of nostalgia which at first

had so preyed upon him, and should he deliberately risk the renewal

of these poignant throes, now possibly spent forever? Regret, danger,

despair, lay in the way thither; why should he long to look in upon

scenes that were now as reminiscences, so well could he predicate them

on experiences elsewhere? He wondered, fretfully, however, and with

a rising doubt of himself, that when he and Euphemia had climbed the

mountain and looked down at the shimmer of the small towns in the

furthest valley, and he had felt no stir of wistfulness, he should

have interpreted his tranquillity as a willing renunciation of the

life he had left,--as if the treadmill limitations and deprivations

and mental stagnation of a village were the life he had left. And

suddenly--although he had chosen this spot because it shut him in,

because naught could be seen to deflect his errant mind, in order that

he might realize and earnestly grapple with this wild and troublous

lure--the illusions of a sophistry glimmered even in these scant

spaces. He was definitely reconciled, he told himself, to his destiny.

It was only his imagination that vaguely yearned for the status he

had left. With a touch of reality the prismatic charms of this bubble

of fancy would collapse,--or the glimpse of conditions native to him,

the sound of familiar speech as of his mother tongue, the sight of

men and women as compatriots in this long exile as of a foreign land,

would prove a refreshment, a tonic, an elixir, renewing his strength to

endure. He was a coward to deprive himself--for fear of discontent--of

something to enjoy in the present, to remember, and to look forward to,

in recurrent years.

He had not thought to notice the dwindling shadows that betokened

noon and the waiting dinner which Euphemia had made ready with many

a remembrance of his preferences. The sun was westering apace when,

as if impelled by a force beyond his control, he found himself in

the country road, forging ahead with that long swift stride, the

envy of his comrades of the pedestrian club of his urban days. His

heart seemed to divine the way, for he scarcely paused to debate

which fork to pursue when the road diverged; he gave no heed to the

laurel jungles on either hand, or, further on, to the shady vistas

under the towering trees; he only perceived at last that the density

of the woods had diminished. Soon peaked and turreted roofs appeared

among the thinning boughs, and as he crossed an elaborately rustic

foot-bridge, coquettishly picturesque, flung across a chasm where

deep in the brown damp shadows a silver rill trickled, he recognized

this as an outpost of artificiality. A burst of music from a band

thrilled his unaccustomed ears; a vast panorama of purple and azure

mountains, a vermilion sun, a flaring amber sky, great looming gray

crags, and the bronze-green sunlit woods beyond were asserted in

an unfolding landscape; he heard the laughter cadenced to express

the tempered mirth of polite society, and the stir of talk. The

verandas of the two-storied hotel were full of well-dressed people.

His swiftly glancing eye marked the dowagers; their very costumes

were familiar,--black grenadines or silks with a subdued inclination

toward a touch of lavender decoration, and some expert softening of

the ravages of time by the sparing use of white chiffon or lace, with

always something choice in the selection of dainty shawls on the

back of a chair near at hand (how often had he resignedly borne such

a wrap over his arm in the meek train of a pretty girl’s chaperon!):

he knew the type,--clever, discreet, discerning. On the lawn two games

of tennis were in progress, the white of the flannel suits of the men

enhanced in the sun against the green grass. Along the road beyond,

two or three smart little carts were coming in with the jauntiest

of maidens in daintily tinted summer attire and sailor hats. An

equestrian couple--the young man of a splendid physique and elegantly

mounted--went by him like a flash, as he stood, dazed and staring, by

the rail of the bridge. He retained barely enough presence of mind to

dodge aside out of the way, and he received a volley of sand, covering

him from head to foot, from the heels of the horses as they disappeared

in the woods at the steady hand-gallop. On the crag at the verge of

the bluff were groups of young people, strolling about or seated on

the ledges of the cliff, the young men dangling their feet over the

abysses beneath, such being the accepted fad; now and then, one not

emerged from the hobbledehoy chrysalis would, by means of grotesque

affectations of falling, elicit small complimentary shrieks, half

terror, half mirth, from the extremely young ladies whom he favored

with his improving society. At one side there was a meeting of fir

boughs, a dank and cool dark vista, a great piling of fractured and

splintered rocks, a sudden descent, and down this bosky way was so

constant a going and coming that Lucien Royce divined that it led to

the hidden spring.

