Rigdon had been temporizing. He recurred to it at once. "You contemplate
giving it to the public," he said to Gordon; "why not try its effect on
a disinterested listener first, and judge from that?"
Gordon assented with an extreme gravity that surprised Geraldine; then
Rigdon hesitated, evidently scarcely knowing how to begin. He looked
vaguely at the moon riding high in the heavens above the long, broad
expanse of the Mississippi and the darkling forests on either hand.
Sometimes a shaft of light, a sudden luminous glister, betokened the
motion of the currents gliding in the sheen. "Last night," he said in a
tense, bated voice--"last night Mr. Gordon saw the phantom of Bogue
Holauba. Stop! Hush!"--for the girl had sprung half screaming from her
chair. "This is important." He laid his hand on her arm to detain her.
"We want you to help us!"
"Help you! Why, you scare me to death!" She had paused, but stood
trembling from head to foot.
"There is something explained in one of Mr. Keene's papers,--addressed
to Mr. Gordon; and we have been much startled by the coincidence of
his--his vision."
"Did he see--really----?" Geraldine had sunk back in her chair, her face
ghastly pale.
"Of course it must be some illusion," said Rigdon. "The effect of the
mist, perhaps----"
"Only, there was no mist," said Gordon.
"Perhaps a snag waving in the wind."
"Only, there was no wind."
"Perhaps a snag tossing in the motion of the water,--at all events, you
can't say there was no water." Dr. Rigdon glanced at Gordon with a
genial smile.
"Mighty little water for the Mississippi," Gordon sought to respond in
the same key.
"You know the record of these apparitions." Leaning forward, one arm on
his knee, the document in question in his hand, Rigdon looked up into
Geraldine's pale face. "In the old days there used to be a sort of
water-gypsy, with a queer little trading-boat that plied the region of
the bends-a queer little old man, too--Polish, I think, foreign
certainly--and the butt of all the wags alongshore, at the stores and
the wood-yards, the cotton-sheds and the wharf-boats. By some accident,
it was thought, the boat got away when he was befuddled with drink in a
wood-chopper's cabin--a stout, trig little craft it was! When he found
it was gone, he was wild, for although he saw it afloat at a
considerable distance down the Mississippi, it suddenly disappeared near
Bogue Holauba, cargo and all. No trace of its fate was ever discovered.
He haunted these banks then--whatever he may have done since--screaming
out his woes for his losses, and his rage and curses on the miscreants
who had set the craft adrift--for he fully believed it was done in
malice--beating his breast and tearing his hair. The Civil War came on
presently, and the man was lost sight of in the national commotions. No
one thought of him again till suddenly something--an apparition, an
illusion, the semblance of a man--began to patrol the banks of Bogue
Holauba, and beat its breast and tear its hair and bewail its woes in
pantomime, and set the whole country-side aghast, for always disasters
follow its return."
"And how do you account for that phase?" asked Gordon, obviously
steadying his voice by an effort of the will.
"The apparition always shows up at low water,--the disasters are usually
typhoid," replied the physician.
"Mr. Keene died from malaria," Geraldine murmured musingly.
The two men glanced significantly at each other. Then Rigdon resumed: "I
mustered the hardihood on one occasion to row up to the bank of Bogue
Holauba for a closer survey. The thing vanished on my approach. There
was a snag hard by, fast anchored in the bottom of the Bogue. It played
slackly to and fro with the current, but I could not see any way by
which it or its shadow could have produced the illusion."
"Is this what you had to tell me?" demanded Geraldine pertinently. "I
knew all that already."
"No, no," replied the Doctor reluctantly. "Will you tell it, Mr. Gordon,
or shall I?"
"You, by all means, if you will," said Gordon gloomily. "God knows I
should be glad never to speak of it."
