X.
It was with a mild countenance and a chastened heart that Tubal Sims rode up to his own door the next evening, and slowly dismounted, his old brains, stiff with the limited uses of a narrow routine, dazed and racked by the brisk pace which they had been fain to conserve in the wide circuits which they had traveled in his absence. Never had the cabin on the river-bank looked so like home; never had home seemed so like heaven. For Tubal Cain Sims, in his secret soul, cared little for the bedizenments of crowns, and the superfluities of harps, and the extravagance of streets paved with gold, and the like celestial scenery of his primitive hymnology. The sight of Jane Ann Sims on the porch, her bulky arms akimbo, the flutter of Euphemia’s pink dress with the dark red roses from the slope of the dell where the spring lurked, could have been no dearer to him if they had had wings,—which appurtenance, however, in his lack of spiritual imagination, would have reduced them to a turkey-like standpoint or other gallinaceous level. He hardly remembered to dread Jane Ann’s questionings; and perhaps because of this beatific ease of mind, the humble works of fiction, which the puritanical might denominate lies, that had occupied his faculties during his return journey, were exploited with a verisimilitude which received the meed of credulity. He stated that the thought of Jerry Gryce, his brother-in-law, and a paralytic, dwelling in Piomingo Cove, had weighed so on his mind, in wakeful hours of the night, that he had felt obliged to rise betimes and journey thither to see that all was well with him. And a cheerful report he was able to give of that invalid,—for indeed he had stopped in Piomingo Cove on the way back,—who had charged him with some asperity, however, being a superstitious man, to have a care how he took the liberty of dreaming about him, or nourishing presentiments in which he was concerned, or viewing visions. “I kin do all my own dreamin’ an’ ghost-seein’ too, thanky kindly,” he had said satirically.
Jane Ann Sims was the less penetrating as she herself had developments of interest to detail. In a wheezy, husky whisper that had less the elements of confidential relation than a shriek might have compassed, she made plain the altered state of Euphemia’s affections and the understanding which she and the juggler had reached.
It is wonderful how little mental capital a man need possess to deceive the cleverest wife. Tubal Cain Sims, seated in the open passage, tilted far back against the wall in his chair, his saddle on the floor beneath his dangling feet and his mare cropping the grass beside the step, sustained every appropriate pose of surprised interest as successfully as if Mrs. Sims’s story were new to his ears. How could she, even if infinitely more astute, have dreamed that it was the recital of these same facts which he had overheard that had sent him straight to Colbury with the instant determination to have his would-be son-in-law incarcerated on a criminal charge, before more romance could come of the juggler’s stay in Etowah Cove? She had expected opposition, having divined Tubal Sims’s disapproval of his guest from his perturbed and unwontedly crusty manner, and was scarcely prepared for the mildly temporizing way in which he received the disclosure.
“Humph—a—waal, we-uns will hev ter gin it cornsideration, Jane Ann, a power o’ cornsideration, an’”—he suddenly remembered his piety—“some pray’r. Watch an’ pray, Jane Ann.”
“I’m ekal ter my prayin’ ’thout yer exhortin’s,” she retorted, with proper spirit. “An’ ef ye don’t wan ter set Phemie agin ye, ye’d better do yer own prayin’ powerful private.” She could not forbear this gibe, albeit at the idol of them both. It was in graver and agitated mood that she revealed how the idea of an elopement had seemed to appeal to the young man’s mind,—so much, indeed, that she began to fear he would welcome any parental opposition which would make it practicable. And here she found Tubal Cain at one with her own thoughts, so a-quiver with her own fears that she felt all at once bolder, as if by communicating them they had mysteriously exhaled. Not so Tubal Cain Sims. It is to be doubted whether in all his life he was ever so earnestly and markedly benign and courteous as when he again met the juggler. His whole manner was so charged with the sentiment of placation that the young man’s quick discernment easily divined his state of mind and his covert terrors. It eliminated for the present any other course of action than drifting along the smooth tides of love’s young dream, for no elopement was possible when there was naught from which to flee.
What wonderful days they were, as the full, strong pulses of June began to beat with the fervors of July! The long, ripe hours from early dawn to the late-lingering twilight held all the choicest flavors of the year. Never was the sunset so gorgeously triumphal; never was the dawn so dank with dew, so fresh of scent, so winged with zephyrs. The wilderness rang to the song of the thrush and of the mocking-bird, not less vocal now than with the impulse of spring. The brimming river yet ran deep in its rocky channel, and the voice of the cascade below the mill in the full-leaved joyous woods could be heard for miles on a still night. And how still were these nights of silent splendor, with the stars so whitely a-glitter in the deep blue spaces above, and a romantic mystery on the mute purple mountains below, and the great bespangled gossamer Galaxy, as if veiling some sanctity of heaven, scintillating through all the darkness! Not till late—till so late that no one was awake to heed or behold—a yellow waning moon with a weird glamour would glide over the eastern summits, and in its precarious hour before the flush of early dawn illumine the world with some sad forecast, with slow troublous augury of change and decline and darkness.
