That night, the rain, beating out its strong staccato rhythm on the old
clapboards roofing the barn, made scant impression on Jasper Larrabee's
senses; he slept soundly amongst the great elastic billows of the hay.
As by degrees the downpour slackened, the comparative silence affected
his half-dormant consciousness as sound had failed to do. He roused
slightly from time to time, and presently was broad awake, to hear only
the melancholy drip from the eaves and the chorus of far-away frogs
beginning to pipe anew along the pools. He did not welcome his other
self, that mysterious essence of thought and will that was torn with
hopes and fed on regrets, and was prone to hold troublous disputations
with yet another inner self, which on its part was always keen to find
out every fault, to upbraid each cherished sin, and had an ugly trick
of unmasking and setting in a strong unflattering light motives which
might otherwise seem to be above suspicion. The humbler obvious entity
known as Jasper Larrabee would, he often thought, be happier without so
definite a development of either of these endowments, his mind or his
conscience; for thus he learned from their functions to differentiate
them. When this Jasper Larrabee was well fed, he was hearty and happy.
The sun shone on him, and he sang till the woods rang. When he went
down into the sunless depths of the Lost Time mine, every strong muscle
rejoiced in the work, and his steady nerve, which is called courage,
gave a zest to danger, whether the menace were of the law, or of the
wild beast in the wilderness, or of the civilized savage amongst his
own associates. If it had not been for his mind forever asking "Why?"
and his conscience grimly protesting "Because," what a thriving,
well-balanced physical organization Jasper Larrabee might have been! He
knew others who were little more than body, who asked no questions and
heard no answers; he held them far the happier for it, and he did not
realize how much the duller. And so he hated the "Why?" and flinched
from the "Because." And here they were in company, these choice
spirits, in the suddenly silent midnight, with only the melancholy drip
at long intervals from the eaves, the vague piping of frogs sounding
afar off and failing again, and that strange preponderating sense of
the proximity of the mountains although enshrouded and invisible in
the mist. The sibilant rustle of the hay was loud in the stillness
as he shifted his posture. He shifted it often, being anxious and
restless, for his brace of companions were more censorious even than
their wont as to that limited cheerful physique which he accounted
Jasper Larrabee. He had had naught to eat but a few handfuls of
grapes from the vines that clambered over the gable of the barn, and
some unpalatable raw eggs found among the hay; and this fact of hunger
gave a mighty grip to the poignancy of "Because." He had had naught to
do all the long rainy day but to lie in the hay and look out through
the crevices of the logs at the queer acorn-like roof of his mother's
house, that had welcomed so many, and had no place now for him or for
her. He watched with all the grief of an exile the children coming
and going, and the gaunt Mrs. Timson wielding an unbridled authority,
making the most of her usurpations; he heard, with the indignant
objection that naturally appertains to the heir to the throne, her
raucous raised voice in objurgation or command. Again and again these
sounds came from the opaque blankness of the mist; for often the
clouds obscured the little house altogether, and crowded through the
crevices of the barn, and shifted back and forth. For the reason of
the continuous fog he had delayed to inform the officer of the law and
deliver Espey to him. Doubtless, in the idleness of his solitary day in
the mine, Espey would be alert and hear an approach, and might escape
through some aperture of the cavern other than the main entrance; the
thick mists would then conceal him indubitably, and further his flight
without the slightest scruple as to responsibility as accessory after
the fact. Larrabee was waiting for the darkness that he might take
Espey the more certainly, while his vigilance was relaxed in working at
the forlorn enterprise of old Haight and his lieutenant "Tawm" in the
mine. But in waiting Larrabee had fallen asleep, and the iteration of
the steady rainfall was somnolent in its effects, and the hours drowsed
by. He knew that it was past midnight before he noted the slant of a
late-risen moon, golden, lustrous, dreamlike, softly shining through
the crevices of the logs in one corner of the ramshackle old place.
