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EARTH'S ENIGMAS
A VOLUME OF STORIES BY
CHARLES G D ROBERTS
LAMSON WOLFFE AND COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK 1896
_Copyright, 1895_,
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
Author's Note.
Most of the stories in this collection have already appeared in the
pages of English, American, or Canadian periodicals. For kind courtesies
in regard to the reprinting of these stories my thanks are due to the
Editors of Harper's Magazine, Longman's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine,
The Cosmopolitan, Lippincott's Magazine, The Independent, The Toronto
Globe, Harper's Bazaar, and The Youth's Companion.
C. G. D. R.
Fredericton, N. B.
_January, 1896._
Contents.
Do Seek their Meat from God
The Perdu
"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him"
Within Sound of the Saws
The Butt of the Camp
In the Accident Ward
The Romance of an Ox-Team
A Tragedy of the Tides
At the Rough-and-Tumble Landing
An Experience of Jabez Batterpole
The Stone Dog
The Barn on the Marsh
Captain Joe and Jamie
Strayed
The Eye of Gluskâp
Earth's Enigmas.
Do Seek their Meat from God.
One side of the ravine was in darkness. The darkness was soft and rich,
suggesting thick foliage. Along the crest of the slope tree-tops came
into view--great pines and hemlocks of the ancient unviolated
forest--revealed against the orange disk of a full moon just rising. The
low rays slanting through the moveless tops lit strangely the upper
portion of the opposite steep,--the western wall of the ravine, barren,
unlike its fellow, bossed with great rocky projections, and harsh with
stunted junipers. Out of the sluggish dark that lay along the ravine as
in a trough, rose the brawl of a swollen, obstructed stream.
Out of a shadowy hollow behind a long white rock, on the lower edge of
that part of the steep which lay in the moonlight, came softly a great
panther. In common daylight his coat would have shown a warm fulvous
hue, but in the elvish decolorizing rays of that half hidden moon he
seemed to wear a sort of spectral gray. He lifted his smooth round head
to gaze on the increasing flame, which presently he greeted with a
shrill cry. That terrible cry, at once plaintive and menacing, with an
undertone like the fierce protestations of a saw beneath the file, was a
summons to his mate, telling her that the hour had come when they should
seek their prey. From the lair behind the rock, where the cubs were
being suckled by their dam, came no immediate answer. Only a pair of
crows, that had their nest in a giant fir-tree across the gulf, woke up
and croaked harshly their indignation. These three summers past they had
built in the same spot, and had been nightly awakened to vent the same
rasping complaints.
The panther walked restlessly up and down, half a score of paces each
way, along the edge of the shadow, keeping his wide-open green eyes upon
the rising light. His short, muscular tail twitched impatiently, but he
made no sound. Soon the breadth of confused brightness had spread itself
further down the steep, disclosing the foot of the white rock, and the
bones and antlers of a deer which had been dragged thither and devoured.
By this time the cubs had made their meal, and their dam was ready for
such enterprise as must be accomplished ere her own hunger, now grown
savage, could hope to be assuaged. She glided supplely forth into the
glimmer, raised her head, and screamed at the moon in a voice as
terrible as her mate's. Again the crows stirred, croaking harshly; and
the two beasts, noiselessly mounting the steep, stole into the shadows
of the forest that clothed the high plateau.
The panthers were fierce with hunger. These two days past their hunting
had been well-nigh fruitless. What scant prey they had slain had for the
most part been devoured by the female; for had she not those small blind
cubs at home to nourish, who soon must suffer at any lack of hers? The
settlements of late had been making great inroads on the world of
ancient forest, driving before them the deer and smaller game. Hence the
sharp hunger of the panther parents, and hence it came that on this
night they hunted together. They purposed to steal upon the settlements
in their sleep, and take tribute of the enemies' flocks.
Through the dark of the thick woods, here and there pierced by the
moonlight, they moved swiftly and silently. Now and again a dry twig
would snap beneath the discreet and padded footfalls. Now and again, as
they rustled some low tree, a pewee or a nuthatch would give a startled
chirp. For an hour the noiseless journeying continued, and ever and anon
the two gray, sinuous shapes would come for a moment into the view of
the now well-risen moon. Suddenly there fell upon their ears, far off
and faint, but clearly defined against the vast stillness of the
Northern forest, a sound which made those stealthy hunters pause and
lift their heads. It was the voice of a child crying,--crying long and
loud, hopelessly, as if there were no one by to comfort it. The panthers
turned aside from their former course and glided toward the sound. They
were not yet come to the outskirts of the settlement, but they knew of a
solitary cabin lying in the thick of the woods a mile and more from the
nearest neighbor. Thither they bent their way, fired with fierce hope.
Soon would they break their bitter fast.