Flowers in myriads budded at night to blow in the morning. Everywhere the strong, rich, vigorous growths unfolded to the sun. The leaves were thick in the woods, the shadows were dark and cool, and rivulets glanced in the midst of them like live leaping crystal. Anywhere down deep ravines, did one look long enough, were to be seen all the creatures of woodland poesy, evoked from the glamours of the June,—hamadryads at their bosky ease, and oreads among the craggy misty heights, and naiads dabbling at the margin of sheltered springs, and elves listening alert with pointed ears to the piping of the wind in the reeds.
These June days seemed to Royce as if he held them in perpetuity,—as if there could be no change save for the slow enhancement of all the charms of nature, bespeaking further perfections. The past was so bitter; the present was so sweet; and he thought no more of the future. He was content. He had developed a certain adaptability to the uncouth conditions of the simple life here, or love had limited his observation and had concentrated it. All the artificialities of his wonted standards had fallen from him, and he was happy in the simplest way. He wondered that he should ever have thought the girl beautiful and charming hitherto, so embellished was her loveliness now; as if she too shared the ineffable radiance and grace of the June, with the fair and faintly tinted roses known as “the maiden’s-blush” that grew just outside the door. He had told her that they were like her, and when he learned the old-fashioned name he wore one always stuck in the clumsy, ill-worked buttonhole of his blue-checked cotton shirt. So pervasive was the sentiment of happiness in the house that it suffused even the consciousness of the two old people; Jane Ann accepting it willingly and with vicarious joy, and Tubal Cain yielding after many a qualm of doubt and tremor of fear, and still experiencing strong twinges of remorse. He had been led to believe, by the crafty sheriff’s show of indifference to his disclosure, and repeated rejection as naught the significant points of the suspicion he had entertained, that he had been wrong from the first in his conclusion. He had begun to argue from the officer’s standpoint, and he was amazed and somewhat dismayed to perceive how slight were the grounds on which any reasonable charge could be based. As this conviction grew more decided, he anticipated, with an ever increasing terror, the possible visit of which the sheriff had casually spoken. Although he was sure now that, officially considered, it could but be a flash in the pan, still it would reveal to the juggler his host’s hideous suspicions and flagrant breach of hospitality, and from this Tubal Sims winced as from corporeal pain. He thought that the sheriff already considered him a preposterous fool; and albeit that judgment from so great a man—for Tubal Cain Sims’s self-conceit had been much abated by his trip to Colbury—was humiliating to his pride, it would be far more poignant, multiplied by the number of inhabitants in the Cove, when published abroad and entertained by every man who dwelt in its vicinity. Moreover, the disclosure of his mission to Colbury would deliver the graceless informer, bound hand and foot as it were, into the power of Jane Ann Sims, and it might well alienate the juggler from them all and thus wreck Euphemia’s happiness and prospects in life; and he had begun of late to value these. Whenever he was not mulishly resistant, he fell much under the influence of Jane Ann Sims, and her views of the preëminent qualities of the juggler’s mind and manners and morals affected his estimate. She laid great stress on the fact of the young man’s elaborate education, and was wont to toss her large head with a vertigo-provoking lightness as she averred, “Phemie warn’t a-spellin’ year in an’ year out ter marry one o’ these hyar Cove boys ez dunno B from bull-foot!” And Tubal Cain would sneer in sympathetic scorn, as if both he and his wife were not in precisely that sublime state of ignorance themselves. He shared her pride in a plan which the juggler had evolved to open a school in the little “church-house” when the crops should be laid by, and in the fact that this suggestion had met with the readiest acceptance for miles around, despite the prejudice touching his feats of magic.
One night, Jane Ann Sims, with the dish-cloth in her hand, was alternately wiping the supper dishes in the shed-room and cheerfully wheezing breathless snatches of a most lugubrious hymn, while Royce and Euphemia sat on the steps of the passage, where the moon, now in her first quarter, drew outlines of the vines on the floor,—with here the similitude of a nest, whence now a wakeful, watching head protruded, and now a lifted wing, and now a downy, ball-like bulk; and here, with indistinct verges, a cluster of quivering trumpet-flowers, all dusky and blurring, like the smudging black-and-white study of some impressionist artist. Tubal Cain Sims, seeking company, was aware, as he entered his domicile, that he would find no welcome here, so he betook himself, with his pipe in hand, to the leisurely scene of his help-meet’s labors. There triumph awaited him, for Jane Ann Sims left the table and the dishes to the tallow dip and the candle-flies, to sink down in a chair and detail the fact that while he was gone to the blacksmith’s shop to get his team shod a wonderful event had happened. Parson Tynes had been here again!