V.
Except in so far as his sedulously cultivated fraternal sentiments were concerned, the peculiar domestic training to which Ben Hanway had been subjected had had slight effect in softening a somewhat hard and stern character. To continue the canine simile by which his mother had described him, his gentleness and watchful care toward his sister were not more reassuring to the public at large than is the tender loyalty of a guard-dog toward the infant of a house which claims his fealty; that the dog does not bite the baby is no fair augury that he will not bite the peddler or the prowler. The fact that the traveler had borne letters addressed to Alan Selwyn, and no other papers, and yet Alan Selwyn could not or would not identify him, had already furnished Hanway with an ever-recurrent subject of cogitation. It had been the presumption of the coroner's jury, since confirmed by inquiry of the postmaster, that, going for some purpose to Alan Selwyn's lodge in the wilderness, the unknown traveler had, in passing, called for his prospective host's mail at the Cross-Roads, some fifteen miles distant and the nearest post-office, such being the courtesy of the region. A visitor often insured a welcome by thus voluntarily expediting the delivery of the mail some days, or perhaps some weeks, before its recipient could have hoped to receive it otherwise. Hanway had long been cognizant of this habit of the Cross-Roads postmaster to accede to such requests on the part of reputable people, but he was reminded forcibly of it the next morning. A neighbor, homeward bound from a visit to the valley, had paused at Hanway's house to leave a letter, with which he had charged himself, addressed to Selwyn.
"I 'lowed ye mought be ridin' over thar some day, bein' ez ye air toler'ble nigh neighbors," he said.
And Hanway the more willingly undertook the delivery of the missive since it afforded him a pretext for the reconnoissance which he had already contemplated.
Rain-clouds had succeeded those fine aerial flauntings of the sunset splendors, and he set out in the pervasive drizzle of a gray day. Torn and ragged with the rain and the gusts, the white mist seemed to come to meet him along the vistas of the dreary dripping woods. The tall trees that shut off the sky loomed loftily through it. Sometimes, as the wind quickened, it deployed in great luminously white columns, following the invisible curves of the atmospheric current; and anon, in flaky detached fragments, it fled dispersed down the avenues like the scattered stragglers of a routed army. The wind was having the best of the contest; and though it still rained when he reached the vicinity of Alan Selwyn's lonely dwelling, the mist was gone, the clouds were all resolved into the steady fall of the torrents, and the little house on the slope of the mountain and all its surroundings were visible.
A log cabin it was, containing two rooms and the unaccustomed luxury of glass windows; so new that the hewn cedar logs had not yet weathered to the habitual dull gray tone, but glowed jauntily red as the timbers alternated with the white and yellow daubing. A stanch stone chimney seemed an unnecessary note of ostentation, since the more usual structure of clay and sticks might serve as well. It reminded Ben Hanway that its occupant was not native to the place, and whetted anew his curiosity as he looked about, the reins on his horse's neck in his slow approach. It was a sheltered spot; the great mountain's curving summit rose high toward the north and west above the depression where the cabin stood; across the narrow valley a still more elevated range intercepted the east wind. Only to the south was the limited plateau open, sloping down to great cliffs, giving upon a vast expanse of mountain and valley and plain and far reaches of undulating country, promising in fair weather high, pure, soft air, a tempered gentle breeze, and the best that the sun can do.
He noted the advantages of the situation in reference to the "lung complaint," feeling a loser in some sort; for he had begun to suspect that the consumptive tendencies of the stranger were a vain pretense, assumed merely to delude the unwary. He could not have doubted long, for when he dismounted and hitched his horse to the rail fence he heard the door of the house open, and as its owner, standing on the threshold in the wind and the gusty rain, called out to him a welcoming "Hello," the word was followed by a series of hacking coughs which told their story as definitely as a medical certificate.
Ben Hanway was not a humane man in any special sense, but he was conscious of haste in concluding the tethering of the animal and in striding across the vacant weed-grown yard striped with the ever-descending rain.
"Ye'd better git in out'n all this wind an' rain," he said in his rough voice. "A power o' dampness in the air."
"No matter. There's no discount on me. Don't take cold nowadays. I've got right well here already."
