Twilight fell softly over Beersheba, beautiful Beersheba. It is going into history now with its sad old fancies and its quaint old legends,—its record of happiness and of heartbreak,—those two opposing, yet closely interwoven inevitables which always belong to a summer resort.
But Beersheba is different from the rest, in that the railroads have never found it; and it goes into history a monument to the old days when the wealthy among the southern folk flocked to the mountains, and to Beersheba—queen of the hill country of Tennessee.
The western sky, where it seemed to slope down toward Dan, had turned to gaudy orange; the east was hazy and dimly purple, streaked with long lines of shadow, resembling, in truth, some lives we remember to have noticed, lives that for all the sombre purple were still blotched with the heavier shadows of pain that is never spoken.
It was inexpressibly lonely; true, a cowbell tingled in the distance, and now and then a fox barked in a covert of Dark Hollow, that almost impenetrable jungle that lies along the “Back Bone,” a narrow, zigzag ridge stretching from Dan to Beersheba.
Dan, modest little Dan, seven furlongs distant from queenly Beersheba, with its one artistic little house refusing in spite of time and weather, and that more deadly foe, renters, to be other than pretty and picturesque, as it nestles like a little gray dove in its nest of cedar and wild pine. A very dreamful place is Dan, dreamful and safe.
Safe, so thought the man leaning upon the low fence that inclosed the old ante-bellum graveyard that was a part of Beersheba also. For in the olden days people came by families and family connections, bringing their servants and carriages. And those who died at Beersheba were left sleeping in the little graveyard—a quiet spot, shut in by old cedars and rustling laurel. A very solemn little resting-place, with the cedars moaning, and the winds soughing, as if in continual lament for the dead left to their care. Among the quiet sleepers was one concerning whom the man leaning upon the fence never tired of thinking, while he made, by instinct it seemed to him, a daily pilgrimage to her grave. It was marked by a long, narrow shaft, exceedingly small at the top. Midway the shaft a heart, chased out of the yellow, moss-stained marble, a heart pierced by a bullet. He had brushed the moss aside long ago to read the quaint yet fascinating inscription:—
“Millicent—April, 1862. ‘Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!’”
He had heard the story of the sleeper underneath often, often. It is one of the legends now, of Beersheba. Yet he thought of it with peculiar interest, that twilight time, as he stood leaning upon the low fence while the sun set over Dan. His face, with the after-glow of sunset full upon it, was not a face in keeping with the quiet scene about him. It was not a youthful face, although handsome. Yet the lines upon it were not the lines made by time: a stronger enemy than time had left his mark there. Dissipation was written in the ruddy complexion, the bloated flesh, and the bloodshot eye. The continual movement of the hand feeling along the whitewashed plank, or fingering, unconsciously, the trigger of the loaded rifle, testified, in a dumb way, to the derangement of the nervous system which had been surrendered to that most debasing of all passion, drink. He had sought the invigorating mountains, the safety of isolation, to do for him that which an abused and deadened will refused to do. It is a terrible thing to stand alone with the wreck of one’s self. It is worse to set the Might-Have-Been side by side with the Is, and know that it is everlastingly too late to alter the colorings of either picture.
His was an hereditary passion, an iniquity of the father visited upon the son. Against such there is no law, and for such no remedy.