Chapter XXXV READJUSTMENTS
A day or two later Alden was returning to New York. Durgan drove him to Hilyard in Miss Claxton's surrey.
All the mountains had begun to wear golden caps. Lower down the yellow pod of the wild pea and purple clusters of wild grapes were tangled in the roadside bushes. The sun shone, and the birds cawed and chirped as they quarreled for the scarlet berries of the ash; not a bird sang, for it was not nesting time.
"The doctor can't make a guess, then, as to how long Claxton may live? It may be for months, I suppose," said Durgan.
Alden drew himself up in the attitude of one who gives an important opinion. He was going back to his world of conventions, and already taking on its ways. "My dear sir, I see no reason why, with such nursing, surrounded by such luxuries, in the finest air, and in such tranquillity, he should not live—ah, perhaps for years."
"It will not be so long as that, I think."
"That must be as God wills."
But there was too much religious starch in the tone of these words to suggest acquiescence.
This good little man, with all his constancy and fervor, had not a large enough soul to see so vile a prodigal feasted without resentment.
Said Durgan, "If his mind is as lucid as the doctor thinks, his present experience must be pretty much like lying helpless in a lake of fire."
"Sir, what is there to trouble him? Two of the finest, most agreeable women who ever lived on this earth are his slaves. They wheel him hither and thither as he suggests a preference. They read; they sing; they show him nature in her glory; and his body suffers no pain. I do not understand your allusion."
"I thought it just possible that, being human, he might have a soul latent in him."
"'Soul'! He has, without excuse or provocation, committed the most brutal crime of the decade; he has passed his years since ministering to his own tastes and indolences in the society of a lady who pleased his fancy, while, with the most horrid cruelty and worm-like cowardice, he has left his tender daughter to suffer the consequences of his crime. He has within him, sir, a soul, humanly speaking, beyond hope of redemption."
"But Christian faith compels his daughter to set aside the human aspects of the case."
"Women, sir—women have no standard of manly virtue. Can you conceive that a son—a man who knew the world, could slur over such vice, such perfidy, in a parent?"
Alden's reiteration of "Sir," spoken between his teeth, had so very much the force of "Damn you," that Durgan forbore to suggest that the point of his remark had been evaded.
Alden, half conscious of his own angry inconsistency as a religious man in desiring the torment of the wicked, still resented Durgan's logic enough to bring forward at this point an unpalatable subject. "With regard to Mrs. Durgan, sir; from all the inquiries I have made, I understand that she probably was aware that Adolphus, who has been his valet all these years, had summoned Claxton here on threat of disclosure, and that Claxton had gone to New Orleans, there to assume his new incognito—which, knowing the negro's origin, was natural enough before he interfered on his behalf in your neighborhood. But I understand that Mrs. Durgan did not know that I or the ladies were here, and had no suspicion of the servant's intended treachery. In all probability she has not heard from Claxton, at any rate since he left New Orleans. You are aware that we have decided that the Miss Claxtons shall, till their father's death, retain the name they took upon entering this neighborhood. I wish to suggest to you that it would not be safe to trust Mrs. Durgan with the secret of their whereabouts. It is undesirable, in keeping a secret, to trust human nature any further than is absolutely necessary, and it appears to me, therefore, needful to request you to let Mrs. Durgan be left in entire ignorance of the fate of her late protégé."
Durgan could not but inwardly admit that there was a certain poetic justice in leaving his wife thus in a condition of suspense, and altho he resented the manner of the instruction, he expressed conditional acquiescence.
Durgan more than suspected that Alden was querulously wreaking upon the criminal, and upon all he met, the anger he felt against himself for not, at the first, discerning the simple mistake which had caused the mystery of the "Claxton case." As they drove on, mile after mile, through the wild harvests of the woodland, this supposition was confirmed. After talking of many things, Alden broke out in self-soothing comment:
"As to the mistake of the murdered man's identity, my dear sir, how could doubt enter the mind? The body lay in Claxton's private room, beside the couch that he constantly occupied—an unrecognizable mass; Mrs. Claxton dead beside him, and neither of self-inflicted wounds; Bertha wailing the loss of her father; Hermione stunned by shock of grief. Who the dead was, seemed so self-evident; who the murderer could be, such a puzzle, that the mind inevitably dwelt exclusively on the latter point. My dear sir, looking back on the matter, even now I cannot see how a suspicion of the truth could have arisen."
With his professional pique adding to his intense private grief for Hermione's long sacrifice, it was, perhaps, not surprising that the return of perfect confidence in her, after the agony of reluctant distrust, did not do more to sweeten the ferment of his little soul. Durgan reflected that on a mind no longer young, filled with long earlier memories of mutual trust, the suspicion of a few recent days could make little impression. And, again, this short-lived emotion of suspicion was succeeded by the pain of knowing that his own happiness and hers had been voluntarily sacrificed for a wretch so devoid of any trace of chivalry or of parental feeling.
