VII.
The site of the old mill continued the scene of many curious groups long after all efforts for the recovery of the body had ceased. The river was dragged no more, and hope was relinquished. There had never been any strong expectation of success. The stream was abnormally high considering the season of the year, and running with great impetuosity. Though with the aggregations of its tributaries swollen by the late rains it had the volume of a river, it retained all the capricious traits of the mountain torrent which it had been. It was full of swirling rapids, of whirlpools, of sudden cataracts. Its bed was treacherous with quicksands and rugged with bowlders. Hitched to the miller’s orchard fence were rows of horses, dozing under their old Mexican saddles or the lighter weight of a ragged blanket or a folded quilt; teams of oxen stood yoked under the trees of the open space beyond; children and dogs sat on the roots or lay in the grass, while the heavy, jeans-clad figures of the mountaineers explored the banks as they chewed their quids with renewed vigor, and droned the gossip in drawling voices.
The same faces were seen day after day,—often enough to excite no particular remark that, whoever came or was absent, Peter Rood was here with the dawn, and night found him still strolling along the banks, looking upon the swollen floods with gloomy, insistent dark eyes, as if he were seeking to read in the writhing lines of the current the inscrutable secret of the Scolacutta River. Sometimes, with his hands in his pockets, his lowering face shadowed by his broad hat, he would silently listen to the speculations of those who found solace for the futility of the undertaking in the enlarged conjectural field which failure afforded, discussing the relative probabilities whether the body had floated down to the Tennessee River, or whether it had been engulfed by the quicksands and buried forever, or caught among the rocks of the jagged bank and wedged in, to be found some day—a ghastly skeleton—by a terrified boy, fishing or wading at low water.
It was only when these bootless surmises had palled at last, through many repetitions and lack of further developments, that the ruins of the old mill asserted an interest. There seemed a strange hush on the landscape, here where the wheel would whir no more. A few timbers scattered about, a rotten old stump that had served as part of the foundation, the hopper washed up by the waters, several of the posts which had upheld the race, were all that was left of the old mill, so long the salient feature of the place that more than one mountaineer was beset with bewilderment at the sight,—the recollection of the oblique line of the roof against the mountain, the open door, the reflections in the water, having more reality than the bereft bank of the river.
And now the old miller—seeming older than before—was wont to come tottering out with his stick, the gay sunshine on his long, white hair, and sit on the broken timbers, forlorn amidst the ruins of his poverty. At first his appearance created renewed excitement, and his old customers and friends pressed up to speak to him and hear what he would say, feeling a certain desire to mark the moral phenomena of loss and the fine processes of grief. But he held his clasped hands upon the stick, and silently shook his bowed gray head in his ragged old hat.
“I reckon ye’d better leave him alone,” his pretty granddaughter said; for she always accompanied him, and stood, as radiant as youth may ever be, twirling the end of her tattered apron between her fingers, her tangled yellow hair, like skeins of sunshine, hanging down on her shoulders, and her blue, undismayed eyes looking with a shallow indifference upon the scene. It was replete with interest and curiosity, not to say awe, to the little four-year-old sister who hung upon her skirts, or thrust a tow head from behind her grandfather. Sometimes her lips were wreathed with a smile as she saw some child in the crowd, but if the demonstration were returned she straightway hid her head in the old man’s sleeve and for a while looked out no more.
Once old Griff spoke suddenly. “’Gustus Tom,” for his favorite kept beside him, “ye wouldn’t treat nobody mean, would ye?”
“Would ef they treated me mean,” said ’Gustus Tom, with an unequivocal nod, which intimated that his code of ethics recognized retribution. “’Thout,” he qualified, “’twar sister Eudory thar,”—he glanced at the little girl,—“I’d gin ’em ez good ez they sent.”
“’Tain’t religion, ’Gustus Tom,—’tain’t religion,” said the old man brokenly. ’Gustus Tom, with his fragment of hat on the side of his tow head, hardly looked as if he cared.
A grizzled old mountaineer in jeans, with a stern, square face and a deep-set eye, that was lighted suddenly, spoke abruptly in a sepulchral voice.
“Ye oughter go ter camp, Brother Griff,” he said in a religious twang,—“ye oughter go ter camp, an’ tell yer ’speriunce! Ye hev lived long. Ye hev wrastled with the devil. Ye hev seen joy, ye hev knowed sorrow, ye hev fund grace. Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Ye air full o’ ’speriunce, brother, an’ ye oughter go ter camp an’ comfort yerse’f, an’ sing, an’ pray.”
