Back Meadows lies three miles to the northwest of Hagar, rich bottom-lands in Sanderson Hollow, and the Cattle Ridge shelters it on the north. Five generations of Sandersons have added to the Sanderson accumulation of this world's goods, without sensible interference on the part of moths or rust or thieves that break through and steal. Cool, quiet men, slow of speech and persistent of mood, they prospered and lived well where other families, desiring too many things or not desiring anything enough, found nothing at all desirable and drifted away. The speculative traveller, hunting “abandoned farms,” or studying the problem of the future of New England's outlying districts, who should stand on the crest of the Cattle Ridge overlooking the sheltered valley, would note it as an instance of the problem satisfactorily solved and of a farm which, so far from abandonment, smiled over all its comfortable expanse in the consciousness of past and certainty of future occupancy. These were ready illustrations for his thesis, if he had one: the smooth meadows, square stone walls and herds of fawn-colored cattle, large bams and long stables of the famous Sanderson stud; also the white gabled house among the maples with spreading ells on either side, suggesting a position taken with foresight and carefully guarded and secured—a house that, recognizing the uncertainties and drifting currents of the world, had acted accordingly, and now could afford to consider itself complacently. The soul of any individual Sanderson might be required of him, and his wisdom relative to eternity be demonstrated folly, but the policy of the Sanderson family had not so far been considered altogether an individual matter. Even individually, if the question of such inversion of terms ever occurred to a Sanderson, it only led to the conclusion that it was strictly a Pickwickian usage, and, in the ordinary course of language, the policy of building barns, stowing away goods and reflecting complacently thereon, still came under the head of wisdom.
Mrs. Cullom Sanderson, sister of Israel Sanderson of the last generation and married into a distant branch of the Sanderson family, carried her materialism with an unconscious and eccentric frankness that prevented the family from recognizing in her a peculiar development of its own quality. When Israel's gentle wife passed from a world which she had found too full of unanswered questions, it was Mrs. Cullom who plunged bulkily into the chamber of the great mystery and stopped, gulping with astonishment.
“I just made her some blanc-mange,” she gasped. “Isn't that too bad! Why, Israel!”
Israel turned from the window and contemplated her gravely with his hands clasped behind him.
“I think you had better move down to the Meadows, Ellen,” he said. “If you will contrive to say as little as possible to me about Marian, and one or two other matters I will specify, we shall get along very well.”
He went out with slow step and bent head, followed by Mrs. Cullom trying vainly to find an idea on the subject suggested, which she was quite positive she had somewhere about her. What Israel may have thought of the thing that had whispered within his doors in an unknown tongue, and had taken away what was his without receipt or equivalent exchange, it were hard to say; equally hard even to say what he had thought of Marian these twenty years. If her cloistral devotions and visionary moods had seemed to him, in uninverted terms, folly, he had never said so. Certainly he had liked her quiet, ladylike ways, and possibly respected a difference of temperament inwardly as well as outwardly. At any rate, tolerance was a consistent Sanderson policy and philosophy of life.
There was a slight movement in the chamber, after the silence which followed the departing footsteps of Israel and Mrs. Cullom. A small person in pinafores crept stealthily from under the bed and peered over the edge. It was a hard climb but he persisted, and at last seated himself on it panting, with his elbows on his knees, gravely considering. A few hours since, the silent lips had whispered, among many things that came back to his memory in after years like a distant chime of bells, only this that seemed of any immediate importance: “I shall be far away to-night, Joe, but when you say your prayers I shall hear.” The problem that puckered the small brow was whether prayers out of regular hours were real prayers. Joe decided to risk it and, getting on his knees, said over all the prayers he knew. Then he leaned over and patted the thin, cold cheek (Joe and his mother always tacitly understood each other), slid off the bed with a satisfied air, and solemnly trotted out of the room.
Mrs. Cullom Sanderson was a widow; “Which,” Israel remarked, “is a pity. Cullom would have taken comfort in outliving you, Ellen.”
“Well,” remonstrated Mrs. Cullom, “I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Israel. I've always respected his memory.”
