where the Settlement was perched upon the crag. The black, jagged
outline of the rock serrated the horizon, and was cut sharply into
the delicate, indefinable tints of the sky. Above it a great red moon
was rising. There was the gleam of the waterfall; how did it give
the sense of its emerald green in the darkness? The red, rising moon
showed, but did not illumine, the humble cluster of log huts upon the
great cliff. Here and there a dim yet genial flare of firelight came
broadly flickering out into the night. It was darker still in the
dense woods from which the road showed this nocturnal picture framed
in the oak leaves above his head. But was a sudden flash of lightning
shooting across that clear, tenderly-tinted sky? He felt his warm blood
gushing down his face; he had a dizzying sense of falling heavily; and
he heard, strangely dulled, a hoarse, terrified cry, which he knew
he did not utter. It echoed far through the quiet woods, startling
the apathetic inhabitants of the Settlement, and waking all the weird
spirits of the rocks. The men sitting in the store took their pipes
from their mouths, and looked at each other in surprise.
"What's that?" asked one of the newly-arrived candidates, an Ephesus
man, who held that the mountains were not over and above safe for
civilized people, and was fain to investigate unaccustomed sounds.
"Jes' somebody a-hollerin' fur thar cow, mebbe," said the store-keeper.
"Or mebbe it air Isaac Boker, ez gits dancin'-drunk wunst in a while."
The cry rose again, filling all the rocky abysses and mountain heights
with a frenzied horror. From the woods a dark figure emerged upon the
crag; it seemed to speed along the sky, blotting out, as it went, the
moon and stars. The men at the store sprang to their feet, shaken by a
speechless agitation, when Isaac Boker rushed in among them, suddenly
sobered, and covered with blood.
"I hev done it!" he exclaimed, with a pallid anguish upon his bloated
face. "I met him in the woods, an' slashed him ter pieces."
The red moon turned to gold in the sky, and the world was flooded with
a gentle splendor; and as the hours went by no louder sound broke upon
the gilded dusk than the throb of the cataract, pulsing like the heart
of the mountains, and the stir of the wind about the rude hut where the
wounded man had been carried.
When Rufus Chadd opened his eyes upon the awe-stricken faces that
clustered about the bed, he had no need to be reminded of what had
happened. The wave of life, which it seemed would have carried him so
far, had left him stranded here in the ebb, while all the world sailed
on.
"They hev got Isaac Boker tied hard an' fast, Rufe," said the
store-keeper, in an attempt to reply to the complex changes of
expression that flitted over the pale face.
Chadd did not answer. He was thinking that no adequate retribution
could be inflicted upon Isaac Boker. The crime was not only the
destruction of merely sensuous human life, but, alas, of that
subtler entity of human schemes, and upward-reaching ambitions, and
the immeasurable opportunity of achievement, which after all is the
essence of the thing called life. He was to die at the outset of
his career, which his own steadfast purpose and unaided talent had
rendered honorable and brilliant, for the unreasoning fury of a drunken
mountaineer. And this was an end for a man who had turned his ambitious
eyes upon a chief-justice's chair,--an absurd ambition but for its
splendid effrontery! In all this bitterness, however, it was some
comfort to know that the criminal had not escaped.
"Are you able to tell how it happened, Chadd?" asked one of the lawyers.
As Chadd again opened his eyes, they fell upon the face of a woman
standing just within the door,--so drawn and piteous a face, with such
lines of patient endurance burnt into it, with such a woful prophecy in
the sunken, horror-stricken eyes, he turned his head that he might see
it no more. He remembered that face with another expression upon it. It
had given him a look like a stab from the door of Boker's hut, when he
had passed in the afternoon. He wished never to see it again, and yet
he was constrained to glance back. There it was, with its quiver of a
prescient heart-break. He felt a strange inward thrill, a bewildering
rush of emotion. That sense of doubleness and development which so
mystified him was upon him now. He was surprised at himself when he
said, distinctly, so that all might hear, "If I die--don't let them
prosecute Isaac Boker."