Up to noon of the previous day the lonely cabin had been occupied. Then
its owner, a shiftless fellow, who spent his days for the most part at
the corner tavern three miles distant, had suddenly grown disgusted with
a land wherein one must work to live, and had betaken himself with his
seven-year-old boy to seek some more indolent clime. During the long
lonely days when his father was away at the tavern the little boy had
been wont to visit the house of the next neighbor, to play with a child
of some five summers, who had no other playmate. The next neighbor was a
prosperous pioneer, being master of a substantial frame-house in the
midst of a large and well-tilled clearing. At times, though rarely,
because it was forbidden, the younger child would make his way by a
rough wood road to visit his poor little disreputable playmate. At
length it had appeared that the five-year-old was learning unsavory
language from the elder boy, who rarely had an opportunity of hearing
speech more desirable. To the bitter grief of both children, the
companionship had at length been stopped by unalterable decree of the
master of the frame house.
Hence it had come to pass that the little boy was unaware of his
comrade's departure. Yielding at last to an eager longing for that
comrade, he had stolen away late in the afternoon, traversed with
endless misgivings the lonely stretch of wood road and reached the cabin
only to find it empty. The door, on its leathern hinges, swung idly
open. The one room had been stripped of its few poor furnishings. After
looking in the rickety shed, whence darted two wild and hawklike
chickens, the child had seated himself on the hacked threshold, and
sobbed passionately with a grief that he did not fully comprehend. Then
seeing the shadows lengthen across the tiny clearing, he had grown
afraid to start for home. As the dusk gathered, he had crept trembling
into the cabin, whose door would not stay shut. When it grew quite dark,
he crouched in the inmost corner of the room, desperate with fear and
loneliness, and lifted up his voice piteously. From time to time his
lamentations would be choked by sobs, or he would grow breathless, and
in the terrifying silence would listen hard to hear if any one or
anything were coming. Then again would the shrill childish wailings
arise, startling the unexpectant night, and piercing the forest depths,
even to the ears of those great beasts which had set forth to seek their
meat from God.
The lonely cabin stood some distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, back
from the highway connecting the settlements. Along this main road a man
was plodding wearily. All day he had been walking, and now as he neared
home his steps began to quicken with anticipation of rest. Over his
shoulder projected a double-barrelled fowling-piece, from which was
slung a bundle of such necessities as he had purchased in town that
morning. It was the prosperous settler, the master of the frame house.
His mare being with foal, he had chosen to make the tedious journey on
foot.
The settler passed the mouth of the wood road leading to the cabin. He
had gone perhaps a furlong beyond, when his ears were startled by the
sound of a child crying in the woods. He stopped, lowered his burden to
the road, and stood straining ears and eyes in the direction of the
sound. It was just at this time that the two panthers also stopped, and
lifted their heads to listen. Their ears were keener than those of the
man, and the sound had reached them at a greater distance.
Presently the settler realized whence the cries were coming. He called
to mind the cabin; but he did not know the cabin's owner had departed.
He cherished a hearty contempt for the drunken squatter; and on the
drunken squatter's child he looked with small favor, especially as a
playmate for his own boy. Nevertheless he hesitated before resuming his
journey.
"Poor little devil!" he muttered, half in wrath. "I reckon his precious
father's drunk down at 'the Corners,' and him crying for loneliness!"
Then he reshouldered his burden and strode on doggedly.
But louder, shriller, more hopeless and more appealing, arose the
childish voice, and the settler paused again, irresolute, and with
deepening indignation. In his fancy he saw the steaming supper his wife
would have awaiting him. He loathed the thought of retracing his steps,
and then stumbling a quarter of a mile through the stumps and bog of the
wood road. He was foot-sore as well as hungry, and he cursed the
vagabond squatter with serious emphasis; but in that wailing was a
terror which would not let him go on. He thought of his own little one
left in such a position, and straightway his heart melted. He turned,
dropped his bundle behind some bushes, grasped his gun, and made speed
back for the cabin.
"Who knows," he said to himself, "but that drunken idiot has left his
youngster without a bite to eat in the whole miserable shanty? Or maybe
he's locked out, and the poor little beggar's half scared to death.
_Sounds_ as if he was scared;" and at this thought the settler quickened
his pace.
As the hungry panthers drew near the cabin, and the cries of the lonely
child grew clearer, they hastened their steps, and their eyes opened to
a wider circle, flaming with a greener fire. It would be thoughtless
superstition to say the beasts were cruel. They were simply keen with
hunger, and alive with the eager passion of the chase. They were not
ferocious with any anticipation of battle, for they knew the voice was
the voice of a child, and something in the voice told them the child was
solitary. Theirs was no hideous or unnatural rage, as it is the custom
to describe it. They were but seeking with the strength, the cunning,
the deadly swiftness given them to that end, the food convenient for
them. On their success in accomplishing that for which nature had so
exquisitely designed them depended not only their own, but the lives of
their blind and helpless young, now whimpering in the cave on the slope
of the moon-lit ravine. They crept through a wet alder thicket, bounded
lightly over the ragged brush fence, and paused to reconnoitre on the
edge of the clearing, in the full glare of the moon. At the same moment
the settler emerged from the darkness of the wood-road on the opposite
side of the clearing. He saw the two great beasts, heads down and snouts
thrust forward, gliding toward the open cabin door.