Israel, gravely regarding her, observed, “You'd better not try to train Joe,” and departed, leaving her to struggle with the idea that between Joe and Cullom's comfort Israel was getting very disconnected. Disconnection of remark did not imply any changeableness in Israel's temperament. He observed a silent sequence of character, and possibly a sequence of thought of which he did not care to give evidence, on matters which he found no profit in discussing. Twelve years later the mystery again whispered within his doors, and he rose and followed it in his usual deliberate and taciturn way, without disclosing any opinion on the question of the inversion of terms. The story of each generation is put away when its time comes with a more or less irrelevant epitaph, whether or not its threads be gathered into a satisfactory finale. The Spirit-of-things-moving-on is singularly indifferent to such matters. Its only literary principle seems to be, to move on. The new Sanderson of Back Meadows grew up a slight, thin-faced young fellow. The Sanderson men were always slight of build, saving a certain breadth of shoulders. A drooping mustache in course of time hid the only un-Sanderson feature, a sensitive mouth. The cool gray eyes, slightly drawling speech, and deliberate manner were all Sanderson, indicating “a chip of the old block,” as Mr. Durfey remarked to the old Scotchman who kept the drag store in Hagar. If the latter had doubts, he kept them to himself.
The Sanderson stud sprang from a certain red mare, Martha, belonging to Blake Sanderson of Revolutionary times. They were a thin-necked, generally bad-tempered breed, with red veins across the eyes, of high repute among “horsey” men. Blake Sanderson was said to have ridden the red mare from Boston in some astonishingly quick time on some mysterious errand connected with the evacuation of New York, whereby her descendants were at one time known as the Courier breed; but as no one seemed to know what the errand was, it was possibly not a patriotic one. Three of these red, thinnecked mares and a stallion were on exhibition at the Hamilton County Fair of '76. Notable men of the county were there, mingled with turfmen of all shades of notoriety; several immaculately groomed gentlemen, tall-hatted, long-coated, and saying little, but pointed out with provincial awe as coming from New York and worth watching; a few lean Kentuckians, the redness of whose noses was in direct ratio with their knowledge of the business, and whose artistic profanity had a mercantile value in expressing contempt for Yankee horse-flesh. There was the Honorable Gerald and the some-say Dishonorable Morgan Map, originally natives of Hagar, with young Jacob Lorn between them undergoing astute initiation into the ways of the world and its manner of furnishing amusement to young men of wealth; both conversing affably with Gypsy John of not even doubtful reputation, at present booming Canadian stock in favor of certain animals that may or may not have seen Canada. Thither came the manager of the opera troupe resident in Hamilton during the Fair, and the Diva, popularly known as Mignon, a brown-haired woman with a quick Gallic smile and a voice, “By gad, sir, that she can soak every note of it in tears, the little scamp,” quoth Cassidy, observing from a distance. Cassidy was a large fleshy man with a nickel shield under his coat.
“A face to launch a thousand ships,
And burn the topless towers of Ilium''
misquoted a tall, thin personage with an elongated face and sepulchral voice. “The gods made you poetical, Mr. Cassidy. Do you find your gift of sentiment of use on the force?”
“Yes, sir,” shouted Cassidy, inadvertently touched on one of innumerable hobbies and beginning to pound one hand excitedly with the fist of the other. “In fine cases, sir, the ordinary detective slips up on just that point. Now let me tell you, Mr. Mavering—”
“Tell me whether that is not Mignon's 'mari.' What sort of a man is he?”
“Mignon's what? Oh—Manager Scott. He isn't married, further than that he's liable to rows on account of Mignon, who—has a face to upset things as you justly observe, not to speak of a disposition according. At least, I don't know but what they may be married. If they are, they're liable to perpetuate more rows than anything else.”
“'Does something smack, something grow to, has a kind of taste?”'
“Eh?” said Cassidy, inquiringly.
Sanderson, standing silently by, as silently turned and walked toward the crowd drifting back and forth in front of the stables. Portly Judge Carter of Gilead, beaming through gold-rimmed glasses, side-whiskered and rubicund, stopped him to remark tremendously that he had issued an injunction against the stallion going out of the state. “A matter of local patriotism, Joe, eh?”
“Hear, hear,” commented the Honorable Gerald Map. A crowd began to gather anticipating a conference of notables. Sanderson extricated himself and walked on, and two small boys eventually smacked each other over the question whether Judge Carter was as great a man as Mr. Sanderson.
Mavering's eyes followed him speculatively.
“What's the particular combination that troubles the manager's rest?”
“Eh?” said Cassidy. “Oh, I don't know. Bob Sutton mostly. He's here somewhere. Swell young fellow in a plush vest, fashionable proprietor of thread mills.”
The yellow, dusty road ran between the stables and a battle line of sycamores and maples. Over the stables loomed the brick wall of the theatre, and at the end of them a small green door for the private use of exhibitors gave exit from the Fair Grounds. Sanderson stopped near a group opposite it, where Mignon stood slapping her riding-boot with her whip.
“Mr. Sanderson,” said Mignon, liquidly, “how can I get out through that door?”