There was a sudden silence, so intense that it seemed as if the hush of
death had already fallen, or that the primeval stillness of creation
was never broken. Had his soul gone out into the night? Was there now
in the boundless spaces of the moonlit air some mysterious presence,
as incomprehensible to this little cluster of overawed humanity as to
the rocks and woods of the mighty, encompassing wilderness? How did the
time pass? It seemed hours before the stone-like figure stirred again,
and yet the white radiance on the puncheon floor had not shifted. His
consciousness was coming back from those vague border-lands of life
and death. He was about to speak once more. "Nobody can know how it
happened except me." And then again, as he drifted away, "Don't let
them prosecute."
There was a fine subject of speculation at the Settlement the next
morning, when the country-side gathered to hear the candidates speak.
The story of Isaac Boker's attack upon Rufus Chadd was repeated
to every new-comer, and the astonishment created by the victim's
uncharacteristic request when he had thought he was dying revived
with each consecutive recital. It presently became known that no
fatal result was to be anticipated. The doctor, who lived twenty
miles distant, and who had just arrived, said that the wounds, though
painful, were not dangerous, and his opinion added another element of
interest to the eager discussion of the incident.
Thus relieved of the shadow of an impending tragedy, the knots of
men congregated on the great cliff gradually gave themselves up to
the object of their meeting. Candidates of smiling mien circulated
among the saturnine, grave-faced mountaineers. In circulation, too,
were other genial spirits, familiarly known as "apple-jack." It was a
great occasion for the store-keeper; so pressing and absorbing were
his duties that he had not a moment's respite, until Mr. Slade, the
first speaker of the day, mounted a stump in front of the store and
began to address his fellow-citizens. He was a large, florid man, with
a rotund voice and a smooth manner, and he was considered Chadd's
most formidable competitor. The mountaineers hastily concentrated in
a semicircle about him, listening with the close attention singularly
characteristic of rural audiences. Behind the crowd was the immensity
of the unpeopled forests; below, the mad fret of the cataract; above,
the vast hemisphere of the lonely skies; and far, far away was the
infinite stretching of those blue ranges that the Indians called The
Endless.
Chadd had lain in a sort of stupor all the morning, vaguely conscious
of the distant mountains visible through the open window,--vaguely
conscious of numbers of curious faces that came to the door and gazed
in upon him,--vaguely conscious of the candidate's voice beginning to
resound in the noontide stillness. Then he roused himself.
The sensation of the first speech came at its close. As Chadd lay in
expectation of the stentorian "Hurrah for Slade!" which should greet
his opponent's peroration, his face flushed, his hands trembled; he
lifted himself on his elbow, and listened again. He could hardly trust
his senses, yet there it was once more,--his own name, vibrating in a
prolonged cheer among the mountain heights, and echoing far down the
narrow valley.
That sympathetic heart of the multitude, so quick to respond to a noble
impulse, had caught the true interpretation of last night's scene, and
to-day all the barriers of ignorance and misunderstanding were down.
The heaviest majority ever polled on Big Injun Mounting was in the
reëlection of the attorney for the State. And the other candidates
thought it a fine electioneering trick to get one's self artistically
slashed; they became misanthropic in their views of the inconstancy of
the people, and lost faith in saving grace and an overruling Providence.
This uncharacteristic episode in the life of Rufus Chadd was always
incomprehensible to his associates. He hardly understood it himself.
He had made a keen and subtle distinction in a high moral principle.
As Abel Stubbs said, in extenuation of the inconsistency of voting for
him, "I knows that this hyar Rufe Chadd air a powerful hard man, an'
evil-doers ez offends agin the law ain't got no mercy ter expect from
him. But then he don't hold no grudge agin them ez hev done _him_ harm.
An' that's what I'm a-lookin' at."
THE ROMANCE OF SUNRISE ROCK.
I.
What momentous morning arose with so resplendent a glory that it should
have imprinted its indelible reflection on the face of this great
Cumberland cliff; what eloquence of dawn so splendid that the dumb,
insensate stone should catch its spirit and retain its expression
forever and forever? A deep, narrow stream flowed around the base of
the "paint-rock." Immense fissures separated it from its fellows. And
charged with its subtler meaning it towered above them in isolated
majesty. Moons waxed and waned; nations rose and fell; centuries came
and went. And still it faced the east, and still, undimmed by storm and
time, it reiterated the miracle and the prophecy of the rising sun.
"'Twar painted by the Injuns,--that's what I hev always hearn tell.
