They lived together in a part of the country which was not so prosperous
as it had once been, about three miles from one of those small towns
that, instead of increasing in population, is steadily decreasing. The
territory was not very thickly settled; perhaps a house every other mile
or so, with large areas of corn-and wheat-land and fallow fields that at
odd seasons had been sown to timothy and clover. Their particular house
was part log and part frame, the log portion being the old original home
of Henry’s grandfather. The new portion, of now rain-beaten, time-worn
slabs, through which the wind squeaked in the chinks at times, and which
several overshadowing elms and a butternut-tree made picturesque and
reminiscently pathetic, but a little damp, was erected by Henry when he
was twenty-one and just married.
That was forty-eight years before. The furniture inside, like the house
outside, was old and mildewy and reminiscent of an earlier day. You have
seen the what-not of cherry wood, perhaps, with spiral legs and fluted
top. It was there. The old-fashioned heavy-posted bed, with ball-like
protuberances and deep curving incisions, was there also, a sadly
alienated descendant of an early Jacobean ancestor. The bureau was of
cherry also, high and wide and solidly built, but faded-looking, and
with a musty odor. The rag carpet that underlay all these sturdy
examples of enduring furniture was a weak, faded, lead-and-pink-colored
affair woven by Phœbe Ann’s own hands when she was fifteen years younger
than she was when she died. The creaky wooden loom on which it had been
done now stood like a dusty, bony skeleton, along with a broken
rocking-chair, a worm-eaten clothes-press,--Heaven knows how old,--a
lime-stained bench that had once been used to keep flowers on outside
the door, and other decrepit factors of household utility, in an east
room that was a lean-to against this so-called main portion. All sorts
of broken-down furniture were about this place: an antiquated
clothes-horse, cracked in two of its ribs; a broken mirror in an old
cherry frame, which had fallen from a nail and cracked itself three days
before their youngest son, Jerry, died; an extension hat-rack, which
once had had porcelain knobs on the ends of its pegs; and a
sewing-machine, long since outdone in its clumsy mechanism by rivals of
a newer generation.
The orchard to the east of the house was full of gnarled old
apple-trees, worm-eaten as to trunks and branches, and fully ornamented
with green and white lichens, so that it had a sad, greenish-white,
silvery effect in moonlight. The low outhouses, which had once housed
chickens, a horse or two, a cow, and several pigs, were covered with
patches of moss as to their roof, and the sides had been free of paint
for so long that they were blackish gray as to color, and a little
spongy. The picket-fence in front, with its gate squeaky and askew, and
the side fences of the stake-and-rider type were in an equally run-down
condition. As a matter of fact, they had aged synchronously with the
persons who lived here, old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phœbe Ann.
They had lived here, these two, ever since their marriage, forty-eight
years before, and Henry had lived here before that from his childhood
up. His father and mother, well along in years when he was a boy, had
invited him to bring his wife here when he had first fallen in love and
decided to marry; and he had done so. His father and mother were the
companions of him and his wife for ten years after they were married,
when both died; and then Henry and Phœbe were left with their five
children growing lustily apace. But all sorts of things had happened
since then. Of the seven children, all told, that had been born to them,
three had died; one girl had gone to Kansas; one boy had gone to Sioux
Falls, and never been heard of after; another boy had gone to
Washington; and the last girl lived five counties away in the same
State, but was so burdened with cares of her own that she rarely gave
them a thought. Time and a commonplace home life that had never been
attractive had weened them thoroughly, so that, wherever they were, they
gave little thought as to how it might be with their father and mother.
Old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phœbe were a loving couple. You
perhaps know how it is with simple natures that fasten themselves like
lichens on the stones of circumstance and weather their days to a
crumbling conclusion. The great world sounds widely, but it has no call
for them. They have no soaring intellect. The orchard, the meadow, the
corn-field, the pig-pen, and the chicken-lot measure the range of their
human activities. When the wheat is headed it is reaped and threshed;
when the corn is browned and frosted it is cut and shocked; when the
timothy is in full head it is cut, and the hay-cock erected. After that
comes winter, with the hauling of grain to market, the sawing and
splitting of wood, the simple chores of fire-building, meal-getting,
occasional repairing, and visiting. Beyond these and the changes of
weather--the snows, the rains, and the fair days--there are no
immediate, significant things. All the rest of life is a far-off,
clamorous phantasmagoria, flickering like Northern lights in the night,
and sounding as faintly as cow-bells tinkling in the distance.
