Conscience, the great moral inquisitor, whose sessions are held in
secret, whose absolute justice is untempered by mercy, whose processes
are unrelated and superior to the laws of the land, makes manifest
its decrees only at such long intervals that we are prone to consider
their results exceptional. Although its measures are invariably meted,
they are seldom so plainly set forth as in Peter Rood’s fate. Alethea,
listening to ’Gustus Tom’s story, saw in aghast dismay how he had been
pursued by those terrible potencies of the right which he had sought
to disregard. Many things that had been vague were made distinct. She
understood suddenly the meaning of the strange words he had spoken at
the camp-meeting, when his spiritual struggles had nearly betrayed him.
She divined the mingled fear and self-reproach, and at the same time the
cowardly gratulation he experienced because of his fancied security, when
entrapped to serve on the jury. She remembered with a new comprehension
his joyous excitement when it appeared that the idiot boy had not been
drowned, and the pallid anguish on his face as the lawyer dexterously
reversed the probabilities. It might seem that he had expiated his deed,
but the extremest penalties were not abated. He had been a pillar in the
church, renowned for a certain insistent piety, and zealous to foster
good repute among men; and this last possession that he held dear upon
earth, which may be maintained even by a dead man, who can carry naught
out of the world, was wrested from him.
The truth which he had so feared, which he had so labored to hide, over
which the grave had seemed to close, was at last brought to light by very
simple means.
On the eventful morning, the miller’s erratic grandson, awaking early, he
knew not why, had sought to utilize the occurrence by robbing an owl’s
nest in the hollow of a tree beside the mill. The day had not yet dawned,
and he hoped that one or the other of the great birds would be away on
its nocturnal foragings, so that he might the more easily secure the
owlet, which he had long wanted for a pet. It was very still, ’Gustus Tom
said. The frogs by the water had ceased their croaking; the katydids were
silenced long ago; he heard only the surging monotone of the gleaming
cascade falling over the natural dam. He had climbed the tree to the
lower limbs, and had perched on one of them to rest for a moment, when
there broke upon the air the sound of the galloping of a horse far away,
approaching at a tremendous rate of speed. Presently he came into view,
his head stretched forward, his coat flecked with foam, his rider plying
both heel and whip.
This rider was Peter Rood, whom ’Gustus Tom knew well, as he often came
to the mill. He dismounted hastily, close to the water-side. He walked
uncertainly, even pausing sometimes to steady himself by holding to
the supports of the old mill. He was evidently very drunk, and thus it
appeared to ’Gustus Tom the less surprising that he should drag two or
three fence rails stranded on the margin of the river,—which was high
and full of floating rubbish,—and laboriously place them in a position
to cumber the wheel; an empty barrel, too, he found and put to this use,
some poles, drift-wood. He paused after a careful survey of his work, and
held up his head, looking away toward the east, as if he were listening.
It seemed to ’Gustus Tom, all veiled by the dew-tipped chestnut leaves,
that Rood was strangely intent of purpose for a drunken man. He heard,
long before the boy did, some monition of approach in the distance, for
he caught eagerly at his horse’s bridle. Yet he was drunk enough to find
difficulty in mounting. As the animal swerved, he was obliged to grasp
the stirrup with one hand in order to steady it, so that he could put
his foot in it; then he flung his right leg over the saddle, and away he
went along the grassy margin of the road,—noiseless, swift, dark, like
some black shadow, some noxious exhalation of the night.