Them folks war mos'ly leagued with the Evil One. That's how it kem
they war gin the grasp ter scuffle up that thar bluff, ez air four
hunderd feet high an' ez sheer ez a wall; it ain't got foothold fur a
cockle-burr. I hev hearn tell that when they got ez high ez the pictur'
they war 'lowed by the devil ter stand on air. An' I believes it. Else
how'd they make out ter do that thar job?"
The hairy animal, whose jeans suit proclaimed him man, propounded
this inquiry with a triumphant air. There was a sarcastic curve on
the lips of his interlocutor. Clearly it was not worth his while to
enlighten the mountaineer,--to talk of the unknown races whose work
so long survives their names, to speculate upon the extent of their
civilization and the mechanical contrivances that reached those
dizzy heights, to confide his nebulous fancies clustering about the
artist-poet who painted this grand, rude lyric upon the immortal rock.
He turned from the strange picture, suspended between heaven and earth,
and looked over the rickety palings into the dismal little graveyard
of the mountaineers. Nowhere, he thought, was the mystery of life and
death so gloomily suggested. Humanity seemed so small, so transitory
a thing, expressed in these few mounds in the midst of the undying
grandeur of the mountains. Material nature conquers; man and mind are
as naught. Only a reiteration of a well-conned lesson, for so far this
fine young fellow of thirty had made a failure of life; the material
considerations with which he had wrestled had got the better of him,
and a place within the palings seemed rather preferable to his place
without.
It was still strange to John Cleaver that his lines should have fallen
in this wilderness; that the door of that house on the slope of the
Backbone should be the only door upon earth open to him; that such men
as this mountaineer were his neighbors and associates. The fact seemed
a grotesque libel on likelihood. As he rode away he was thinking of his
costly education, the sacrifices his father had made to secure it, his
dying conviction, which was such a comfort to him, that in it he had
left his penniless son a better thing than wealth,--with such training
and such abilities what might he not reach? When John Cleaver returned
from his medical studies in Paris to the Western city of his birth, to
scores of charity patients, and to a fine social position by virtue
of the prestige of a good family, there seemed only a little waiting
needed. But the old physicians held on to life and the paying practice
with the grip of the immortals. And he found it difficult to sustain
existence while he waited.
At the lowest ebb of his fortunes there came to him a letter from a
young lawyer, much in his own professional position, but who had
confessed himself beaten and turned sheep-farmer. Here, among the
mountains of East Tennessee, said the letter, he had bought a farm for
a song; the land was the poorest he ever saw, but served his purposes,
and the house was a phenomenal structure for these parts,--a six-room
brick, built fifty years ago by a city man with a bucolic craze and
consumptive tendencies. The people were terribly poor; still, if his
friend would come he might manage to pick up something, for there was
not a physician in a circuit of sixty miles.
So Cleaver had turned his face to the mountains. But unlike the
sheep-farmer he did not meet his reverses lightly. The man was at bay.
And like a savage thing he took his ill-fortune by the throat. Success
had seemed so near that there was something like the pain of death in
giving up the life to which he had looked forward with such certainty.
He could not console himself with this comatose state, and call it
life. He often told himself that there was nothing left but to think of
what he might have done, and eat out his heart. His ambition died hard.
As his horse ambled along, a gruff voice broke his reverie, "'Light an'
hitch," called out the master of a wayside hovel.
A man of different temperament might have found in Cleaver's uncouth
surroundings some points of palliation. His heart might have warmed
to the ignorant mountaineers' high and tender virtue of hospitality.
A responsive respect might have been induced by the contemplation of
their pride, so intense that it recognizes no superior, so inordinate
that one is tempted to cry out, Here are the true republicans! or,
indeed, Here are the only aristocrats! The rough fellow was shambling
out to stop him with cordial insistence. An old crone, leaning on a
stick in the door-way, called after her son, "Tell him ter 'light an'
hitch, Peter, an' eat his supper along of we-uns." A young girl sitting
on the rude porch, reeling yarn preparatory to weaving, glanced up,
her sedate face suddenly illumined. Even the bare-footed, tow-headed
children stood still in pleased expectation. Certainly John Cleaver's
position in life was as false as it was painful. But the great human
heart was here, untutored though it was, and roughly accoutred. And he
himself had found that Greek and Latin do not altogether avail.