He stared at the scene through the tears in his eyes. To him who had

never had a home it was home, who had never dreamed of heaven it was

bliss. He would have given all he could imagine--but, poor fellow, he

had naught to give!--to be able to communicate in some mysterious way

the knowledge of his quality to one of those high-nosed, keen-eyed

elder women, of composed features and fine position and long social

experience and much discrimination in the world’s ways, and to have

her commend his course, and counsel prudence, and pity his plight. He

looked at the elder men, whose type he also knew,--men of weight in the

business world, lawyers, bankers, brokers,--and he thought what a boon

might be even the slightest impersonal conversation with one of his own

sphere, his equal in breeding, in culture, in social standing. He was

starved,--he had not realized it; he was dying of mental inanition; he

was starved.

The next moment, two of the tennis-players, ending the diversions

of the afternoon with a walk, approached the bridge: the man in his

immaculate white flannels, his racket carried over his shoulder; the

girl in her picturesque tennis toggery. Royce, dusty, besprinkled with

sand, conscious of his coarse ill-made jeans clothes and his great

cowhide boots, colored to the roots of his hair as their eyes fell upon

him. In adaptation to the custom of the mountaineers, who never fail

to speak to a stranger in passing, they both murmured a “Good-evening”

as they went by. Royce, rousing with a galvanic start, lifted his hat,

hardly realizing why they should glance at him in obvious surprise and

with elevated eyebrows. For one moment he pondered fruitlessly on the

significance of this trifling incident. The solution of the mystery

came to him with a monition of added caution. The social training of

the mountaineer does not comprise the ceremony of lifting the hat in

salutation. If he would sustain the rural character he must needs have

heed, since so slight a deflection was marked. He heard them laughing

as they went, and he thought, with all the sensitiveness incident to a

false position, that he was the cause of their mirth, the incongruity

of this “million of manners” with such a subject. With an aversion

to a repetition of this scene he betook himself out of the way of

further excursionists, noticing that several couples were slowly

strolling in the direction of the bridge. But as he moved forward from

under the shadows of the fir and into the clear space of the lawn, he

could scarcely sustain the observation which he felt leveled at him,

Argus-eyed, from the verandas, the lawn, the tennis-court, the crags.

His pride was in arms against his humble plight. His face burned with

shame for his coarse garments, the dust, the very clumsiness of his

rough boots, the length of his overgrown silky red-brown hair, his

great awkward hat, the uncouth figure he cut in respectable society.

But despite the flush on his cheek, and a thrill hot and tingling ever

starting with each searing thought to his eyes, as if tears were to be

shed but for the sheer shame of it, he laughed scornfully at his pride,

and despised himself to be so poor, so forlorn, so outcast from his

native world, yet so yearning for it. “What does it matter?” he said

to himself. “They don’t know me. Lucien Royce is dead,--dead forever.”

He walked on for a few minutes, the trained gait of an athlete, his

graceful bearing, the individuality and distinction of his manner, all

at their best, mechanically asserted as an unrealized protest in some

sort that those lorgnettes on the verandas should not conceive too

meanly of him. “I suppose I thought the ghost of a dude like Lucien

Royce would be a mighty well-set-up affair, with a sort of spectral

style about him and an unearthly chic. But what does it matter what

they think of a nonentity of a stray mountaineer like this? Lucien

Royce is dead,--dead forever!”

He had merely ventured to partially skirt the lawn, bending his steps

toward the shelter of a small two-storied building at the nearest

corner of it, and somewhat down the road. The lower portion of this

structure, he perceived, was used as a store, containing a few dry

goods, but dispensing chiefly needles and pins, especially hairpins,

and such other commodities of toilet as the guests might have forgotten

or exhausted or could be induced to buy. He paused in the doorway:

even the sight of the limited stock ranged decorously on the shelves,

the orderly counters, the smooth countenance of the salesman, seemed

pleasing to him, as reminiscent of the privileges of civilization.