Sanderson considered and suggested opening it.
“But it's locked! Ciel! It's locked!”
Sanderson considered again. “Here's a key,” he said hopefully.
“There!” shouted the plush vest. “I knew there'd be some solution. You see, mademoiselle, what Ave admire in Sanderson is his readiness of resource. Mademoiselle refused to melt down the fence with a smile or climb over it on a high C, and we were quite in despair.”
Outside the gate, in the paved courtyard between the theatre and the hotel, Mignon lifted her big brown eyes which said so many things, according to Cassidy, that were not so, and observed demurely, “If you were to leave me that key, Mr. Sanderson, well, I should steal in here after the performance tonight and ride away on the little red mare, certainly.”
Sanderson gravely held out the key, but Mignon drew back in sudden alarm and clasped her hands tragically.
“Oh, no! You would be on guard and, what! cut up? Yes. Ah, dreadfully! You are so wise, Mr. Sanderson, and secret.”
And Jack Mavering, following slowly after, chuckled sepulchrally to himself. “Pretty cool try sting. Peace to the shades of Manager Scott. I couldn't have done it better myself.”
The Fair Grounds were as dark and lonely at eleven o'clock as if the lighted street were not three hundred feet away with its gossipy multitude going up and down seeking some new thing. The stands yawned indifferently from a thousand vacant seats and the race-track had forgotten its excitement. Horses stamped and rustled spectrally in their stalls. The shadow under the maples was abysmal and the abyss gave forth a murmur of dialogue, the sound of a silken voice.
“Oh,” it sighed in mock despair, “but Americans, they are so very impassive. Look! They make love in monosyllables. They have no passion, no action. They pull their mustachios, say 'Damn!'—so, and it is tragedy. They stroke their chins, so, very grave. They say 'It is not bad, and it is comedy. Ah, please, Joe, be romantique!”
“Why,” drawled the other voice, “I'll do whatever you like, except have spasms.”
“Indifferent! Bah! That's not romantique. How would I look in the house of your fathers?”
“You'd look like thunder.”
“Would I?” The silken voice sank low and was quiet for a moment. “Well then, listen. This shall you do. You shall give me that key and an order to your man that I ride the little mare of a Sunday morning, which is to-morrow, because she is the wind and because you are disagreeable. Is it not so?”
A ripple of low laughter by the green door, and “There then. You drive a hard bargain in love, monsieur.” The door opened and she stepped with a rustle of skirts into and through the paved courtyard, now unlit by lamps at the theatre entrance, dark enough for the purposes of Manager Scott, in an angle of the entrance pulling his mustache and speaking after the manner described by Mignon as tragedy.
In the valley of the Wyantenaug many stopped and listened breathlessly by barn-yard and entry door to a voice that floated along the still air of the Sabbath morning, now carolling like a bobolink, now fluting like a wood-thrush, now hushed in the covert of arching trees, and now pealing over the meadows by the river bank; others only heard a rush of hoofs and saw a little red horse and its rider go by with the electric stride of a trained racer. Each put his or her interpretation thereon, elaborately detailed after the manner of the region, and approximated the fact of Mignon and her purposes as nearly as might be expected. Delight in the creation of jewelled sounds as an end in itself; delight in the clear morning air of autumn valleys, the sight of burnished leaves and hills in mad revelry of color; delight in following vagrant fancies with loose rein, happy, wine-lipped elves that rise without reason and know no law; delight in the thrill and speed of a sinewy horse compact of nerves; however all these may have entered in the purposes of Mignon, they are not likely to have entered the conjectures of the inhabitants of Wyantenaug Valley, such pleasures of the flesh. Mignon let the mare choose her road, confining her own choice to odd matters of going slow or fast or not at all, pausing by the river bank to determine the key and imitate the quality of its low chuckle, and such doings; all as incomprehensible to the little red mare as to the inhabitants of Wyantenaug Valley.
The valley is broad with cup-shaped sides, save where the crowding of the hills has thrust one forward to stand in embarrassed projection. Some twenty miles above Hamilton rises Windless Mountain on the right, guarding from the world the village of Hagar behind it. Northward from Windless lie irregular hills, and between them and the long westward-inclining tumulus of the Cattle Ridge a narrow gorge with a tumbling brook comes down. Up this gorge goes a broad, well-kept road, now bridging the brook, now slipping under shelving ledges, everywhere carpeted with the needles of pines, secret with the shadows of pines, spicy and strong with the scent of pines, till at the end of half a mile it emerges from beneath the pines into Sanderson Hollow. The little red mare shot from the gloom into the sunlight with a snort and shake of the head that seemed to say: “Oh, my hoofs and fetlocks! Deliver me from a woman who makes believe to herself she is n't going where she is, or if she is that it's only accidental.”