"Well," Rigdon began slowly, "Mr. Gordon was made by his cousin Jasper
Keene not only the executor of his will, but the repository of a
certain confession, which he may destroy or make public as he sees
proper. It seems that in Mr. Keene's gay young days, running wild in his
vacation from college on a secluded plantation, he often lacked
congenial companionship, and he fell in with an uncouth fellow of a
lower social grade, who led him into much detrimental adventure. Among
other incidents of very poor fun, the two were notable in hectoring and
guying the old Polish trader, who, when drunk on mean whisky as he often
was, grew violent and antagonistic. He went very far in his
denunciations one fatal night, and by way of playing him a trick in
return, they set his boat adrift by cutting the rope that tied the craft
to a tree on the bank. The confession states that they supposed the
owner was then aboard and would suffer no greater hardship than having
to use the sweeps with considerable energy to row her in to a landing
again. They were genuinely horrified when he came running down the bank,
both arms out-stretched, crying out that his all, _his all_ was floating
away on that tumultuous, merciless tide. Before any skiff could be
launched, before any effort could be made to reach the trading-boat, she
suddenly disappeared. The Mississippi was at flood height, and it was
thought that the boat struck some drifting obstruction, swamped, and
went down in deep water. The agents in this disaster were never
suspected, but as soon as Jasper Keene had come of age, and had command
of any means of his own, his first act was to have an exhaustive search
made for the old fellow, with a view of financial restitution. But the
owner of the trading-boat had died, spending his last years in the
futile effort to obtain the insurance money. As the little he had left
was never claimed, no representative could profit by the restitution
that Jasper Keene had planned, and he found what satisfaction he could
in giving it secretly to an old man's charity. Then the phantom began to
take his revenge. He appeared on the banks of Bogue Holauba, and
straightway the only child of the mansion sickened and died. Mr. Keene's
first wife died after the second apparition. Either it was the fancy of
an ailing man, or perhaps the general report, but he notes that the
spectre was bewailing its woes along the banks of Bogue Holauba when
Jasper Keene himself was stricken by an illness which from the first he
felt was fatal."
"I remember--I remember it was said at the time," Geraldine barely
whispered.
"And now to the question: he leaves it to Mr. Gordon as his kinsman,
solicitous of the family repute, to judge whether this confession should
be made public or destroyed."
"Does he state any reasons for making it public?" demanded Geraldine,
taking the document and glancing through its pages.
"Yes; as an expiation of his early misdeeds toward this man and, if any
such thing there be, to placate the spirit of his old enemy; and lastly
better to secure his peace with his Maker."
"And which do you say?" Geraldine turned an eager, spirited face toward
Gordon, his dejected attitude and countenance distinctly seen in the
light from the lamp within the parlor, on a table close to the window.
"I frankly admit that the publication of that confession would humiliate
me to the ground, but I fear that it _ought_ to be given to the public,
as he obviously desires!"
"And which do _you_ say?" Geraldine was standing now, and swiftly
whirled around toward Dr. Rigdon.
"I agree with Mr. Gordon--much against my will--but an honest confession
is good for the soul!" he replied ruefully.
"You infidels!" she exclaimed tumultuously. "You have not one atom of
Christian faith between you! To imagine that _you_ can strike a bargain
with the good God by letting a sick theory of expiation of a dying,
fever-distraught creature besmirch his repute as a man and a gentleman,
make his whole life seem like a whited sepulchre, and bring his name
into odium,--as kind a man as ever lived,--and you know it!--as honest,
and generous, and whole-souled, to be held up to scorn and humiliation
because of a boyish prank forty years ago, that precipitated a disaster
never intended,--bad enough, silly enough, even wicked enough, but not
half so bad and silly and wicked as _you_, with your morbid shrinking
from moral responsibility, and your ready contributive defamation of
character. Tell me, you men, is this a testamentary paper, and you think
it against the law to destroy it?"
"No, no, not that," said Rigdon.
"No, it is wholly optional," declared Gordon.
"Then, I will settle the question for you once for all, you wobblers!"
She suddenly thrust the paper into the chimney of the lamp on the table
just within the open window, and as it flared up she flung the document
forth, blazing in every fibre, on the bare driveway below the veranda.
"And now you may find, as best you can, some other means of exorcising
the phantom of Bogue Holauba!"
HIS CHRISTMAS MIRACLE
He yearned for a sign from the heavens. Could one intimation be
vouchsafed him, how it would confirm his faltering faith! Jubal Kennedy
was of the temperament impervious to spiritual subtleties, fain to reach
conclusions with the line and rule of mathematical demonstration. Thus,
all unreceptive, he looked through the mountain gap, as through some
stupendous gateway, on the splendors of autumn; the vast landscape
glamorous in a transparent amethystine haze; the foliage of the dense
primeval wilderness in the October richness of red and russet; the
"hunter's moon," a full sphere of illuminated pearl, high in the blue
east while yet the dull vermilion sun swung westering above the massive
purple heights. He knew how the sap was sinking; that the growths of the
year had now failed; presently all would be shrouded in snow, but only
to rise again in the reassurance of vernal quickening, to glow anew in
the fullness of bloom, to attain eventually the perfection of fruition.