Before reaching Hilyard, Alden expressed his opinion upon another aspect of the recent disclosure. "You say, sir, that to you the most amazing part is that such a man as Claxton could do so deadly a deed. My dear sir, my experience of crime is that the purely selfish nature only needs the spark of temptation to flame out into some hellish deed. No doubt you will think me puritanical, but I hold that, while to most cultured egoists such temptation never comes, in God's sight they are none the less evil for that mere absence of temptation. Idleness and self-love, especially where education enhances the guilt, are the dirt in which the most virulent plague-germs can propagate with speed and fecundity."
Durgan felt that, whether his opinion was true or false, it was brought forward now with an energy directed against the class to which he himself belonged.
The two men parted stiffly, but they both felt that Alden would return in a more placable mood.
That day, in a burying-ground near Hilyard, the mulatto called "'Dolphus" was laid beneath the ground. Born the ward of a nation whose institutions had first brought about his existence and then severed him from his natural protectors, he had been given only a little knowledge by way of life's equipment, which, murderer as he was, had proved in his hands a less dangerous thing than in those of many a citizen of the dominant race. No one in that great nation mourned his death or gave a passing sigh to his lone burial; and if anyone set store by that bare patch of grave cut in the unkempt grass among the wild field lilies it must have been God, who is said to gather what mortals cast away.
Durgan took Adam back to Deer with him. Adam was somewhat the worse for the success of his grief and piety, genuine tho they were. These qualities had won him praise and consideration; they were no longer unconscious. Like a child who had been on a stage, he was inclined to pose and show elaborate signs of grief.
Durgan bore with him for a few days, and then spoke his mind:
"Stop that, you absurd nigger! If you don't look alive I'll make you!"
Adam paused in the middle of a pious ejaculation with his mouth open.
"Reckon you don't know what I'll do to you."
"No, Marse Neil. How can this pore child know your mind, suh?"
"I'll have you married to the new girl Miss Smith got. I'll do it next week!"
Adam rolled his eyes heavenward. "An' the Lord only just took my pore gal, suh! You's not in earnest, suh?"
"And if I make you marry the new girl the Lord will have given you a better one."
Adam was deftly cooking Durgan's breakfast, moving about the hut with the light step of pride in the new service.
There was a silence. Durgan had become absorbed in the newspaper.
At last, with another sigh that was cut short ere it had expanded his huge chest, Adam meekly began:
"Marse Neil, suh."
"Well?"
"The minister who visited me in my affliction, he say—sez he—that we ought to take wi' joy all the dealin' of the Lord an' bless His name."
And Durgan replied, without raising his eyes, "I believe it. Adam, you are a good nigger. I'll speak to Miss Smith."
One day, a while after, the young gardener against whose aspirations Durgan had warned Bertha came up to the mica mine. He had left Deer Cove soon after Bertha had dismissed him, and gone, as the old stories have it, "into the world to seek his fortune." It was a very unusual step for a mountain white, and had given his father so much concern that he had had the son prayed for at the Sunday camp meeting. The errant gardener had roamed as far as Baltimore, and worked awhile in the household of a certain rich man. He had come away from the plutocrat's palace homesick for his mountains, but had brought back one dominant idea. Probably his disappointed love had made his mind peculiarly impressionable, or, true to the traditions of his class, he might, perhaps, not have gained even one. He had now the most exaggerated idea of the elevation to which the "rich and great" were raised. Convinced when he left Deer that Bertha would not receive his addresses, he had found consolation in investing her with a new glamor, as one of an almost princely cast. Upon his return he had heard the talk of the neighborhood—the story which Alden had allowed to go abroad—that the invalid father, who had been leading some kind of dissipated life abroad, had returned, after years of estrangement, to be nursed in his last illness by his daughters. Herein lay the motive of young Godson's errand.
"They say that he doesn't like colored men lifting him and moving him about—that Miss Smith's looking for a helper for him."
Durgan laid his pick against the rock and stood in silent astonishment. He had seen different emotions work different changes in the habits of men, but never so remarkable a result of love as this cure of petty pride in the stiff-necked mountaineer. He was uncertain how far the young man had interpreted himself aright.
"It is for Miss Bertha's sake you wish to do this?" he asked.
Godson assented.
And having at last satisfied himself, by more interrogation, that the youth had actually no further hope at present than to serve his goddess in some lowly task, Durgan undertook to support his application.
With this end in view he went up to the summit house at his usual hour, when the day's work was over, at sundown.
On the lawn the invalid's flat carriage was tilted at an angle which enabled him to see the delectable mountains bathed in the light reflected from that other country—the cloud-land beyond the golden river of the horizon, in which the sun, like a pilgrim, was going down. The elder daughter was reading to him.
Durgan had no mind to disturb them. He had come hoping that the paralytic would have been put away for the night. He disliked encountering Claxton; and, had he disliked the man less, the wrestling soul that shone through the eyes of the almost inanimate face would have distressed him.
Bertha, who was sitting at a short distance from the pair, and out of their sight, saw the visitor and came across the grass.
They went for a stroll together up on the higher rocks.
"I am very idle in these days," said Bertha. "All the children in my nursery have grown up and are too big to be nursed. There is nothing to do, even in the garden."
"But the care of your father must absorb all your time and thought."
As he said this there was a questioning inflection in his mind that he kept out of his tone.
