In the Tennessee mountains

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Cleaver fell to meditating ruefully upon the future in store for his friend in this desolate place. King Cophetua and the beggar-maid are a triumph of ideal contrast, eminently fascinating in an ideal point of view. But real life presents prosaic corollaries,—the Teakes, for example, on the familiar footing of Trelawney's brothers-in-law; the old crone with her pipe, his wife's grandmother; that ignorant girl, his wife—oh, these sublunary considerations are too inexorable. In his sluggish content he would never make another effort; he would always live here; he would sink, year by year, by virtue of his adaptability and uncouth associations nearer to the level of the mountaineers. This culminating folly seemed destined to complete the ruin of every prospect in a fine man's life.

Cleaver did not know what was to come, and he brooded upon these ideas.

III.

Those terrible problems of existence of which happier men at rare intervals catch a fleeting glimpse, and are struck aghast for a moment, pursued John Cleaver relentlessly day by day. He could not understand this world; he could not understand the waste of himself and his friend in this useless, purposeless way; he could not even understand the magnificent waste of the nature about him. Sometimes he would look with haggard eyes on the late dawns and marvel that the sun should rise in such effulgence upon this sequestered spot; a perpetual twilight might have sufficed for the threnody, called life, here. He would gaze on Sunrise Rock, forever facing and reflecting the dawn, and wonder who and what was the man that in the forgotten past had stood on these red hills, and looked with his full heart in his eyes upon that sun, and smote the stone to sudden speech. Were his eyes haggard too? Was his life heavy? Were his fiery aspirations only a touch of the actual cautery to all that was sensitive within him? Did he know how his world was to pass away? Did he know how little he was in the world? Did he too wring his hands, and beat his breast, and sigh for the thing that was not?

Cleaver did the work that came to him conscientiously, although mechanically enough. But there was little work to do. Even the career of a humble country doctor seemed closed to him. He began to think he saw how it would end. He would be obliged to quit the profession; in sheer manliness he would be obliged to get to something at which he could work. A terrible pang here. He cared nothing for money,—this man, who was as poor as the very mountaineers. He was vowed to science as a monk is vowed to his order.

It was an unusual occurrence, therefore, when Trelawney came in one day and found that Cleaver had been called out professionally. He sat down to dine alone, but before he had finished carving, his friend entered.

"Well, doctor," said Trelawney cheerily, "how is your patient?"

Cleaver was evidently out of sorts and preoccupied. "These people are as uncivilized as the foxes that they live among," he exclaimed irrelevantly. "A case of malignant diphtheria, a physician their nearest neighbor, and they don't let him know till nearly the last gasp. Then they all go frantic together, and swear they had no idea it was serious. I could have brained that fool, Peter Teake. But it is a hopeless thing now."

A premonition thrilled through Trelawney. "Who is ill at Teake's?"

Cleaver was stricken dumb. His professional indignation had canceled all realization of the impending crisis. He remembered Fred's foolish fancy an instant too late. His silence answered for him. And Trelawney, a sudden blight upon his handsome face, rose and walked out heavily into the splendors of the autumn sunset. Cleaver was bitter with self-reproach. Still he felt an impotent anger that Fred should have persuaded himself that he was in love with this girl, and laid himself liable to this sentimental pain.