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

Royce caught himself with a start. Then speaking with his teeth half

closed to disguise his voice, and drawling like a mountaineer, he said,

shaking his head, “Jes’ viewin’ the folks some.”

He had a sense that the imitation was ill done, and glanced furtively

at the face of the man behind the counter. But the clerk was devoid of

speculation save as this faculty might explore his customers’ pockets.

Royce noted, however, a second warning, and since the sun was down and

the lawn now depopulated, save for here and there a hastening figure

making for the deserted verandas, he ventured out in his shabby gear

upon the plank walk that stretched along the bluff where no crags

intervened, but the descent was sheer to a green and woodsy slope

below. The early tea was in progress; the band that for some time had

been heralding its service, playing within the quadrangle, was silent

now, and the shadows were abroad in the mountains; mists were rising

from dank ravines on the opposite range. A star was in the flushed

sky. A whippoorwill’s plaintive tones came once and again from the

umbrageous tangles that overshadowed the spring. Yellow lamps were

flaring out into the purple dusk from the great looming unsubstantial

building. He marked the springing into sudden brilliancy of a row

of windows on the ground floor, that revealed a long, bare, empty

apartment which he identified as the ballroom. There would be dancing

later on. A cheerful clicking as of ivory against ivory caused him to

pause abruptly and peer down the slope below, where a yellow radiance

was aglow amongst the trees and precipitous descents. It came from

the billiard-room in the pavilion, picturesquely poised here among

the rocks and chasms, and looking out into a wild gorge that gave a

twilight view of the darkening valley, and the purple glooms of the

mountains towering along the horizon. It was the airiest type of

structure. With only its peaked roof and its supporting timbers, the

floor and the flights of steps, it seemed free to the breeze, so wide

and long were the windows, all broadly open. Royce, looking down into

its illuminated interior, glowing like a topaz in the midst of the

dark foliage that pressed close about it, had a glimpse of the green

cloth of the tables, the red and white balls, the dexterously poised

cues, the alertly attitudinizing figures,--still loitering in white

flannels, although the lights now agleam in bedroom windows told that

all the world had begun to dress for the ball,--and heard the pleasant,

mirthful voices.

Why did he linger here, he asked himself, as he repressed the natural

mundane interest which almost spoke out his criticism as he watched

the game with the eye of a connoisseur. This was not for him. He was

not of this world. He had quitted it forever. And if he were mortified

to fill a place in a sphere so infinitely removed from that to which

he was born and entitled, would it better matters to emerge from his

decent obscurity and his promised opportunities, his honest repute

and his simple happiness, to the conspicuous position as the cynosure

of all eyes in a criminal trial, and to the permanent seclusion of a

felon’s cell? For that was what he risked in these hankerings after the

status and the sphere from which he was cast out forever.

He was in the darkening road and plodding homeward before this

admonition to his own rebellious heart was concluded, so did the

terrors of that possible ignominious fate dominate his pride, and

scorch his sensibility, and lay his honest self-respect in the dust. He

was tired. The drops stood on his forehead and his step lagged. Thrice

the distance in the time he had walked it would not have so reduced

his strength as did the mental perturbation, the inward questionings,

those tumultuous plungings of his strong young heart. He was pale, and

his face was lined and bore some vague impress of the nervous stress he

had sustained, when at last he came up the steps of the open passage at

Sims’s house, and Jane Ann bent her anxious flabby countenance toward

him.

“Waal, before the Lawd!” she exclaimed, holding the tallow dip in her

hand so as to throw its light full upon him,--and he divined that at

frequent intervals in the last two hours she had emerged thus with the

candle in her hand to listen for his step,--“hyar the chile be at last!

Whar in the name o’ sense hev ye been, John Leonard?” she demanded, as

Phemie fluttered out, pale and wistful despite her embarrassed laughter

at the folly of their fright, and old Tubal Cain followed stiffly, with

sundry grooves of anxiety added to the normal corrugations of his face.

