The lightning flashed; the thunder pealed. The blind man lifted his head,
listening. He hesitated between his righteous scorn, his sense of injury,
and the hospitality that was the instinct of his nature. He yielded at
last, shamefacedly, as to a weakness.
“Waal, waal,” he said, in an off-hand cavalier fashion, “keep Jerry dry;
he’s mighty val’y’ble. Good men air sca’ce, Jerry; take keer o’ yerse’f!”
He laughed sarcastically and resumed his chair. As he did so his booted
knee struck against the little girl, still staring at him with eyes full
of wonder.
“What’s this?” he cried sharply, his nerves jarring yet with the
excitement. He had not before noticed her. “I can’t see!” with a shrill
rising inflection, as if the affliction were newly realized.
A propitiatory smile broke upon her face.
“Jes’ Rosamondy.” Her voice vibrated through the room—the high quavering
treble of childhood that might have been shrill were it not so sweet.
“Jerry’s leetle gal,” said aunt Jemima.
“Shucks!” he exclaimed, contemptuously, and turned aside.
“Set down, Rosamondy,” said aunt Jemima, assuming a grandmotherly
authority. “Set down like a good leetle gal.”
But Rosamond was not amenable to bidding and paid no heed. She had risen
from her chair and stood by the side of the blind artillery-man.
“Set down,” aunt Jemima admonished her again. “_He_ can’t see.”
“Kin ye feel?” she said, suddenly laying her dimpled pink hand upon his.
She gazed up at him, her eyes bright and soft, her lips parted, her cheek
flushed. “Kin ye feel my hand?”
He looked surly, affronted for a moment. He shook the light hand from
his own. It fell upon his knee where Rosamond leaned her weight upon
it. There was a subtle change on his face. In his old debonair way
he drawled, “Yes, I kin feel. What’s this?”—he laid his hand upon her
hair—“Flax, I reckon. Hyar, Sis’ Jemimy, hyar’s that flax ye war goin’
ter hackle. Mus’ I han’ it over ter ye?”
He made a feint of lifting her by her hair, and she sank down beside him,
screaming with laughter till the rafters rang.
Aunt Jemima had taken the sock from her knitting needles and was swiftly
putting on the stitches for newly projected work.
“Lemme medjure ye fur a stockin’,” she said, reaching out for the little
girl. “Look at the stitches this child’s stockin’ will take! The fatness
of her is s’prisin’. An’ ef Ab air willin’,” she continued, “I want
Rosamondy ter bide hyar till I can knit her a couple o’ pair o’ stockin’s
an’ mend up her clothes.”
“I dunno ’bout’n that,” said Jerry Binwell. He had seated himself in a
chair, his garments dripping with rain, and small puddles forming from
them on the floor. “I dunno ez we-uns kin bide enny arter the rain’s
over.”
The capable aunt Jemima cast upon him a glance which seemed to contrast
his limp, forlorn, and ineffective personality with her own stalwart
moral value.
“I ain’t talkin’ ter you-uns, Jerry, nor thinkin’ ’bout ye, nuther,”
she remarked slightingly. “I done said my say,” she continued after
the manner of a proclamation. “That thar child air goin’ ter bide hyar
till I fix her clothes comfortable—ef it takes me a year.” Then with
a recollection of her brother’s grievance she again added, “Ef Ab’s
willin’.”
The stocking was already showing a ribbed top of an admirable
circumference. Aunt Jemima evidently felt a pride in its proportions
which was hardly decorous.
Jerry made no reply. He looked disconsolately at the fire from under the
brim of his rain-soaked hat, that now and then contributed a drop to his
cheek, which thus bore a tearful aspect. Presently he broke the silence,
speaking in a strained rasping voice.
“Ef I hed knowed ez Ab held sech a pack o’ old gredges ag’in me I
wouldn’t kem nigh hyar,”—he glanced at the stalwart soldierly form
bending to the little laughing maiden. “Ab dunno what I tole the en’my—he
warn’t thar. I never tole the en’my nuthin’. An’ ennybody ez be captured
kin be accused o’ desertin’—ef folks air so minded. I never deserted,
nuther. An’ sech gredges ez Ab hev got,” he continued, complainingly,
“air fur what I done, an’ what I ain’t done whenst I war nuthin’ but a
boy.”