’Gustus Tom explained at this point, with tears and many anxious
twistings of the button on his shirt front,—which was quite useless, the
correlative button-hole being torn out,—that he understood so little of
what all this meant at the time that it seemed to him the only important
point involved was to remember to tell his grandfather early in the day
of Pete Rood’s drunken freak of clogging the mill-wheel. He did not call
out and make his presence known, because he was frightened by the man’s
strange conduct and terrible look. As he still sat meditating on the limb
of the tree, the sound which had aroused Peter Rood again broke upon the
silence. Once more the regular thud of hoofs—of many hoofs. The pace was
far slower than the rattling gallop at which Pete Rood had come. There
were several men in the group that presently appeared. ’Gustus Tom knew
some of them,—he couldn’t help knowing Mink Lorey from far off; he looked
so wild and gamesome; the moonlight was on his face and all his hair was
flying. He knew Mink well. Mink it was who climbed the timbers of the
race and lifted the gate. And once more ’Gustus Tom, with quivering lips
and twisting the futile button on his shirt front, began to exculpate
himself. He did not understand what Mink was about to do until the gate
was lifted and the water surged through. The wheel, turning with its
curiously contrived clogs, jerked spasmodically, gave sudden violent
wrenches, finally breaking and crashing against the shanty, that itself
tottered and careened and fell. He heard Tad scream, for the idiot,
having incurred the miller’s displeasure during the day, had been locked
in the mill, supperless, to sleep. ’Gustus Tom did not see the boy in the
river, because of the falling timbers, the clouds of dust and flour and
meal, and the commotion of the water. The men galloped away, Mink among
them. For the house had been alarmed by the noise; old Griff ran out,
wringing his hands and crying aloud, first for the loss of the mill, then
for the fate of the idiot. The others of the family came, too. ’Gustus
Tom easily slipped down unobserved from the tree, in the midst of the
excitement, and no one was aware, except sister Eudory, that he knew more
than the rest. Lately she had noticed that he was afraid of the dark and
would not sit alone; and she had begun to say so much of this that he was
alarmed lest she might excite the suspicions of others. And so, thinking
she would keep his secret,—he would have divulged it to no one else,—he
told her that he was afraid of Peter Rood, who was dead, and who perhaps
had found out in the other world that he knew the secret, and would come
and haunt him to make sure that he did not reveal it. And at the renewal
of these ghastly terrors ’Gustus Tom bent his head upon his arm, and
began to sob afresh.
“Why didn’t ye tell at fust, ’Gustus Tom?” asked Alethea, her mind
futilely reviewing the complications that circumstance had woven about
Mink Lorey.
’Gustus Tom lifted his head, a gleam of this world’s acumen shining
through the tears in his eyes.
“He’d hev walloped the life out’n me, ef I hed told. He kem nigh every
day ter the mill arterward, whenst they war a-s’archin’ fur the body. An’
his eyes looked so black an’ mad an’ cur’ous whenst he cut ’em round at
me, I ’lowed he knowed what I knowed. An’ I war afeard o’ him.”
Aunt Dely could not be altogether repressed. “Waal, ’Gustus Tom, ye air
a bad aig,” she remarked, politely. “Ye ter know all that whenst ye war
down thar at Shaftesville, along o’ yer gran’dad, an’ seen them men
a-talkin’ by the yard-medjure, an’ a-cavortin’ ’bout in the court, ez
prideful ez ef thar brains war ez nimble ez thar tongues; an’ ye look at
’em try Mink fur bustin’ down the mill an’ drowndin’ Tad, an’ ye ter know
ez Pete Rood done it,—an’ ye say nuthin’!”
“Waal,” said ’Gustus Tom, sorely beset, “he war a-settin’ thar in the
cheer; he could hev told hisself.”
“Whyn’t ye tell arter he drapped dead?” suggested the politic Mrs.
Purvine.
The boy winced at the recollection. “He looked so awful!” he said,
putting up his hand to his eyes as if to shut out the image presented. “I
war ’feared he’d harnt me.”
It occurred to sister Eudora that this investigation was degenerating
into a persecution of ’Gustus Tom. She had looked from one to the other
in grave excitement and with a flushing face, as she stood on the hearth,
the breath from the fire waving her flaxen hair, hanging upon her
shoulders.
Suddenly, with an accession of color, she stepped across the broad,
ill-joined stones, and, fixing a threatening eye on Mrs. Purvine’s
moon-face, she lifted her fat hand, and retributively smote that lady on
the knee.