The passage-way was dark, but the room into which Ben was ushered, illumined by two opposite windows, was as bright as the day would allow. A roaring wood fire in the great chimney-place reinforced the pallid gray light with glancing red and yellow fluctuations. The apartment was comfortable enough, although its uses were evidently multifarious,—partly kitchen, and dining-room, and sitting-room. Its furniture consisted of several plain wooden chairs, a table and crockery, a few books on a shelf, a lounge in the corner, and a rifle, after the manner of the mountaineers, over the mantelpiece. Upon the shelf a cheap clock ticked away the weary minutes of the lonely hours of the long empty days while the valley man abode here, exiled from home and friends and his accustomed sphere, and fought out that hopeless fight for his life.
Ben Hanway gave him a keen, covert stare, as he slowly and clumsily accepted the tendered chair and his host threw another log on the fire. Hanway had seen him previously, when Selwyn testified before the coroner's jury, but to-day he impressed his visitor differently. He was tall and slight, twenty-five years of age, perhaps, with light brown hair, sleek and shining and short, a quick blue eye, a fair complexion with a brilliant flush, and a long mustache. But the bizarre effect produced by this smiling apparition in the jaws of death seemed to Hanway's limited experience curiously enhanced by his attire. Its special peculiarity was an old smoking-jacket, out at the elbows, ragged at the cuffs, and frayed at the silk collar; Hanway had never before seen a man wear a red coat, or such foot-gear as the slipshod embroidered velvet slippers in which he shuffled to a chair and sat down, tilted back, with his hands in the pockets of his gray trousers. To be sure, he could but be grave when testifying before a coroner's jury, but Hanway was hardly prepared for such exuberant cheerfulness as his manner, his attire, and his face seemed to indicate.
"Ain't ye sorter lonesome over hyar?" he ventured.
"You bet your sweet life I am," his host replied unequivocally. A shade crossed his face, and vanished in an instant. "But then," he argued, "I didn't have such a soft thing where I was. I was a clerk—that is, a bookkeeper—on a salary, and I had to work all day, and sometimes nearly all night!"
He belittled his former vocation with airy contempt, as if he did not yearn for it with every fibre of his being,—its utility, its competence, its future. The recollection of the very feel of the fair smooth paper under his hand, the delicate hair-line chirography trailing off so fast from the swift pen, could wring a pang from him. He might even have esteemed an oath more binding sworn on a ledger than on the New Testament.
"And we were a small house, anyway, and the salary was no great shakes," he continued jauntily, to show how little he had to regret.
"An' now ye ain't got nuthin' ter do but ter read yer book," said the mountaineer acquiescently, realizing, in spite of his clumsy mental processes, how the thorn pierced the bosom pressed against it.
Selwyn followed his guest's glance to the shelf of volumes with an unaffected indifference.
"Yes, but I don't care for it. I wish I did, since I have the time. But the liking for books has to be cultivated, like a taste for beer; they are both a deal too sedative for me!" The laugh that ensued was choked with a cough, and the tactless Hanway was moved to expostulate.
"I wonder ye ain't 'feared ter be hyar all by yerse'f hevin' the lung complaint."
"Why, man alive, I'm well, or so near it there's no use talking. I could go home to-morrow, except, as I have had the house built, I think I'd better stay the winter in it. But before the cold weather comes on they are going to send up a darky to look after me. I only hope I won't have to wait on him,—awful lazy nigger! He used to be a porter of ours. Loafing around these woods with a gun on his shoulder, pretending to hunt, will be just about his size. He's out of a job now, and comes cheap. I couldn't afford to pay him wages all the time, but winter is winter."
He was silent a moment, gazing into the fire; then Hanway, gloomily brooding and disturbed, for the conversation had impressed him much as if it had been post-mortem, so immediate seemed his companion's doom, felt Selwyn's eye upon him, as if his sentiment were so obvious that the sense of sight had detected it.
"You think I'm going to die up here all by myself. Now I tell you, my good fellow, dying is the very last thing that I expect to do."
He broke out laughing anew, and this time he did not cough.
Hanway could not at once cover his confusion. He looked frowningly down at the steam rising from his great cowhide boots, outstretched as they dried in the heat of the fire, and slowly shifted them one above the other. The flush on his sunburned cheek rose to the roots of his dark hair, and overspread his clumsy features. His appearance did not give token of any very great delicacy of feeling, but he regretted his transparency, and sought to nullify it.