“In the woods,” replied the juggler; and then realizing that he spoke

with a covert meaning, “I lost my way.”

He slept the sleep of exhaustion that night, and the next morning

he rose refreshed in body, and with the resolutions of his sober

reflections confirmed.

“I am not such a snob as to care for the mere finery of existence, the

mere wealth and show and fashion,” he argued within himself. “It’s

partly the folly of my youth to care so much for those young fools over

yonder,--so much like myself, or like what I used to be,--and dancing,

and tennis, and wheeling, and flirting, and frivolity. A certain

portion of these amenities has been the furniture of my life hitherto,

and I am a trifle awkward at laying hold on it now without them. I love

the evidences of good breeding, because I have been taught to respect

them. I am prejudiced in favor of certain personal refinements,

because I was reared to think a breach of them as iniquitous as to

crash all the ten commandments at one fell swoop. I revere culture and

literary or scientific achievement, because I appreciate what they

require in mental capacity, and I am educated to gauge in a degree the

quality of their excellence. I should like to have some conversation,

occasionally, with people near my own calibre in social status and

mind, and with similar motives and sentiments and way of looking at

things. But I _can_ live without a ballroom and a billiard-table, and,

by the Lord, I’ll brace up like a man and do it contentedly.”

He went off cheerfully enough, after breakfast, to meet Tynes in the

little schoolhouse. There he recited, in forgetfulness of his troubles,

poems that he loved, and bits of ornate prose that he recalled, for he

had a good memory; and he delivered sundry sound dicta touching the

correct method of opening the mouth and of the pose of the body, and a

dissertation on the physical structure of the vocal organs, illustrated

by diagrams which he drew on the fly-leaf of the reading-book, and

which mightily astonished Absalom Tynes, who learned for the first

time that such things be. The leaves of the low-swinging elms rustled

at the windows; the breeze came in and stirred up the dust; the flying

squirrel who nested in the king-post of the roof, and who had had an

early view of the juggler upon his first appearance in this house, came

down and sat upon a beam and with intent eyes gazed at him. Tynes, in

an unaccustomed station among the benches used by the congregation,

watched and listened with unqualified commendation as Royce stood upon

the platform and made the little house ring with his strong, melodious

young voice. Abdicating the vantage-ground of spiritual preëminence,

Tynes subordinated his own views, and when he read in his turn sundry

of the secular bits of verse embalmed in the Reader--he seemed to think

there were no books in the world but school-books and the Bible--he

accepted corrections with the mildest docility, and preserved a slavish

imitation of the spirited delivery of his preceptor. He rose into

vigorous rebellion, however, when, with many a “Pshaw!” Royce rejected

the continued use of the elementary Reader for the vital defect of

having nothing in it fit to read, and took up, as matter worthy of

elocutionary art, the Bible. Tynes, struck aghast by the change of

delivery, the reverent, repressed, almost overawed tones, the deep,

still gravity of the manner, listened for a time, then openly protested.

“That ain’t no way ter read the Bible,” he stoutly averred. “Ye hev got

ter thunder it at the sinner, an’ rest yer v’ice on this word an’ lay

it down on that, an’ lift it up”--

“Ding-dong it, you mean,” said the juggler, shifting quickly to his

habitual tone.

“The sinner ain’t ter be kep’ listenin’ ter sech ez that. Jes’ let yer

v’ice beat agin his ear till he can’t keep the gospel out ’thout he be

deef,” Tynes contended.

“Yes, and his senses accommodate themselves to the clamor, and his

consciousness sways back and forth with the minister’s voice, and he

doesn’t hear more than one half of what is said, because the fellow

yells so loud that the sound drowns out the sense. But the congregation

looks pious, and folds its arms, and rocks itself back and forth with

the rhythm of the sing-song, and the whole thing is just one see-saw.

Do you believe that’s the way St. Paul preached on Mars’ hill?”