The sky was clearing, then. He rose hastily to his feet, and leaned
out of the window. Clear! It was of a deeply limpid and definite blue,
with white and gray clouds, moon-illumined, drawing back swiftly from
vast expanses of this lucid ether all a-sparkle with the whiteness of
the stars. With the dank earth so dark below, and the dully glamourous
light of the moon in her last quarter, it seemed to him that he had
never seen the stars so splendidly white. The next moment a sudden pang
of suspense, of fear, that was like a bodily throe had wrested away his
breath. He hardly realized that he had moved; he only knew that he had
sprung down the rotting rungs of the old ladder and through the barn
below, because he was standing outside the door upon the ground, gazing
up, bareheaded, wild-eyed, in a frenzy of doubt, of anxiety, of a sort
of unreasoning terror, at the skies. For the star--his star--was gone!
It had vanished! Again and again, with the strong pulse of hope, he
swept the heavens with eager search. Afterward he thought he remembered
a dull leaden-hued minute object in the place of that splendid silver
shining that had made his heart so glad. It had vanished,--its message
withheld, its mystery unrevealed, like an illusion, like a fagged-out
enthusiasm, like the futile words of a prayer without the fervor
of faith. He could not believe it. Again and again he sought a new
posture, a new hope. He followed its closer neighbors along the steeps
of the mountain as they journeyed toward the west in the sky above.
The tint of the heavens was changing presently,--a lighter blue. The
golden moon grew of a pearl-like lustre. The stars waxed faint. The
clouds were red. And here was the gray day hard upon him, and in the
earth naught of value, for in the sky he had lost a star. How strong,
how resistless of advance, was the riding up of the great sun! Get ye
away, illusions, and glamours, and dreamers of dreams! Such a definite
visible world! How full of fixed facts! He saw, as he stood, the
shanties of the workmen in the Cove, where the mists were hustling off
in great haste, as if too tenuous, too unsubstantial, too inutile, to
hold ground in the face of the strong practicalities dawning over the
horizon. The smoke was curling up from the chimney of Cap'n Lucy's
cabin, where breakfast was cooking. The cows were at the bars. All the
woods were lustrous with moisture, and splendidly a-glint with the
yellow sunbeams striking aslant through them. The distant mountains
were blue and amethyst and violet and purple,--a rhapsody of color.
Here and there, as if the rain had painted them, boughs of sumach and
sourwood were scarlet in the woods; the sweet-gum showed flecks of
purple leaves, and the hickory had occasional flares of yellow. The
goldenrod had burst into bloom, and with this seal of the autumnal
season stamped upon the land came Julia along the road, her bonnet
hanging on her shoulders, her head bare, her face like spring itself,
her hands full of flowers that she scattered as she sang. How her fresh
young voice rang against the turmoil of the current from the Lost Time
mine, like some sudden burst of joy from out the fretted tides of a
troubled life! As she tossed the flowers, and glanced over her shoulder
to see where they fell, Larrabee crossed the log laid from one deeply
gullied bank to the other side of the road, to serve foot passengers
when the water was high in wet weather. She paused, and looked at him
with a frown. The unwonted corrugations in her fair young brow changed
her inexpressive face almost out of recognition. He stood in silent
deprecation for a moment. His heart was sore. His life was full of
trouble of many sorts and degrees. That æsthetic loss, that sense of
bereavement because of his vanished star, outrankled them all.
Courage is of the nature of an essence; one may not judge how it will
pull the beam, nor is it dispensed by dry measure. Something seemingly
inadequate, a breath of wind, a change of mind, or the chilling of the
fervors of some futile and foolish enthusiasm, and behold the volatile
element is dispersed through the air. The strain on Larrabee's nerves
had been great. His sensibilities had waxed tender. He faltered before
the definite bending of those delicately marked brows.
"Ye air out betimes, Julia?" he ventured propitiatingly, as she stoutly
maintained silence. "What be ye a-doin' of with them flowers?"
"Sowin' 'em," said Julia instantly. "I expec' 'em ter bloom thar in the
road ter mo' purpose 'n they ever did afore."
He cast a glance of wonderment at her. But her unfriendly manner, her
cold eye, disconcerted him afresh, and nullified his surprise at her
words.
"Air you-uns mad at me down at yer house?" he demanded eagerly.
"What fur?" she asked, with a keen, belligerent look that was mightily
like Cap'n Lucy.
"'Bout my speakin' so free 'bout Espey, an' Cap'n Lucy not warnin' me
an' my mother, knowin' him ter be sought fur murder?"