The little log-house was encompassed by the splendor of autumnal
foliage. A purple haze clung to the distant mountains; every range and
every remove had a new tone and a new delight. The gray crags, near at
hand, stood out sharply against the crimson sky. And high above them
all in its impressive isolation loomed Sunrise Rock, heedless of the
transitory dying day and the ineffective coming night.
The girl's reel was still whirling; at regular intervals it ticked and
told off another cut. Cleaver's eyes were fixed upon her as he declined
Peter Teake's invitation. He had seen her often before, but he did not
know as yet that that face would play a strange part in the little
mental drama that was to lead to the making of his fortune. Her cheek
was flushed; her delicate crimson lips were slightly parted; the live
gold of the sunbeams touched the dead-yellow, lustreless masses of her
hair. Here and there the clustering tendrils separated, as they hung
about her shoulders, and disclosed bright glimpses of a red cotton
kerchief knotted around her throat; she wore a dark blue homespun
dress, and despite the coarse texture of her attire there was something
of the mingled brilliance and softness of the autumn tints in her
humble presence. Her eyes reminded him of those deep, limpid mountain
streams with golden-brown pebbles at the bottom. Scornful as he was,
he was only a man--and a young man. With a sudden impulse he leaned
forward and handed her a pretty cluster of ferns and berries which he
had gathered in the forest.
The reel stopped, the thread broke. She looked up, as she received
mechanically his woodland treasure, with so astonished a face that it
induced in this man of the world a sense of embarrassment.
"Air they good yerbs fur somethin'?" she asked.
A quick comprehension of the ludicrous situation flashed through
his mind. She evidently made no distinctions in the healing art as
practiced by him and the "yerb-doctor," with whom he occasionally came
into professional contact. And the presentation of the "yerbs" seemed a
prescription instead of a compliment.
"No,--no," he said hastily, thinking of the possibility of a decoction.
"They are not good for tea. They are of no use,--except to look at."
And he rode away, laughing softly.
Everything about the red brick house was disorganized and dilapidated;
but the dining-room, which served the two young bachelors as a
sitting-room also, was cheerful with the glow of a hickory fire and
a kerosene lamp, and although the floor was bare and the tiny-paned
windows curtained only with cobwebs, there was a suggestively
comfortable array of pipes on the mantel-piece, and a bottle of
gracious aspect. Sitting in front of the fire, the light full on
his tawny beard and close-clipped blond hair, was a man of splendid
proportions, a fine, frank, intellectual face, and a manner and
accent that proclaimed him as distinctly exotic as his friend. He too
had reared the great scaffolding of an elaborate education that he
might erect the colossal edifice of his future. His hands beat the
empty air and he had no materials wherewith to build. But there was
the scaffolding, a fine thing in itself,--wasted, perhaps. For the
sheep-farmer did not need it.
"Well, old sinner!" he exclaimed smilingly, as Cleaver entered. "Did
you tell Tom to put up your 'beastis'? He is so 'brigaty' that he might
not stand."
Were the two friends sojourning in the Cumberland Mountains on a
camp-hunt, these excerpts from the prevalent dialect might have
seemed to Cleaver a pleasantry of exquisite flavor. But they were no
sojourners; they were permanently established here. And he felt that
every concession to the customs of the region was a descent toward the
level of its inhabitants. He thought Trelawney was already degenerating
in this disheveled life,--mentally, in manner, even in speech. For with
a philologist's zest Trelawney chased verbal monstrosities to their
lair, and afterward displayed them in his daily conversation with as
much pride as a connoisseur feels in exhibiting odd old china. As
these reflections intruded themselves, Cleaver silently swore a mighty
oath--an oath he had often sworn before--that he would not go down with
him, he would not deteriorate too, he would hold hard to the traditions
of a higher sphere.
But sins against convention could not detract from the impressiveness
of the man lounging before the fire. If Trelawney only had money, how
he would adorn the state of nabob!
"Brigaty!" he reiterated. "That's a funny word. It sounds
as if it might be kin to the Italian _brigata_. Or, see
here--_briga?_--eh?--_brigare_--_brigarsi?_ I wonder how these people
come by it."
A long pause ensued, broken only by the ticking of their watches: the
waste of time asserted itself. All was silent without; no wind stirred;
no leaf nor acorn fell; the mute mists pressed close to the window.