’Gustus Tom had never manifested any special desire to suit his own
conduct to a high standard of deportment, but he appeared to entertain
the most sedulous solicitude concerning sister Eudory’s manners, and to
be jealous that she should be esteemed the pink of juvenile propriety.
His mortification at the present lapse was very great. It expressed
itself in such unequivocal phrase, such energetic shakings of his
tow-head, which seemed communicated, with diminished rigor, however,
to her plump little shoulders,—for he went through all the motions of
discipline,—that Mrs. Purvine, beaming with injudicious laughter, was
forced to interfere. Her indulgence did not serve to reassure sister
Eudory, who stood dismayed at the fullness of fraternal displeasure.
She presently put her hands before her eyes, although she did not shed
tears, and thus she was led toward the door, to be taken home as unfit
for polite society. Mrs. Purvine hurried after her, carrying the roasted
egg—which was very hot, in its shell—between two chips, and further
pressing upon her a present of a sweet-potato, an ear of pop-corn, and a
young kitten, all of which sister Eudory, regardless of the animate and
the inanimate, the hot and the cold, carried together in her apron. The
affront was but a slight matter to aunt Dely, whose lenient temperament
precluded her from viewing it as an enormity; but as the brother and
sister went away in humiliation, one could well guess that sister Eudora
would be a woman grown before she would be allowed to contemplate with
indifference the dreadful day when she “hit Mis’ Purvine.”
In whatever manner it might have seemed judicious to make use, in Mink’s
interest, of the disclosures of Peter Rood’s agency in the destruction
of the mill, anything like caution, or reserve, or secrecy was rendered
impossible by the circumstance that it was Mrs. Purvine who shared in the
discovery of the fact. For weeks no one passed the house, going or coming
on the winding road, whom she did not descry through the worldly glass
windows,—which thus demonstrated an additional justification for their
existence,—and whom she did not hail with a loud outcry from the unsteady
flight of steps, and bring to a not unwilling pause as she hurried out to
the fence, with her glib tongue full of words. There was no weather too
cold for the indulgence of this gossip. Sometimes aunt Dely would merely
fling her apron over her head, if the exigency suggested haste; or she
would hood herself with her shawl, like a cowled friar, and stand in the
snow, defiant of the rigors of the temperature. More often, however, the
passer-by would suffer himself to be persuaded to come in and sit down
by aunt Dely’s fire, and discuss with her all the details so tardily
elicited. Pete Rood’s death, considered as a judgment upon him, was a
favorite point of contemplation, offering that symmetrical exposition
of cause and effect, sin and retribution, peculiarly edifying to the
obdurate in heart and acceptable to the literalist in religion. So much
was said on this subject at the store, and the blacksmith-shop, and the
saw-mill,—those places where the mountain cronies most congregated,—that
it came to the ear of Rood’s relatives with all the added poignancy of
comment. They indignantly maintained that only the ingenuity of malice
could feign to attach any special meaning to the moment or manner of his
death, for it was widely known that he had for years suffered from a
serious affection of the heart; they stigmatized the whole story as an
effort to blacken his name in order to clear Mink Lorey. Their attitude
and sentiment enlisted a certain sympathy, and it was only when they were
not of the company that the counter-replication was made that it was a
supremely significant moment when Peter Rood’s doom fell upon him, and
that it behooves those who sit in the shadow of death to be not easily
diverted from the true interpretation of the darkling signs of the wrath
of God.