Old Henry and his wife Phœbe were as fond of each other as it is
possible for old people to be who have nothing else in this life to be
fond of. He was a thin old man, seventy when she died, a queer,
crotchety person with coarse gray-black hair and beard, quite straggly
and unkempt. He looked at you out of dull, fishy, watery eyes that had
deep-brown crow’s-feet at the sides. His clothes, like the clothes of
many farmers, were aged and angular and baggy, standing out at the
pockets, not fitting about the neck, protuberant and worn at elbow and
knee. Phœbe Ann was thin and shapeless, a very umbrella of a woman, clad
in shabby black, and with a black bonnet for her best wear. As time had
passed, and they had only themselves to look after, their movements had
become slower and slower, their activities fewer and fewer. The annual
keep of pigs had been reduced from five to one grunting porker, and the
single horse which Henry now retained was a sleepy animal, not
over-nourished and not very clean. The chickens, of which formerly there
was a large flock, had almost disappeared, owing to ferrets, foxes, and
the lack of proper care, which produces disease. The former healthy
garden was now a straggling memory of itself, and the vines and
flowerbeds that formerly ornamented the windows and dooryard had now
become choking thickets. Yet these two lived together in peace and
sympathy, only that now and then old Henry would become unduly cranky,
complaining almost invariably that something had been neglected or
mislaid which was of no importance at all.
“Phœbe, where’s my corn-knife? You ain’t never minded to let my things
alone no more.”
“Now you hush, Henry,” his wife would caution him in a cracked and
squeaky voice. “If you don’t, I’ll leave yuh. I’ll git up and walk out
of here some day, and then where would y’ be? Y’ ain’t got anybody but
me to look after yuh, so yuh just behave yourself.”
Old Henry, who knew that his wife would never leave him in any
circumstances, used to speculate at times as to what he would do if she
were to die. That was the one leaving that he really feared. As he
climbed on the chair at night to wind the old, long-pendulumed,
double-weighted clock, or went finally to the front and the back door to
see that they were safely shut in, it was a comfort to know that Phœbe
was properly ensconced on her side of the bed, and that if he stirred
restlessly in the night, she would be there to ask what he wanted.
“Now, Henry, do lie still! You’re as restless as a chicken.”
“Well, I can’t sleep, Phœbe.”
“Well, yuh needn’t roll so, anyhow. You can let me sleep.”
This usually reduced him to a state of somnolent ease. If she wanted a
pail of water, it was a grumbling pleasure for him to get it; and if she
did rise first to build the fires, he saw that the wood was cut and
placed within easy reach. They divided this simple world nicely between
them.
As the years had gone on, fewer and fewer people had called. They were
well known for a distance of as much as ten square miles as old Mr. and
Mrs. Reifsneider, honest, moderately Christian, but too old to be really
interesting any longer. Now and then some old friend stopped with a pie
or cake or a roasted chicken or duck, or merely to see that they were
well; even these kindly minded visits were no longer frequent.
One day in the early spring of her sixty-fourth year Mrs. Reifsneider
took sick, and from a low fever passed into some indefinable ailment
which, because of her age, was no longer curable. Old Henry drove to
Swinnerton, the neighboring town, and procured a doctor. Some friends
called, and the immediate care of her was taken off his hands. Then one
chill spring night she died, and old Henry, in a fog of sorrow and
uncertainty, followed her body to the nearest graveyard, an unattractive
space, with a few pines growing in it. It was suggested to him at once
by one friend and another that he come to stay with them awhile, or that
he seek his daughter in Pemberton County. She had been notified. He was
so old, and so fixed in his notions, however, and so accustomed to the
exact surroundings he had known all his days, that he could not think of
leaving. He wanted to remain near where they had put his Phœbe; and the
fact that he would have to live alone did not trouble him in the least.
“I kin make a shift for myself,” he continually announced to old Dr.
