He came often afterward. The spot seemed to have a fascination for him. And within sound of the cheerful hubbub and busy whir of the industry he would lean over the palings and look at the grave, covered sometimes with a drift of leaves, and sometimes with a drift of snow, and think of the two men that it had successively housed, and nurse his grudge against the company. With an unreasoning hatred of it, Hanway felt that both were victims of the great strong corporation that was to reap the value of the discovery which was not its own save by accident. He could not appraise the justice of the dispensation by which the keen observation of the one man, and the science and experience that the other had brought to the enterprise, should fall so far short of achievement, while an idle story, the gossip of the day, should fill the hands of those who were strangers to the very thought. He grudged every augury of success; he welcomed every detail of difficulty. As time went on, the well was said to be of intermittent flow, and new borings resulted in naught but vast floods of sulphur water. Finally, when the admitted truth pervaded the community,—that the oil was practically exhausted, that it had long since ceased to pay expenses, that the company was a heavy loser by the enterprise,—he was as a man appeased.
The result was succeeded by a change in Narcissa so radical and immediate that Constant Hite could but perceive the fact that it was induced by the failure and abandonment of the work. She grew placid as of yore, and was softened, and now and again the gentle melancholy into which she fell suggested sad and reminiscent pleasure rather than the remorseful and desperate sorrow that she had known. He began to realize that it was no sentimental and love-stricken grief she had felt for Selwyn, but a sympathy akin to his own and to her brother's; and since the disappointment of the hope of fortune must needs have come to Selwyn at last, they made shift to resign themselves, and were wont to talk freely of the dead with that affectionate and immediate interest which seems to prolong the span of a mortal's day on earth, like the tender suffusive radiance of the afterglow of a sunken sun.
The road fell quickly into disuse after the abandonment of the work. In the storms of winter, trees were uprooted and thrown athwart the way; overhanging rocks, splitting in the freeze, precipitated obstructive avalanches upon the dim serpentine convolutions; the wind piled drifts of dead leaves above the turns; and in the spring grass began to grow in the tracks of the wheels.
It held no woeful memories now for Narcissa. She loved to sit on the step of the stile and watch through the leafless sunlit trees the silver haze shimmering in the valley, where the winter wheat was all of an emerald richness, and the blue mountains afar off so near akin to the aspect of heaven that one might hardly mark where the horizon line merged the sweet solitudes of earth into the solitary sky. Many a day, the spring, loitering along the shadow-flecked vistas, with the red maple-blooms overhead and violets underfoot, was the only traveler to be seen on the deserted road. And the pensive dusk was wont to deepen into the serene vernal night, sweet with the scent of the budding wild cherry, and astir with timorous tentative rustlings as of half-fledged breezes, and illumined only with the gentle lustre of the white stars; for never again was the darkness emblazoned with that haggard incandescence so long the mystery of Witch-Face Mountain.
TAKING THE BLUE RIBBON AT THE COUNTY FAIR.
Jenks Hollis sat on the fence. He slowly turned the quid of tobacco in his cheek, and lifting up his voice spoke with an oracular drawl:—
"Ef he kin take the certif'cate it's the mos' ez he kin do. He ain't never a-goin' ter git no premi-um in this life, sure 's ye air a born sinner."
And he relapsed into silence. His long legs dangled dejectedly among the roadside weeds; his brown jeans trousers, that had despaired of ever reaching his ankles, were ornamented here and there with ill-adjusted patches, and his loose-fitting coat was out at the elbows. An old white wool hat drooped over his eyes, which were fixed absently on certain distant blue mountain ranges, that melted tenderly into the blue of the noonday sky, and framed an exquisite mosaic of poly-tinted fields in the valley, far, far below the grim gray crag on which his little home was perched.
Despite his long legs he was a light weight, or he would not have chosen as his favorite seat so rickety a fence. His interlocutor, a heavier man, apparently had some doubts, for he leaned only slightly against one of the projecting rails as he whittled a pine stick, and with his every movement the frail structure trembled. The log cabin seemed as rickety as the fence. The little front porch had lost a puncheon here and there in the flooring—perhaps on some cold winter night when Hollis's energy was not sufficiently exuberant to convey him to the wood-pile; the slender posts that upheld its roof seemed hardly strong enough to withstand the weight of the luxuriant vines with their wealth of golden gourds which had clambered far over the moss-grown clapboards; the windows had fewer panes of glass than rags; and the chimney, built of clay and sticks, leaned portentously away from the house. The open door displayed a rough, uncovered floor; a few old rush-bottomed chairs; a bedstead with a patch-work calico quilt, the mattress swagging in the centre and showing the badly arranged cords below; strings of bright red pepper hanging from the dark rafters; a group of tow-headed, grave-faced, barefooted children; and, occupying almost one side of the room, a broad, deep, old-fashioned fireplace, where winter and summer a lazy fire burned under a lazy pot.
Notwithstanding the poverty of the aspect of the place and the evident sloth of its master, it was characterized by a scrupulous cleanliness strangely at variance with its forlorn deficiencies. The rough floor was not only swept but scoured; the dark rafters, whence depended the flaming banners of the red pepper, harbored no cobwebs; the grave faces of the white-haired children bore no more dirt than was consistent with their recent occupation of making mudpies; and the sedate, bald-headed baby, lying silent but wide-awake in an uncouth wooden cradle, was as clean as clear spring water and yellow soap could make it. Mrs. Hollis herself, seen through the vista of opposite open doors, energetically rubbing the coarse wet clothes upon the resonant washboard, seemed neat enough in her blue-and-white checked homespun dress, and with her scanty hair drawn smoothly back from her brow into a tidy little knot on the top of her head.