“I pray no mo’,” said the old man, lifting his aged, piteous face. “I’m ’feared the Lord mought hear me an’ answer my prayer.” He smote his breast. “I ain’t keerin’ fur the mill. I ain’t keerin’ for the chill’n,—they’ll make out somehows. But ef my prayers could take back every word o’ wrath I ever spoke ter the idjit, every lick I struck him, I’d weary the very throne o’ grace. Ef I could git him back an’ begin over—but I can’t! An’ I won’t pray fur myself, fur the Lord mought hear me. An’ I want ter remember every one o’ them words an’ every lick, an’ pay back fur ’em, wropped in the flames o’ Torment.”
He got up and tottered away toward the house, followed by his grandchildren, leaving the by-standers staring after him, strangely thrilled.
“Waal, I hopes they won’t hear at the camp-meetin’ o’ his talkin’ sech ez that,” remarked the elderly adviser in dismay. “They hev been a-sermonizin’ a good deal ’bout Tad’s early death an’ Mink Lorey’s awful crime, an’ sech, ter them young sinners over yander ter camp, an’ it ’peared ter be a-sorter skeerin’ of ’em, a-sorter a-shooin’ of ’em inter the arms o’ grace. An’ I hopes none o’ ’em will hear ’bout the old man a-repentin’ an’ wantin’ ter burn, an’ sech, fur the boy’s hevin’ been c’rected by his elders; they air perverted enough now agin them ez hev authority over ’em.”
“Old Griff would change his mind ’bout burnin’ ef he seen the fire one time,” said another, winking seriously, as if he spoke from pyrotechnic experience. Then with a sudden change of tone, “What ails Pete Rood?”
For Rood was leaning against a tree, his swarthy face overspread with a sallow paleness, his lips blue, his eyes half closed, his hand clutching at his heart.
He said it was nothing much; he had been “tuk” this way often before; he would be better presently. Indeed, he was shortly able to walk down to the bank of the river, and sit and listen to the surmises of a half dozen idle fellows, lying in the grass, as to the drowning of Tad and the fate of Mink, and the terrible illustrations that both had furnished in the sermons at the camp-meeting in Eskaqua Cove.
And when he left them at last it was to the camp-meeting he went.
The afternoon brought a change in the weather. Rood noted it as he rode his raw-boned horse over the ranges and down the red clay roads into Eskaqua Cove. Clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun. There were no shadows, no gradations of light, no point of brilliant climax. The foliage was heavy masses of solid color. Only in certain plumy silver-green boughs lurked a subdued glister, some luculent enchantment; for if ever the moonlight were enmeshed by a tree it is in the branches of the white pine.
Silence had fallen, as if the source of light were also source of sound. There was wind in the upper atmosphere, but no breath stirred the leaves. Twilight had sunk upon the cove before he turned off into a road leading up a wooded hill. In the dusk, sundry equine figures loomed up. The head of a horse was clearly defined against a patch of the pale sky, and a shrill neigh jarred the quiet. There were wagons, too, under the trees, empty, the teams unharnessed, and the poles lying on the ground. A dim light, deeply yellow, shone among the boles of the trees further on, a little misty, because already large drops were falling. All unmindful of the rain, a row of young men and half-grown boys perched on a rail fence in crouching attitudes, not unlike gigantic roosting fowls. Now and then a subdued, drawling voice sounded from among them, and a smothered laugh was attestation of callow humanity. They were not devoid of interest in the proceedings of the camp-meeting, but it was in the impersonal quality of spectator, and they held aloof from the tabernacle as if they had no souls to be saved. They turned to look down at Rood as he dismounted and hitched his horse, and he heard his own name passed along the row, it being a self-constituted register of all who came and went. The little gate dragged and creaked on its hinges, and resisted as if it grudged the spiritual opportunities to which it gave access, and desired to point the fact that salvation was not easy to come by. As it yielded and Rood entered the inclosure there were more yellow lights showing with misty halos in the olive-green dusk. They came from the doors of a row of shanties, floorless and windowless, which served as quarters for the crowd at night. There was a great flaring flame in the rear of each cabin, with leaping red tongues, surrounded by busy, hovering figures that cast huge distorted shadows against the encompassing foliage, as if some uncanny phenomenal beings were stalking a solemn round among the trees. These fires had uncomfortable spiritual suggestions. But they issued merely from the kitchens, the most cheerful things at camp, and here saint and sinner were equally heartily represented. Supper was