"Not that," he said disingenuously; "but bein' all by yerse'f, I wonder ye ain't willin' fur the county road ter be put through. 'T would run right by yer gate, an' ye could h'ist the winder an' talk to the folks passin'. Ye wouldn't be lonely never."
For the first time Selwyn looked like a man of business. His eyes grew steady. His face was firm and serious and non-committal. He said nothing. Hanway cleared his throat and crossed his legs anew. The thought of his true intention in coming hither, not his ostensible errand, had recurred more than once to his mind,—to lay bare the secret touching the visitor to Selwyn's remote dwelling, whom he could not or would not identify; and if there were aught amiss, as the mountaineer suspected, to take such action thereupon as in the fullness of his own good judgment seemed fit. But since the man was evidently so sharp, Hanway had hitherto feared even indirectly to trench upon it; here, however, the opening was so natural, so propitious, that he was fain to take advantage of it.
"An' see," he resumed, "what dangers kem o' hevin' no road. That thar man what war killed las' month, ef we hed hed a reg'lar county road, worked on an' kep' open, stiddier this hyar herder's trail, this-a-way an' that, he could hev rid along ez free an' favored, an'"—
"Why," Selwyn broke in, "the testimony was to the effect that he was riding a young, skittish horse, which was startled by stray hogs breaking at a dead run through the bushes, and that the horse bolted and ran away. And the man died from concussion of the brain. That would have happened if we had had a road of the first class, twenty feet wide, instead of this little seven-foot freak you all are so mashed on."
His face had not lost a tinge of its brilliant color. His animated eyes were still fired by that inward flame that was consuming his years, his days, even his minutes, it might seem. His hands, fine, white, and delicate, were thrust jauntily into the pockets of his red jacket, and Hanway felt himself no nearer the heart of the mystery than before. The subject, evidently, was not avoided, held naught of menace. He went at it directly.
"Seems strange he war a-comin' ter visit you-uns, an' hed yer mail in his pocket, an' ye never seen him afore," he hazarded, "nor knowed who he war."
"But I have found out since," Selwyn said, his clear eyes resting on his visitor without the vestige of an affrighted thought. "He was Mr. Keith, a chemist from Glaston; he was quite a notable authority on matters of physical science generally. I had written to him about—about some points of interest in the mountains, and as he was at leisure he concluded to come and investigate—and—take a holiday. He didn't let me know, and as I had never seen him I didn't at first even imagine it was he."
There was a silence. Selwyn's blue eyes dwelt on the fast-descending lines of rain that now blurred all view of the mountains; the globular drops here and there adhering to the pane, ever dissolving and ever renewed, obscured even the small privilege of a glimpse of the dooryard. The continual beat on the roof had the regularity and the tireless suggestion of machinery.
"How did ye find out?" demanded Hanway, his theory evaporating into thin air.
"Why, as he didn't reply to my letter about a matter of such importance"—he checked himself suddenly, then went on more slowly—"it occurred to me that he might have decided to come, and might have been the man who was killed. So I wrote to his brother. He had not been expected at home earlier. His brother doesn't incline to the foul-play theory. The horse he rode is a wild young animal that has run away two or three times. He had been warned repeatedly against riding that horse, but he thought him safe enough. The horse has returned home,—got there the day my letter was received. So the brother and an officer came and exhumed the body: he was buried, you know, after the inquest, over in the little graveyard yonder on the slope of the mountain."
Selwyn shivered slightly, and the fine white hands came out of the gaudy red pockets, and fastened the frogs beneath the lapels across his chest, to draw the smoking-jacket closer.
"Great Scott! what a fate,—to be left in that desolate burying-ground! Death is death, there."
"Death is death anywhar," said the mountaineer gloomily.
"No. Get you a mile or two of iron fence, and stone gates, and lots of sculptured marble angels around, and death is peace, or rest, or heaven, or paradise, according to your creed and the taste of the subject; but here you are done for and dead."
Hanway, in the limited experience of the mountaineer, could not follow the theory, and he forbore to press it further.
"Well," Selwyn resumed, "they took him home, and I was glad to see him go. I was glad to see them filling that hole up. I took a pious interest in that. I should have felt it was waiting for me. I shoveled some of the earth back myself."