It was a scene of pathetic interest when his aged mother, resolved
upon forcing a recantation, came herself to the miller’s home. A dark,
withered, white-haired crone she was, with a hooked nose and a keen,
fierce, intent eye that suggested strength of mind and purpose defying
age and ailments. She shrewdly questioned the boy, and sought to involve
him in discrepancies and to elicit some admission that the story had
been prompted by Alethea Sayles. Her dark-browed sons stood about the
great white-covered ox-wagon, their bemired boots drawn high over
their trousers, their broad hats pulled down to their lowering eyes,
maintaining a sedulous silence. So strong a family resemblance existed
between them and the dead man that ’Gustus Tom was greatly perturbed
as from time to time he glanced at them; looking away instantly with a
resolution to see them no more, and yet again with a morbid fascination
turning his eyes to meet theirs, before whose dark and solemn anger he
quailed. Now and then the sobs would burst from him, and he would lay his
head on his arm against the rails, as he cowered in the fence corner;
for the old woman would not enter the miller’s house, but stood upon
the frozen crust of snow by the roadside, and looked upon the denuded
site of the mill, and the turbulent river, and the austere bleak bluffs
on the opposite bank. The miller peered out from his door, himself the
impersonation of winter, his snowy locks and beard falling about his
rugged face; the desolate little shanty was plainly to be seen among the
naked and writhen boughs of the orchard, that bore only snow and icicles
in the stead of the bloom and fruit they had known.
Cross-questioning, threats, all the devices of suggestion, availed
naught. The terrible story once told, ’Gustus Tom found the pluck somehow
to stand by it without other support than the uncognizant affection of
sister Eudory; for the shallow Sophy cared for none of it. She came to
the door once to lead the old man within from the piercing wind, and she
lingered for a moment, her golden hair flying in the blast; her placid
blue eyes and superficial smile underwent no change when the old woman
turned away, baffled and hopeless and stricken.
“I ’lowed my son war dead,” she said to the cluster of gossips who
had assisted at the colloquy. She shook her head as she leaned upon
her stick, and hobbled down across the frozen ruts of the road toward
the wagon. “I ’lowed my son war dead, an’ I mourned him. But I said
the words of a fool, for he war alive; the best part of him, his good
name, war lef’ ter me. An’ now he air beset, an’ druv, an’ run down ter
death,—fur ye air a-murderin’ of him in takin’ his good name. Lemme know,
neighbors,”—she turned, with her hand upon the wheel,—“when the deed air
fairly done, so ez I kin gin myself ter mournin’ my son, fur then he’ll
be plumb dead.”
The two dark-browed brothers said never a word; the slow oxen started;
the wagon moved creaking down the road toward the snowy mountains, with
their whitened slopes and black trees, and gray shadows.
The public sentiment excited in favor of Mink Lorey by the developments
during his trial, and which had expressed itself in the riot and attempt
at a rescue, had sustained a rebuff consequent upon his assault on
Judge Gwinnan. Nevertheless, it is difficult to nullify a popular
prepossession, and the discovery that the young mountaineer had been
the victim of the machinations of the true criminal, that he had been
placed in jeopardy, had suffered many months’ imprisonment, had still
longer duress in prospect, served to justify him in some sort, and
reinstated him in the feelings of the people, never very logical. All
the details of the trial were canvassed anew with reviviscent interest.
Now that the veil of mystery was torn from it, there seemed still other
inculpations involved. It would appear to imply some gross negligence,
some intentional spite, some grotesque perversion of justice, that the
criminal should have been one of the jury impaneled to try an innocent
man. The fact itself was shocking. It was significant that only through
accident had it come to light, and it augured grievous insecurity of
liberty, life and property.
Mr. Harshaw, who had returned to Shaftesville upon the adjournment, for
a few days, of the Legislature, was not slow to note the direction and
progress of popular favor. In the state of his feelings toward Gwinnan,
he had no great impulse to combat the position taken by the unlearned
that it was a grave dereliction on the part of the court that Pete Rood
had been admitted to the panel. Why should he expound the theory of
judicial challenges, the conclusiveness of the _voir dire_, in instances
of general eligibility? He truly believed that in the incarceration
of the jury Gwinnan had sacrificed the interests of the defense and
a favorable verdict, and as he felt much reminiscent interest in the
details of his cases, he could listen with all the relish of mental
affirmation to the denunciations of the stranger judge, who was often
profanely apostrophized and warned to show his head no more in Cherokee
County.
