XXII.
Conscience, the great moral inquisitor, whose sessions are held in secret, whose absolute justice is untempered by mercy, whose processes are unrelated and superior to the laws of the land, makes manifest its decrees only at such long intervals that we are prone to consider their results exceptional. Although its measures are invariably meted, they are seldom so plainly set forth as in Peter Rood’s fate. Alethea, listening to ’Gustus Tom’s story, saw in aghast dismay how he had been pursued by those terrible potencies of the right which he had sought to disregard. Many things that had been vague were made distinct. She understood suddenly the meaning of the strange words he had spoken at the camp-meeting, when his spiritual struggles had nearly betrayed him. She divined the mingled fear and self-reproach, and at the same time the cowardly gratulation he experienced because of his fancied security, when entrapped to serve on the jury. She remembered with a new comprehension his joyous excitement when it appeared that the idiot boy had not been drowned, and the pallid anguish on his face as the lawyer dexterously reversed the probabilities. It might seem that he had expiated his deed, but the extremest penalties were not abated. He had been a pillar in the church, renowned for a certain insistent piety, and zealous to foster good repute among men; and this last possession that he held dear upon earth, which may be maintained even by a dead man, who can carry naught out of the world, was wrested from him.
The truth which he had so feared, which he had so labored to hide, over which the grave had seemed to close, was at last brought to light by very simple means.
On the eventful morning, the miller’s erratic grandson, awaking early, he knew not why, had sought to utilize the occurrence by robbing an owl’s nest in the hollow of a tree beside the mill. The day had not yet dawned, and he hoped that one or the other of the great birds would be away on its nocturnal foragings, so that he might the more easily secure the owlet, which he had long wanted for a pet. It was very still, ’Gustus Tom said. The frogs by the water had ceased their croaking; the katydids were silenced long ago; he heard only the surging monotone of the gleaming cascade falling over the natural dam. He had climbed the tree to the lower limbs, and had perched on one of them to rest for a moment, when there broke upon the air the sound of the galloping of a horse far away, approaching at a tremendous rate of speed. Presently he came into view, his head stretched forward, his coat flecked with foam, his rider plying both heel and whip.
This rider was Peter Rood, whom ’Gustus Tom knew well, as he often came to the mill. He dismounted hastily, close to the water-side. He walked uncertainly, even pausing sometimes to steady himself by holding to the supports of the old mill. He was evidently very drunk, and thus it appeared to ’Gustus Tom the less surprising that he should drag two or three fence rails stranded on the margin of the river,—which was high and full of floating rubbish,—and laboriously place them in a position to cumber the wheel; an empty barrel, too, he found and put to this use, some poles, drift-wood. He paused after a careful survey of his work, and held up his head, looking away toward the east, as if he were listening. It seemed to ’Gustus Tom, all veiled by the dew-tipped chestnut leaves, that Rood was strangely intent of purpose for a drunken man. He heard, long before the boy did, some monition of approach in the distance, for he caught eagerly at his horse’s bridle. Yet he was drunk enough to find difficulty in mounting. As the animal swerved, he was obliged to grasp the stirrup with one hand in order to steady it, so that he could put his foot in it; then he flung his right leg over the saddle, and away he went along the grassy margin of the road,—noiseless, swift, dark, like some black shadow, some noxious exhalation of the night.
’Gustus Tom explained at this point, with tears and many anxious twistings of the button on his shirt front,—which was quite useless, the correlative button-hole being torn out,—that he understood so little of what all this meant at the time that it seemed to him the only important point involved was to remember to tell his grandfather early in the day of Pete Rood’s drunken freak of clogging the mill-wheel. He did not call out and make his presence known, because he was frightened by the man’s strange conduct and terrible look. As he still sat meditating on the limb of the tree, the sound which had aroused Peter Rood again broke upon the silence. Once more the regular thud of hoofs—of many hoofs. The pace was far slower than the rattling gallop at which Pete Rood had come. There were several men in the group that presently appeared. ’Gustus Tom knew some of them,—he couldn’t help knowing Mink Lorey from far off; he looked so wild and gamesome; the moonlight was on his face and all his hair was flying. He knew Mink well. Mink it was who climbed the timbers of the race and lifted the gate. And once more ’Gustus Tom, with quivering lips and twisting the futile button on his shirt front, began to exculpate himself. He did not understand what Mink was about to do until the gate was lifted and the water surged through. The wheel, turning with its curiously contrived clogs, jerked spasmodically, gave sudden violent wrenches, finally breaking and crashing against the shanty, that itself tottered and careened and fell. He heard Tad scream, for the idiot, having incurred the miller’s displeasure during the day, had been locked in the mill, supperless, to sleep. ’Gustus Tom did not see the boy in the river, because of the falling timbers, the clouds of dust and flour and meal, and the commotion of the water. The men galloped away, Mink among them. For the house had been alarmed by the noise; old Griff ran out, wringing his hands and crying aloud, first for the loss of the mill, then for the fate of the idiot. The others of the family came, too. ’Gustus Tom easily slipped down unobserved from the tree, in the midst of the excitement, and no one was aware, except sister Eudory, that he knew more than the rest. Lately she had noticed that he was afraid of the dark and would not sit alone; and she had begun to say so much of this that he was alarmed lest she might excite the suspicions of others. And so, thinking she would keep his secret,—he would have divulged it to no one else,—he told her that he was afraid of Peter Rood, who was dead, and who perhaps had found out in the other world that he knew the secret, and would come and haunt him to make sure that he did not reveal it. And at the renewal of these ghastly terrors ’Gustus Tom bent his head upon his arm, and began to sob afresh.
“Why didn’t ye tell at fust, ’Gustus Tom?” asked Alethea, her mind futilely reviewing the complications that circumstance had woven about Mink Lorey.
’Gustus Tom lifted his head, a gleam of this world’s acumen shining through the tears in his eyes.