The wind surged around the house, and shook the outer doors. The rain trampled on the roof like a squadron of cavalry. With his fate standing ever behind him, almost visibly looking over his shoulder, although he saw it not, the valley man was a pathetic object to the mountaineer. Hanway's eyes were hot and burned as he looked at him; if he had been but a little younger, they might have held tears. But Hanway had passed by several years his majority, and esteemed himself exempt from boyish softness.
Selwyn shook off the impression with a shiver, and bent forward to mend the fire.
"Where were you yesterday?" he asked, seeking a change of subject.
"At home sowin' turnip seed, mos'ly. I never hearn nuthin' 'bout'n it all."
Selwyn threw himself back in his chair, his brow corrugated impatiently at this renewal of the theme, and in the emergency he even resorted to the much-mooted point of the thoroughfare.
"I suppose all the family there are dead gone on that road?" he sought to make talk.
"Dad an' aunt M'nervy don't keer one way nor another, but my sister air plumb beset fur the jury of view to put it through."
"Why?" Selwyn had a mental vision of some elderly, thrifty mountain dame with a long head turned toward the enhancement of the values of a league or so of mountain land.
Hanway, slow and tenacious of impressions, could not so readily rouse a vital interest in another subject. He still gazed with melancholy eyes at the fire, and his heart felt heavy and sore.
"Waal," he answered mechanically, "she 'lows she wants ter see the folks go up an' down, an' up an' down."
Selwyn's blue eyes opened. "Folks?" he asked wonderingly. The rarest of apparitions on Witch-Face Mountain were "folks."
Hanway roused himself slightly, and raucously cleared his throat to explain.
"She 'lows thar'll be cornsider'ble passin'. Folks, in the fall o' the year, mought be a-wagonin' of chestnuts over the mounting an' down ter Colb'ry; an' thar's the Quarterly Court days; some attends, leastwise the jestices; an' whenst they hev preachin' in the Cove; an' wunst in a while thar mought be a camp-meetin'. She sets cornsider'ble store on lookin' at the folks ez will go up an' down."
There was a swift movement in the pupils of the valley man's eyes. It was an expression closely correlated to laughter, but the muscles of his face were still, and he remained decorously grave.
There was some thought in his mind that held him doubtful for a moment. His craft was cautious of its kind, and his manner was quite incidental as he said, "And the others of the family?"
"Thar ain't no others," returned Hanway, stolidly unmarking.
"Oh, so you are the eldest?"
"By five year. Narcissa ain't more 'n jes' turned eighteen."
The valley man's face was flushed more deeply still; his brilliant eyes were elated.
"Narcissa!" he cried, with the joy of delighted identification. "She is the girl, then, that testified at the inquest. Narcissa!"
Hanway lifted his head, with a strong look of surly objection on his heavy features. Selwyn noted it with a glow of growing anger. He felt that he had said naught amiss. People could not expect their sisters to escape attracting notice, especially a sister with a remarkable name and endowed with a face like this one's.
"Narcissa,—that's an odd name," he said, partly in bravado, and partly in justification of the propriety of his previous mention of her. "I knew a man once named Narcissus. Must be the feminine of Narcissus. Good name for her, though." The recollection of the white flower-like face, the corolla of red-gold hair, came over him. "Looks just like 'em."
Hanway, albeit all alert now, descried in this naught more poetical than the fact that Selwyn considered that his sister resembled a man of his acquaintance. As for that fairest of all spring flowers, it had never gladdened the backwoods range of his vision.
The exclusive tendency of the human mind is tested by this discovery of a casual resemblance to a stranger. One invariably sustains an affront at its mention. Whatever one's exterior may be, it possesses the unique merit of being one's own, and the aversion to share its traits with another, and that other a stranger, is universal. In this instance the objection was enhanced by the fact that the stranger was a man; ergo, in Hanway's opinion, more or less clumsy and burly and ugly; the masculine type of his acquaintance presenting to his mind few of the superior elements of beauty. He resented the liberty the stranger took in resembling Narcissa, and he resented still more Selwyn's effrontery in discovering the likeness.
"Not ez much alike ez two black-eyed peas, now. I reckon not,—I reckon not," he sneered, as he rose to bring his visit to an end.
His host's words of incipient surprise were checked as Hanway slowly drew forth from his pocket a letter.
"Old man Binney war at the Cross-Roads Sad'day, an' he fotched up some mail fur the neighbors. He lef' this letter fur you-uns at our house, 'lowin' ez I would fetch it over."