“Somebody besides Mink Lorey’ll try ter beat some sense inter it, ef
he do,” said Bylor. The bitterness of the affront offered to the jury
by their imprisonment had grown more poignant as time went on, for
while the general excitement had gradually subsided, the fact remained.
Not one of the unlucky panel, venturing from time to time into town
with peltry, or game, or produce for sale, could escape the gibes and
laughter of retrospective ridicule. The dignity of the interests involved
had ceased to be a shield to them. Even the acrimony excited by their
failure to agree had yielded to light sarcasm and jocose scorn,—not
ill-natured, perhaps, but sufficiently nettling to proud and sensitive
men whom accident had succeeded in immuring behind the bars. Everywhere
the subject lurked in ambuscade,—in the stores, at the tavern, on the
streets. The jailer was the most hospitable man alive. “When’ll ye
kem an’ take pot-luck agin, gentlemen?” he would hail them in chance
encounters. “My door air easy ter open—_from the outside_.” Or he would
call out, with a roguish twinkle in his brown eyes, “How’s ’rithmetic up
in the cove?” in allusion to the unlucky thirteen on the panel. It seemed
to them that humiliation was their portion, and the festive and gala
occasion known as “goin’ ter town,” which had hitherto been so replete
with excitement and interest, and was in the nature of a tour and a
recompense of toil, had resolved itself into a series of mortifications.
Harshaw’s law-office proved in some sort a refuge to the coterie, as
it had always been more or less a resort. It had some of the functions
of a club-house, and its frequenters felt hardly less at home than its
proprietor. He was a man difficult to be taken amiss by his country
friends. He had a sonorous, hearty greeting for whoever came. If he were
at work, half a dozen sprawling fellows talking about his fireside were
no hindrance to the flow of his thought, the scratch of his pen, or the
chase of some elusive bit of legal game through the pages of a law-book.
More often he bore a part in the conversation. The bare floor defied the
red clay mire that came in with the heavy boots; the broken bricks in
the hearth were not more unsightly in his eyes for the stains of tobacco
juice. The high mantelpiece was ornamented by a box of tobacco, a can of
kerosene, and an untrimmed lamp that asserted its presence in unctuous
odors. There were some of the heavy books of his profession in a case,
and many more lying in piles on the floor, near the walls, defenseless
against the borrower. There was a window on one side of the office, and
another opening upon the street. At this a face was often applied, with
a pair of hands held above the eyes to shut out the light, that the
passer-by might scan the interior, perchance to see if someone sought
were within; perchance merely to regale an idle curiosity. The unique
proceeding occasioned no comment and gave no offense. An open door showed
an inner apartment, where consultations were held when too important for
the ear of the indiscriminate groups in the main office, and where there
was a lounge, on which he slept during court week, or when political
business was too brisk to admit of his driving out to his home on his
farm, some miles from the town.
“Well,” said Harshaw, tilting his chair back upon its hind legs until
it creaked and quaked with the weight, and clasping both hands behind
his yellow head, “I wonder you ain’t willing for Gwinnan to be a fool,
considering what Mink got for beating his skull into a different shape.”
The county boasted no weekly newspaper, and without it the news was a
laggard. Ben Doaks looked up with interest; Bylor paused expectant. Jerry
Price, too, was present, for there was an unusual number from the coves
in town—this was county court week, and the crowd assembled offered
special facilities for trading stock and small commodities.
The hickory logs crackled on the hearth above the gleaming coals, and the
white and yellow flames were broadly flaring; great beds of gray ashes
lay beneath, for they were seldom removed; the murmurous monotone of the
fire filled the pause.
“Yes, sir,” said Harshaw, taking his pipe from his lips and knocking
the ashes from the bowl, “Mink got a sentence for twenty years in the
penitentiary for assault with intent to commit murder.”