"Oh!" she cried, with airy causticity. "I hed furgot it."
He felt the covert fleer of this speedy dismissal. But with him pride
was at a low ebb. He silently looked at her as she held a cardinal
flower to her red lips, while her long-lashed blue eyes scanned the
dewy bunch of jewel-weed and mountain snow and wild asters that filled
her hands. The wind swayed her dark blue skirt as she stood on a great
fragment of rock beside the running stream. It gave a certain volant
effect to her pose, her flower-laden hands, her singular beauty;
she seemed the very genius of the flowering season, its perfect
personification.
"Waal, I'm glad o' that," he said humbly. "I need all my friends, an'
all the comfort I kin git."
He paused, daunted in a measure by her unresponsiveness. But she was
always silent, always undemonstrative, and perhaps her manner in this
instance went for less than its worth.
"Julia," he said, "I hev hed a powerful strange 'sperience lately. An'
it hev cast me down mightily. Not religious,--though I expected suthin'
leadin' an' speritual out'n it. I viewed a new star in the sky."
She was looking at the flowers on the soggy road as if she cared for
no other radiance than their gleam of earthy hue, albeit an evanescent
glow.
"Nobody but me viewed it," he went on after a moment of unfruitful
expectation. "I tried other folks, an' they seen nuthin'. An' by that
I 'lowed it hed some charge fur me, some leadin'. Stars hev been
messengers afore this." He interposed this affirmation of precedent
for proof. His senses were keen. He had not failed to note the ring
of incredulity in Kenniston's voice. He paused, thinking again of the
wise men of the East, and the blessed path to the cradled Christ as the
Star guided them. He sighed deeply as he plucked off the yellow plumes
of a wayside spray of goldenrod. The fragments floated away on the
stream, and he drearily lifted his haggard eyes to the broad whiteness
of the day brightening over all the purple mountains and bronze-green
valleys; here all miracles exhaled with the mists of the night and the
evanescence of the stars. The atmosphere of the practical, the prosaic,
the recognized and thrice-tried forces of nature was paramount.
Naught seemed to exist that man in his ignorant cognoscence had not
explored. But he had expected no miracle; he had sought no wonderful
worldly gifts or graces. True, the will of God is much to know, but
he had thought that with so signal an intimation a leading might be
vouchsafed. Had not other men followed a star to Christ? And was there
naught for him, no little thing for him to do? Did that gracious
supernal stellular presence shine on him, and him alone, only to amaze,
to baffle, to dismay him,--to find his life but poorly furnished, and
to leave it empty?
"I got no leadin' out'n it," he said drearily. "It jes' disappeared
somehows. I dunno ef ez suddint ez it kem or no, bein' ez several
nights war rainy and clouded over. It's gone!"
Something in his dreary tone smote upon Julia's preoccupied faculties.
Whether she harbored rancor against him for Jack Espey's sake, whether
she resented his criticism of her father, whether she repelled the
intrusion of the consciousness of any other emotion than the paramount
emotion which possessed her, and love crowded out and trampled on pity,
she spoke with a keen fling of satire.
"Waal, ef yer star hev petered out, ye hed better go an' get Ad'licia
ter hearten ye up by tellin' ye ter take notice how many stars thar be
lef'. Ye'll be lighted full well on occasion."
He flushed at the taunt, but love is of long patience.
"Air ye mad at Ad'licia?" he queried, interested in aught that touched
Julia.
"Naw--yes"--She hesitated, interested herself. "That is, I can't holp
bein' mad with the idjit fur bein' _sech_ a idjit."
"How is she a idjit?" demanded Larrabee.
"Fur not marryin' Jack Espey whenst she hed the chance. Dad an' Luther
would hev stood off Ross an' sech cattle, or gin bond fur him an'
patched up things somehow. Ye know they would. Ef I hed been in her
place, now, an' ef he hed axed _me_"--
She paused abruptly, with a sort of appalled recognition of the
sentiment that animated her. A sudden illumination had broken in upon
her; her heart throbbed tumultuously with pleasure, or was it pain? For
she loved Jack Espey; and he--oh, was it true that he loved Adelicia
still? She hardly heeded or realized her self-betrayal. She did not
see--so little did she care--the pallid dismay, the heartbreak, on
Jasper Larrabee's face. He could not deceive himself,--it was too
patent. He turned away with a bitter sense of resentment, another
grudge toward Jack Espey for thus slyly and completely supplanting him.
