The old man sighed and shifted his position. “Me too,” he admitted. “But thar it be,” he observed, “fur the man ez air a-comin’.”
They fell silent, perhaps both projecting a mental ideal of the man of the future, and the subservient circumstance that should lead him to stand one day on these stupendous heights, with sunshine and clouds about him and the world at his feet, and to look upon the mystic curves of the river, trebly visible, strike his heel upon the ground, and triumphantly proclaim, “It is here!”
The dogs lay about the hearth; one, a hound, in the shadow, with his muzzle stretched flat on the floor between his fore-paws, had saurian suggestions,—he was like an alligator. Leonidas and Lucinda had gone to bed, but the baby was still up and afoot. The fiat of nursery ethics that gentry of his age should be early asleep had been complied with only so far as getting him into his night-gown, which encased his increasing plumpness like a cylinder. He wore a queer night-cap, that made him look incongruously ancient and feminine. He plodded about the puncheon floor, in the joy of his newly acquired powers of locomotion, with reckless enthusiasm. His shadow accompanied him, magnified, elongated,—his similitude as he might be in years to come; he seemed in some sort attended by the presentiment of his future. The energy, however, with which he had started on his long journey through life would presently be abated. In good sooth, he would be glad to sit down often and be still, and would find solace in perching on fences and whittling, and would know that hustling through this world is not what one might hope. He had fallen under the delusion that he could talk as well as walk, and was inarticulately loquacious.
Alethea’s errand outside was to gather chips from the wood-pile hard by, to kindle the morning’s fires. It had been long since rain had fallen, but the routine of spreading them upon the hearth, to dry during the night, was as diligently observed as if the reason that gave rise to the habit now existed. The splint baskets filled and redolent of the hickory bark, stood at her feet, yet she did not move.
She was solitary in her isolated life, with her exalted moral ideal that could compromise with nothing less than the right. She had known no human being dominated by a supreme idea. The reformers, the martyrs, all who have looked upward, sacrificed in vain for her—not even as a tradition, an exemplar might they uphold when she failed. Religion was vague, distorted, uncomprehended, in the primitive expoundings to which she was accustomed. Her inherent conscience prevailed within her like some fine, ecstatic frenzy. It was of an essence so indomitably militant that in her ignorant musings it seemed that it must be this which marshals the human forces, and fights the battle of life, and is unconquered in death, and which the stumbling human tongue calls the soul. And yet so strange it was, she thought, that she could not always recognize the right,—that she must sedulously weigh and canvass what she had done and what she might have done, and what had resulted.
She dwelt long on the moonshiner’s story. She was heart-sore for the hungry idiot, filching from the hogs,—and what forlorn fate had he found at last! She drew her shawl closer about her head, and shivered more with her fears than with the wind. She was very tired; not in body, for she was strong and well, but in mind and heart and life. Somehow, she felt as if she were near the end,—surely there was not enough vitality of hope to sustain her further,—the frequent illusion of sturdy youth, with the long stretches of weary years ahead. There was even a certain relaxation of Mink’s tyrannous hold upon her thoughts. It was not that she cared for him less, but she had pondered so long upon him that her imagination was numb; she had beggared her invention. She could no more project scenes where he walked with all those gentler attributes with which her affection, despite the persistent contradictions of her subtler discernment, had invested him. She could no longer harass herself with doubts of his state of mind, with devising troublous reasons why he had avoided her, with fears of harm and grief menacing him. She had revolted at last from the thrall of these arid unrealities. She felt, in a sort of grief for herself, that they were but poor delusions that occupied her. He must come, and come soon, her heart insistently said. And yet so tired was her heart that she felt in a sort of dismay that were he here to-night there would be no wild thrill of ecstasy in her pulses, no trembling joys. All that she had suffered—despair, and frantic hope that was hardly less poignant, and keen anxieties, and a stress of care—had made apathy, quiet, rest, nullity, the grave, seem dearer than aught the earth could promise.
“He oughter hev kem afore,” she said to herself, in weary deprecation.
And then she thought that perhaps now, since he was at liberty again, he was happy with Elvira, and she experienced another pang to know that she was not jealous.
The clouds had obscured the few stars. The wind was flagging; the smoke grew denser; the forest flames emitted only a dull red glow; the file of peaks that they had conjured from the blackness of night was lost again in the deepening gloom.
She was roused suddenly to the fact that it was intensely quiet in-doors. She could even hear the sound of the fire in the deep chimney-place; it was “treadin’ snow,” the noise being very similar to the crunch of a footfall on a frozen crust. She rose, looking upward and holding her hand to the skies; the glow from within fell upon her fair face, half hooded in the shawl, and upon her pensive eyes. Flakes were falling; now, no more; and again she felt the faint touch in her palm.