For a few moments the child had been silent. Now his voice rose again in
pitiful appeal, a very ecstasy of loneliness and terror. There was a
note in the cry that shook the settler's soul. He had a vision of his
own boy, at home with his mother, safe-guarded from even the thought of
peril. And here was this little one left to the wild beasts! "Thank God!
Thank God I came!" murmured the settler, as he dropped on one knee to
take a surer aim. There was a loud report (not like the sharp crack of a
rifle), and the female panther, shot through the loins, fell in a heap,
snarling furiously and striking with her fore-paws.
The male walked around her in fierce and anxious amazement. Presently,
as the smoke lifted, he discerned the settler kneeling for a second
shot. With a high screech of fury, the lithe brute sprang upon his
enemy, taking a bullet full in his chest without seeming to know he was
hit. Ere the man could slip in another cartridge the beast was upon him,
bearing him to the ground and fixing keen fangs in his shoulder. Without
a word, the man set his strong fingers desperately into the brute's
throat, wrenched himself partly free, and was struggling to rise, when
the panther's body collapsed upon him all at once, a dead weight which
he easily flung aside. The bullet had done its work just in time.
Quivering from the swift and dreadful contest, bleeding profusely from
his mangled shoulder, the settler stepped up to the cabin door and
peered in. He heard sobs in the darkness.
"Don't be scared, sonny," he said, in a reassuring voice. "I'm going to
take you home along with me. Poor little lad, _I'll_ look after you if
folks that ought to don't."
Out of the dark corner came a shout of delight, in a voice which made
the settler's heart stand still. "_Daddy_, daddy," it said, "I _knew_
you'd come. I was so frightened when it got dark!" And a little figure
launched itself into the settler's arms, and clung to him trembling. The
man sat down on the threshold and strained the child to his breast. He
remembered how near he had been to disregarding the far-off cries, and
great beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead.
Not many weeks afterwards the settler was following the fresh trail of a
bear which had killed his sheep. The trail led him at last along the
slope of a deep ravine, from whose bottom came the brawl of a swollen
and obstructed stream. In the ravine he found a shallow cave, behind a
great white rock. The cave was plainly a wild beast's lair, and he
entered circumspectly. There were bones scattered about, and on some dry
herbage in the deepest corner of the den, he found the dead bodies, now
rapidly decaying, of two small panther cubs.
The Perdu.
To the passing stranger there was nothing mysterious about it except the
eternal mystery of beauty. To the scattered folk, however, who lived
their even lives within its neighborhood, it was an object of dim
significance and dread.
At first sight it seemed to be but a narrow, tideless, windless bit of
backwater; and the first impulse of the passing stranger was to ask how
it came to be called the "Perdu." On this point he would get little
information from the folk of the neighborhood, who knew not French. But
if he were to translate the term for their better information, they
would show themselves impressed by a sense of its occult
appropriateness.
The whole neighborhood was one wherein the strange and the
not-to-be-understood might feel at home. It was a place where the
unusual was not felt to be impossible. Its peace was the peace of one
entranced. To its expectancy a god might come, or a monster, or nothing
more than the realization of eventless weariness.
Only four or five miles away, across the silent, bright meadows and
beyond a softly swelling range of pastured hills, swept the great river,
a busy artery of trade.
On the river were all the modern noises, and with its current flowed the
stream of modern ideas. Within sight of the river a mystery, or anything
uninvestigated, or aught unamenable to the spirit of the age, would have
seemed an anachronism. But back here, among the tall wild-parsnip tops
and the never-stirring clumps of orange lilies, life was different, and
dreams seemed likely to come true.
The Perdu lay perpetually asleep, along beside a steep bank clothed with
white birches and balsam poplars. Amid the trunks of the trees grew
elder shrubs, and snake-berries, and the elvish trifoliate plants of the
purple and the painted trillium. The steep bank, and the grove, and the
Perdu with them, ran along together for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and
then faded out of existence, absorbed into the bosom of the meadows.
The Perdu was but a stone's throw broad, throughout its entire length.
The steep with its trunks and leafage formed the northern bound of it;
while its southern shore was the green verge of the meadows. Along this
low rim its whitish opalescent waters mixed smoothly with the roots and
over-hanging blades of the long grasses, with the cloistral arched
frondage of the ferns, and with here and there a strayed spray of purple
wild-pea. Here and there, too, a clump of Indian willow streaked the
green with the vivid crimson of its stems.
Everything watched and waited. The meadow was a sea of sun mysteriously
imprisoned in the green meshes of the grass-tops. At wide intervals
arose some lonely alder bushes, thick banked with clematis. Far off, on
the slope of a low, bordering hill, the red doors of a barn glowed
ruby-like in the transfiguring sun. At times, though seldom, a blue
heron winged over the level. At times a huge black-and-yellow bee hummed
past, leaving a trail of faint sound that seemed to linger like a
perfume. At times the landscape, that was so changeless, would seem to
waver a little, to shift confusedly like things seen through running
water. And all the while the meadow scents and the many-colored
butterflies rose straight up on the moveless air, and brooded or dropped
back into their dwellings.