Morrow, who had attended his wife in this case. “I kin cook a little,
and, besides, I don’t take much more ’n coffee an’ bread in the
mornin’s. I’ll get along now well enough. You just let me be.” And after
many pleadings and proffers of advice, with supplies of coffee and bacon
and baked bread duly offered and accepted, he was left to himself. For a
while he sat idly outside his door brooding in the spring sun. He tried
to revive his interest in farming, and to keep himself busy and free
from thought by looking after the fields, which of late had been much
neglected. It was a gloomy thing to come in of an evening or in the
afternoon and find no shadow of Phœbe where everything suggested her. By
degrees he put a few of her things away. He sat beside his lamp and read
in the papers that were left him occasionally or in a Bible that he had
neglected for years, but he could get little solace from these things.
Mostly he held his hand over his mouth and looked at the floor as he sat
and thought of what had become of her, and how soon he himself would
die. He made a great business of making his coffee in the morning and
frying himself a little bacon at night; but his appetite was gone. This
shell in which he had been housed so long seemed vacant, and its shadows
were suggestive of immedicable griefs. So he lived quite dolefully for
five long weeks, and then a change began.
It was one night, after he had looked after the front and the back door,
wound the clock, blown out the lamp, and gone through all the selfsame
motions that he had indulged in for years, that he went to bed not so
much to sleep as to think. It was a moonlight night. The
green-lichen-covered orchard was a silvery affair, sweetly spectral. The
moon shone through the east windows, throwing the pattern of the panes
on the wooden floor, and making the old furniture, to which he was
accustomed, stand out dimly in the gloom. As usual he had been thinking
of Phœbe and the years when they had been young together, and of the
children who had gone, and the poor shift he was making of his present
days. The house was coming to be in a very bad state indeed. The
bed-clothes were in disorder and not clean, for he made a wretched shift
of washing. It was a terror to him. He was getting into that brooding
state when he would accept anything rather than exert himself. He
preferred to pace slowly to and fro or to sit and think.
By twelve o’clock he was asleep, however, and by two o’clock he had
waked again. The moon by this time had shifted to a position on the
western side of the house, and it now shone in through the windows of
the living-room and those of the kitchen beyond. A certain combination
of furniture--a chair near a table, with his coat on it, the half-open
kitchen door casting a shadow, and the position of a lamp near a
paper--gave him an exact representation of Phœbe leaning over the table
as he had often seen her do in life. He looked at her fixedly in the
feeble half-light, his old hair tingling oddly at the roots, and then he
sat up. The figure did not move. He put his thin legs out of the bed and
sat looking at her, wondering if this could really be Phœbe. They had
talked of ghosts often in their lifetime, of apparitions and omens; but
they had never agreed that such things could be. It had never been a
part of his wife’s creed that she could have a spirit that could return
to walk the earth. Her after-world was quite a different affair, a vague
heaven, no less, from which the righteous did not trouble to return. Yet
here she was now, bending over the table in her black skirt and gray
shawl, her pale profile outlined against the moonlight.
“Phœbe,” called old Henry, thrilling from head to toe and putting out
one bony hand, “have you come back?”
The figure did not stir, and he arose and walked uncertainly to the
door, looking at it fixedly the while. As he drew near, however, the
apparition resolved itself into its primal content--his old coat over
the high-backed chair, the lamp by the paper, the half-open door.
“Well,” he said to himself, his mouth open, “I thought shore I saw her.”
And he ran his hand strangely and vaguely through his hair, the while
his nervous tension relaxed.
Another night, because of this first illusion, and because his mind was
now constantly on her and he was old, he looked out of the window that
was nearest his bed and commanded hen-coop and pig-pen and a part of the
wagon-shed, and there, a faint mist exuding from the damp of the ground,
he thought he saw her again. It was a little wisp of mist, one of those
faint exhalations of the earth that rise in a cool night after a warm
day, and flicker like small white cypresses of fog before they
disappear. It had been a custom of hers to cross the lot from her
kitchen door to the pig-pen to throw in any scrap that was left from her
cooking, and here she was again. He sat up and watched it strangely,
doubtfully, because of his previous experience, but inclined, because of
the nervous titillation that passed over his body, to believe that
spirits really were, and that Phœbe, who would be concerned because of
his lonely state, must be thinking about him, and hence returning. It
would be within the province of her charity so to do, and like her
loving interest in him. He quivered and watched it eagerly; but, a faint
breath of air stirring, it wound away toward the fence and disappeared.