There was dead silence. The clay pipe that Jerry Price was smoking fell
from his hands unheeded, and broke into fragments on the hearth. This
knowledge affected the group more than the news of Mink’s death might
have done. That at least was uncertain. The mind flags and fails to
follow in the journey to the unknown the spirit that has quitted the
familiar flesh,—the entity for which it has merely a name, an impression,
an illusion of acquaintance. But this sordid, definite fact, this
measure of desolation bounded by four walls, this hopeless rage, this
mental revulsion from ignominy, all were of mortal experience and easily
imagined.
“Yes, sir,” resumed Harshaw, his florid face grave but firm. He had the
air of a man whose feelings have been schooled to calmness, but who
protests against a fact. “I did what I could for Mink. I couldn’t defend
him myself,—couldn’t leave the interests of my constituents in the House
for the sake of an individual; but I put the case in Jerome Maupert’s
hands. Maupert couldn’t help it. Mink was locking the door of the state
prison and double-locking it every time he lifted his hand to strike
Gwinnan. A _judge_, you know,”—he rolled his eyes significantly at the
group,—“a judge is a mighty big man, and Mink is just a poor mountain
boy.”
He stuck his pipe into his mouth again, and vigorously puffed it into a
glow.
“The crowd in court cheered when the jury gave their verdict,” he said.
The group looked at each other with quick, offended glances; then lapsed
into gazing at the fire and contemplating the circumstances.
“’Pears like ez nobody kin git even with Gwinnan right handy,” said
Bylor. “Ef ’twarn’t fur makin’ bad wuss fur Mink, I’d wisht ez he hed
killed him.”
“Shucks!” said Harshaw scornfully. “Gwinnan thinks he’s mighty popular
with the people. He’s always doing the humbugging and bamboozling dodge.
Just before I left Glaston the attorney-general—Kenbigh, you know—showed
me a letter from Judge Gwinnan asking him to take no notice of Mink’s
assault, as he wasn’t willing to prosecute.”
He brought his chair down with a thump on its forelegs, and looked about
the circle, his roseate plump face full of bantering sarcasm.
“What war his notion fur that?” demanded Doaks, slowly possessing himself
of the facts.
“To impose on the people—so good—so lenient”——
“Mighty lenient, sure!” interpolated Bylor. He rubbed his wrist
mechanically; he never was quite sure that he had not been shackled.
“Letter dated just about two weeks after Mink was sentenced,” Harshaw
sneered.
“Waal, who war the prosecutor, then?” demanded Jerry Price, at a loss.
“Why, of course they didn’t wait for a prosecutor. Mink was tried on a
presentment by the grand jury; and as the criminal court came on right
straight, Kenbigh just hurried him through. He’s a regular blood-hound,
Kenbigh is.”
There was a silence for a few moments. Several of the sticks of wood
had burned in two and fallen apart, and were sending up dull columns of
smoke, some of which puffed into the room,—an old trick of the chimney’s,
if the testimony of the blackened ceiling be admitted.
“As if,” cried Harshaw, suddenly uncrossing and crossing his legs,
reversing their position, “Gwinnan, of all the men in the world, wouldn’t
know and think of that! But Kenbigh seemed to take it _all_ in,—seemed
to think ’twas Gwinnan’s modesty. He showed me the answer he wrote to
the judge.” Harshaw cast up his eyes meditatively to the ceiling, as
if seeking to recall the words. “He begged to express his admiration
of Judge Gwinnan’s modesty in thinking that so serious an injury to
one of the most brilliant ornaments of the State judiciary could fail
to be summarily punished, or would need his personal interposition as
prosecutor.”
They all listened with an absent air, as if the refusal to hear the
compliments nullified them.
Harshaw gave a short, satirical laugh, showing his strong white teeth.