Yet in all this stillness there was no invitation to sleep. It was a
stillness rather that summoned the senses to keep watch, half
apprehensively, at the doorways of perception. The wide eye noted
everything, and considered it,--even to the hairy red fly alit on the
fern frond, or the skirring progress of the black water-beetle across
the pale surface of the Perdu. The ear was very attentive--even to the
fluttering down of the blighted leaf, or the thin squeak of the bee in
the straitened calyx, or the faint impish conferrings of the moisture
exuding suddenly from somewhere under the bank. If a common sound, like
the shriek of a steamboat's whistle, now and again soared over across
the hills and fields, it was changed in that refracting atmosphere, and
became a defiance at the gates of waking dream.
The lives, thoughts, manners, even the open, credulous eyes of the quiet
folk dwelling about the Perdu, wore in greater or less degree the
complexion of the neighborhood. How this came to be is one of those nice
questions for which we need hardly expect definitive settlement. Whether
the people, in the course of generations, had gradually keyed themselves
to the dominant note of their surroundings, or whether the neighborhood
had been little by little wrought up to its pitch of supersensibility by
the continuous impact of superstitions, and expectations, and
apprehensions, and wonders, and visions, rained upon it from the
personalities of an imaginative and secluded people,--this might be
discussed with more argument than conclusiveness.
Of the dwellers about the Perdu none was more saturated with the magic
of the place than Reuben Waugh, a boy of thirteen. Reuben lived in a
small, yellow-ochre-colored cottage, on the hill behind the barn with
the red doors. Whenever Reuben descended to the level, and turned to
look back at the yellow dot of a house set in the vast expanse of pale
blue sky, he associated the picture with a vague but haunting conception
of some infinite forget-me-not flower. The boy had all the chores to do
about the little homestead; but even then there was always time to
dream. Besides, it was not a pushing neighborhood; and whenever he would
he took for himself a half-holiday. At such times he was more than
likely to stray over to the banks of the Perdu.
It would have been hard for Reuben to say just why he found the Perdu so
attractive. He might have said it was the fishing; for sometimes, though
not often, he would cast a timorous hook into its depths and tremble
lest he should lure from the pallid waters some portentous and dreadful
prey. He never captured, however, anything more terrifying than catfish;
but these were clad in no small measure of mystery, for the white waters
of the Perdu had bleached their scales to a ghastly pallor, and the
opalescence of their eyes was apt to haunt their captor's reveries. He
might have said, also, that it was his playmate, little Celia
Hansen,--whose hook he would bait whenever she wished to fish, and whose
careless hands, stained with berries, he would fill persistently with
bunches of the hot-hued orange lily.
But Reuben knew there was more to say than this. In a boyish way, and
all unrealizing, he loved the child with a sort of love that would one
day flower out as an absorbing passion. For the present, however,
important as she was to him, she was nevertheless distinctly secondary
to the Perdu itself with its nameless spell. If Celia was not there, and
if he did not care to fish, the boy still longed for the Perdu, and was
more than content to lie and watch for he knew not what, amid the rapt
herbage, and the brooding insects, and the gnome-like conspiracies of
the moisture exuding far under the bank.
Celia was two years younger than Reuben, and by nature somewhat less
imaginative. For a long time she loved the Perdu primarily for its
associations with the boy who was her playmate, her protector, and her
hero. When she was about seven years old Reuben had rescued her from an
angry turkey-cock, and had displayed a confident firmness which seemed
to her wonderfully fine. Hence had arisen an unformulated but enduring
faith that Reuben could be depended upon in any emergency. From that day
forward she had refused to be content with other playmates. Against this
uncompromising preference Mrs. Hansen was wont to protest rather
plaintively; for there were social grades even here, and Mrs. Hansen,
whose husband's acres were broad (including the Perdu itself), knew well
that "that Waugh boy" was not her Celia's equal.
The profound distinction, however, was not one which the children could
appreciate; and on Mrs. Hansen lay the spell of the neighborhood,
impelling her to wait for whatever might see fit to come to pass.
For these two children the years that slipped so smoothly over the Perdu
were full of interest. They met often. In the spring, when the Perdu was
sullen and unresponsive, and when the soggy meadows showed but a tinge
of green through the brown ruin of the winter's frosts, there was yet
the grove to visit. Here Reuben would make deep incisions in the bark of
the white birches, and gather tiny cupfuls of the faint-flavored sap,
which, to the children's palates, had all the relish of nectar. A
little later on there were the blossoms of the trillium to be
plucked,--blossoms whose beauty was the more alluring in that they were
supposed to be poisonous.
But it was with the deepening of the summer that the spell of the Perdu
deepened to its most enthralling potency. And as the little girl grew in
years and came more and more under her playmate's influence, her
imagination deepened as the summer deepens, her perception quickened and
grew subtle. Then in a quiet fashion, a strange thing came about. Under
the influence of the children's sympathetic expectancy, the Perdu began
to find fuller expression. Every mysterious element in the
neighborhood--whether emanating from the Perdu itself or from the
spirits of the people about it--appeared to find a focus in the
personalities of the two children. All the weird, formless
stories,--rather suggestions or impressions than stories,--that in the
course of time had gathered about the place, were revived with added
vividness and awe. New ones, too, sprang into existence all over the
country-side, and were certain to be connected, soon after their origin,
with the name of Reuben Waugh. To be sure, when all was said and sifted,
there remained little that one could grasp or set down in black and
white for question. Every experience, every manifestation, when
investigated, seemed to resolve itself into something of an epidemic
sense of unseen but thrilling influences.