Selwyn sat silent for a moment. He felt that severe reprehension and distrust which a man of business always manifests upon even the most trifling interference with his vested rights in his own mail matter. The rural method of aiding in distributing the mail was peculiarly unpalatable to him. He much preferred that his letters should lie in the post-office at the Cross-Roads until such time as it suited his convenience to saddle his horse and ride thither for them. The postmaster, on the contrary, seized the opportunity whenever responsible parties were "ridin' up inter the mounting" to entrust to them the neighborhood mail, thus expediting its delivery perhaps by three weeks, or even more, and receiving in every instance the benediction of his distant beneficiaries of the backwoods.
"I'll write to the postmaster this very day!" Selwyn thought, as he tore the envelope open and mastered its contents at a swift glance. A half-suppressed but delighted excitement shone suddenly in his eyes, and smoothed every line of agitation and anxiety from his brow.
"I'm a thousand times obliged to you for bringing it," he exclaimed, "and for staying awhile and talking! I wish you would come again. But I'm coming to see you, to return your call." He laughed gayly at the sophisticated phrase. "Coming soon."
Hanway's growl of pretended pleasure in the prospect was rendered nearly inarticulate by the thought of Narcissa. He had not anticipated a return of the courtesy. He had no welcome for this stranger, and somehow he felt that he did not altogether understand Narcissa at times; that she had flights of fancy which were beyond him, and took a mischievous pleasure in tantalizing him, and was freakish and hard to control.
Moreover, under the influence of this reaction of feeling, a modicum of his doubts of Selwyn had revived. Not that he suspected him, as heretofore, but a phrase that had earlier struck his attention came back to him. Selwyn had written, he said, to the traveler to come and "investigate," and he had hesitated and chosen his phrases, and half discarded them, and slurred over his statement. What was there to "investigate" in the mountains? What prospect of profit worth a long, lonely journey and a risk that ended in death? The capture of moonshiners was said to be a paying business, and an informer also reaped a reward. Hanway wondered if Con Hite could be the point of "investigation," if the dead man were indeed of the revenue force.
"Oh, you needn't shut the door on me," Selwyn said, as they stood together in the passage, and Hanway, with his instinct to cut him off, had made a motion to draw the door after him; "this mountain air is so bland, even when it is damp." He paused on the dripping threshold, with his hands in the pockets of his red jacket, and surveyed with smiling complacence the forlorn, weeping day, and the mountains cowering under their misty veil, and the sodden dooryard, and the wild rocks and chasms of the gorge, adown the trough of which a stream unknown to the dry weather was tumbling with a suggestion of flight and trouble and fear in its precipitancy. "I'm well, well as a bear; and I'm getting fat as a bear, doing nothing. Feel my arm. I'm just following the example of the bears about this time of the year,—hibernating, going into winter quarters. I'm going to get this place into good shape to sell some day. I have bought that land over there all down the gorge from Squire Helm; and last July I bought all that slope at the tax sale, but that is subject to redemption; and then I am trying to buy in the rear of my wigwam, too,—a thousand acres."
"Ye kin sell it higher ef the road goes through," said Hanway doubtfully.
It seemed very odd that the man who protested that his stay in the mountains was so temporary, and whose stay in the world was evidently so short, should spend his obviously scanty substance in purchase after purchase of the worthless mountain wilderness. To be sure, the land was cheap, but it cost something. And Hanway looked again at the frayed cuffs and elbows of the red smoking-jacket. In his infrequent visits to Colbury, he had noted the variance of the men's costumes with the mountain standard of dress. He saw naught like this, but he knew that if ever the sober burghers lent themselves to this sort of fantastic toggery, it was certainly whole.
"Say, my friend, what day does the jury of view hold forth?" Selwyn called out after the slouching figure, striped with the diagonal lines of rain and flouted by the wind, tramping across the weeds of the yard to his horse.
"Nex' Chewsday week," Hanway responded hoarsely.
"Well, if this weather holds out, it is to be hoped that the gentlemen of the jury are web-footed!" Selwyn exclaimed.
He shut the door, and as he went back to his lonely hearth his eyes fell upon the letter lying on the table.
"Now," he said as he took it again in his hand, "if fate should truly cut such a caper as to make my fortune in this forlorn exile, I could find it in my heart to laugh the longest and the loudest at the joke."