XVI.
In contrast with the steam-cars, the old ox-cart was a slow way of getting through the world, and had little of that magnificence which forced itself upon Mink’s jaded and preoccupied faculties. But as Alethea turned her face toward the mountains, it seemed the progress into Paradise, so happy was she in the belief that the rescuers had prevailed. For she, aunt Dely, and Jerry Price had left town early that morning, before doubts and contradictions were astir. The waning yellow moon still swung high in the sky, above the violet vapors of the level west. Long shadows were stalking athwart the fields and down the woodland ways, as if some mystic beings of the night were getting them home. A gust of wind came shivering along the road once and again,—an invisible, chilly presence, that audibly rustled its weird garments and convulsively caught its breath, and was gone. Above the Great Smoky Mountains the inexpressible splendors of the day-star glowed and burned. She walked behind the cart much of the time with Jerry, while aunt Dely sat, a shapeless mass, within it. A scent of tar issued from its clumsy wheels, heavy with the red clay mire of many a mile; a rasping creak exuded from its axles, in defiance of wagon-grease. The ox between his shafts had a grotesque burliness in the moonlight. The square, unpainted little vehicle was a quaint contrivance. Four of the dogs ran beneath it, in leash with their nimble shadows. And aunt Dely’s sun-bonneted head, nodding with occasional lapses into sleep, was faithfully reproduced in the antics of the silhouettes upon the ground that journeyed with them.
Now and again the Scolacutta River crossed their way in wide, shining curves scintillating with the stars, and then Alethea would perch upon the tail-board, and Jerry would clamber into his place as driver, and the dogs would yelp and wheeze on the bank, reluctant to swim, and the ox would plunge in, sometimes with a muttered low of surprise to find the water so cold. Fording the stream was slow work; the wheels often scraped against great hidden bowlders, threatening dislocation and destruction to the running gear. The transit was attended with a coruscation of glittering showers of spray, and left a foaming track across the swift current. Sometimes it was a hard pull up the steep, rocky bank opposite. The old ox had a sober aspect, a resolute tread, and insistently nodding horns. His sturdy rustic demeanor might have suggested that he was glad to be homeward bound, and to turn his back upon the frivolities of civilization and fashion. Not so aunt Dely. It seemed for a time as if her enforced withdrawal from these things had impaired her temper. She woke up ever and anon with caustic remarks.
“I reckon now, Lethe Ann Sayles, ye be goin’ ter bide along o’ yer step-mother?”
“Ye know that’s my home. I hev ter, aunt Dely.”
The girl’s voice was clear, sweet, thrilling with gladness, like some suddenly awakened bird’s singing a stave before dawn.
“I b’lieve ye!” satirically. “Ennybody but you-uns would be ’shamed ter own up ez ye hev got no home. Old ez ye be, an’ ye ain’t married yit! How old be ye? Lemme see,”—with a tone intimating that she would give no quarter,—“nineteen year, five month, an’ fower days. It’s plumb scandalous,” she muttered, arranging her shawl about her. “Ye Bluff!” addressing the ox in a querulous crescendo, “ye goin’ ter jolt the life out’n me, a-tryin’ ter ape the gait o’ the minchin’ sinners ye seen in Shaftesville! Actially the steer hev got the shuffles! I tell ye, Sodom an’ G’morrah warn’t nowhar fur seethin’ sin ter Shaftesville. The devil be a-gatherin’ his harvest thar. His bin an’ barn air full. Them folks will know some day ez store clothes ain’t no defense agin fire. They hev bartered thar salvation fur store clothes. But I do wisht,” she broke off suddenly, dropping her voice from her sanctimonious whine to her cheery drawl, “I hed one o’ them ready-made sun-bonnets. I hed traded off all my feathers an’ truck for store sugar an’ sech afore I seen ’em. I was so full o’ laff that I couldn’t keep my face straight whenst I viewed the contrivance.”
The darkness had fled; the moonlight had failed; the fine, chastened pallor of the interval—the moment’s pause before the dawn—showed the colorless sky, the massive dusky mountains, the stretches of woods below, almost leafless now, the gaunt, tawny fields here and there, the zigzag lines of the rail fences, the red clay road. There were gullies of such depth on either side that the ox, who received so little supervision that he appeared to have the double responsibility of drawing and driving the cart, demonstrated, in keeping out of pitfalls, ampler intellectual capacities than are usually credited to the bovine tribe. But indeed his gifts were recognized. “I ain’t s’prised none ef some day Bluff takes ter talkin’,” his mistress often averred, with her worldly pride in her possessions.