The only effect of all this, however, was to invest Reuben with an
interest and importance that consorted curiously with his youth. With a
certain consciousness of superiority, born of his taste for
out-of-the-way reading, and dreaming, and introspection, the boy
accepted the subtle tribute easily, and was little affected by it. He
had the rare fortune not to differ in essentials from his neighbors, but
only to intensify and give visible expression to the characteristics
latent in them all.
Thus year followed year noiselessly, till Reuben was seventeen and Celia
fifteen. For all the expectancy, the sense of eventfulness even, of
these years, little had really happened save the common inexplicable
happenings of life and growth. The little that might be counted an
exception may be told in a few words.
The customs of angling for catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap,
had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting to
wander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from the
books which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby library of the old
schoolmaster.
As the girl reached up mentally, or perhaps, rather, emotionally, toward
the imaginative stature of her companion, her hold upon him
strengthened. Of old, his perceptions had been keenest when alone, but
now they were in every way quickened by her presence. And now it
happened that the great blue heron came more frequently to visit the
Perdu. While the children were sitting amid the birches, they heard the
_hush! hush!_ of the bird's wings fanning the pallid water. The bird,
did I say? But it seemed to them a spirit in the guise of a bird. It had
gradually forgotten its seclusiveness, and now dropped its long legs at
a point right over the middle of the Perdu, alighted apparently on the
liquid surface, and stood suddenly transformed into a moveless statue of
a bird, gazing upon the playmates with bright, significant eyes. The
look made Celia tremble.
The Perdu, as might have been expected when so many mysteries were
credited to it, was commonly held to be bottomless. It is a very poor
neighborhood indeed, that cannot show a pool with this distinction.
Reuben, of course, knew the interpretation of the myth. He knew the
Perdu was very deep. Except at either end, or close to the banks, no
bottom could be found with such fathom-lines as he could command. To
him, and hence to Celia, this idea of vast depths was thrillingly
suggestive, and yet entirely believable. The palpably impossible had
small appeal for them. But when first they saw the great blue bird
alight where they knew the water was fathoms deep, they came near being
surprised. At least, they felt the pleasurable sensation of wonder. How
was the heron supported on the water? From their green nest the children
gazed and gazed; and the great blue bird held them with the gem-like
radiance of its unwinking eye. At length to Reuben came a vision of the
top of an ancient tree-trunk just beneath the bird's feet, just beneath
the water's surface. Down, slanting far down through the opaline
opaqueness, he saw the huge trunk extend itself, to an immemorial
root-hold in the clayey, perpendicular walls of the Perdu. He unfolded
the vision to Celia, who understood. "And it's just as wonderful," said
the girl, "for how did the trunk get there?"
"That's so," answered Reuben, with his eyes fixed on the bird,--"but
then it's quite possible!"
And at the low sound of their voices the bird winnowed softly away.
At another time, when the children were dreaming by the Perdu, a far-off
dinner-horn sounded, hoarsely but sweetly, its summons to the workers in
the fields. It was the voice of noon. As the children, rising to go,
glanced together across the Perdu, they clasped each other with a start
of mild surprise. "Did you see that?" whispered Celia.
"What did you see?" asked the boy.
"It looked like pale green hand, that waved for a moment over the water,
and then sank," said Celia.
"Yes," said Reuben, "that's just what it looked like. But I don't
believe it really was a hand! You see those thin lily-leaves all about
the spot? Their stems are long, wonderfully long and slender. If one of
those queer, whitish catfish, like we used to catch, were to take hold
of a lily-stem and pull hard, the edges of the leaf might rise up and
wave just the way _that_ did! You can't tell what the catfish won't do
down there!"
"Perhaps that's all it was," said Celia.
"Though we can't be sure," added Reuben.
And thereafter, whensoever that green hand seemed to wave to them across
the pale water, they were content to leave the vision but half
explained.
It also came to pass, as unexpectedly as anything could come to pass by
the banks of the Perdu, that one dusky evening, as the boy and girl came
slowly over the meadows, they saw a radiant point of light that wavered
fitfully above the water. They watched it in silence. As it came to a
pause, the girl said in her quiet voice,--
"It has stopped right over the place where the heron stands!"
"Yes," replied Reuben, "it is evidently a will-o'-the-wisp. The queer
gas, which makes it, comes perhaps from the end of that dead tree-trunk,
just under the surface."
But the fact that the point of light was thus explicable, made it no
less interesting and little less mysterious to the dwellers about the
Perdu. As it came to be an almost nightly feature of the place, the
people supplemented its local habitation with a name, calling it "Reuben
Waugh's Lantern." Celia's father, treating the Perdu and all that
pertained to it with a reverent familiarity befitting his right of
proprietorship, was wont to say to Reuben,--
"Who gave you leave, Reuben, to hoist your lantern on my property? If
you don't take it away pretty soon, I'll be having the thing put in
pound."