A third night, as he was actually dreaming, some ten days later, she
came to his bedside and put her hand on his head.
“Poor Henry!” she said. “It’s too bad.”
He roused out of his sleep, actually to see her, he thought, moving
from his bed-room into the one living-room, her figure a shadowy mass of
black. The weak straining of his eyes caused little points of light to
flicker about the outlines of her form. He arose, greatly astonished,
walked the floor in the cool room, convinced that Phœbe was coming back
to him. If he only thought sufficiently, if he made it perfectly clear
by his feeling that he needed her greatly, she would come back, this
kindly wife, and tell him what to do. She would perhaps be with him much
of the time, in the night, anyhow; and that would make this lonely state
endurable.
In age and with the feeble it is not such a far cry from the subtleties
of illusion to actual hallucination, and in due time this transition was
made for Henry. Night after night he waited, expecting her return. Once
in his weird mood he thought he saw a pale light moving about the room,
and another time he thought he saw her walking in the orchard after
dark. It was one morning when the details of his lonely state were
virtually unendurable that he woke with the thought that she was not
dead. How he had arrived at this conclusion it is hard to say. His mind
had gone. In its place was a fixed illusion. He and Phœbe had had a
senseless quarrel. He had reproached her for not leaving his pipe where
he was accustomed to find it, and she had left. It was an aberrated
fulfilment of her old jesting threat that if he did not behave himself
she would leave him.
“I guess I could find yuh ag’in,” he had always said. But her cackling
threat had always been:
“Yuh’ll not find me if I ever leave yuh. I guess I kin git some place
where yuh can’t find me.”
This morning when he arose he did not think to build the fire in the
customary way or to grind his coffee and cut his bread, as was his wont,
but solely to meditate as to where he should search for her and how he
should induce her to come back. Recently the one horse had been
dispensed with because he found it cumbersome and beyond his needs. He
took down his soft crush hat after he had dressed himself, a new glint
of interest and determination in his eye, and taking his black crook
cane from behind the door, where he had always placed it, started out
briskly to look for her among the distant neighbors that he knew. His
old shoes clumped briskly in the dust as he walked, and his gray-black
locks, now grown rather long, straggled out in a dramatic fringe or halo
from under his hat. His short coat stirred busily as he walked, and his
hands and face were peaked and pale.
“Why, hello, Henry! Where’re yuh goin’ this mornin’?” inquired Farmer
Dodge, who, hauling a load of wheat to market, encountered him on the
public road. He had not seen the aged farmer in weeks, not since his
wife’s death, and he wondered now, seeing him looking so spry.
“Yuh ain’t seen Phœbe, have yuh?” inquired the old man, looking up
quizzically.
“Phœbe who?” inquired Farmer Dodge, not for the moment connecting the
name with Henry’s dead wife.
“Why, my wife Phœbe, o’ course. Who do yuh s’pose I mean?” He stared up
with a pathetic sharpness of glance from under his shaggy, gray
eyebrows.
“Wall, I’ll swan, Henry, yuh ain’t jokin’, are yuh?” said the solid
Dodge, a pursy man, with a smooth, hard, red face. “It can’t be your
wife you’re talkin’ about. She’s dead.”
“Dead! Shucks!” retorted the demented Reifsneider. “She left me early
this mornin’, while I was sleepin’. She allus got up to build the fire,
but she’s gone now. We had a little spat last night, an’ I guess that’s
the reason. But I guess I kin find her. She’s gone over to Matilda
Race’s; that’s where she’s gone.”
He started briskly up the road, leaving the amazed Dodge to stare in
wonder after him.
“Well, I’ll be switched!” he said aloud to himself. “He’s clean out ’n
his head. That poor old feller’s been livin’ down there till he’s gone
mad. I’ll have to notify the authorities.” And he flicked his whip with
great enthusiasm. “Geddap!” he said, and was off.
Reifsneider met no one else in this poorly populated region until he
reached the whitewashed fence of Matilda Race and her husband three
miles away. He had passed several other houses en route, but these not
being within the range of his illusion were not considered. His wife,
who had known Matilda well, must be here. He opened the picket-gate
which guarded the walk, and stamped briskly up to the door.