“I wisht ter Gawd that thar Gwinnan wanted ter go ter Congress, or sech,
ez would fling him ’fore the vote o’ Cher’kee County,—it be in the same
congressional deestric’ whar he hails from,—I’d show him,” said Bylor,
shaking his head with the savagery of supposititious revenge, and in
the full delusion of unbridled power characteristic of the free and
independent American unit. “_I’d_ show him.”
“I reckon everybody don’t feel like we-uns do,” said Jerry Price, who,
although he smarted under the unmerited disgrace he had experienced at
the hands of Gwinnan, had submitted to it as a judicial necessity. Its
rankling pangs were manifested only when, chancing to meet the foreman,
Jerry would ask, in a manner charged with interest and an affectation of
mystery, whether he had had his tongue measured yet, and how many joints
it had been ascertained to have.
“They’re a little more disgruntled over in Kildeer than you are here,”
Harshaw declared. “You’d allow the court-room was a distric’ school, if
you could know the way he domineers over there. I always look to see the
learned counsel put his finger in his mouth and whine when Gwinnan gets
on the rampage.”
“Why, look-a-hyar, Mr. Harshaw,” demanded Bylor, “do you-uns call this a
free country? Ain’t thar no way o’ stoppin’ him off? Goin’ ter hev five
mo’ years o’ him on the bench?”
“He’ll be impeached some day, mark my words,” Harshaw declared; and
then he fell to eying the smoking fire with slow, sullen, vengeful
speculation, and for the rest of the day he was not such jovial company
as his general repute for good-fellowship might promise.
In this interval of leisure which the recess afforded him, both as
legislator and lawyer, Harshaw devoted himself to furthering his
political prospects and strengthening his hold upon the predilections
of the people. He was a man of many mental and moral phases: he sang
loud and long at the revival at the cross-roads church; he attended
rural merry-makings; he connived at having his own house “stormed” by
a surprise party, the preparations being profuse and exhilarating, and
the flavor of his hospitality was not impaired by his shaking hands
with his guests, and violently promising to vote for them at the next
election, each enlightened and independent citizen being himself not
quite clear as to who was the prospective candidate: but the whole
episode faded from recollection with the evening, mingling with the
vain phantasmagoria of wild elation, and subsequent drowsiness, and
retributive headache, and physical repentance. He went on a camp hunt
with a party of roaring blades. The weather in the changeful Southern
winter had turned singularly fine and dry; the air had all the crisp
buoyancy of autumn and all the freshness of spring; fires drowsed on
hearths; doors stood ajar; the sunshine was pervasive, warm, languorous,
imbued with pensive vernal illusions. One might wonder to see the silent
sere grass; were there indeed no whirring songs, no skittering points of
light, hovering in mazy tangles, and telling the joy that existence might
prove to the tiniest insect life? Birds? The trees were empty, but one
must look to make sure: only the rising quail from the clumps of withered
weeds; only the infrequent cry of the wild turkey down the bare, sunny
vistas of the woods. The shadows of the deciduous trees were spare and
linear, distinctly traced on the brown ground or upon the gray rock. In
these fine curves and strokes of dendritic scripture a graceful sylvan
idyl might perchance be deciphered by the curious. But the dense masses
of laurel and the darkling company of pines cloaked themselves in their
encompassing gloom, in these bright days as ever, and in their shade the
dank smell and the depressing chill attested the winter. Vague shimmers
hung about the mountains, blue in the distance, garnet and brown and
black close at hand. The terrible heights and unexplored depths, the
vast, sheer, precipitous descents, the titanic cliffs, the breadth, the
muscle, the tremendous velocity of the torrents hurling down the gorges,
gave august impressions of space unknown to the redundant richness of the
summer woods. There were vistas of incomparable amplitude, as still,
with the somnolent sunshine and the sparse shadow, as if they were some
luminous effect on a canvas, painted in dark and light browns, graduated
through the tints of the sere leaf in ascendant transition to the pale
gold of the sunbeams; affording, despite the paucity of detail, an
ecstasy to the sense of color.
