IN WHICH DAVID VISITS THE BISHOP, AND FRALE SEES HIS ENEMY
The bishop was seated in a deep canvas chair on his wide veranda,
looking out over his garden toward a distant line of blue hills. His
little wife sat close to his side on a low rocker, very busy with the
making of buttonholes in a small girl's frock of white dimity and lace.
Betty Towers loved lace and pretty things.
The small girl was playing about the garden paths with her puppy and
chattering with Frale in her high, happy, childish voice, while he bent
weeding among the beds of okra and egg-plant. His face wore a more than
usually discontented look, even when answering the child with teasing
banter. Now and then he lifted his eyes from his work and watched
furtively the movements of David Thryng, who was pacing restlessly up
and down the long veranda in earnest conversation with the bishop and
his wife.
The two in the garden could not understand what was being said at the
house, but each party could hear the voices of the other, and by calling
out a little could easily converse across the dividing hedge and the
intervening space.
"Talk about the influence of the beautiful in nature upon the human
soul,--it is all very pretty, but I believe the soul must be more or
less enlightened to feel it. I've learned a few things among your people
up there in the mountains. Strange beings they are."
"It only goes to show that heredity alone won't do everything," said the
bishop, placing the tips of his fingers together and frowning
meditatively.
"Heredity? It means a lot to us over there in England."
"Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and
then, even if they have to come over here for it."
"For that and--your money--yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain
people of yours, who are they anyway?"
"Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world--as
any you will find at home. They have their heredity--and only that--from
all your classes over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more
years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here
for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime."
"How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"
"Circumstances and environment have kept them to the pure stock, and
neglect has left them untrammelled by civilization and unaided by
education. Time and generations of ignorance have deteriorated them, and
nature alone--as you were but now admitting--has hardly served to arrest
the process by the survival of the fittest."
"Nature--yes--how do you account for it? I have been in the grandest,
most wonderful places, I venture to say, that are to be found on earth,
and among all the glory that nature can throw around a man, he is still,
if left to himself, more bestial than the beasts. He destroys and
defaces and defiles nature; he kills--for the mere sake of killing--more
than he needs; he enslaves himself to his appetites and passions,
follows them wildly, yields to them recklessly; and destroys himself and
all the beauty around him that he can reach, wantonly. Why, Bishop
Towers, sometimes I've gone out and looked up at the stars above me and
wondered which was real, they and the marvellous beauty all around me,
or the three hundred reeking humanity sleeping in the camp beneath them.
Sometimes it seemed as if only hell were real, and the camp was a bit of
it let loose to mock at heaven."
"We mustn't forget that what is transitory is not a part of God's
eternity of spirit and truth."
"Oh, yes, yes! But we do forget. And some transitory things are mighty
hard to endure, especially if they must endure for a lifetime."
David was thinking of Cassandra and what in all probability would be her
doom. He had not mentioned her name, but he had come down with the
intention of learning all he could about her, and if possible to whom
she was "promised." He feared it might be the low-browed, handsome youth
bending over the garden beds beyond the hedge, and his heart rebelled
and cried out fiercely within him, "What a waste, what a waste!"
Betty Towers, intent on her sewing, felt the thrill that intensified
David's tone, and she, too, thought of Cassandra. She dropped her work
in her lap and looked earnestly in her husband's face.
"James, I feel just as Doctor Thryng does--when I think of some things.
When I see a tragedy coming to a human soul, I feel that a lifetime of
transitory things like that is hard to endure. Fancy, James! Think of
Cassandra. You know her, Doctor Thryng, of course. They live just below
your place. She is the Widow Farwell's daughter, but her name is
Merlin."
David arrested his impatient stride and, drawing a chair near her,
dropped into it. "What about her?" he said. "What is the tragedy?"
"I think, Betty, the hills must keep their own secrets," said the
bishop.
His little wife compressed her lips, glanced over the hedge at the young
man who happened at the moment to have straightened from his bent
position among the plants and was gazing at their guest, then resumed
her sewing.
"Is it something I must not be told?" asked David, quietly. "But I may
have my suspicions. Naturally we can't help that."
"I think it is better to know the truth. I don't like suspicions. They
are sure to lead to harm. James, let me put it to the doctor as I see
it, and see what he thinks of it."
"As you please, dear."
"It's like this. Have you seen anything of that girl or observed her
much?"
"I certainly have."
"Then, of course, you can see that she is one of the best of the
mountain people, can't you? Well! She has promised to marry--promised to
marry--think of it! one of the wildest, most reckless of those mountain
boys, one that she knows very well has been in illicit distilling. He
is a lawbreaker in that way; and, more than that, he drinks, and in a
drunken row he shot dead his friend."