At that moment his eye fell upon the jagged rock about the entrance of
the Lost Time mine, and he drew back in amazement.
"Why, where does all this water come from?" he exclaimed sharply. He
wondered that he had not marked it before, despite his preoccupation.
For the flow of the stream was quadrupled, its momentum every instant
greater. Naught could enter now. The interior must be flooded anew. As
he gazed at it, wide-eyed and dumfounded, a sudden enlightenment as to
the phenomenon broke upon him. The blasting which he had heard,--he
remembered it now; doubtless the concussion had brought down some mass
of rock or earth, damming an underground current, and forcing its
waters into the channel of the stream which partially emptied here,
while the residue backed up and filled the spaces. He thought that
Espey and the old man and "Tawm" had possibly made good their escape
before it happened; but if not--and Taft--He remembered how close were
the ghostly voices when he had last heard the false, cracked tones of
command ring through the tunnel. Those ill-timbered galleries would
fall to a certainty. He turned pale at the very thought of a living
burial in the den of the still-room.
He did not hesitate. Without a word he sprang upon the log, crossed
the water, and sped away like the wind, leaving Julia gazing in
astonishment after him. He thought his worst fears were realized, when
he reached the store of the Lost Time mine. His hasty question elicited
from the children only the fact of the absence of Taft and Copley. He
ran down into the cellar, to find the obliteration of the traces of the
old door, which he recognized only as an added precaution since his
departure. Doubtless some other method of entering the tunnel had been
devised. An axe hacking through the chinking served to reveal the ruin
of the tunnel, and to admit a strong and pervasive odor of gunpowder.
Lorenzo Taft's plans were very perfectly calculated and adjusted to
the probabilities. There had been no rift in his judgment. Nowhere
could he find fault or flaw in his reasoning. A lucky chance had fired
the hotel, and freed his hands from the smirch of the firebrand and
the possible penalties of arson. The moving of the great monument
of boundary had thrown the only available site for the hotel on the
Kenniston tract well within Cap'n Lucy's lines when the land was
processioned, and thus the summer swallow must needs alight elsewhere,
and the commercial interests of moonshining would thereby be promoted.
Each detail had fallen out exactly as he had planned. Success seemed
the essential sequence. Only Espey's frantic fear of arrest had
precipitated all the untoward events which had advanced parallel after
parallel, and forced him to his last defenses. And these one might
think were most sagacious and adequate. The foolish drunken boy,
whose tongue might work mischief, was within the hour hustled out of
the country. Every trace of the forbidden vocation was demolished
beyond the possibility of detection. If Larrabee should seek revenge
by informing, he could prove naught, not even his own complicity. It
would seem but the groundless accusation of malice. And Taft had even
taken time by the forelock by avowing his former illegal practices,
his prison record, his familiarity with the motives and manœuvres of
moonshiners, and insidiously casting suspicion on Larrabee, ascribing
to him an adequate motive for moving the Big Hollow Boulder, in the
eyes of the law a felony.
No possible flaw in his reasoning from the premises from which
he argued. He had guarded himself logically, boldly, with great
perspicacity, from enmity, from revenge. It never for one moment
occurred to him to devise protection from good will!
Kenniston and Ross, even in the excitement of the emergency, and the
tumultuous tide of Larrabee's eager explanations when he suddenly burst
in upon them as they sat smoking together after breakfast, could but
take heed of the subtler sub-current of significance in his disclosure.
More than once they exchanged glances charged with a meaning deeper
than he wot of.
"Thar's a shaft," he cried, "an old air-shaft, a-nigh that thar tunnel!
Ef ye'll rig up a windlass, or let yer men put me down with a rope,
I'll find Taft, an' the t'others too, ef they be thar yit."
"You'll drown yourself, or fall, or suffocate with gas," Kenniston said
tentatively, looking about for his hat, and pausing to cast a keen
glance at Larrabee.