Tynes was suddenly bewildered. His manner assumed a sort of bridling

offense; it seemed somewhat profane to speculate on the character of

St. Paul’s delivery.

“Your way ain’t the way the men read at the Colbury revival, ennyhow,”

he urged; for the union meeting, despite his wounded pride, had become

a sort of standard.

“I’ll bet my old hat there wasn’t anybody there who could come within a

mile of my reading,” glibly wagered the juggler, unabashed.

Tynes reflected doubtfully a moment. “I dunno _what_’s the matter

with it,” he said. “It hurts me! I couldn’t git my cornsent ter read

that-a-way. It sounds like ye jes’ been thar yestiddy, an’ it all

happened fraish, an’ ye war tellin’ ’bout it, an’ ye hedn’t got over

the pain an’ the grief of it yit--an’ mebbe ye never would.”

In the pause that ensued the juggler trifled with the pages, his eyes

cast down, a smile of gratified vanity lurking in the lustrous pupils.

“Well,” Tynes said abruptly, “go on, John Leonard, go on.”

But as the reading proceeded, the face of the slight and pallid man

sitting on the bench--now and again wincing palpably from the scenes

seemingly enacted before him, from the old, old words all instinct with

the present, from the terrible sense of the reality of those dread

happenings of the last night in Gethsemane, and the denial of Peter,

and the judgment-hall--all at once lighted up with a new and vivid

gleam of animation. The chapter was at an end, the lingering musical

cadences of the reverent voice were dying away, and as the reader

lifted his head there were tears in his eyes, and the fisher of men had

seen them.

“Ye ain’t so far from the kingdom, John Leonard,” he said, in solemn

triumph.

The juggler recoiled in a sort of ashamed self-consciousness. “Don’t

deceive yourself!” he exclaimed. “It is only my literary sensibility.

All the four Gospels--speaking profanely--are works of high artistic

merit, and they can floor me when nothing else can.”

But the worldly ambition of Tynes had suddenly fled. He was baiting

his hook and reeling out his line; here was the prospect of a precious

capture in the cause of religion. He might not learn to read the Bible

in John Leonard’s illusive and soul-compelling way,--and he hardly

knew if he cared to do this, so did it seem to penetrate into the

very mystery of sacred things which had less poignancy under the veil

of custom and indifference and a dull sense of distance in time and

place,--but he would learn of him in secular things, he would remain

by him, and now and again insidiously instill some sense of religious

responsibility; and the soul of this sinner would indeed be a slippery

fish if it could contrive to elude his vigilance at last.

He listened indulgently as the juggler declared he would have no more

of the Reader, insisting that such literature would wreck his mind. But

Tynes, for his own part, was not willing to trust himself to learn the

arts of elocution from the sanctities of the Holy Book read with that

immediate and vital certainty which tore so at his heart-strings.

“I wonder,” he said, his narrow, pallid face brightening with the

inspiration,--“I wonder ef thar ain’t some o’ them books ye speak of

over yander ter the sto’ what that valley-man keeps at New Helveshy

Springs? They all bein’ valley folks, mebbe he hev some valley books

ter sell ter ’em.”

“I have no doubt of it!” cried the juggler in delighted anticipation.

He looked down for a moment, dubious of the wisdom of the course he had

in contemplation, but with a quick joy beating at his heart. It was but

natural, he argued within himself, recognizing the access of pleasure,

that, young and debarred as he was from the society of his equals, he

should experience a satisfaction in these fleeting glimpses of life as

he had once known it, and in its attraction for him was no harbinger of

regret and rue. Moreover, he judged that it would excite less attention

for him to buy the book in person--he would make it appear that he

was on an errand for some cottager of the summer sojourners--than if

this ignorant parson should overhaul the literature of the Springs,

with some wild tale of lessons from an elocutionary mountaineer. As

to danger, he would hold his tongue as far as he might, and he deemed

that he looked the veriest mountain rustic in the garb he so despised.

“Rather a jaunty rural rooster, perhaps,” he said to himself, “but as

rural as a cornfield.”