"Ah!" David rose, turned away, and again paced the piazza. Then he
returned to his seat. "I see. The young man I tried to help off when I
first arrived."
"Yes. There he is."
"I see. Handsome type."
"He's down here now, keeping quiet. How long it will last, no one knows.
Justice is lax in the mountains. His father shot three or four men
before he died himself of a gunshot wound which he received while
resisting the officers of the law. If there's a man left in the family
to follow this thing up, Frale will be hunted down and arrested or shot;
otherwise, when things have cooled off a little up there, he will go
back and open up the old business, and the tragedy will be repeated.
James, you know how often after the best you could do and all their
promises, they go back to it?"
"I admit it's always a question. They don't seem to be content in the
low country. I think it is often a sort of natural gravitation back to
the mountains where they were born and bred, more than it is depravity."
"I know, James, but that excuse won't help Cassandra."
"Why did she do it?" asked David. "She must have known to what such a
marriage would bring her."
"Do it? That is the sort of girl she is. If she thought she ought, she
would leap over that fall there."
"But why should she think she ought? Had she given her--promise--" David
saw her as she appeared to him when she had said that word to him on the
mountain, and it silenced him, but only for a moment. He would learn all
he could of her motives now. He must--he would know. "I mean before he
did this, before she went away to study--had she made him such
a--promise?"
"No. You tell him about it, James. You have seen her and talked with
her. They were quarrelling about her, as I understand, and she thinks
because she was the cause of the deed she must help him make
retribution. Isn't that it, James? She knows perfectly well what it
means for her, for she has had her aspirations. I can see it all. Frale
says he was not drunk nor his friend either. He says the other man
claimed--but I won't go into that--only Cassandra promised him before
God, he says, that if he would repent, she would marry him. And when she
was here she used to talk about the way those women live. How her own
mother has worked and aged! Why, she is not yet sixty. You have seen how
they live in their wretched little cabins, Doctor; that's what Frale
would doom her to. He never in life will understand her. He'll grow old
like his father,--a passionate, ignorant, untamed animal, and worse, for
he would be drunken as well. He's been drunk twice since he came down
here. James, you know they think it's perfectly right to get drunk
Saturday afternoon."
"Yes, it seems a terrible waste; but if she has children, she will be
able to do more for them than her mother has done for her, and they will
have her inheritance; so her life can't be wholly wasted, even if she is
not able to live up to her aspirations."
"James Towers! I--that--it's because you are a man that you can talk so!
I'm ashamed, and you a bishop! I wish--" Betty's eyes were full of angry
tears. "I only wish you were a woman. Slowly improve the race by bearing
children--giving them her inheritance! How would she bear them? Year
after year--ill fed, half clothed, slaving to raise enough to hold their
souls in their bodies, bringing them into the world for a brute who
knows only enough to make corn whiskey--to sell it--and drink it--and
reproduce his kind--when--when she knows all the time what ought to be!
Oh, James, James, think of it!"
"My dear, my dear, you forget, he has promised to repent and live a
different life. If he does, things will be better than we now see them.
If he does not change, then we may interfere--perhaps."
"I know, James. But--but--suppose he repents and she becomes his wife,
and puts aside all her natural tastes, and the studies she loves, and
goes on living with him there on the home place, and he does the best he
can--even. Don't you see that her nature is fine and--and so
different--even at the best, James, for her it will be death in life.
And then there is the terrible chance, after all, that he might go back
and be like his father before him, and then what?"
"Well, their lives and destinies are not in our hands; we can only
watch out for them and help them."
"James, he has been drunk twice!"
"Yes, yes, Betty, my little tempest, and if he gets drunk twice more,
and twice more, she will still forgive him until seventy times seven. We
must make her see that unless he keeps his promise to her, she must give
him up."
"Of course. I suppose that's all we can do. I--don't know what you'll
think of me, Doctor Thryng; I'm a dreadful scold. If James were not an
angel--"
"It's perfectly delicious. I would rather hear you scold than--"
"Than hear James preach," laughed the bishop. "I agree with you."
"I agree with her," said David, emphatically. "It ought to be stopped
if--"
"If it ought to be, it will be. What do you think she said to me about
it when I went to reason with her? 'If Christ can forgive and stand such
as he, I can. It is laid on my soul to do this.' I had no more to say."
"That is one point of view, but we mustn't lose sight of the practical,
either. To be his wife and bear his children--I call it a waste, a--"
"Yes, yes. So it is." And what more could the bishop say? After a
little, he added, "But still we must not forget that he, too, is a human
soul and has a value as great as hers."