She hung her head as she walked. After a while she spoke, a beautiful flush on her face. "In the old days father loved me better than Hermie, because I was better-looking, and I always thought all that he did was perfect. I thought I loved him far more than Hermie did, because she often tried to persuade him that what he did was wrong. Now——"
Durgan waited.
"Now he does not want to see me. He does not like me to talk or read to him. It makes it hard for Hermie, for she has everything to do. She thinks father is shy of me and that it will wear away."
"I have no doubt it will."
"No," she sighed; "you are both wrong. Father, in spite of his helplessness, sees far more clearly. He was always quick to read everyone. He knows"—her voice faltered—"that I cannot love him now that I know what he did. Oh, I hate him for deserting Hermie and letting her bear it!" She pressed her hand to her side, as if speaking of some disease that gave her pain. "How can I help it, Mr. Durgan? I despise him, and he knows it."
"I dare say he does. He knows, of course, that the whole world could regard him with no feelings but those of hatred and scorn."
She stopped short in her walk. In a minute she said, "I think I will go back again, Mr. Durgan. I cannot bear that you should speak that way to me about my own father."
He smiled. "You seem to have some filial affection left."
"Did you only say it to make me feel angry?"
"Yes; that is why I said it; but, at the same time, you must remember that the world would certainly judge as you have said; and if the ties of kindred did not give a closer embrace than the world does, there would be no home feeling for any of us; there would be no bright spark of the sacred fire of the next world in this."
"'Fire.' We think of heaven as light, not heat."
"And we think of hell as heat, not light; yet we know light and heat to be one and the same thing; and both are the supreme need of life, and both are the only adequate symbols of love."
Many a red flag and gay pennon of autumn was now flying on the heights of Deer. The leaves of the stunted oak wood were floating and falling, and below, the chestnuts were yellowing, burr and leaf. The weeds were sere and full of ripe seed, and the shrubs of ripe berries. Birds of passage in flocks were talking and calling, eating their evening meal, or settling, a noisy multitude, in verdant lodging for the night.
"I always wonder where they come from, or where they are going," said the girl. "I used to long so often, in all the nights and days I have been on this mountain, to be able to fly away as the birds fly; and now, since Eve died, what we have suffered makes me feel that just to live here, away from the worse sorrows of the world, would be enough happiness always."
"That's right. Let us make the best of our mountain, for we are likely to enjoy its solitudes for some time to come."
"If I only could set my affections right!" she said wistfully. "Perhaps, as you think, I have better feelings underneath, but they are not on the top just now. I am ashamed to be with Hermie, because I suspected her; and father is ashamed to be with me, because I am not good enough to forget what he has done. And I have no comfort in religion, for either I think God is cruel, or else most likely it is all chance and there is no reason at the heart of the universe."
"You are quite ready to believe now in God's insanity."
"How can you taunt me that way? I have told you that I am ashamed of my wicked thoughts about Hermione. But how can we tell that there is any mind governing the universe?"
"It was only when you could not understand your sister that you thought you had found any proof of lack of mind. You would treat the great Power that lies behind the universe in the same way."
"I have heard many good people say as much. Do you think it wicked?"
"I can only say that I have never liked you so well since I knew your thoughts about your sister. How much more must all good spirits despise us when we distrust the mind of God."
"You speak unkindly. I cannot alter my doubt."
"No. You are endowed with beauty and health, intellect and heart. You have done many things well. But this, I suppose, is a radical defect."
She did not look satisfied. "How can I alter it?"
"If I were you I would go on laying out the orchard you were working at in spring. You could put in a great many of the small trees yourself. I have gained so much from delving that I offer you the same occupation with a certificate of merit."
"But I can't get the rows straight alone," she said, "or prepare the ground. It is all as it was when the Godsons left. It was you who made me send them away."
"And now I have come to ask you to take young Godson back," he said. So he told the young man's story. "He will have time to help in the orchard if he is employed about your father."
"Do you think there is no risk?" she asked, with the grave dignity that the peculiar isolation of her life had given.
"I would not undertake to say that," he replied, with a smile. "But, such as it is, he takes it. You need help sadly, and perhaps you will both learn more wisdom than I was able to impart when I first interfered."
Durgan went his solitary way down the trail. Godson was still waiting for him. He was as fine a fellow as those remote mountains produce—spare, tall, with a curious look of ideality peculiar to their hardy sons. When he was told he might go up to the summit house, his blue eyes, far under the projecting tow-colored brows, looked almost like the eyes of a saint wrapped in adoration. Durgan was not in a mood to feel that Bertha was his superior.
Durgan built sticks for a fire on the rock-ledge to make his own coffee. He was a better man physically than he had been when he came to Deer Mountain—strong, sinewy, and calm, the processes of age arrested by the vital tide of work. Alone as he was in his eyrie, he could take keen pleasure in the stateliness of his rock palace, in the vision of nights and days that passed before it, in the food and rest that his body earned. To-night he was not expecting satisfaction, and when he struck his match the whole universe was gray and seemed empty; but no sooner had his small beacon blazed than an answering beam leaped out of the furthest distance. It was the evening star.