It may be permitted me to cite yet one more incident to illustrate more
completely the kind of events which seemed of grave importance in the
neighborhood of the Perdu. It was an accepted belief that, even in the
severest frosts, the Perdu could not be securely frozen over. Winter
after winter, to be sure, it lay concealed beneath such a covering of
snow as only firm ice could be expected to support. Yet this fact was
not admitted in evidence. Folks said the ice and snow were but a film,
waiting to yield upon the slightest pressure. Furthermore, it was held
that neither bird nor beast was ever known to tread the deceptive
expanse. No squirrel track, no slim, sharp foot-mark of partridge,
traversed the immaculate level. One winter, after a light snowfall in
the night, as Reuben strayed into the low-ceilinged kitchen of the
Hansen farm-house, Mr. Hansen remarked in his quaint, dreamy drawl,--
"What for have you been walking on the Perdu, Reuben? This morning, on
the new snow, I saw foot-marks of a human running right across it. It
must have been you, Reuben. There's nobody else round here 'd do it!"
"No," said Reuben, "I haven't been nigh the Perdu these three days past.
And then I didn't try walking on it, any way."
"Well," continued Celia's father, "I suppose folks would call it queer!
Those foot-marks just began at one side of the Perdu, and ended right up
sharp at the other. There wasn't another sign of a foot, on the meadow
or in the grove!"
"Yes," assented Reuben, "it looks queer in a way. But then, it's easy
for the snow to drift over the other tracks; while the Perdu lies low
out of the wind."
The latter days of Reuben's stay beside the banks of the Perdu were
filled up by a few events like these, by the dreams which these evoked,
and above all by the growing realization of his love for Celia. At
length the boy and girl slipped unawares into mutual self-revelations;
and for a day or two life seemed so materially and tangibly joyous that
vision and dream eluded them. Then came the girl's naïve account of how
her confidences had been received at home. She told of her mother's
objections, soon overruled by her father's obstinate plea that "Reuben
Waugh, when he got to be a man grown, would be good enough for any girl
alive."
Celia had dwelt with pride on her father's championship of their cause.
Her mother's opposition she had been familiar with for as long as she
could remember. But it was the mother's opposition that loomed large in
Reuben's eyes.
First it startled him with a vague sense of disquiet. Then it filled his
soul with humiliation as its full significance grew upon him. Then he
formed a sudden resolve; and neither the mother's relenting cordiality,
nor the father's practical persuasions, nor Celia's tears, could turn
him from his purpose. He said that he would go away, after the
time-honored fashion, and seek his fortune in the world. He vowed that
in three or four years, when they would be of a fit age to marry, he
would come back with a full purse and claim Celia on even terms. This
did not suit the unworldly old farmer, who had inherited, not in vain,
the spiritualities and finer influences of his possession, the Perdu. He
desired, first of all, his girl's happiness. He rebuked Reuben's pride
with a sternness unusual for him. But Reuben went.
He went down the great river. Not many miles from the quiet region of
the Perdu there was a little riverside landing, where Reuben took the
steamer and passed at once into another atmosphere, another world. The
change was a spiritual shock to him, making him gasp as if he had fallen
into a tumultuous sea. There was the same chill, there was a like
difficulty in getting his balance. But this was not for long. His innate
self-reliance steadied him rapidly. His long-established habit of
superiority helped him to avoid betraying his first sense of ignorance
and unfitness. His receptiveness led him to assimilate swiftly the
innumerable and novel facts of life with which he came all at once in
contact; and he soon realized that the stirring, capable crowd, whose
ready handling of affairs had at first overawed him, was really inferior
in true insight to the peculiar people whom he had left about the Perdu.
He found that presently he himself could handle the facts of life with
the light dexterity which had so amazed him; but through it all he
preserved (as he could see that those about him did not) his sense of
the relativity of things. He perceived, always, the dependence of the
facts of life upon the ideas underlying them, and thrusting them forward
as manifestations or utterances. With his undissipated energy, his
curious frugality in the matter of self-revelation, and his instinctive
knowledge of men, he made his way from the first, and the roaring port
at the mouth of the great river yielded him of its treasures for the
asking. This was in a quiet enough way, indeed, but a way that more than
fulfilled his expectations; and in the height of the blossoming time of
his fifth summer in the world he found himself rich enough to go back to
the Perdu and claim Celia. He resolved that he would buy property near
the Perdu and settle there. He had no wish to live in the world; but to
the world he would return often, for the sake of the beneficence of its
friction,--as a needle, he thought, is the keener for being thrust often
amid the grinding particles of the emery-bag. He resigned his situation
and went aboard an up-river boat,--a small boat that would stop at every
petty landing, if only to put ashore an old woman or a bag of meal, if
only to take in a barrel of potatoes or an Indian with baskets and
bead-work.