"According to your viewpoint, but not to mine--not to mine. If a man is
enslaved to his own appetites, he has no right to enslave another to
them."
The following day David took himself back to his hermitage, setting
aside all persuasions to remain.
"Don't make a recluse of yourself," begged the bishop's wife. "The
amenities of life can't always be dispensed with, and we need you, James
and I, you and your music."
David laughed. "I'm too fatally human to become a recluse, and as for
the amenities, they are not all of one order, you know. I find plenty of
scope for exercising them on others, and I often submit to having them
exercised on me,--after their own ideas." He laughed again. "I wish you
could look into my larder. You'd find me provided with all the hills
afford. They have loaded me with gifts."
"No wonder! I know what your life up there means to them, taking care of
their mothers and babies, and sitting up with them nights, going to them
when they are in trouble, rain or shine, and visiting them in their
bare, wretched, crowded homes."
"It wouldn't be so bad often, if it weren't that when a family is in
serious trouble or has a case needing quiet and care, the sympathies of
all their relatives are roused, and they come crowding in. In one case,
the father was ill with pneumonia. I did all I could for him, and next
day--would you believe it?--I found his sister and her 'old man' and
their three youngsters, his old mother and a brother and a widowed
sister, all camped down on them, all in one room. The sister sat by the
fire nursing her three-months-old baby, his mother was smoking at her
side, and the sick man's six little children and their three cousins
were raising Ned, in and out, with three or four hounds. Not one of the
visitors was helping, or, as they say up there, 'doing a lick,' but the
wife was cooking for the whole raft when her husband needed all her
care. Marvellous ideas they have, some of them."
"You ought to write out some of your experiences."
"Oh, I can't. It would seem like a sort of betrayal of friendship. They
have adopted me, so to speak, and are so naive and kind, and have
trusted me--I think they are my friends. I may be very odd--you know."
"I know how you feel," said Betty.
The bishop's little daughter had assumed the proprietorship of the
doctor. She even preferred his companionship to that of her puppy. She
clung to his hand as he walked away, pulling and swinging upon his arm
to coax him back. He took her in his arms and carried her out upon the
walk, the small dog barking and snapping at his heels, as David
threatened to bear his tyrannical young mistress away to the station.
"Doggie wants you to leave me here," she cried, pounding him vigorously
with her two little fists.
He brought her back and placed her on the broad, flat top of the high
gate-post. "Very well, doggie may have you. I will leave you here."
"Doggie wants you to stay, too." She held him with her small arms about
his neck.
"Well, doggie can't have me." He unclinched her chubby hands, crossed
them in her lap, and held them fast while he kissed her tanned and rosy
cheek. "Good-by, you young rogue," he said, and strode away.
"Come and lift me down," she wailed. But he knew well she could scramble
down by herself when she chose, and walked on. She continued to call
after him; then, spying Frale in the wood yard, she imperatively
summoned him to her aid, and trotted at his side back to the woodpile,
where they sat comfortably upon a log and visited together.
They were the best of friends and chattered with each other as if both
were children. In the slender shadow of a juniper tree that stood like a
sentinel in the corner of the wood yard they sat, where a high board
fence separated them from the back street.
The bishop's place was well planted, and this corner had been the
quarters of the house servants in slave times. It was one of Frale's
duties to pile here, for winter use, the firewood which he cut in short
lengths for the kitchen fire, and long lengths for the open fireplaces.
He hated the hampered village life, and round of small duties--the
weeding in the garden, cleaning of piazzas and windows, and the sweeping
of the paths. The woodcutting was not so bad, but the rest he held in
contempt as women's work. He longed to throw his gun in the hollow of
his arm and tramp off over his own mountains. At night he often wept,
for homesickness, and wished he might spend a day tending still, or
lying on a ridge watching the trail below for intruders on his privacy.
The joy of life had gone out for him. He thought continually of
Cassandra and desired her; and his soul wearied for her, until he was
tempted to go back to the mountains at all risks, merely for a sight of
her. Painfully he had tried to learn to write, working at the copies
Betty Towers had set for him,--and certainly she had done all her
conscientious heart prompted to interest him and keep him away from the
village loungers. He had even progressed far enough to send two horribly
spelled missives to Cassandra, feeling great pride in them. And now he
had begun to weary of learning. To be able to write those badly scrawled
notes was in his eyes surely enough to distinguish him from his
companions at home; of what use was more?
"What's that you are tossing up in the air? Let me see it," demanded the
child, as Frale tossed and caught again a small, bright object. He kept
on tossing it and catching it away from the two little hands stretched
out to receive it. "Give it to me. Give it to me, Frale. Let me see it."