The wind freshened; the white frost gleamed; a pale flush, expanding into a suffusion of amber light, irradiated the sky; and the great red wintry sun rose slowly above the purple ranges.
They had barely passed through a gap of the mountains and entered Eskaqua Cove, when they saw riding along an intersecting road close to the bank of the river a girl in a yellow homespun dress, with a yellow bonnet on her head, and mounted on a great white mare. She had the slaie of a loom in her hand which she had borrowed of a neighbor, and which served to explain her early errand.
Alethea, in her joy, had forgotten Elvira Crosby’s sneers and gibes the night she had brought to the Hollow the raccoon which Mink had given her. All other considerations were dwarfed by the rapturous idea that he was at liberty. Eager to tell the news, she sprang forward.
“Elviry!” she cried. The girl drew up her mare and turned about. Alethea ran down the road and caught the bridle. “Elviry,” she reiterated, “Reuben air out o’ jail! He’s free! He’s free!”
The news was not received as she expected. Elvira put back her bonnet from the soft rings of short hair that lay about her head. She fixed her dark eyes on Alethea in doubting surprise.
“Waal,” she demanded, as if herself sitting in judgment, “who killed Tad?”
“Tad be alive ez I be!” cried Alethea, harried by the reawakening of those questions which she had thought were forever set at rest.
“An’ did the jury say sech?” Elvira asked. It might have seemed that with the breach between her and Mink irreparable, she was not rejoiced to hear of his good fortune.
“The jury couldn’t ’gree,” said Alethea breathlessly. “The rescuers tuk him out.”
“Sech ez that be agin the law,” said Elvira staidly.
“I ain’t keerin’ fur the law!” cried Alethea. “He hev done no harm, an’ all the kentry knowed it. An’ ’twarn’t right ter keep him cooped in jail. So they tuk him out.”
She lifted her head and smiled. Ah, did she indeed look upon a wintry landscape with those eyes? So irradiated with the fine lights of joy, so soft, they were, it might seem they could reflect only endless summers. The gaunt, bleak mountains shivered in the niggardliness of the averted sun; the wind tossed her loose locks of golden hair from beneath her brown bonnet as if they were flouts to the paler beams.
Elvira looked down at her with the pitiless enmity of envy.
“Waal,” she said, “’twixt ye two ye hev done me a powerful mean turn. Mink kep’ a-tryin’ ter cut out Pete Rood till I didn’t know my own mind. An’ then ye a-tellin’ them tales ’bout harnts till Pete drapped dead,—ye knowin’ he hed heart-disease! Yes, sir, he’s dead; buried right over yander in the graveyard o’ the church-house in the cove. An’ I reckon ye be sati’fied now,—ef ye kin be sati’fied.”
She looked away over the swift flow of the river, and began to fleck her shoe with the hickory switch she carried.
Alethea’s face fell. She still stood holding the mare’s rein, but aunt Dely’s voice had broken upon the silence. For Bluff had followed Alethea when she turned from the main road, and had refused to be guided by Mrs. Purvine’s acrid remonstrance. As to Jerry, he was stalking on ahead, unaware that the others were not close on his steps. Sawing upon the ropes on Bluff’s horns which served for reins, Mrs. Purvine succeeded in drawing him up when she reached the spot where the two girls stood. She suddenly joined in the conversation with an astute intention.
“Yes, sir, Mink’s out,” she said, confirming her niece’s statement. “An’ ye’ll hev ter do mighty little tollin’ ter git him back agin, Elviry,” she added beguilingly.
“I don’t want no jail-bird roun’ me,” said Elvira, with a toss of her head.
“Mebbe ye air right, child!” cried Mrs. Purvine. “That’s edzacly what I tole Lethe.” She nodded gayly, and her head-gear, swaying with the expressive gesture, could not have seemed more jaunty had it been a ready-made sun-bonnet from the store. “Ye mark my words, Lethe air goin’ ter marry a man she seen in Shaftesville.” Elated with this effort of imagination, she continued, inspirationally, “He ’lowed she war a plumb beauty, beat ennything he ever dreampt could hev kem out’n the mountings. He air a town man, an’ he be a fust-rate one.”
“Oh, aunt Dely!” faltered Alethea, amazed and almost speechless.