Surely there were no other creatures in all the dreary world. And this,
thought Cleaver, was what he had come to, after all his prestige, all
his efforts!
"Trelawney," he said suddenly, "these are long evenings. Don't you
think that with all this time on our hands--I don't know--but don't you
think we might write something together?"
A frank surprise was in his friend's brown eyes. He replied doubtfully,
"Write what?"
"I don't know," said Cleaver despondently.
"And suppose we had the talent to project 'something' and the energy to
complete it, who would publish it?"
"I don't know," said the doctor, more hopelessly still.
Another pause. The foxes were barking in the moonlight, in the red
autumn woods. That a man should feel less lonely for the sound of a
wild thing's voice!
"My dear fellow," said John Cleaver, a certain passion of despair
welling up in his tones,--he leaned forward and laid his hand on
his friend's knee,--"it won't do for us to spend our lives here. We
must turn about and get back into the world of men and action. Don't
think I'm ungrateful for this haven,--you are the only one who held
out a hand,--but we must get back, and go on with the rest. Help me,
Trelawney,--help me think out some way. I'm losing faith in myself
alone. Let us help each other. Many a man has made his pen his
strongest friend; they were only men at last, just such as we are. Many
of them were poor; the _best_ of them were poor. We can try nothing
else, Fred,--so little chance is left to us."
Trelawney laid his warm strong hand upon the cold nervous hand
trembling on his knee. "Jack," he said, "I have given it all up. I am
through forever with those cursed alternations of hope and despair. I
don't believe we could write anything that would do--do any good, I
mean. I wore out all energy and afflatus--the best part of me--waiting
for the clients who never came. And all the time my appropriate sphere,
my sheep-farm, was waiting for me here. I have found contentment, the
manna from heaven, while you are still sighing for the flesh-pots of
Egypt. Ambition has thrown me once; I sha'n't back the jade again. I am
a shepherd, Jack, a shepherd.
'Pastorem, Tityre, pingues
Pascere oportet oves, deductum dicere carmen.'
That's it, my dear old boy. Sing a slender song! We've pitched our
voices on too high a key for our style of vocalization. We must sing
small, Jack,--sing a slender song!"
"I'll be damned if I do!" cried Cleaver, impetuously, springing to his
feet and pacing the room with a quick stride.
But his friend's words dogged him deep into the night. They would not
let him sleep. He lay staring blankly at the darkness, his thoughts
busy with his forlorn position and his forlorn prospects, and that
sense of helplessness, so terrible to a man, pressing heavily upon his
heart. In the midst of the memories of his hopes, his ambitions, and
his failures he was like a worm in the fire. The vague presence of the
majestic company of mountains without preyed upon him; they seemed
stolid, unmoved witnesses of his despair. The only human creature
who might have understood him would not understand him. He knew that
if he were writhing in pain with a broken limb, or the sentimental
spurious anguish of a broken heart, Trelawney would resolve himself
into every gracious phase of healing sympathy. But a broken life!--his
friend would not make an effort. Yet why should he crave support?
Was it true that he had pitched his voice too high? In this day of
over-education, when every man is fitted for any noble sphere of
intellectual achievement and only inborn talent survives, might it
not be that he had mistaken a cultivated aspiration for latent power?
And if indeed his purposes had outstripped his abilities, the result
was tragic--tragic. He was as dead as if he were six feet deep in the
ground. A bitter throe of shame came with these reflections. There is
something so ludicrously contemptible in a great personal ambition
and a puny capacity. Ambition is the only grand passion that does not
ennoble. We do not care that a low thing should lift its eyes. And if
it does, we laugh.
There was a movement in the hall below. He had left Trelawney reading,
but now his step was on the stairs, and with it rose the full mellow
tones of his voice. He was singing of the spring-time in the autumn
midnight. Poor Fred! It was always spring with him. He met his
misfortunes with so cordial an outstretched hand that it might have
seemed he disarmed them. It did not seem so to John Cleaver. He shifted
his attitude with a groan. His friend's fatal apathy was an added pang
to his own sorrows. And now the house was still, and he watched through
all the long hours the western moonlight silently scale the gloomy
pines, till on their plumy crests the yellow beams mingled with the red
rays of the rising sun, and the empty, lonely day broke in its useless,
wasted splendor upon the empty loneliness of the splendid night.
II.