over, however. The hymn rising even now from the tabernacle was far from cheerful: one of the long-drawn, melancholy songs, with wild, thrilling swells and sudden falls and monotonous recitative passages, sometimes breaking into a strange, ecstatic chant. The serried vertical lines of rain seemed to vibrate with it like the strings of a harp. Far away the thunder rolled in its pauses. More than once the sudden lightning illumined the grounds with a ghastly gleam, and the rhythmic solemn song went on like a part of the storm. It was a grave assemblage under the great roof of the rude structure, shown in the dim light of six or eight kerosene lamps fixed against the posts. At one end was a platform with a bench, on which sat some five or six of the preachers participating in the exercises. Brother Jethro Sims, a hoary-headed patriarch, was walking slowly up and down the main aisle, clapping his hands and singing with a look of ecstasy in his upturned eyes which a sophisticated religionist might vainly wonder at, finding that his superior attainments and advanced theories had bereft him of the power to even comprehend such faith, such piously prescient joys. The ground was covered with a deep layer of straw, deadening the stir among the rows of benches. Many of these, having no backs, served to acquaint their occupants with martyrdom and to offer a premium to the naturally upright. There were numbers of little children present, for as yet the lenient rule of the mountain churches tolerates their babble and even their crying in reason. Here and there one of the humbly clad young women, with her sleeping infant in her arms, the yellow light falling upon its head and on her solemn, listening, almost holy face, might remind one of another peasant mother whose Child is the hope of the world. The extreme seriousness, the devout aspiration, the sublimity of the unquestioning faith, that animated the meeting, could annul ignorance, poverty, uncouthness.
There were many canine figures on the outskirts of the crowd, now and then peering with wolfish green eyes and weird effect from the darkness among the laurel, which was beginning to sway and sound with the wind. Those in the full light, standing even beneath the roof and, with lolling tongue and wagging tail, looking upon the proceedings, seemed peculiarly idle here and to incur the imputation of loafers, despite that they are never very busy elsewhere. Others were more selfishly employed, creeping about under the benches and among the feet of the congregation, searching in the straw for the bits of bread and meat thrown aside by the frequenters of the meeting who did not camp on the grounds, but brought their lunch for the midday, and went home at night. One little dapper yellow dog had bounded on the end of the mourners’ bench, and sat there, gravely gazing about him with small, affable eyes, all unnoticed by the elders, but threatening the gravity of an urchin, who grinned and coughed to hide the grin, breaking out with a wild, uncontrollable vocalization, relic of the whooping-cough, not long over-past. He was finally motioned out of the tabernacle, and scudded across in the rain to the shanty, while the little dog sat demure and unmolested on the mourners’ bench.
Larger sinners were gathering there presently, albeit slowly.
“Come! come!” cried the old man sonorously over the singing. “Delay not! My brethren, I hev never seen a meetin’ whar the devil held sech a strong hold! Come! Hell yawns fur ye! Come! Yer time is short! Grace beckons! Come! The fires o’ perdition air kindled! The flames air red!”
And as his voice broke forth once more in the chanting, the thunder rolled as a repetition of his summons, the lightning glared, all the mountains became visible over the woods of the abrupt declivity toward the east; and higher still above the summits was revealed a vast cloud-vista in the midst of the black night, vividly white, full of silent surging motion, with strange suggestions of bending forms, of an awful glister at the vanishing point,—darkness enveloped it, and once more the thunder pealed.
As the gathering storm burst, the monotonously chanting voices seemed keyed to an awed undertone, lisping with this mighty psalm of nature,—the thunder and its echo in the mountains, the tumultuous cry of the wind, and the persistent iteration of the rain. In the intervals of its splendid periods, one might feel it a relief to hear the water timidly splashing in the little ditches that served to drain the ground on either side of the tabernacle, and the continual whisper in the pines above the primitive structure. Here and there two or three boughs hung down further than the rest, fringing the eaves. Ben Doaks noted, when the lightning flared again, that just between them the distant peak of Thunderhead loomed dimly visible,—or was it a cloud? Strain his eyes as he might, he could hardly say.