Ab turned his imperious youthful face toward him. “Ye hesh up!” he said.
“Thar ain’t no truce hyar fur you-uns.”
His attention reverted instantly to the babyish sorceress at his knee,
who with an untiring repetition and an unfailing delight in the exercises
would rise from her chair and gently touch his hand or brow crying out,
with a joyous voice full of laughter, “Kin you-uns feel my hand!” Then he
would pinch her rosy cheeks and retort in a gruff undertone, “Kin you-uns
feel my hand!”
They all behaved, Ike thought, as if they had found something choice and
of rare value. And if the truth must be known, he watched the scene
with somewhat the same sentiments which animated the old dogs. He shared
their sense of supersedure, and he noticed how they whined and could take
comfort in no spot about the hearth; how they would walk around three
times and lie down with a sigh of renunciation, to get up suddenly with
an afflicted wheeze, and hunt about for another place where the distemper
of their jealous hearts might let them find rest for their lazy bones.
They all sought to intrude themselves upon notice. One of them crept
to aunt Jemima and humbly licked her foot, only to have that stout and
decided member deal him a prompt rebuke upon the nose, eliciting a yelp
altogether out of proportion to the twinge inflicted; for the dog, since
he was not going to be petted, was glad to have some grievance to howl
about, as he might thus more potently appeal to her sympathy. The hound
that was accustomed to lead the blind man was even more insistent in
his manifestations. He went and rested his head on his master’s knee,
while the little girl sat close in her chair on the opposite side, and
he wagged his tail and looked imploringly up in the sightless face. But
Rosamondy leaned across and patted the dog on the head, and let him take
her hand between his teeth, and jovially pulled his ears, and finally
caught him by both, when they lost their balance and went over on the
hearth together in a wild scramble, about to be “scorched an’ scarified
ter death,” as aunt Jemima said snappishly when she rescued the little
girl, who was a very red rose now, and with a tender shake deposited her
once more in her chair. Then the old dog left his master, and ran and sat
by her and sought to incite more gambols.
But Ike was not so easily reconciled. He did not appreciate the
gratulation in this acquisition that pervaded the fireside. She was
nothing but a girl, and a little one at that. Girls were not uncommon;
in fact they abounded. They were nothing to brag on—Ike was young as
yet. They couldn’t do anything that was worth while. To be sure the
miller’s daughter _was_ tolerably limber, and could walk on the timbers
of the race, which were high above the stream. But how she worked her
arms above her head to balance herself! And she pretended to shoot once
in a while; he would rather be the mark than stand forty yards from it.
That was the best he could say for her shooting. And she was the most
valuable and desirable specimen of girlhood in his acquaintance. He noted
with a sort of wonder that his mother, through sheer absorption, let the
hoe-cake burn to a cinder, and had to make up and bake one anew. And when
it was at last done, and placed on the table with the platter of venison
and corn dodgers, he did not admire particularly the simple but vivid
delight with which Rosamond greeted the prospect of supper. But even the
saturnine Hiram Guyther looked at her with a smile as she ran glibly
around the table, and with her hands on the edge stood on her tiptoes to
see what they were to have, and he turned and said to Jerry Binwell, “She
air a powerful bouncin’ leetle gal. I reckon we-uns’ll hev ter borry her,
Jerry—ef,” recollecting in his turn that this was the child of his blind
brother’s enemy, “ef Ab’s willin’.”
The dawdling Jerry, still staring disconsolately at the fire, drawled
non-committally, “I dunno ’bout’n that.”
Despite all her fervor of anticipation, Rosamondy was not hungry. She
knelt in her chair at the table to be tall enough to participate in the
exercises, and her beaming pink face, and her tossing yellow hair, and
her glittering rows of squirrel teeth—she showed a great many of them
when she laughed—irradiated the space between aunt Jemima and Ab. Her
conduct was what Ike mentally designated as “robustious.” She bounced
up and down; she fed her supper to the dogs; she let the cat climb up
the back of her chair and put two paws on her shoulder among her tangled
yellow curls and lap milk out of her saucer. She shrieked and bobbed
about till Ike did not know whether he was eating hoe-cake or sawdust.