And still he was deaf to the reiterated analogy of death, and blind to
the immanent obvious prophecy of resurrection and the life to come.
His thoughts, as he stood on this jutting crag in Sunrise Gap, were with
a recent "experience meeting" at which he had sought to canvass his
spiritual needs. His demand of a sign from the heavens as evidence of
the existence of the God of revelation, as assurance of the awakening of
divine grace in the human heart, as actual proof that wistful mortality
is inherently endowed with immortality, had electrified this symposium.
Though it was fashionable, so to speak, in this remote cove among the
Great Smoky Mountains, to be repentant in rhetorical involutions and a
self-accuser in fine-spun interpretations of sin, doubt, or more
properly an eager questioning, a desire to possess the sacred mysteries
of religion, was unprecedented. Kennedy was a proud man, reticent,
reserved. Although the old parson, visibly surprised and startled, had
gently invited his full confidence, Kennedy had hastily swallowed his
words, as best he might, perceiving that the congregation had wholly
misinterpreted their true intent and that certain gossips had an unholy
relish of the sensation they had caused.
Thereafter he indulged his poignant longings for the elucidation of the
veiled truths only when, as now, he wandered deep in the woods with his
rifle on his shoulder. He could not have said to-day that he was nearer
an inspiration, a hope, a "leading," than heretofore, but as he stood on
the crag it was with the effect of a dislocation that he was torn from
the solemn theme by an interruption at a vital crisis.
The faint vibrations of a violin stirred the reverent hush of the
landscape in the blended light of the setting sun and the "hunter's
moon." Presently the musician came into view, advancing slowly through
the aisles of the red autumn forest. A rapt figure it was, swaying in
responsive ecstasy with the rhythmic cadence. The head, with its long,
blowsy yellow hair, was bowed over the dark polished wood of the
instrument; the eyes were half closed; the right arm, despite the
eccentric patches on the sleeve of the old brown-jeans coat, moved with
free, elastic gestures in all the liberties of a practiced bowing. If he
saw the hunter motionless on the brink of the crag, the fiddler gave no
intimation. His every faculty was as if enthralled by the swinging
iteration of the sweet melancholy melody, rendered with a breadth of
effect, an inspiration, it might almost have seemed, incongruous with
the infirmities of the crazy old fiddle. He was like a creature under
the sway of a spell, and apparently drawn by this dulcet lure of the
enchantment of sound was the odd procession that trailed silently after
him through these deep mountain fastnesses.
A woman came first, arrayed in a ragged purple skirt and a yellow blouse
open at the throat, displaying a slender white neck which upheld a face
of pensive, inert beauty. She clasped in her arms a delicate infant,
ethereal of aspect with its flaxen hair, transparently pallid
complexion, and wide blue eyes. It was absolutely quiescent, save that
now and then it turned feebly in its waxen hands a little striped
red-and-yellow pomegranate. A sturdy blond toddler trudged behind, in a
checked blue cotton frock, short enough to disclose cherubic pink feet
and legs bare to the knee; he carried that treasure of rural juveniles,
a cornstalk violin. An old hound, his tail suavely wagging, padded along
the narrow path; and last of all came, with frequent pause to crop the
wayside herbage, a large cow, brindled red and white.
"The whole fambly!" muttered Kennedy. Then, aloud, "Why don't you uns
kerry the baby, Basil Bedell, an' give yer wife a rest?"
At the prosaic suggestion the crystal realm of dreams was shattered. The
bow, with a quavering discordant scrape upon the strings, paused. Then
Bedell slowly mastered the meaning of the interruption.
"Kerry the baby? Why, Aurely won't let none but herself tech that baby."
He laughed as he tossed the tousled yellow hair from his face, and
looked over his shoulder to speak to the infant. "It air sech a plumb
special delightsome peach, it air,--it air!"
The pale face of the child lighted up with a smile of recognition and a
faint gleam of mirth.
"I jes' kem out ennyhows ter drive up the cow," Basil added.
"Big job," sneered Kennedy. "'Pears-like it takes the whole fambly to do
it."
Such slothful mismanagement was calculated to affront an energetic
spirit. Obviously, at this hour the woman should be at home cooking the
supper.
"I follered along ter listen ter the fiddle,--ef ye hev enny call ter
know." Mrs. Bedell replied to his unspoken thought, as if by divination.