“Why, Mr. Reifsneider,” exclaimed old Matilda herself, a stout woman,
looking out of the door in answer to his knock, “what brings yuh here
this mornin’?”
“Is Phœbe here?” he demanded eagerly.
“Phœbe who? What Phœbe?” replied Mrs. Race, curious as to this sudden
development of energy on his part.
“Why, my Phœbe, o’ course. My wife Phœbe. Who do yuh s’pose? Ain’t she
here now?”
“Lawsy me!” exclaimed Mrs. Race, opening her mouth. “Yuh pore man! So
you’re clean out’n your mind. Now yuh come right in and sit down. I’ll
git yuh a cup o’ coffee. O’ course your wife ain’t here; but yuh come in
an’ sit down. I’ll find her fer yuh after a while. I know where she is.”
The old farmer’s eyes softened, and he entered. He was a thin,
pantalooned, patriarchal specimen, and he took off his hat and laid it
on his knees quite softly and mildly.
“We had a quarrel last night, and she left me,” he volunteered.
“Laws! laws!” sighed Mrs. Race, there being no one present with whom to
share her astonishment as she went to her kitchen. “The pore man! Now
somebody’s got to look after him. He can’t be allowed to run around the
country this way lookin’ for his dead wife. It’s turrible.”
She boiled him a pot of coffee and brought in some of her new-baked
bread and fresh butter. She set out some of her best jam and put a
couple of eggs to boil, lying whole-heartedly the while.
“Now yuh stay right here, Uncle Henry, until Jake comes in, and I’ll
send him to look for Phœbe. I think it’s more than likely she’s over to
Swinnerton with some o’ her friends. Anyhow, we’ll find out. Now yuh
just drink this coffee an’ eat this bread. Yuh must be tired. Yuh’ve had
a long walk this mornin’.” Her idea was to take counsel with Jake, “her
man,” and perhaps have him notify the authorities.
She bustled about, meditating on the uncertainties of life, while old
Reifsneider thrummed on the rim of his hat with his pale fingers and
later ate abstractedly of what she offered. His mind was on his wife,
however, and since she was not here, it wandered vaguely away to a
family by the name of Murray, miles away in another direction. He
decided after a time that he would not wait for Jake Race to hunt his
wife. He could not. He must be on, and urge her to come back.
“Well, I’ll be goin’,” he said, getting up and looking strangely about
him. “I guess she didn’t come here. She went over to the Murrays’. I’ll
not wait any longer, Mrs. Race. There’s a lot to do over to the house
to-day.” And out he marched, while Mrs. Race pleaded with him to stay.
He took to the dusty road again in the warm spring sun, his cane
striking the earth as he went.
It was two hours later that this pale figure of a man appeared in the
Murrays’ doorway, dusty, perspiring, eager. He had tramped all of five
miles, and it was noon. An amazed husband and wife of sixty heard his
strange query, and realized also that he was mad. They begged him to
stay to dinner, intending to notify the authorities later and see what
could be done; but though he stayed to partake of a little something, he
did not stay long, and was off again, to another distant farmhouse, his
idea of many things to do and his need of Phœbe impelling him.
The process by which a character assumes the significance of being
peculiar, weird, harmless, in such a community is often involute and
pathetic. This day saw Reifsneider at other doors, eagerly asking his
unnatural question, and leaving a trail of amazement, sympathy, and pity
in his wake. Although the authorities were informed,--the county
sheriff, no less,--it was not deemed advisable to take him into custody;
for when those who knew old Henry, had known him for so long, reflected
on the condition of the county insane asylum, a place, because of the
poverty of the district, of staggering aberration and sickening
environment, it was decided to let him remain at large; for, strange to
relate, it was found on investigation that at night he returned to his
lonesome domicile to find whether his wife had returned, and to brood
there in loneliness until the morning. Who would lock up a thin, eager
old man with long iron-gray hair and an attitude of kindly, innocent
inquiry, particularly when he was well known for a past of only kindly
servitude and reliability? Those who had known him best rather agreed
that he should be allowed to roam at large. He could do no harm. There
were many who were willing to help him as to food, old clothes, the odds
and ends of his daily life--at least at first. His figure after a time
became not so much a commonplace as an accepted curiosity, and the
replies, “Why, no, Henry; I ain’t seen her,” or “No, Henry; she ain’t
been here to-day,” more customary.