But aunt Dely, charmed with the image she had conjured up, had no mind to relinquish this mythical man, and added another touch of verisimilitude: “He’s well off, too. Lethe, she don’t keer nuthin’ ’bout riches, but bein’ ez I hev ’sociated so much with town folks, I sorter set store by worldly goods,—though not enough ter resk my soul’s salvation, nuther.”
Aunt Dely’s evident desire was to combine spiritual and material welfare, and in this she was not unlike more sophisticated religionists.
The opinionated Bluff being induced to turn around at last, Mrs. Purvine let fly a Parthian dart: “But ez ter you-uns, Elviry, I dunno whether ye hed better be lookin’ down on fust one boy, an’ then another. Ye’ll git lef’ hyar a lonesome single woman, the fust thing ye know,—the only one in the cove! But then, mebbe ye’d better jes’ bow yer mind ter the dispensation, fur arter all ye moughtn’t be able ter ketch Mink. The gals honey him up so ez he air toler’ble sp’iled; they ’low he air special good-lookin’, though I hev never been able ter see good looks in him sence he kem ter my house, one night, an’ bedeviled my front steps so ez they hev never been so stiddy sence.”
“Aunt Dely,” cried Alethea, when they were once more on their homeward way, “what ailed ye ter tell Elviry sech a pack o’”—Respect for her elders restrained her.
“I war prompted by my conscience!” replied the logical Mrs. Purvine, unexpectedly. “I can’t be at peace with my conscience ’thout doin’ all I kin ter purvent a spry, good-lookin’ gal like you-uns from marryin’ a wuthless critter sech ez Mink Lorey.” She made no secret of her designs. “He be good a plenty an’ ter spare fur that thar snake-eyed Elviry Crosby, but I want ye ter marry Jerry Price, an’ kem an’ live along o’ me.”
The immaterial suitor evolved by Mrs. Purvine’s conscience dwelt in Alethea’s mind with singular consistency and effect afterward. When she was once more in Wild-Cat Hollow, and day after day passed,—short days they were, of early winter,—and Mink did not come, expectation was supplanted by alternations of hope and disappointment, and they in their turn by fear and despair. Was it possible, she asked herself, that he could have heard and credited this fantastic invention of Mrs. Purvine’s affection and pride; that Elvira had poisoned his mind; that he was jealous and angry; that for this he had held aloof? Then the recollection of their old differences came upon her. His sorrows had obliterated them in her contemplation. It did not follow, however, that they had brought her nearer to him. He had long ago fallen away from her. Why should she expect that he would return now? She remembered with a new interpretation his joyous relief the morning that she had told to him and his lawyer in the jail the story of her glimpse of Tad; although she had shared his gratulation, it was for his sake alone. She remembered his burning eyes fixed with fiery reproaches upon her face in the court-room, when the disclosure was elicited that it was in a graveyard she had seen the missing boy. After all, she had done nothing for him; her testimony had fostered doubt and roused superstition, and other and stronger friends had effected his release.
She became silent, sober-eyed, and absorbed, and went mechanically about the house. Her changed demeanor occasioned comment from Mrs. Jessup, who sat idle, with a frowzy head and an active snuff-brush, by the fireside instead of on the porch, as in the summer days. “When Lethe fust kem back from Shaftesville she ’peared sorter peart an’ livened up. Her brain war shuck up, somehow, by her travels. I ’lowed she war a-goin’ ter behave arter this like sure enough folks,—but shucks! she ’pears ter be feared ter open her mouth, else folks’ll know she hev got a tongue ’twixt her teeth.” For Alethea found it hard now to reply to the continued queries of Mrs. Sayles and Mrs. Jessup, who had relished her opportunity, and in the girl’s observation of village life were enjoying all the benefits of travel without impinging upon their inertia or undertaking its fatigues. The elder woman sat smoking in the corner, her pink sun-bonnet overhanging her pallid, thin face, ever and anon producing a leaf of badly cured tobacco, and drying it upon the hearth-stone before serving her pipe. Now and then she chuckled silently and toothlessly at some detail of the gossip. It had hurt the girl to know how little they cared for the true object of the expedition. Mink Lorey was naught to them, and they did not affect a picturesque humanity which they did not feel.
“Waal, sir!” Mrs. Sayles would say, “I’ll be bound them town folks air talkin’ ’bout Dely Purvine yit. I jes’ kin view in the sperit how she went a-boguein’ roun’ that town, stare-gazin’ everything, like she war raised nowhar, an’ warn’t used ter nuthin’. Didn’t the folks laff powerful at yer aunt Dely?”