For Ben Doaks was there, the first to respond to the earnest exhortations to the sinners to come forward. He had a shamefaced look as he shambled up and took his seat on the mourners’ bench, while the little dog sat unnoticed at the other end. Doaks was quick, however, to observe that one of the preachers eyed him sharply, and spoke to another, who shook his head with a gesture indeed of negation, but an expression of reluctant affirmation, and he felt sure that they recognized how often he had sat there, and that they were saying to each other that it was of no use,—he was evidently rejected by grace.
Now and then low voices sounded in the midst of the singing,—the Christians urging those convicted of sin to go up and be prayed for. Others came forward. There was more stir than before; a vivid curiosity was on many faces turning about to see who was going up, who was resisting entreaty, who ought to be convicted of sin, being admirably supplied with obliquity of which to repent.
Pete Rood sat, his black eyes on the ground, intent, brooding, deeply grave. Elvira Crosby thought at first that he affected to overlook her. Then, with a sinking of the heart, she realized that indeed he did not see her. The tears welled up to her eyes. The past was not to be recalled. When was he ever before unaware of her presence? He had been so eager, so devoted, so unlike the capricious lover for whom she had lightly flung him away. It was all over, though. She looked about her to divert her mind, to preserve her composure. She noted Mrs. Sayles in the congregation, identifying her by her limp sun-bonnet. Mrs. Sayles had long been saying that she intended to put splints in it some day when time favored her; but it still hung over her eyes, obscuring her visage, except her mouth, as she sang, and she was an edifying spectacle of a disregard of earthly pomps and a lack of vain interest in baubles and bonnets. Alethea’s face, like some fair flower half enfolded in its sheath, was visible in the funnel-shaped depths of her own brown bonnet, with a glistening suggestion of her gold hair on her forehead, and one escaped tress hanging down beneath the curtain on her dark brown homespun dress. She did not sing, and she looked downcast.
In the aisle between the two benches reserved for the mourners the brethren were crowding, talking individually to the contrite sinners, sometimes with such effect that sobs and tears broke forth; and then the hymn was renewed, with the rhythmic sound of the clapping of hands, while the thunder crashed and the forked lightnings darted through the sky. The lurid scenic effects added their impressiveness to the terrible word-painting of another preacher, who was less interesting though not less efficient than that gentle old man, Brother Jethro Sims. He described hell with an accurate knowledge of its topography, its personnel, and its customs, which was a triumph of imagination, and made one feel that he had surely been there. A young woman suddenly broke into wild screams, shouting that she had found her salvation, and clapping her hands, and crying, “Glory!” finally fainting, and being borne out into the rain.
In the aisles they all often knelt, praying aloud in turns: sometimes, the voice of one failing in a whispered Amen! another would cry out insistently, “Let us continue the supplication!” And once more the prayer would go up.
There were no more conversions. Over and again the brethren announced in pious dudgeon that it was a stubborn meeting, and hell gaped for the sinner. It was evidence of the sincerity of the mourners, and their anxiety not to deceive themselves and others, that they could thus resist the urgency of the impassioned appeals, that with quivering nerves they could still withhold all demonstrations of yielding until the spirit should descend upon them.
Presently persons who desired the prayers of the congregation were requested to rise and make known their wish. It might be feared that some of the compliances did not tend to preserve domestic harmony. One woman asked prayers for her husband, whose heart, she stated, was not in his religion, and the defiant contradiction expressed in the face of a man seated beside her suggested that she had thus publicly made reprisal for sundry conjugal differences. Nevertheless, old Brother Sims said, “Amen!” Mrs. Sayles rose and begged prayers for the “headin’ young folks o’ the kentry, that they’d be guided by thar elders, an’ not trest thar own green jedgmints, an’ finally be led ter grace.” And all the old people said, heartily, “Amen!” Many turned to look at Alethea, whose face had become a delicate pink.
And suddenly Peter Rood rose. “I want the prayers o’ the godly,” he said, now and then casting a hasty glance at Brother Sims, who stood listening intently, his chin in the air, his hands arrested in the gesture of clapping, “fur light ter my steps. I reckon I’m a backslider, fur I git no light when I pray. It’s all dark,—mighty dark!” His voice trembled. He was beginning to lose his self-control. “My actions tarrify me! I ’lowed wunst I hed fund grace, but in trouble I hev no helper.”
The lightnings flashed once more. The swift illumination seemed to blanch his swarthy face, and lighted his uplifted black eyes with a transient gleam. “I’m in sin an’ great mis’ry. I hev done wrong.” He was about to sit down.
“Make reparation, brother, an’ free yer soul in prayer,” said the old man.