"I'll resk it--I'll resk it--fur him and Espey too--an' I dunno what
my mother would do ef old grand-daddy Haight war ter kem ter sech an
e-end! Oh, I'll resk it! An' Taft, he ain't a bad man when all's said.
Taft's mighty clever sometimes."
"I think he's the worst man I ever saw," said Kenniston, as he flung
away his cigar.
A call for volunteers and the offer of a reward by Kenniston secured
no companion to Larrabee in his venture when the workmen looked down
into the dark shaft, with its crumbling sides, and sound of tumbling
waters, and chill dank foul breath. They only manifested their good
will in their alacrity in adjusting and adapting such appliances as
they could to insure Larrabee's safety as far as possible. Kenniston
doubted at the time whether he ought to permit the jeopardy; being
assured, however, that the effort would be made at all events, but
without the advantage of the heavy cables and pulleys which had been
used in building the hotel, and which his compliance offered, he
yielded. Afterward he was disposed to take great credit to himself
for several devices which facilitated the enterprise, and from his
knowledge of mechanical resources he doubtless insured its success;
he bore the honors of the rescue,--which Larrabee at the peril of his
life achieved,--with all the unblushing effrontery of an officer whose
command has won a battle.
He was in a glow of enthusiasm for the nonce, and he continued the rôle
of benefactor with more genuine pleasure than had lately fallen to his
jaded susceptibility. He placed eighty-seven silver dollars in a worn
leather bag, a tobacco pouch of one of the workmen, to be given to old
Haight when he should be sufficiently recovered, with the pious fiction
that his own money had been found in the shaft. "This will keep the old
mole from burrowing again," he said.
His abounding good nature was very thorough when once aroused. His
heart was touched by Espey's forlorn plight, as he lay panting on the
grass, and the pallor of his young face marked by the dread of life
that had just succeeded the dread of death.
"Can't you make out to let up on Espey, somehow?" he said aside to
Rodolphus Ross, whose clumsy pranks of delight at the successful
outcome of this most exciting episode were like the extravagant
joviality of a gamboling Newfoundland dog, and not unpleasing to his
interlocutor from their common bond of sympathy.
"Who? Espey?" He paused, turning his lighted dark eyes on Kenniston,
his peaked hat shading his elevated eyebrows and surprised face. "I
ain't hyar arter Espey no more. I'm arter the fire-bug, ye know. That
thar man ez Espey shot in Tanglefoot Cove hev got well o' the pip, or
the gapes, or whatever the weak-kneed chicken took from the bullet; an'
this hyar warrant fur arrest hev been kerried round in my pocket till
it's mighty nigh wore out." He took the ragged paper from his pocket
and shook out its tatters, and laughed and grimaced in the very face of
its august authority. "Go on, boy, go on! I wouldn't put the county
ter charges ter board ye!" he said to Espey.
A supply of whiskey was on hand, for the ostensible purpose of reviving
the victims of the Lost Time mine, as they were drawn up one by one
from those treacherous depths, limp and pallid and fainting. But the
quantity was sufficient to enable the company of rescuers subsequently
to refresh themselves, and Kenniston genially treated the crowd. Some
of the men now and then began to coil up the ropes, and again fell to
discussing the jeopardy and the disastrous possibilities; and much
hilarity and gratulation prevailed amongst the group in the dewy woods,
still filled with the slant of the early morning sunshine, when Espey
slipped away from it. His heart was still sore, as if it had forgotten
to beat except with a dull throb of pain, unrealizing his change of
fortune except to sullenly rebel against all the unnecessary woe that
had fallen to his lot. As he went along the road, he scarcely noted a
flower here and there on the soggy ground. The dash and fret of the
stream from the portal of the Lost Time mine caught his attention. He
marked its added volume, and, with his familiarity with the terrible
subterranean chambers, he could picture to himself the obstacles
which lay in its course, and which the blasting from the tunnel or
the still-room had brought down. He trembled and grew cold with the
thought of his jeopardy. He mechanically cursed anew Taft's name, as he
had done again and again since his voice, his "partin' compliments,"
had been audible before the charge in the tunnel had been fired. He
shuddered again as he recalled the sound of the water backing up ever
higher and higher through those black dungeons, lisping and hissing
its insidious threat through all the long night. How woeful it had
been--with the wild terror of his companions to contemplate, till
he was as wild with the terror of them as of his own fate--to look
momently to meet death here, without a soul on earth to truly care,
to anguish for him as he was anguished--He paused, the tenor of his
thought breaking abruptly. Had he seen it before, or had he only
fancied that cardinal flower lying in the sun on the gray rock by the
water? Was it not thus that he should know that Julia had passed and
had thought of him,--was not this their covenant? He doubtfully picked
up the delicate spray--another; still, it might be an accident, a
coincidence. A cluster of jewel-weeds lay caught in the bark of the log
that served as footbridge, and swayed and glowed in the sun; it was in
his hand when he reached the further bank. As far as one might hope to
command a glimpse from the mine, the fragile tokens were scattered.