But indeed such strictures were not heard for the first time. They were
in some sort the penalty of the disinterested friendship which Kennedy
had harbored for Basil since their childhood. He wished that his compeer
might prosper in such simple wise as his own experience had proved to be
amply possible. Kennedy's earlier incentive to industry had been his
intention to marry, but the object of his affections had found him "too
mortal solemn," and without a word of warning had married another man in
a distant cove. The element of treachery in this event had gone far to
reconcile the jilted lover to his future, bereft of her companionship,
but the habit of industry thus formed had continued of its own momentum.
It had resulted in forehanded thrift; he now possessed a comfortable
holding,--cattle, house, ample land; and he had all the intolerance of
the ant for the cricket. As Bedell lifted the bow once more, every
wincing nerve was enlisted in arresting it in mid-air.
"Mighty long tramp fur Bobbie, thar,--whyn't ye kerry him?"
The imperturbable calm still held fast on the musician's face. "Bob," he
addressed the toddler, "will you uns let daddy kerry ye like a baby?"
He swooped down as if to lift, the child, the violin and bow in his left
hand. The hardy youngster backed off precipitately.
"Don't ye _dare_ ter do it!" he virulently admonished his parent, a
resentful light in his blue eyes. Then, as Bedell sang a stave in a full
rich voice, "Bye-oh, Baby!" Bob vociferated anew, "Don't you _begin_ ter
dare do it!" every inch a man though a little one.
"That's the kind of a fambly I hev got," Basil commented easily. "Wife
an' boy an' baby all walk over me,--plumb stomp on me! Jes' enough lef
of me ter play the fiddle a leetle once in a while."
"Mighty nigh all the while, I be afeared," Kennedy corrected the phrase.
"How did yer corn crap turn out?" he asked, as he too fell into line
and the procession moved on once more along the narrow path.
"Well enough," said Basil; "we uns hev got a sufficiency." Then, as if
afraid of seeming boastful he qualified, "Ye know I hain't got but one
muel ter feed, an' the cow thar. My sheep gits thar pastur' on the
volunteer grass 'mongst the rocks, an' I hev jes' got a few head
ennyhows."
"But _why_ hain't ye got more, Basil? Whyn't ye work more and quit
wastin' yer time on that old fool fiddle?"
The limits of patience were reached. The musician fired up. "'Kase," he
retorted, "I make enough. I hev got grace enough ter be thankful fur
sech ez be vouchsafed ter me. _I_ ain't wantin' no meracle."
Kennedy flushed, following in silence while the musician annotated his
triumph by a series of gay little harmonics, and young Hopeful, trudging
in the rear, executed a soundless fantasia on the cornstalk fiddle with
great brilliancy of technique.
"You uns air talkin' 'bout whut I said at the meetin' las' month,"
Kennedy observed at length.
"An' so be all the mounting," Aurelia interpolated with a sudden fierce
joy of reproof.
Kennedy winced visibly.
"The folks all 'low ez ye be no better than an onbeliever." Aurelia was
bent on driving the blade home. "The idee of axin' fur a meracle at this
late day,--so ez _ye_ kin be satisfied in yer mind ez ye hev got grace!
Providence, though merciful, air _obleeged_, ter know ez sech air plumb
scandalous an' redic'lous."
"Why, Aurely, hesh up," exclaimed her husband, startled from his wonted
leniency. "I hev never hearn ye talk in sech a key,--yer voice sounds
plumb out o' tune. I be plumb sorry, Jube, ez I spoke ter you uns 'bout
a meracle at all. But I war consider'ble nettled by yer words, ye
see,--'kase I know I be a powerful, lazy, shif'less cuss----"
"Ye know a lie, then," his helpmate interrupted promptly.
"Why, Aurely, hesh up,--ye--ye--_woman_, ye!" he concluded injuriously.
Then resuming his remarks to Kennedy, "I know I _do_ fool away a deal of
my time with the fiddle----"
"The sound of it is like bread ter me,--I couldn't live without it,"
interposed the unconquered Aurelia. "Sometimes it minds me o' the
singin' o' runnin' water in a lonesome place. Then agin it minds me o'
seein' sunshine in a dream. An' sometimes it be sweet an' high an' fur
off, like a voice from the sky, tellin' what no mortial ever knowed
before,--an' _then_ it minds me o' the tune them angels sung ter the
shepherds abidin' in the fields. I _couldn't_ live without it."