He dropped it lightly in her palm. "Don't you lose hit. That thar's
somethin' 'at's got a charm to hit."
"What's a 'charm to hit'? I don't see any charm."
Then Frale laughed aloud. He took it with his thumb and forefinger and
held it between his eye and the sun. "Is that the way you see the 'charm
to hit'? Let me try."
But he slipped it in his pocket, first placing it in a small bag which
he drew up tightly with a string. "Hit hain't nothing you kin see. Hit's
only a charm 'at makes hit plumb sure to kill anybody 'at hit hits.
Hit's plumb sure to hit an' plumb sure to kill, too."
"Oh, Frale! What if it had hit me when you threw it up that
way--and--killed me? Then you'd be sorry, wouldn't you, Frale?"
"Hit nevah wouldn't kill a girl--a nice little girl--like you be. Hit's
charmed that-a-way, 'at hit won't kill nobody what I don't want hit to."
"Then what do you keep it in your pocket for? You don't want to kill
anybody, do you, Frale?"
"Naw--I reckon not; not 'thout I have to."
"But you don't have to, do you, Frale?" piped the child.
He rose, and selecting an armful of stove wood carried it into the shed
and began packing it away. Dorothy sat still on the log, her elbows on
her knees, her chin in her hands, meditating. A tall man slouched by and
peered over the high board fence at her. His eyes roved all about the
place eagerly, keen and black. His matted hair hung long beneath his
soft felt hat. The child looked up at him with fearless, questioning
glance, then trotted in to her friend.
"Frale, did you see that man lookin' over the fence? You think he was
lookin' for you, Frale? Come see who 'tis. P'r'aps he's a friend of
yours."
"Dorothy, Dorothy," called her mother from the piazza, and the child
bounded away, her puppy yelping and leaping at her side. The tall man
turned at the corner and looked back at the child.
The bishop's place occupied one corner of the block, and the fence with
a hedge beneath it ran the whole length of two sides. Slowly sauntering
along the second side, the gaunt, hungry-eyed man continued his way,
searching every part of the yard and garden, even endeavoring, with
backward, furtive glances, to see into the woodhouse, where in the
darkness Frale crouched, once more pallid with abject fear, peering
through the crack where on its hinges the door swung half open.
As the man disappeared down the straggling village street, Frale dropped
down on the wheelbarrow and buried his haggard face in his hands. A long
time he sat thus, until the dinner-hour was past, and black Carrie had
to send Dorothy to call him. Then he rose, but in the place of the white
and haunted look was one of stubborn recklessness. He strolled to the
house with the nonchalant air of one who fears no foes, but rather
glories in meeting them, and sat himself down at his place by the
kitchen table, where he bantered and badgered Carrie, who waited on him
reluctantly, with contemptuous tosses of her woolly head. From the day
of his first appearance there had been war between them, and now Frale
knew that if the stranger asked her, she would gladly and slyly inform
against him.
The afternoon wore on. Again Frale sat on the wheelbarrow, thinking,
thinking. He took the small bag from his pocket and felt of the bullet
through the thin covering, then replaced it, and, drawing forth another
bag, began counting his money over and over. There it was, all he had
saved, five dollars in bills, and a few quarters and dimes.
He did not like to leave the shelter of the shed, and his eyes showed
only the narrow glint of blue as, with half-closed lids, he still peered
out and watched the street where his enemy had disappeared. Suddenly he
rose and climbed with swift, catlike movements up the ladder stairs
behind him, which led to his sleeping loft. There he rapidly donned his
best suit of dyed homespun, tied his few remaining articles of clothing
in a large red kerchief, and before a bit of mirror arranged his tie and
hair to look as like as possible to the village youth of Farington. The
distinguishing silken lock that would fall over his brow had grown
again, since he had shorn it away in Doctor Thryng's cabin. Now he
thrust it well up under his soft felt hat, and, taking his bundle,
descended. Again his eyes searched up and down the street and all about
the house and yard before he ventured out in the daylight.
Dorothy and her dog came bounding down the kitchen steps. She carried
two great fried cakes in her little hands, warm from the hot fat, and
she laughed with glee as she danced toward him.
"Frale, Frale. I stole these, I did, for you. I told Carrie I wanted two
for you, an' she said 'G'long, chile.'" She thrust them in his hands.
"What's the matter, Frale? What you all dressed up for? This isn't
Sunday, Frale. Is they going to be a circus, Frale, is they?" She poured
forth her questions rapidly, as she hopped from one foot to the other.