About mid-morning of the second day, at a landing not a score of miles
below the one whereat Reuben would disembark, an Indian did come aboard
with baskets and bead-work. At sight of him the old atmosphere of
expectant mystery came over Reuben as subtly as comes the desire of
sleep. He had seen this same Indian--he recognized the unchanging
face--on the banks of the Perdu one morning years before, brooding
motionless over the motionless water. Reuben began unconsciously to
divest himself of his lately gathered worldliness; his mouth softened,
his eyes grew wider and more passive, his figure fell into looser and
freer lines, his dress seemed to forget its civil trimness. When at
length he had disembarked at the old wharf under the willows, had struck
across through the hilly sheep-pastures, and had reached a slope
overlooking the amber-bright country of the Perdu, he was once more the
silently eager boy, the quaintly reasoning visionary, his spirit waiting
alert at his eyes and at his ears.
Reuben had little concern for the highways. Therefore he struck straight
across the meadows, through the pale green vetch-tangle, between the
intense orange lilies, amid the wavering blue butterflies and the warm,
indolent perfumes of the wild-parsnip. As he drew near the Perdu there
appeared the giant blue heron, dropping to his perch in mid-water. In
almost breathless expectancy Reuben stepped past a clump of red willows,
banked thick with clematis. His heart was beating quickly, and he could
hear the whisper of the blood in his veins, as he came once more in view
of the still, white water.
His gaze swept the expanse once and again, then paused, arrested by the
unwavering, significant eye of the blue heron. The next moment he was
vaguely conscious of a hand, that seemed to wave once above the water,
far over among the lilies. He smiled as he said to himself that nothing
had changed. But at this moment the blue heron, as if disturbed, rose
and winnowed reluctantly away; and Reuben's eyes, thus liberated, turned
at once to the spot where he had felt, rather than seen, the vision. As
he looked the vision came again,--a hand, and part of an arm, thrown out
sharply as if striving to grasp support, then dropping back and bearing
down the lily leaves. For an instant Reuben's form seemed to shrink and
cower with horror,--and the next he was cleaving with mighty strokes the
startled surface of the Perdu. That hand--it was not pale green, like
the waving hand of the old, childish vision. It was white and the arm
was white, and white the drenched lawn sleeve clinging to it. He had
recognized it, he knew not how, for Celia's.
Reaching the edge of the lily patch, Reuben dived again and again,
groping desperately among the long, serpent-like stems. The Perdu at
this point--and even in his horror he noted it with surprise--was
comparatively shallow. He easily got the bottom and searched it
minutely. The edge of the dark abyss, into which he strove in vain to
penetrate, was many feet distant from the spot where the vision had
appeared. Suddenly, as he rested, breathless and trembling, on the
grassy brink of the Perdu, he realized that this, too, was but a vision.
It was but one of the old mysteries of the Perdu; and it had taken for
him that poignant form, because his heart and brain were so full of
Celia. With a sigh of exquisite relief he thought how amused she would
be at his plight, but how tender when she learned the cause of it. He
laughed softly; and just then the blue heron came back to the Perdu.
Reuben shook himself, pressed some of the water from his dripping
clothes, and climbed the steep upper bank of the Perdu. As he reached
the top he paused among the birch trees to look back upon the water. How
like a floor of opal it lay in the sun; then his heart leaped into his
throat suffocatingly, for again rose the hand and arm, and waved, and
dropped back among the lilies! He grasped the nearest tree, that he
might not, in spite of himself, plunge back into the pale mystery of the
Perdu. He rubbed his eyes sharply, drew a few long breaths to steady his
heart, turned his back doggedly on the shining terror, and set forward
swiftly for the farm-house, now in full view not three hundred yards
away.
For all the windless down-streaming summer sunshine, there was that in
Reuben's drenched clothes which chilled him to the heart. As he reached
the wide-eaved cluster of the farmstead, a horn in the distance blew
musically for noon. It was answered by another and another. But no such
summons came from the kitchen door to which his feet now turned. The
quiet of the Seventh Day seemed to possess the wide, bright farm-yard. A
flock of white ducks lay drowsing on a grassy spot. A few hens dusted
themselves with silent diligence in the ash-heap in front of the shed;
and they stopped to watch with bright eyes the stranger's approach. From
under the apple-trees the horses whinnied to him lonesomely. It was very
peaceful; but the peacefulness of it bore down upon Reuben's soul like
lead. It seemed as if the end of things had come. He feared to lift the
latch of the well-known door.
As he hesitated, trembling, he observed that the white blinds were down
at the sitting-room windows. The window nearest him was open, and the
blind stirred almost imperceptibly. Behind it, now, his intent ear
caught a sound of weary sobbing. At once he seemed to see all that was
in the shadowed room. The moveless, shrouded figure, the unresponding
lips, the bowed heads of the mourners, all came before him as clearly as
if he were standing in their midst. He leaned against the door-post, and
at this moment the door opened. Celia's father stood before him.
The old man's face was drawn with his grief. Something of bitterness
came into his eyes as he looked on Reuben.
"You've heard, then!" he said harshly.
"I know!" shaped itself inaudibly on Reuben's lips.
At the sight of his anguish the old man's bitterness broke. "You've come
in time for the funeral," he exclaimed piteously. "Oh, Reube, if you'd
stayed it might have been different!"