They were full of dew; their breath allured him. They trembled as with
some shy, timorous thought in his trembling hand. The color had come
into his face; a light was in his eyes; his tired, troubled pulses were
beating fast, strong, with a new rhythm. And as Julia, still loitering
homeward, her head bare, her hands empty, heard a footstep behind her
and turned, she saw him, all her garnered blossoms in his grasp, and
all his heart in his eyes.
* * * * *
Kenniston, still elated, but somewhat tired out with the morning's
excitements, upon reaching his quarters among the workmen's shanties,
found Cap'n Lucy there awaiting an audience, and all unaware of the
progress of events of so much moment elsewhere to-day. A rousing
"cock-a-doodle-doo" might be a fair summary of Cap'n Lucy's discourse.
His perplexities had vanished with the tangled twists of the rain, and
he set forth boldly and with much detail his discovery of the moving of
the boulder, the corner monument of boundary, his anxiety and doubt as
to his proper course, and his realization that the surveyor's line had
thrown much land which he knew was Kenniston's within his own domain.
A man of tact was Cap'n Lucy in his own way. He so glossed over his
suspicions of Kenniston that albeit the latter detected them rather
through the correlated circumstances than through the veneer of that
section of his mind which it pleased Cap'n Lucy to present, he did not
look upon them seriously. He was a stranger; the old man was densely
ignorant, and his experience of life and comparative knowledge of men
were limited indeed; and in truth it was apparently impossible to
deduce from the facts any other interest than Kenniston's to be served
by the moving of the boulder. Thus he silently forgave Cap'n Lucy for
his suspected suspicions.
And Cap'n Lucy was heartily ashamed of them now.
"I know it air moved bodaciously--Big Hollow Boulder--corner
mark--monimint o' boundary; an' now what air ye an' me goin' ter do
'bout that thar dad-burned line what's gone an' coiled itself like the
plumb old Scorpion o' the Pit?"
"Procession the land again, and prosecute the man who moved the
boulder," said Kenniston coolly.
And indeed justice had hardily overtaken Lorenzo Taft, for Kenniston's
unwonted leniency did not hold out to include his offending. It seemed
to him a very pretty play of cause and effect that so close upon the
heels of Taft's accusations of Larrabee, and his subtle and successful
hoodwinking of the practiced man of business, who made a point of
knowing men, Taft should be hurrying to Colbury and the county jail,
under the escort of the jubilant Rodolphus Ross and a posse of two
or three stout fellows, to answer these very charges of arson and of
feloniously moving a corner monument of boundary,--all because of
Larrabee's voluntarily putting his life in jeopardy for his sake.
Nevertheless, Kenniston listened mildly enough to Adelicia's earnest
intercessions for Taft that evening, when he sat as of yore with the
family circle around Cap'n Lucy's fireside; he seemed to find a
certain fascination in the incongruities of her ingenious palliations
and extenuations of his crime.
"He moughtn't hev been acquainted with the boulder ez a monimint o'
boundary," she urged; and when the fallacy of this was demonstrated,
"He mought hev been sorry an' wanted to put it back, but it war too
heavy an' the hill war too high."
Whereupon Kenniston burst into satiric laughter.
"He's sorry enough now, I'll warrant you; and he'll be sorrier still
before I'm through with him."