“I never seen nobody laffin’,” protested Alethea, loyally.
Jacob Jessup, sober enough, but surly, was wont also to sit in these days idle by the fire. The farm work, such as it was, had been done. The stock he fed when he liked. He chose to consider Alethea’s metropolitan trip as a bit of personal self-assertion, and sneered whenever it was mentioned, and sought to ignore it as far as he might. For his own part, he had never been to Shaftesville, and he grudged her the distinction. He would not recognize it; he treated the fact as if it were not, and thus he extinguished it. He seemed somehow, as he sprawled idly about, to take up much more room by the fire than the women, despite their skirts, and he was often engaged in altercations with the dogs, the children, and the pet cub as to the space they occupied. The bear had been reared in a bad school for his manners; he had grown intelligent and impudent and selfish in captivity among his human friends. He would stretch himself along the hearth in front of the family, absorbing all the heat, snarling, and showing his teeth sometimes, but steeling himself in his fur and his fat and his fortitude, and withstanding kicks and blows till his persecutor was tired. Sometimes Jessup would catch him by the rolls of fat about his neck and drag him to the door, but the nimble beast would again be stretched upon the hearthstones before the man could reach his chair. Jessup did the brute no great hurt, for, lowering and ill-natured as the fellow was, he was kindly disposed toward animals, and this made the more marked a sort of spite which he seemed to entertain toward the raccoon which Mink had given Elvira, and which she had brought to Alethea. The grotesque creature was in some sort a domestic martyr. As it scuttled about the uneven puncheon floor, he would affect to stumble over it, swear at it, seize it by the tail, and fling it against the wall. But the coon’s griefs were readily healed. It would skulk away for a time, and then be seen eating stolen delicacies in its dainty fashion, washing the food between its two fore-paws in the drinking pail. Old man Sayles, silent, subdued, sat a sort of alien at his own fireside, sorting seeds, and bits of tobacco, buttons, herbs, tiny gourds, which went by the name of “lumber” with him, in a kind of trough beneath the window that served in lieu of sill. Now and then he passed his hand over his head and sighed. Perhaps he regretted his second matrimonial venture; for the domestic scene was one of frowzy confusion, very pronounced when crowded into one small room, instead of being shared with the porch, which the wind swept now and shook, and where the mists congregated in the evenings or the frosts convened. The Jessup children were shrill at play. The baby had got on its feet, and was walking into everything,—unwary pans and kettles and tubs of water. Tige’s overbearing disposition was very manifest in his capacity as fireside companion. And when the chimney smoked, and L’onidas preferred his complaints at Alethea’s side as she sat and carded wool, and the cub leaned his weight against her as he contemplated the fire with his head upon her knee, and her step-mother scolded, and Jacob Jessup fumed and contradicted, and the experimental baby brought down the churn with a crash, while the cat lapped amidst the waste, Mrs. Jessup would shift her snuff-brush to the other corner of her pretty mouth, and demand, “Now ain’t Lethe a plumb fool ter live hyar along o’ sech cavortin’ ways up on the side o’ a mounting, a-waitin’ fur a pore wuthless scamp like Mink Lorey, when she could hev a house ter herself in Piomingo Cove, with no hendrance but Ben Doaks, a quiet respectable boy, ez I don’t look down on ’kase he ain’t got religion! I know some folks ez religion itself can’t holp.”
Sometimes, however,—it was at long intervals,—even Mrs. Jessup would be summoned to rouse herself from the heavy sluggishness that made all exertion, beyond the necessary routine, positive pain. The code of etiquette that prevails in the mountains, simple as it is, has yet its rigorous requirements; and when the death of a kinsman in Eskaqua Cove presently occurred, the graceless creature deplored it less than the supervening necessity of attending the obsequies. There was no snow, nor ice, nor rain, to urge as an excuse. The weather was singularly fine and dry. It was easier getting down the mountain now than in the summer. And so she was constrained to go.