"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him."
It was just before dawn, and a grayness was beginning to trouble the
dark about the top of the mountain.
Even at that cold height there was no wind. The veil of cloud that hid
the stars hung but a hand-breadth above the naked summit. To eastward
the peak broke away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the valleys
and the lower hills. Just under the brow, on a splintered and creviced
ledge, was the nest of the eagles.
As the thick dark shrank down the steep like a receding tide, and the
grayness reached the ragged heap of branches forming the nest, the young
eagles stirred uneasily under the loose droop of the mother's wings. She
raised her head and peered about her, slightly lifting her wings as she
did so; and the nestlings, complaining at the chill air that came in
upon their unfledged bodies, thrust themselves up amid the warm feathers
of her thighs. The male bird, perched on a jutting fragment beside the
nest, did not move. But he was awake. His white, narrow, flat-crowned
head was turned to one side, and his yellow eye, under its straight,
fierce lid, watched the pale streak that was growing along the distant
eastern sea-line.
The great birds were racked with hunger. Even the nestlings, to meet the
petitions of whose gaping beaks they stinted themselves without mercy,
felt meagre and uncomforted. Day after day the parent birds had fished
almost in vain; day after day their wide and tireless hunting had
brought them scant reward. The schools of alewives, mackerel, and
herring seemed to shun their shores that spring. The rabbits seemed to
have fled from all the coverts about their mountain.
The mother eagle, larger and of mightier wing than her mate, looked as
if she had met with misadventure. Her plumage was disordered. Her eyes,
fiercely and restlessly anxious, at moments grew dull as if with
exhaustion. On the day before, while circling at her viewless height
above a lake far inland, she had marked a huge lake-trout, basking near
the surface of the water. Dropping upon it with half-closed, hissing
wings, she had fixed her talons in its back. But the fish had proved too
powerful for her. Again and again it had dragged her under water, and
she had been almost drowned before she could unloose the terrible grip
of her claws. Hardly, and late, had she beaten her way back to the
mountain-top.
And now the pale streak in the east grew ruddy. Rust-red stains and
purple, crawling fissures began to show on the rocky face of the peak. A
piece of scarlet cloth, woven among the fagots of the nest, glowed like
new blood in the increasing light. And presently a wave of rose appeared
to break and wash down over the summit, as the rim of the sun came above
the horizon.
The male eagle stretched his head far out over the depth, lifted his
wings and screamed harshly, as if in greeting of the day. He paused a
moment in that position, rolling his eye upon the nest. Then his head
went lower, his wings spread wider, and he launched himself smoothly and
swiftly into the abyss of air as a swimmer glides into the sea. The
female watched him, a faint wraith of a bird darting through the gloom,
till presently, completing his mighty arc, he rose again into the full
light of the morning. Then on level, all but moveless wing, he sailed
away toward the horizon.
As the sun rose higher and higher, the darkness began to melt on the
tops of the lower hills and to diminish on the slopes of the upland
pastures, lingering in the valleys as the snow delays there in spring.
As point by point the landscape uncovered itself to his view, the eagle
shaped his flight into a vast circle, or rather into a series of
stupendous loops. His neck was stretched toward the earth, in the
intensity of his search for something to ease the bitter hunger of his
nestlings and his mate.
Not far from the sea, and still in darkness, stood a low, round hill, or
swelling upland. Bleak and shelterless, whipped by every wind that the
heavens could let loose, it bore no bush but an occasional juniper
scrub. It was covered with mossy hillocks, and with a short grass,
meagre but sweet. There in the chilly gloom, straining her ears to catch
the lightest footfall of approaching peril, but hearing only the hushed
thunder of the surf, stood a lonely ewe over the lamb to which she had
given birth in the night.
Having lost the flock when the pangs of travail came upon her, the
unwonted solitude filled her with apprehension. But as soon as the first
feeble bleating of the lamb fell upon her ear, everything was changed.
Her terrors all at once increased tenfold,--but they were for her young,
not for herself; and with them came a strange boldness such as her heart
had never known before. As the little weakling shivered against her
side, she uttered low, short bleats and murmurs of tenderness. When an
owl hooted in the woods across the valley, she raised her head angrily
and faced the sound, suspecting a menace to her young. When a mouse
scurried past her, with a small, rustling noise amid the withered mosses
of the hillock, she stamped fiercely, and would have charged had the
intruder been a lion.
When the first gray of dawn descended over the pasture, the ewe feasted
her eyes with the sight of the trembling little creature, as it lay on
the wet grass. With gentle nose she coaxed it and caressed it, till
presently it struggled to its feet, and, with its pathetically awkward
legs spread wide apart to preserve its balance, it began to nurse.
Turning her head as far around as she could, the ewe watched its every
motion with soft murmurings of delight.
And now that wave of rose, which had long ago washed the mountain and
waked the eagles spread tenderly across the open pasture. The lamb
stopped nursing; and the ewe, moving forward two or three steps, tried
to persuade it to follow her. She was anxious that it should as soon as
possible learn to walk freely, so they might together rejoin the flock.
She felt that the open pasture was full of dangers.