But although Adelicia's expertness in excuses for other people failed
in this instance, Kenniston's purposes were frustrated by a wholesale
jail delivery which occurred at Colbury shortly after, and Taft was
among the jail-birds who took flight thence. He was never heard of
again in the Cove. The thought of him at large and at enmity served to
postpone the building of the hotel for a time. The plans for a great
public edifice in Bretonville absorbed Kenniston in the immediate
future, and finally he grew indifferent to the project of the mountain
resort, and it was definitely abandoned.
Larrabee profited by Kenniston's advice, and availed himself of the
"amnesty" proffered by the government to moonshiners about that time,
and thenceforward the still knew him no more. The manufacture of
"brush whiskey" was never resumed at the Lost Time mine. The store
there became truly a centre of barter under the ministrations of old
Copley and the power behind the throne, his niece, Cornelia Taft, who
developed much of her father's decision and definiteness and shrewdness
of character as she grew older, always tempered by Mrs. Jiniway's
precepts, to which she rigidly adhered. She received much countenance,
and guidance too, in these early years, from Adelicia, who persisted
in following the bent of her own lenient inclination toward others,
making the most of their good qualities and light of their foibles. It
was a certain solace in the bitter loss of other illusions for which
she was less charitable. She never could be brought to believe that
Julia had not intentionally wiled her lover's heart away from her. It
was a relief when these strained relations were at an end, when Julia
and Espey were married, in defiance of Cap'n Lucy's opposition, and had
gone to Tanglefoot Cove. Cap'n Lucy argued their much-mooted points of
difference with Adelicia less than before, and deferred in silence to
her. It was only when, in the winter evenings, Jasper Larrabee was wont
to come and read aloud, as in the old days, that Cap'n Lucy rose to
his normal temperature of contradiction, and controverted sundry hard
sayings difficult to be incorporated in the life of a willful man, and
contemned Jasper Larrabee's learning, and accused him of ignorantly
perverting the Scriptures. Then it was that Adelicia's talents of
optimism became transcendently apparent. She developed a wonderful
craft of interpretation. Leaning over one arm of Cap'n Lucy's chair,
while Jasper Larrabee leaned over the other with his book and page to
show,--Cap'n Lucy, flustered and red-faced, acrid and belligerent,
vociferating between them,--Adelicia would demonstrate that this
doubtless meant the other, or it was plain to see that the reference
was not general, thus including Cap'n Lucy, but was made directly to
the character under discussion; whereby Cap'n Lucy, perceiving that no
added burden of meekness or other Christian grace was to be laid upon
him as essential to salvation, would permit himself to be pacified. And
Adelicia's gifts grew by much exercise. Even Cap'n Lucy, always acute,
became reluctantly aware of this, in some sort. "Ad'licia hav got so
durned smart she kin mighty nigh explain away the devil," he fretted,
unaware that this feat had already been accomplished by other and more
pretentious theologians than Adelicia. The gossips said, in the Cove,
that it was in the process of trying to "'square' Cap'n Lucy to the
Scriptur's, or ter square the Scriptur's ter Cap'n Lucy," that Adelicia
and Jasper fell in love with each other. Certain it is the days came
in which neither had aught to regret, and Adelicia's optimism was
triumphantly justified.
Even his vanished star came to be a tender memory to Larrabee rather
than a poignant bereavement. Sometimes thinking of that dread descent
into the crumbling old shaft of the Lost Time mine, with the chill
sound of the tumbling waters below, the thick foul air in his every
breath, the desperate straining of the ropes that so shook his nerves,
the fragments of rock falling about his head, and his heart fairly
failing him for fear, he deemed he had found the "leading" he had asked
and had followed it. For since he could do naught for Christ, whose
humble humanity is merged in the majesty of the great King of heaven,
he might do somewhat for man whom He died to save.
He did not know that his star remained for a time a faint telescopic
object and interested the speculation of astronomers, whose outlook
from their wisdom was also limited as his from his ignorance. They
merely accounted it one of those mysterious, unwonted apparitions, a
stranger to all the astral hierarchy, prettily called "guest-stars"
in the ancient Chinese records, and they knew after a time that the
"Ke-sing dissolved." They did not dream that this celestial visitant
could be charged with a moral mission; for in all the discoveries
and advances of science, what mystic lens might serve to reveal the
amaranthine wreath and the nearing pinion?
* * * * *