She looked as if she were out in a high wind. Aunt Jemima vainly sought
to make her eat her supper, but the displeasure on her face was a feigned
rebuke for which Rosamond cared as little as might be. When she concluded
her defiance of all those observances, which Ike had been taught to
respect, by taking her empty saucer, inverting it and perching it on her
tousled yellow pate after the manner of a cap, Hiram Guyther, the meal
being ended, caught her up delightedly and rode her to the fireplace on
his shoulder.
“I declar’, Jerry,” he exclaimed cordially, his big bass voice booming
amidst the trilling treble laughter, “we-uns’ll hev ter steal this hyar
leetle gal from ye.”
And Jerry, demurely disconsolate, replied, “I reckon I couldn’t spare
her, right handy.”
Presently Ike began to notice that it was very difficult for Rosamondy
to get enough of a joke. She refused to descend from the gigantic
mountaineer’s shoulder, and when he tried to put her down clung to his
collar, around his neck, indeed she did not scruple to clutch his hair.
Hiram Guyther had not for a long time taken such active exercise—for in
this region men of his age assume all the privileges and ailments of
advanced years—as during the time that he trotted up and down the floor
with the little girl on his shoulder, playing he was a horse. A hard
driver he had, to be sure, and he was obliged to stamp, and shy, and
jump, and spurt, smartly. He did not look quite sensible Ike thought in
unfilial surprise.
The whole domestic routine was upset. His mother and aunt Jemima had left
the clearing away of the dishes and applied themselves to pulling out
the old trundle-bed—long ago too short for any of the family—and they
arranged it with loving care and much precaution against the cold and
draughts.
“I’m fairly feared she mought roll out, an’ git her spine bruk, or her
neck,” said aunt Jemima, knitting her wrinkled brows in affectionate
alarm as she looked at the trundle-bed that was about two feet from the
floor.
“I reckon not,” said Jerry meekly as he inoffensively watched the
arrangement of the cosy nest. “She never fell off ’n the top o’ the
kyart—an’ sometimes she napped ef the sun war hot.”
“An’ ye air the only man in Tennessee ez would hev sot the leetle critter
up thar—an’ her tender bones so easy ter break,” said aunt Jemima, tartly.
“Waal, I done the bes’ I could fur her,” drawled Jerry in his tearful
voice, looking harried and woeful.
And remembering how kind and gentle he had seemed to his little
daughter, Ike wondered that he did not feel sorry for Jerry when aunt
Jemima intimated that he was heedless of her safety and neglected her.
But watching the man Ike was even more disapproving of the wholesale
adoration which the family seemed disposed to lay at the feet of the
little girl and of her adoption into a solicitude and love that was
almost parental. He believed that Jerry had an inimical appreciation of
all the slighting consideration of him, but offered no objection to the
authority they had assumed over Rosamondy, thinking it well that she
should get all she could out of them.
Her hilarity seemed to increase as the hour waxed later, and when
aunt Jemima finally took her, squirming and wriggling and shouting
with laughter, from Hiram Guyther’s shoulder and tucked her into the
trundle-bed with a red quilt drawn up close under her dimpled white
chin and her long yellow hair, Ike expected to see the whole bed
paraphernalia rise up while she resurrected herself.
“Ye lie still, now,” said aunt Jemima sternly, laying a hand upon each
shoulder.
A vague squirm, a sleepy chuckle, and Rosamond was eclipsed for the night.
“Waal, that beats my time,” said the grim aunt Jemima softly. “Asleep
a’ready!”
She sat down and resumed her knitting. Hiram Guyther was mopping his brow
with his handkerchief.