"Woman, hold yer jaw!" Basil proclaimed comprehensively. Then, renewing
his explanation to Kennedy, "I kin see that I don't purvide fur my
fambly ez I ought ter do, through hatin' work and lovin' to play the
fiddle."
"I ain't goin' ter hear my home an' hearth reviled." Aurelia laid an
imperative hand on her husband's arm. "Ye know ye couldn't make more
out'n sech ground,--though I ain't faultin' our land, neither. We uns
hev enough an' ter spare, all we need an' more than we deserve. We don't
need ter ax a meracle from the skies ter stay our souls on faith, nor a
sign ter prove our grace."
"Now, now, _stop_, Aurely!--I declar', Jube I dunno what made me lay my
tongue ter sech a word ez that thar miser'ble benighted meracle! I be
powerful sorry I hurt yer feelin's, Jube; folks seekin' salvation git
mightily mis-put sometimes, an'----"
"I don't want ter hear none o' yer views on religion," Kennedy
interrupted gruffly. An apology often augments the sense of injury. In
this instance it also annulled the provocation, for his own admission
put Bedell hopelessly in the wrong. "Ez a friend I war argufyin' with ye
agin' yer waste o' time with that old fool fiddle. Ye hev got wife an'
children, an' yit not so well off in this world's gear ez me, a single
man. I misdoubts ef ye hev hunted a day since the craps war laid by, or
hev got a pound o' jerked venison stored up fer winter. But this air yer
home,"--he pointed upward at a little clearing beginning, as they
approached, to be visible amidst the forest,--"an' ef ye air satisfied
with sech ez it be, that comes from laziness stiddier a contented
sperit."
With this caustic saying he suddenly left them, the procession standing
silently staring after him as he took his way through the woods in the
dusky red shadows of the autumnal gloaming.
Aurelia's vaunted home was indeed a poor place,--not even the rude
though substantial log-cabin common to the region. It was a flimsy
shanty of boards, and except for its rickety porch was more like a box
than a house. It had its perch on a jutting eminence, where it seemed
the familiar of the skies, so did the clouds and winds circle about it.
Through the great gateway of Sunrise Gap it commanded a landscape of a
scope that might typify a world, in its multitude of mountain ranges, in
the intricacies of its intervening valleys, in the glittering coils of
its water-courses. Basil would sometimes sink into deep silences,
overpowered by the majesty of nature in this place. After a long hiatus
the bow would tremble and falter on the strings as if overawed for a
time; presently the theme would strengthen, expand, resound with large
meaning, and then he would send forth melodies that he had never before
played or heard, his own dream, the reflection of that mighty mood of
nature in the limpid pool of his receptive mind.
Around were rocks, crags, chasms,--the fields which nourished the family
lay well from the verge, within the purlieus of the limited mountain
plateau. He had sought to persuade himself that it was to save all the
arable land for tillage that he had placed his house and door-yard here,
but both he and Aurelia were secretly aware of the subterfuge; he would
fain be always within the glamour of the prospect through Sunrise Gap!
Their interlocutor had truly deemed that the woman should have been
earlier at home cooking the supper. Dusk had deepened to darkness long
before the meal smoked upon the board. The spinning-wheel had begun to
whir for her evening stint when other hill-folks had betaken themselves
to bed. Basil puffed his pipe before the fire; the flicker and flare
pervaded every nook of the bright little house. Strings of
red-pepper-pods flaunted in festoons from the beams; the baby slumbered
under a gay quilt in his rude cradle, never far from his mother's hand,
but the bluff little boy was still up and about, although his aspect,
round and burly, in a scanty nightgown, gave token of recognition of the
fact that bed was his appropriate place. His shrill plaintive voice rose
ever and anon wakefully.
"I wanter hear a bear tale,--I wanter hear a bear tale."
Thus Basil must needs knock the ashes from his pipe the better to devote
himself to the narration,--a prince of raconteurs, to judge by the
spell-bound interest of the youngster who stood at his knee and hung on
his words. Even Aurelia checked the whir of her wheel to listen
smilingly. She broke out laughing in appreciative pleasure when Basil
took up the violin to show how a jovial old bear, who intruded into this
very house one day when all the family were away at the church in the
cove, and who mistook the instrument for a banjo, addressed himself to
picking out this tune, singing the while a quaint and ursine lay. Basil
embellished the imitation with a masterly effect of realistic growls.