It was a moment of preëminent consequence to Harshaw one day, when far
up a stately avenue a deer appeared with the suddenness of an illusion,
yet giving so complete a realization of its presence that the very
fullness and splendor of its surprised eyes left their impression. Then,
as in some jugglery of the senses, the animal with consummate grace and
lightness, vanished, bounding through the laurel.
The wind was adverse and the hounds did not readily catch the scent.
A few tentative, melancholy yelps of uncertainty arose; then a deep,
musical, bell-like bay, another, and the pack opened with a great
swelling, oscillating cry, that the mountains echoed as with a thousand
voices, and in a vast compass of tone. The mounted men, hallooing to
one another, dashed off in different directions, making through the
woods towards various “stands” which the deer might be expected to pass.
Now and then the horn sounded to recall the stragglers,—inexpressibly
stirring tones, launched from crag to crag, from height to height;
far-away ravines repeated the summons with a fine and delicate mystery of
resonance, rendered elusive and idealized, till one might believe that
never yet did such sound waves float from the prosaic cow-horn of the
mountaineer.
Harshaw’s pursuits had not been those of a Nimrod, and although a
good horseman and a fair marksman, he had found himself at a grievous
disadvantage with others of the party who were mountaineers and crack
shots. Stimulated by rivalry, they had achieved prodigies in instances of
quickness of sight and unerring aim in unpropitious, almost impossible
circumstances. They had already had some good sport, in which he
had acquitted himself creditably enough; but his inexperience and
ignorance of the topography of the country had given him some occasion
to perceive that without more familiarity with the localities he could
not fully enjoy a camp hunt. He was not surprised when, becoming
involved in an almost impenetrable tangle of the laurel, he lost his
companions, who got over the broken ground with an amazing swiftness,
divination of direction, and quickness of resource. He drew rein upon
emerging, and listened to the baying hounds: now loud, now faint and
far away; now sharply yelping for the lost trail, and again lifting the
exultant, bell-like cry of bated triumph. He despaired of rejoining his
friends till the deer was lost or killed, and, remembering the pluck
of the _personnel_ of the diversion, of the deer, the hounds, and the
mountaineers, he reflected that this result might not soon ensue.
The echoes infinitely confused the sounds, giving no reliable suggestion
of the direction which the hunt was taking. He pushed on for a time—a
long time, his watch told him—in the complete silence of the wintry
woods. He began to experience a dull growing apprehensiveness. He had
no faint approximative conjecture concerning the locality; there was no
path, not even a herders’ trail. He could himself establish no landmark
by which he might be guided. There was a lavish repetitiousness in the
scene: grand as it might be with scarred cliffs and sudden chasms and
stupendous trees, it was presented anew with prolific magnificence forty
yards further, and ride as he might he seemed to make no progress. As
time passed, there recurred to his recollection instances—rare, it is
true, but as uninviting to the imagination as infrequent—of men who have
been lost in these fastnesses, trained woodsmen, herders, the familiars
of the wild nature into whose penetralia even they had ventured too
far. A handful of bleaching bones might tell the story, or perhaps the
mysterious disappearance would be explained by much circling of birds of
prey. Mr. Harshaw felt a sudden violent appreciation of the methods and
interests and affluent attractiveness of the civilized world. He could
not sufficiently condemn his folly in venturing out of its beaten track;
in leaving, even for a space, the things he loved for the things he cared
not for. The scene was inexpressibly repugnant to him; the woods closed
him in so frowningly; his mind recoiled from the stern, Gorgon-like
faces of the crags on every hand. The wintry sunlight was reddening; he
could see only the zenith through the dense forest, and upon its limited
section were interposed many interlacing outlines of the bare boughs;
nevertheless, he was aware that the sky was clouding. The wind did not
stir; the woods were appallingly still; there was no sound of horn or
hounds; the chase had gone like a phantom hunt,—suddenly evoked, as
suddenly disappearing.