“I can’t!” he cried, shrilly. “I’m ’feard! I’m ’feard o’ my life. I wouldn’t hev done sech ’ceptin’ I war drunk,—drunk with liquor an’ drunk with spite.”
He felt that he was saying too much. He sat down, biting his lip till the blood started. Then he rose and faltered, “I want yer prayers fur light.”
“Amen!” said Brother Sims.
Rood had recovered himself abruptly. He was looking about with furtive sharpness through the congregation, seeking to gauge the effect of what he had said when under the strong spell of religious excitement that had swayed the crowd. Fearful as he was, he detected only curiosity, interest, nothing more marked; for in the rhetoric of frenzied repentance these good men often apply to themselves language that seriously entertained could only grace an indictment.
The rain had ceased; the quiet without seemed to conduce to a calmer spirit within. The fervor of the meeting had spent itself. Only a few of the brethren were “workin’” with Ben Doaks; his face was troubled and perplexed, his anxious eyes turned from one to another.
“Can’t ye feel ye air jes’ a wuthless worm a-crawlin’ round the throne o’ grace? Can’t ye feel that only mercy kin save ye?—fur ye richly desarve damnation.”
“Laws-a-massy, naw,” said poor, candid Ben, greatly harried. “I think mighty well o’ myself!”
And so they left him in his sins. The crowd was breaking up, chiefly seeking their several camps, as the shanties were called. But a few had come merely to participate in the exercises of the evening, and these were busy in harnessing their horses or yoking their oxen into their wagons on the hillside without the inclosure. The declivity was veined with rivulets, into which the heavy feet of the men and beasts splashed; the leaves continuously dripped; frogs were croaking near at hand in the sombre woods,—not so dark now, for the melancholy waning moon shone among the breaking clouds. The rumble of wheels presently intruded upon the low-toned conversation, the burden of which was the meeting and reminiscent comparison with other meetings. Several of the boys, not burdened with immortality, took leave less decorously, whooping loudly at each other as they galloped past the vehicles, and were soon out of sight and hearing.
The red clay road was presently lonely enough as Alethea trudged along it. There was no room for her in the little wagon which Buck drew in single harness, as might be called the ropes by which the ox, fastened between the shafts, was made to dispense with a yoke-fellow. A rope tied to his horn was intended to guide him along any intricacies of the road with which he might not be acquainted. Mrs. Sayles, her daughter-in-law, and several of the children were seated in the wagon, and sometimes Alethea walked in advance, and sometimes fell into the rear. It was no great distance that they were to travel,—their destination being her aunt’s house in Eskaqua Cove, where they were to spend the night before wagoning up the Great Smoky.
Alethea was beset with her own unquiet thoughts; the remorse that would not loose its hold; the strange wrong which the right had wrought. Her conscience, forever on the alert—serving, if need were, as proxy—could find no flaw in what she had counseled; and thus perverse fate, in the radiant guise of rectitude, had led Reuben Lorey to despair, and delivered her to grief.
She hardly noted the incidents of the wayside,—the foot-bridge over the creek; the stars amongst the ripples; the sound of the insects; the zigzag fences on either hand; the mists that lurked among the trees, that paced the turn-rows of the corn-fields, that caught the moonbeams, and glittered against the dark mountain side. It was another gleam that struck her attention; she looked again,—the slant of the rays against the windows of a little school-house. There was a deep impression of silence upon it, vacant in the night, dark but for the moonbeams. The pines that overhung it were sombre and still. The vapors shifted about it, fringing even the rotten palings that inclosed it. Her feet had followed her gaze. She was near the edge of the narrow road, as she paused to wait for Buck and the wagon to come up. She heard nothing as she listened. She said to herself that she must be a long way ahead. She was sensible of fatigue presently; the excitements of the evening were superimposed on the work of the day. She leaned against the tottering fence. Her bonnet had fallen back on her shoulders; she rested her head on her hand, her elbows on the low palings. She might have dreamed for a moment. Suddenly something touched her. She turned her head quickly; her shriek seemed to pierce the sky, for there in the inclosure,—did she see aright?—the idiot’s face! white with a responsive terror upon it, vanishing in the mist. Or was it the mist? Did she hear the quick thud of retreating footsteps, or was it the throbs of her own plunging heart? As she turned, wildly throwing up both arms, she beheld Buck and the wagon on the crest of the hill, with the worshipers from the camp-meeting, and the sight restored to her more mundane considerations.