"Will you take me, Frale, if it's a circus? I'll ask mamma. I want to
see the el'phant."
"'Tain't no circus," he replied grimly.
"What's the matter, Frale? Don't you like your fried cakes? Then why
don't you eat them? What you wrapping them up for? You ought to say
thank you, when I bring you nice cakes 'at I went an' stole for you,"
she remonstrated severely.
His throat worked convulsively as he stood, now looking at the child,
now watching the street. Suddenly he lifted her in his arms and buried
his face in her gingham apron.
"I had a little sister oncet, only she's growed up now, an' she hain't
my little sister any more." He kissed her brown cheek tenderly, even as
David had done, and set her gently down on her two stubby feet. "You run
in an' tell yer maw thank you, fer me, will ye? Mind, now. Listen at me
whilst I tell you what to tell yer paw an' maw fer me. Say, 'Frale seen
a houn' dog on his scent, an' he's gone home to git shet of him.'"
"Where's the 'houn' dog,' Frale?" She gazed fearfully about.
"He's gone now. He won't bite--not you, he won't."
"Oh, Frale! I wish it was a circus."
"Yas," drawled the young man, with a sullen smile curling his lips, "may
be hit be a sort of a circus. Kin ye remember what I tol' you to tell
yer paw?"
"You--you seen a houn' dog on--on a cent--how could he be on a cent?"
"Say, 'Frale seen a houn' dog on his scent, an' he's gone home to git
shet of him.'"
"Frale seen a houn' dog on--on a--a cent, an'--an'--an' he's gone home
to--to get shet of him. What's 'get shet of him,' Frale?"
"Nevah mind, honey; yer paw'll know. Run in an' tell him 'fore you
forgit hit. Good-by."
She danced gayly off toward the house, but turned to call back at him,
as he stood watching her. "Are you going to hit the 'houn'' dog with the
pretty ball, Frale?"
"I reckon." He laughed and strode off toward the one small station in
the opposite direction from the way the man had taken.
Frale knew well where he had gone. On the outskirts of the village was a
small grove of sycamore and gum trees, by a little stream, where it was
the custom for the mountain people to camp with their canvas-covered
wagons. There they would build their fires on a charred place between
stones, and heat their coffee. There they would feed their oxen or mule
team, tied to the rear wheels of their wagons, with corn thrown on the
ground before them. At nightfall they would crawl under the canvas cover
and sleep on the corn fodder within.
Often beneath the fodder might be found a few jugs of raw corn whiskey
hidden away, while the articles they had brought down for sale or barter
at the village stores were placed on top in plain view. Sometimes they
brought vegetables, or baskets of splints and willow withes, made by
their women, or they might have a few yards of homespun towelling.
The man Frale had seen was the older brother of his friend Ferdinand
Teasley, and well Frale knew that he was camped with his ox team down by
the spring, where it had been his habit to wait for the cover of
darkness, when he could steal forth and leave his jugs where the money
might be found for them, placed on some rock or stump or fallen trunk
half concealed by laurel shrubs. How often had the products of Frale's
still been conveyed down the mountain by that same ox team, in that same
unwieldy vehicle!
Giles Teasley's cabin and patch of soil, planted always to corn, was a
long distance from his father's mill, and also from his brother's still,
hence he could with the more safety dispose of their illicit drink.
In the slow but deadly sure manner of his people, he had but just
aroused himself to the fact that his brother's murderer was still alive
and the deed unavenged; and Frale knew he had come now, not to dispose
of the whiskey, since the still had been destroyed, but to find his
brother's slayer and accord him the justice of the hills.
To the mountain people the processes of the law seemed vague and
uncertain. They preferred their own methods. A well-loaded gun, a sure
aim, and a few months of hiding among relatives and friends until the
vigilance of the emissaries of the law had subsided was the rule with
them. Thus had Frale's father twice escaped either prison or the rope,
and during the last four years of his life he had never once ventured
from his mountain home for a day at the settlements below; while among
his friends his prowess and his skill in evading pursuit were his glory.
Now it was Frale's thought to dare the worst,--to walk to the station
like any village youth, buy his ticket, and take the train for Carew's
Crossing, and from there make his way to his haunt while yet Giles
Teasley was taking his first sleep.
He reasoned, and rightly, that his enemy would linger about several days
searching for him, and never dream of his having made his escape by
means of the train. Since the first scurry of search was over, it was no
longer the officers of the law Frale feared, but this same lank,
ill-favored mountaineer, who was now warming his coffee and eating his
raw salt pork and corn-bread by the stream, while his drooling cattle
stood near, sleepily chewing their cuds.