The Choir Invisible

by James Lane Allen

He wheeled and walked towards her blindly.

She scanned his face, feature by feature.

"Take off your hat!" she said with a tremulous little laugh. He did so and she looked at his forehead and his hair.

"Go now, dear friend!" she said calmly but quickly.

XXI

It was the morning of the wedding.

According to the usage of the time the marriage ceremony was to take place early in the forenoon, in order that the guests, gathered in from distant settlements of the wilderness, might have a day for festivity and still reach home before night. Late in the afternoon the bridal couple, escorted by many friends, were to ride into town to Joseph's house, and in the evening there was to be a house-warming.

The custom of the backwoods country ran that a man must not be left to build his house alone; and one day some weeks before this wagons had begun to roll in from this direction and that direction out of the forest, hauling the logs for Joseph's cabin. Then with loud laughter and the writhing of tough backs and the straining of powerful arms and legs, men old, middle-aged, and young had raised the house like overgrown boys at play, and then had returned to their own neglected business: so that to him was left only the finishing.He had finished it and furnished it for the simple scant needs of pioneer life.But on this, his wedding morning, he had hardly left the town, escorted by friends on horseback, before many who had variously excused themselves from going began to issue from their homes: women carrying rolls of linen and pones of bread; boys with huge joints of jerked meat and dried tongues of the buffalo, bear, and deer. There was a noggin, a piggin, a churn, a homemade chair; there was a quilt from a grandmother and a pioneer cradle—a mere trough scooped out of a walnut log. An old pioneer sent the antlers of a stag for a hat-rack, and a buffalo rug for the young pair to lie warm under of bitter, winter nights; his wife sent a spinning-wheel and a bundle of shingles for johnny-cakes. Some of the merchants gave packages of Philadelphia groceries; some of the aristo-cratic families parted with heirlooms that had been laboriously brought over the mountains—a cup and saucer of Sevres, a pair of tall brass candlesticks, and a Venus -mirror framed in ebony. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon when John Gray jumped on the back of a strong trusty horse at the stable of the Indian Queen, leaned over to shake the hands of the friends who had met there to see him off, and turned his horse's head in the direction of the path that led to the Wilderness Road.

But when he had gone about a mile, he struck into the forest at right angles and rode across the country until he reached that green woodland pathway which led from the home of the Falconers to the public road between Lexington and Frankfort. He tied his horse some distance away, and walking back, sat down on the roots of an oak and waited.

It was a day when the beauty of the earth makes itself felt like ravishing music that has no sound. The air, warm and full of summer fragrance, was of that ethereal untinged clearness which spreads over all things the softness of velvet. The far-vaulted heavens, so bountiful of light, were an illimitable weightless curtain of pale-blue velvet; the rolling clouds were of white velvet; the grass, the stems of bending wild flowers, the drooping sprays of woodland foliage, were so many forms of emerald velvet; the gnarled trunks of the trees were gray and brown velvet; the wings and breasts of the birds, flitting hither and thither, were of gold and scarlet velvet; the butterflies were stemless, floating velvet blossoms."Farewell, Kentucky! farewell!" he said, looking about him at it all. Two hours passed. The shadows were lengthening rapidly. Over the forest, like the sigh of a spirit, swept from out the west the first intimation of waning light, of the mysteries of coming darkness. At last there reached his ear from far down the woodland path the sounds of voices and laughter—again and again—louder and louder—and then through the low thick boughs he caught glimpses of them coming. Now beneath the darker arches of the trees, now across pale-green spaces shot by slanting sunbeams. Once there was a halt and a merry outcry. Long grape-vines from opposite sides of the road had been tied across it, and this barrier had to cut through. Then on they came again: At the head of procession, astride an old horse that in his better days had belonged to a mounted rifleman, rode the parson. He was several yards ahead of the others and quite forgetful of them. The end of his flute stuck neglectedly out of his waistcoat pocket; his bridle reins lay slack on the neck of the drowsy beast; his hands were piled on the pommel of the saddle as over his familiar pulpit; his dreamy moss-agate eyes were on the tree-tops far ahead. In truth he was preparing a sermon on the affection of one man for another and ransacking Scripture for illustrations; and he meant to preach this the following Sunday when there would be some one sadly missed among his hearers. Nevertheless he enjoyed great peace of spirit this day: it was not John who rode behind him as the bridegroom: otherwise he would as soon have returned to the town at the head of the forces of Armageddon.