It was a silent house. No wind stirred. Not a leaf rustled. One might hear the ash crumble covering the embers on the hearth. A vague monotone came from the river. Outside, the still radiance of a late-risen moon lay pallid and lonely on the newly ploughed fields. Here and there crevices in the chinking between the logs of the walls made shift to admit a ray, sending its slight shaft through the brown gloom of the interior, visible itself and luminous in its filar tenuity, yet dispensing no light. One of these rays glimmered through the clapboards of the roof on the face of the sleeper, which showed in the dusk, with all its wan trouble on it, with the distinctness of some sharply cut cameo, to Tubal Cain Sims, who, half dressed and with shock head and bare feet, had climbed the stair, and lurked there listening, that perchance he might hear more to convey to the sharp-set curiosity of the magisterial lime-burner.
This involuntary lapse of his resolution left no trace on the juggler’s consciousness when he awoke the next morning. He was not aware that he had dreamed, that in sleeping he had swerved from his intention, far less that he had cried out in his unrealized mental anguish. He took comfort from his stanch mental poise. The fact that he held fast to his conclusion seemed to confirm the validity of his judgment. Here he was to begin life anew, and it behooved him to make the most and the best of it. For one moment the recollection of the world he had left almost overcame him,—the contrast it bore to his sorry future! Even its workaday aspect,—the office, his high desk by the window, the thunder of the cotton-laden wagons in the streets and the clamor of voices impinging so slightly on his absorption in his work as to be ignored,—even this wrung a pang from him now. How much more the thought of the club, with its brilliant lights, and its luxury of furnishing, and its delectable cuisine, and the pretensions of its elder members, and the countenance they were pleased to show him; of the fraternity halls where he was so prime a favorite; of the gymnasium he affected, and the boating and swimming clubs; of his choice social circle, with its germans and musicales, its little dinners and tally-ho drives, its private theatricals, its decorous parlors of refined and elegant suggestions, of which he valued the entrée in proportion as he had once felt it jeopardized by the bruiting abroad of that wild gambling escapade, which he feared, in the estimation of the severe and straight-laced matrons and delicate-minded young girls, ill became a member of so elevated a coterie. They seemed, in his recollection, of an embellished beauty and aloof majesty infinitely removed from his sordid plight and maimed estate. He faltered as he thought of his hopeless alienation from it all, his dreary exile.
And then, with a sudden bracing of the nerves, he reflected on the view which this refined society would entertain of the alternative that fate presented; the disgrace which he would sustain in his return was hardly to be mentioned to ears so polite! Was he farther from his friends here than he would be there? Was he more definitely banished from his wonted sphere? He was dead to them,—forever dead,—and the sooner forgotten the better!
In pursuance of his determination, he went downstairs arrayed in the blue-checked homespun shirt and gray jeans trousers which Mrs. Sims with so great and dilatory labor had contrived. He thought he looked the typical mountaineer in this attire, with a pair of long cowhide boots, purchased at the cross-roads store, drawn up to his knees over the legs of the trousers, and a white wool hat of broad brim set far back on his dark red-brown hair. He could hardly have deceived even an unpracticed eye. The texture of his skin, shielded by his vocation from wind and weather; the careful grooming which was the habit of years; the trained step and pose and manner, unconscious though they were; the hand, delicate, however muscular, and white, and with well-tended nails; the silken quality of his smooth hair and mustache; the expression of the eye;—he looked like a young “society swell” dressed for a rural rôle in private theatricals.
Mrs. Sims, who was languidly setting the table in the passage, while Euphemia, clashing the pots and pans and kettles in the room to the left, was “dishin’ up” breakfast, paused in her wheezing hymn, catching sight of him, to survey her handiwork.
“Waal!” she exclaimed in delighted pride, appropriating to her own skill the credit of the effect of his symmetry. “Now don’t them clothes jes’ set! I’ll be boun’ nobody kin say ez I ain’t a plumb special hand fur the needle an’ shears! I jes’ want Tubal Cain Sims ter view them ‘vain trappin’s,’ ez the hyme calls ’em,—though ez we ain’t endowed by Providence with feathers, thar ain’t no use in makin’ a sin out’n hevin’ the bes’ clothes what we kin git.”
The juggler was as vain as a young man can well be. But he had seldom encountered such outspoken admiration, and was a trifle out of countenance; for what Mrs. Sims conceived to be the excellence of her own proficiency as a tailor he apprehended was due to the graces of his personal endowment. He made her a flourishing bow of mock courtesy, and then stood leaning against the jamb of the door, one hand in the pocket of the gray trousers, the other readjusting the wide low shirt-collar about his throat.
“I’d like ter know what Tubal Cain Sims will say now!” exclaimed Mrs. Sims, pursuing corollaries of the main proposition of triumph. “He ’lows, whenst I make him ennythin’ ter wear, ez he kin sca’cely find his way inter sech shapen gear. An’ whenst in ’em, he ’lows he’ll never git out no mo’, an’ air clad in his grave-clothes—goin’ ’bout workin’ an’ sech—in his grave-clothes! It’s a plumb sin, the way he talks!”
Her face clouded for an instant, remembering the ungrateful flouts; then as her gaze returned to her guest, she dimpled anew.
“But laws-a-massy!” she cried, “how peart ye do ’pear in them clothes, to be sure! A heap more like sure enough folks than in them comical little pantees ye hev been a-wearin’.”