He was an odd figure in the sun and rain, on dusty roads and muddy ones,
encountered occasionally in strange and unexpected places, pursuing his
endless search. Under-nourishment, after a time, although the neighbors
and those who knew his history gladly contributed from their store,
affected his body; for he walked much and ate little. The longer he
roamed the public highway in this manner, the deeper became his strange
hallucination; and finding it harder and harder to return from his more
and more distant pilgrimages, he finally took a few utensils from his
home store and, making a small package of them, carried them with him
in order that he might not be compelled to return. In an old tin
coffee-pot of large size he placed a small tin cup, a knife, fork, and
spoon, some salt and pepper, and to the outside of it, by a string
forced through a pierced hole, he fastened a plate, which could be
released, and which was his woodland table. It was no trouble for him to
secure the little food that he needed, and with a strange, almost
religious dignity he had no hesitation in asking for that much. By
degrees his hair became longer and longer, his once black hat became an
earthen brown, and his clothes threadbare and dusty.
For all of a year he walked, and none knew how wide were his
perambulations, nor how he survived the storms and cold. They could not
see him, with homely rural understanding and forethought, sheltering
himself in hay-cocks, or by the sides of cattle, whose warm bodies
protected him from the cold and whose dull understandings were not
opposed to his harmless presence. Overhanging rocks and trees kept him
at times from the rain, and a friendly hay-loft or corn-crib was not
above his humble consideration.
The involute progression of hallucination is strange. From asking at
doors and being constantly rebuffed or denied, he finally came to the
conclusion that although his Phœbe might not be in any of the houses at
the doors of which he inquired, she might nevertheless be within the
sound of his voice. And so, from patient inquiry, he began to call sad,
occasional cries, that ever and anon waked the quiet landscapes and
ragged hill regions, and set to echoing his thin “O-o-o Phœbe! O-o-o
Phœbe!” It had a pathetic, albeit insane, ring, and many a farmer or
plowboy or country housewife came to know it even from afar and to say,
“There goes old Reifsneider.”
Another thing that puzzled him greatly after a time and after many
hundreds of inquiries was, when he no longer had any particular dooryard
in view and no special inquiry to make, which way to go. These
cross-roads, which occasionally led in four or even six directions,
came after a time to puzzle him. But to solve this knotty problem, which
became more and more of a puzzle, there came to his aid another
hallucination. Phœbe’s spirit or some power of the air or wind or nature
would tell him. If he stood at the center of the parting of the ways,
closed his eyes, turned thrice about, and called, “O-o-o Phœbe!” twice,
and then threw his cane straight before him, that would surely indicate
which way to go for Phœbe, or one of these mystic powers would govern
its direction and fall! In whichever direction it went, even though, as
was not infrequently the case, it took him back along the path he had
already come, he was not so far gone in his mind but that he gave
himself ample time to search before calling again,---- but that he had
the strange feeling that sometime he would find her. There were hours
when his feet were sore, and his limbs weary, when he would stop in the
heat to wipe his faded brow, or in the cold to beat his arms. Sometimes,
after throwing his cane, and finding it indicating the direction from
which he had just come, he would shake his head wearily, and
philosophically, as if contemplating the unbelievable or an untoward
fate, and then start briskly off. His strange figure came finally to be
known in the farthest reaches of three or four counties. Old Reifsneider
was a pathetic character. His fame was wide.
Near a little town called Watersville, in Green County, perhaps four
miles from that minor center of human activity, there was a place or
precipice locally known as the Red Cliff, a sheer wall of red sandstone,
perhaps a hundred feet high, which raised its sharp wall for half a mile
or more above the fruitful corn-fields and orchards that lay beneath,
and which was surmounted by a thick grove of trees. The slope that
slowly led up to it from the opposite side was covered by a rank growth
of beech, hickory, and ash, through which threaded a number of
wagon-tracks crossing at various angles. In fair weather it had become
old Reifsneider’s habit, so inured was he by now to the open, to make
his bed in some patch of trees of this character, to fry his bacon or
boil his eggs at the foot of some tree, before laying himself down for
the night. His was a light and inconsequential sleep. More often the
moonlight, some sudden wind stirring in the trees, or a reconnoitering
animal, would arouse him, and he would sit up and think, or pursue his
quest in the moonlight or the dark, a strange, unnatural, half wild,
half savage-looking, but utterly harmless, creature, calling at lonely
road crossings, staring at dark and shuttered houses, and wondering
where, where, Phœbe could really be.