“I feel like ez ef I’d los’ ten pound o’ flesh,” he said. And Ike thought
it not unlikely. His mother was washing the dishes; the blind man was
reflectively smoking his pipe; the dogs came and disposed themselves with
reproachful sighs prominently about the hearth. Jerry Binwell did not
share their relief. He stirred uneasily in his chair, the legs grating on
the puncheon floor, as if he feared that with this distraction removed
the more unfriendly attention of the family might be directed to him. No
one spoke for a moment, all listening to the tumult of the rain on the
roof; they had not before noticed that the violence of the storm had
subsided into a steady downpour. Then, after a glance at the sleeping
face, pensive now and ethereal and sensitive, framed in the yellow hair
that streamed over the red quilt, aunt Jemima turned a long calculating
gaze on Jerry Binwell.
As its result she observed bluntly, “Her mother mus’ hev been a mighty
pritty woman.”
If the inference that Rosamond inherited none of her beauty from her
father was apprehended by Jerry, he did not resent it. His eyes filled
with tears.
“Yes, she war,” he said, dropping his voice to a husky undertone. “She
war a plumb beauty whenst she war young, afore she tuk ter ailin’.”
Another pause ensued. The rain beat monotonously; the eaves dripped
and dripped; the trees on the mountain slopes swayed, and creaked, and
crashed together.
“It hev been mighty hard on me,” Jerry again lifted up his dreary voice,
“ter know how bes’ ter keer fur Rosamondy—not bein’ a ’oman myself an’
sech. I know she’s ragged, but I can’t mend her clothes so they’ll
stay; she jumps so onexpected. I can’t sew fitten fur much, though I hev
tried ter l’arn. I ’pear ter be slow an’ don’t get much purchase on it.
I can’t keep no stiddy aim with a needle, nuther. An’ all the wimmen
ez ever hed a chance at Rosamondy tuk ter quar’lin over her, like them
done ez Sol’mon hed ter jedge a-twixt, till I war actially afeared she
be tore in two. Ever since the war I hev been livin’ down in Persimmon
Cove an’ thar it war I merried. ’Bout a year ago Em’line she died o’
the lung complaint. An’ then the ’tother wimmen, her sister an’ mother,
they quar’led so over Rosamondy, an’ set tharse’fs so ter spite me every
which-a-way, ez I jes’ ’lowed I’d fetch her up hyar fur this winter ter
bide with my folks awhile. An’ I fund ’em all dead or moved away—jes’
my luck! Rosamondy an’ me hev hed a mighty hard time. I hev been mighty
poor, never could git no good holt on nuthin’. I ain’t felt much like
tryin’ noways sence Em’line lef’; ’pears mighty hard she couldn’t hev
been let ter bide awhile longer.” And once more his eyes filled with
tears.
“Waal, mournin’ the dead is grudgin’ ’em the glory,” said Mrs. Guyther in
her comforting tones.
“I know that,” said Jerry, “I hev tried ter bow my mind;” his eyes were
still full of tears. And Ike, looking at them, was disposed to wonder
where he got them, so little did they seem genuine.
The tallow dip on the mantel-piece went out in a splutter and left them
all sitting in the red glow of the fire, which was a mass of coals where
the white flames had been. It was far later than the usual bed-time of
the family, and thus they were reminded of it. Mrs. Guyther, kneeling on
the hearth, began to cover the coals with the plentiful ashes that lay
in great heaps on either side. The dogs, summoned by Hiram Guyther to
leave the house, pulled themselves into various efforts at an upright
posture, and sat gazing blinkingly at the fire with a determination to
misunderstand the tenor of his discourse. One of them glanced over his
shoulder at the door and shivered at the thought of the bleak dampness
outside. Another yawned shrilly and was adjured by aunt Jemima to
hesh his mouth—didn’t he know he’d wake the baby up if he kep’ yappin’
that-a-way.
“Let the dogs alone, Hiram,” said Mrs. Guyther, “they count on bein’
allowed ter stay till the las’ minit. Ye show Jerry whar he hev ter sleep
whilst I fix the fire.”
After the host had shown Jerry up the ladder to the shadowy roof-room,
Abner, who had not again spoken to the visitor, and seeming as if he were
gazing ponderingly into the fire, said suddenly to the two women:—
“What do that leetle gal look like?”
Mrs. Guyther paused with the shovel in her hand, as she still knelt on
the hearth.
Aunt Jemima dropped her knitting in her lap.