Mrs. Cullom Sanderson ponderously made ready for church, not with a mental preparation of which the minister would have approved unless he had seen as clearly as Mrs. Cullom the necessity of denouncing in unmeasured terms the iniquity of Susan. Susan was a maid who tried to do anything that she was told, and bumped her head a great deal. Her present iniquity lay in her fingers and consisted in tying and buttoning Mrs. Cullom and putting her together generally so that she felt as if she had fallen into her clothes from different directions. A ring at the door-bell brought Mrs. Cullom down from heights of sputtering invective like an exhausted sky-rocket, and she plumped into a chair whispering feebly, “Goodness, Susan, who's that?” Susan vaguely disclaimed all knowledge of “that.”
“You might find out,” remonstrated Mrs. Cullom, the reaction precluding anything but a general feeling of injury. Susan went down-stairs and bumped her head on the chandelier, opened the door and bumped it on the door.
“Ouch,” she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. “Please, ma'am, Miss Sanderson wants to know, who's that?”
“Ah,” said the trim little lady in riding-habit, “will you so kindly ask Miss Sanderson that I may speak to her?”
But Mrs. Cullom was already descending the stairs, each step appearing to Mignon to have the nature of a plunge. “My goodness, yes. Come in.” Mignon carried her long skirt over the lintel.
“I am quite grieved to intrude, mademoi—” Mrs. Cullom's matronly proportions seemed to discountenance the diminutive, “a—madame. Mr. Sanderson permitted me to ride one of his horses. He is so generous. And the horse brought me here, oh, quite decisively,” and Mignon laughed such a soft, magical laugh that Susan grinned in broad delight. “It is such a famous place, this, is it not,—Back Meadows? I thought I might be allowed to—to pay tribute to its fame.”
Mrs. Cullom's cordiality was such that if, strictly speaking, two hundred pounds can flutter, she may be said to have fluttered. She plunged through two sombre-curtained parlors, Mignon drifting serenely in the wake of her tumult. Something in the black, old colonial furniture sent a feeling of cold gruesomeness into her sunny veins, and she was glad when Mrs. Cullom declared it chilly and towed her into the dining-room, where a warm light sifted through yellow windows of modern setting high over a long, irregular sideboard, and mellowed the portraits of departed Sandersons on the walls: honorables numerous of colonial times (Blake, first of the horse-breeding Sandersons, booted and spurred but with too much thinness of face and length of jaw for a Squire Western type), all flanked by dames, with a child here and there, above or below—all but the late Israel, whose loneliness in his gilt frame seemed to have a certain harmony with his expression.
“That was Joseph's father, my brother Israel,” said Mrs. Cullom, as Mignon's eyes travelled curiously along and rested on the last. “Joseph keeps his mother hung up in his den.”
“Hung up? Den?” cried Mignon, with a recurrence of the gruesome feeling of the parlors. “Oh, ciel! What does he keep there? Bones?”
“Bones! Goodness no. Books.”
Mrs. Cullom pushed open a door to the right and entered a long, low room piled to the ceiling and littered with books, which, together with the leathern chair and red-shaded lamp before the fireplace, gave a decided air of studious repose, nothing suggesting a breeder of fancy stock. An oil painting of a lady hung over the mantel, and near it some mediæval Madonna, not unresembling the portrait in its pale cheeks, unworldly eyes, and that faint monastic air of vigil and vision and strenuous yearning of the soul to throw its dust aside. Nevertheless the face of the lady was a sweet face, quiet and pure, such as from many a Madonna of the Old World in tawdry regalia looks pityingly down over altar and winking tapers, seeming to say with her tender eyes, “Is it very hard, my dear, the living? Come apart then and rest awhile.” Mignon turned to Mrs. Cullom. “You are dressed for going out, madame,” she said, looking at that lady's well-to-do black silk. “Am I not detaining you?”
“Oh, I was going to church. Goodness, are n't you going to church?” A sudden thought struck her and she added severely: “And you've been riding that wicked little mare on Sunday. And she might have thrown you, and how'd you look pitched headfirst into heaven dressed so everybody ud know you weren't going to church!”
“Oh,” cried Mignon, “but I was good when I was a child. Yes! I went to mass every day, and had a little prie-dieu, oh, so tiny!”
“Mass!” gasped Mrs. Cullom. “Well, I declare. What's a pray-do?”