The sunshine was still, languid; the air was calm, Wild-Cat Hollow wore its wintry aspect, although below in the cove one might have glimpses of red and yellow, as if the autumn yet lingered. Everywhere there was a wider outlook because of the denudation of the woods, and the landscape was the more gaunt, the more rugged. It was like a mind stripped of the illusions of youth; the stern facts are the plainer, and alas! more stern. The purplish-garnet hue of the myriads of bare boughs in the forests covering the mountain slopes contrasted with the indeterminate blue of the sky. There was a fibrous effect in their fine detail; even the great mass, seen at a distance, was like some delicate penciling. Singularly still it was, the air very dry; the dead leaves on the ground did not rustle; the corn-stalks, standing withered and yellow in the fields, did not stir. The only motion was the slow shifting of the shadows as the day went on, and perhaps high, high even above the Great Smoky, a swift passing of wild geese flying southward, their cabalistic syllable Houk! houk! floating down, seeming in the silence strangely intoned and mysterious. At night a new moon looked through the rigid, naked trees. The feeble glimmer from the little log cabin was solitary. The stars themselves were hardly more aloof from the world. The narrow vista through the gap only attested how darkly indistinguishable was the cove, how annihilated in the blackness were the mountains.
No sound of cattle drifted down now from the bald; the herds were gone; sometimes in the midnight the howl of a wolf echoed and re-echoed in all the tortuous ways of the wilderness; then silence, that seemed to tremble with fear of the reiteration of the savage cry. Alethea was prone to be wakeful and sad and anxious, so perhaps it was well that she had much to occupy her thoughts during the day. The baby fretted for his mother. Mrs. Jessup was not a model mother, but she was the only one the baby had, and he was not recreant to filial sentiment. He exacted a vast number of petty attentions from Alethea which he had never before required. Tige and the cub resented the pampering she gave him; they were jealous and made their feeling known in many dumb manifestations: they kept themselves sadly in the way; now they were hungry and now they were thirsty, and they whined continually about her.
She hardly noticed at first that a thick haze had appeared over the cove, but as yet did not dim the sky. It climbed the mountain sides, and hung like a gauze veil about the cabin and the sheds. Suddenly she became aware of the pungent odor of smoke. She put the child away from her, as he clung to her skirts, and stepped out upon the porch. The dog and cub pressed close after her, fancying that they had scored one against the baby, who had sunk, squalling because of his desertion, upon the floor.
She looked about for a moment at the still white presence that had usurped the earth, the air, the sky.
“Somebody hev set out fire in the woods!” she cried.
“Hev ye jes’ fund that out?” drawled Jacob Jessup, as he sat on the porch. Her father and he were languidly discussing whether they should fire against it. It was far enough away as yet, they thought, and with the annual conflagrations in the woods they had become experts in judging of the distance and of the emergencies of fighting fire with fire.
She listened as they talked, thinking that Sam Marvin’s home, miles away, would presently be in danger, if they were right as to the location of the fire. The cruel flames would complete the desolation she had wrought. Her conscience winced always at the recollection of its bare, denuded plight. Some small reparation was suggested in the idea that she might save it; she might go thither now and fire the dead leaves on the slopes below. Above there was a desolate, barren stretch of rocks, covering many acres, which the flames could hardly overleap. There was no wind, but a slight stir was now in the air. Its current was down the mountain.
She set out, Tige and the coon with her: the wild thing ambling demurely along with all the decorum of cultivated manners; the domestic animal barking and leaping before her in mad ecstasy for the simple privilege of the excursion. The cub looked after them from the doorway, whined, and crept within to the fire.
As she went she was vividly reminded of the day when she had journeyed thither before, although the woods had then worn the rich guise of autumn, and they were now austere and bleak and silent, and shrouded in the white smoke. She even noted the lick-log at the forks of the road, where she had sat and trembled and debated within herself. She wondered if what she had said in the court-room would pursue the moonshiner in his hiding place. Would it harm him? Had she done right or wrong?
Still walking on up the steep slant to the moonshiner’s house, seeing only a yard or two before her, she at last came upon the fence. She paused and leaned upon the rails, and looked about her. The corn-field comprised more acreage than is usual in mountain agriculture. The destination of the crop was not the limited legitimate market of the region. It was planted for use in the still. She experienced another pang when she realized that it too was a grievous loss; for Sam Marvin had been forced to leave the fruit of his industry when it stood immature. Now, early in December, the full crisp ears leaned heavily from the sere stalk. She wondered that the abandoned crop, a fine one, had not been plundered. Then she bethought herself how deep in the wilderness it stood secluded. All at once she heard a rustling among the corn. Her first thought was the bear. In amaze she discerned a wagon looming hard by in the smoke. Then the indistinct figures of a man, a woman, and a half-grown girl came slowly down the turn row. To judge from their gestures, they were gathering the corn.