That particular lull that comes in the systole-diastole of this earthly
ball at two o’clock in the morning invariably aroused him, and though he
might not go any farther, he would sit up and contemplate the dark or
the stars, wondering. Sometimes in the strange processes of his mind he
would fancy that he saw moving among the trees the figure of his lost
wife, and then he would get up to follow, taking his utensils, always on
a string, and his cane.
It was in the seventh year of these hopeless peregrinations, in the dawn
of a similar springtime to that in which his wife had died, that he came
at last one night to the vicinity of this little patch of woods that
crowned the rise to the Red Cliff. His far-flung cane, used as a
divining-rod at the last cross-roads, had brought him hither. He had
walked many, many miles. It was after ten o’clock at night, and he was
very weary. Long wandering and little eating had left him only a shadow
of his former self. It was a question now not so much of physical
strength, but of spiritual endurance that kept him up. He had scarcely
eaten this day, and, now exhausted, set himself down in the dark to rest
and possibly to sleep. Curiously, a strange suggestion of the presence
of his wife surrounded him. It would not be long now, he counseled
himself, although the long months had brought him nothing. He fell
asleep after a time, his head on his knees. At midnight the moon began
to rise, and at two in the morning, his wakeful hour, was a large
silver disk shining through the trees to the east. He opened his eyes
when the radiance became strong, making a silver pattern at his feet,
and lighting the woods with strange lusters and silvery, shadowy forms.
His old notion that his wife must be near to him occurred to him as it
usually did on occasions of this kind, and he looked about him with a
strange, speculative, anticipatory eye. What was it that moved in the
distant shadows along the path by which he had entered, a pale,
flickering will-o’-the-wisp that bobbed gracefully among the trees, and
riveted his expectant gaze? Moonlight and shadows combined to give it a
strange form and a strange reality, this fluttering of bog-fire or
dancing of wandering fire-flies. Was it truly his lost Phœbe? By a
circuitous route it passed about him, and in his fevered state he
fancied that he could see the very eyes of her, not as she was when he
last saw her in the black dress and shawl, but a strangely younger Phœbe
now, the one whom he had known years before as a girl. Old Reifsneider
got up. He had been expecting and dreaming of this expected hour all
these days, and now, as he saw the feeble light dancing, he peered at it
questioningly, one thin hand in his gray hair.
There came to him now for the first time in many years the full charm of
her girlish figure as he had first known it in boyhood, the pleasing,
sympathetic smile, the brown hair, the blue sash she had once worn about
her waist, her gay, graceful movements. He walked around the base of the
tree, straining with his eyes, forgetting for once his cane and his
utensils, and following eagerly after. On she moved before him, a
will-o’-the-wisp, a little flame above her head; and it seemed as though
among the small saplings of ash and beech and the thick trunks of
hickory and elm that she signaled with a young, lightsome hand.
“O Phœbe! Phœbe!” he called. “Have yuh really come?” And hurrying
faster, he fell once, scrambling lamely to his feet, only to see the
light in the distance dancing illusively on. On and on he hurried
faster and faster, until he was fairly running, brushing his ragged arms
against the trees, striking his hands and face against impeding twigs.
His hat was gone, his lungs were breathless, when coming to the edge of
the cliff, he saw her below, among a silvery wonder of apple-trees now
blooming in the spring.
“O Phœbe,” he called. “Oh, no; don’t leave me!” And feeling the lure of
a world where love was young and Phœbe was as this vision presented her,
he gave a gay cry of “Oh, wait, Phœbe!” and leaped.
Some farmer-boys, reconnoitering this region of bounty and prospect,
found first the tin utensils tied together under the tree where he had
left them. Months after his body was found, his old hat was discovered
lying under some low-growing saplings the twigs of which had held it
back. At the foot of the cliff they found him, pale, broken, elate, a
molded smile of peace and delight upon his lips. No one of all the
simple population knew how eagerly and joyously he had found his lost
mate.