Mignon surveyed her riding-skirt regretfully. “Would it not be appropriate, madame? I should so like to go with you,” she said plaintively.
“Goodness! I'll risk it if you will. I'd like to see the woman who'd tell me what to wear to church.” She plunged suddenly out of the room, leaving Mignon thinking that she would not like to be the woman referred to. She listened to the ponderous footsteps of Mrs. Cullom climbing the stairs, and then sank into the leathern chair facing the picture. Possibly the living and the dead faced each other on a point at issue; they seemed to debate some matter gravely and gently, as is seldom done where both are living. Possibly it was Mignon's dramatic instinct which caused her to rise at last, gathering up her riding-skirt, at the approaching footsteps of Mrs. Cullom, and bow with Gallic grace and diminutive stateliness to the pure-faced lady with the spiritual eyes. “C'est vrai, madame,” she said, and passed out with her small head in the air.
The congregation that day in the little church of the bended weather-vane, where Hagar's cross-roads meet, heard certain ancient hymns sung as never before in the church of the bended weather-vane. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” pleaded the silken voice, like a visitant invisible, floating from fluted pillar to fluted pillar, calling at some unseen door, “Let me in! Ah, let me in!” Somewhat too much of rose leaves and purple garments in the voice for that simple, steadfast music. The spirit seemed pleading rather for gratification than rest. The congregation stopped singing, save Mrs. Cullom, who flatted comfortably on unnoticed. Deacon Crockett frowned ominously over his glasses at a scandalous scene and a woman too conspicuous; Captain David Brett showed all the places where he had no teeth; Mr. Royce looked down from the pulpit troubled with strange thoughts, and Miss Hettie Royce dropped her veil over her face, remembering her youth.
How should Mignon know she was not expected to be on exhibition in that curious place? Of course people should be silent and listen when an artist sings. Mignon hardly remembered a time when she was not more or less on exhibition. That volatile young lady cantered along the Windless Mountain Road somewhat after twelve o'clock not in a very good humor. She recognized the ill humor, considered ill humor a thing both unpleasant and unnecessary and attributed it to an empty stomach; dismounted before an orchard and swung herself over the wall reckless of where her skirts went or where they did not.
“Them apples is mine,” growled a gray-bearded person behind a barn-yard fence.
“Then why didn't you get them for me, pig?” returned Mignon sharply, and departed with more than her small hands could conveniently carry, leaving the gray-bearded person turning the question over dubiously in his mind.
It happened to have occurred to Sanderson that certain business of his own pointed to Back Meadows that Sunday morning. The up-train on Sunday does not leave till after eleven, and he took the valley road on the red stallion of uncertain temper. The inhabitants of Wyantenaug Valley heard no more carolling voices, or fitful rush and clatter of hoofs. The red stallion covered his miles with a steady stride and the rider kept his emotions, aesthetic or otherwise, to himself. The twain swung into the Hollow about eleven o'clock, and Sanderson presently found himself in his leathern chair debating a question at issue with the lady of the spiritual eyes. What passed between them is their own secret, quite hopeless of discovery, with one end of it on the other side of the “valley of the shadow,” and the other buried in close coverts of Sanderson reserve. When the door-bell rang and Susan appearing bumped her head against the casing and announced, “Mr. Joe, it's a red-haired gentleman,” having no dramatic instinct, he passed into the dining-room without salutation to the lady of the spiritual eyes.
“How are you, Scott? Sit down,” he drawled placidly.
“I suppose you know what I'm here for,” said the other, with evident self-restraint.
“Can't say I do,” returned Sanderson, cheerfully. “It needn't be anything in particular, need it?” He sat down, stretched his legs under the dining-room table and his arms on top of it. Manager Scott paced the floor nervously. Suddenly he stooped, picked up something and flung it on the table—a strip of thin gray veil. “You can save yourself a lie, Mr. Sanderson.”
Sanderson gravely regarded the delicate article which seemed to be put forth both as an accusation and a proof of something. Then he leaned forward and rang the bell. “I will overlook that implication for the present, Mr. Scott,” he remarked. “If it's a bluff, it's a good one. I take it it is n't. Susan, has any one been here this morning?” as that maiden tumbled into the room in a general tangle of feet.
“Yes, sir, and she's gone. My! She ain't comin' back to dinner! Lady rode the little mare and she went to church with Miss Sanderson.”
“Mademoiselle Mignon,” drawled Sanderson, turning to Manager Scott, “asked permission to ride the mare this morning. I was not aware she intended making an excursion to Back Meadows or I should have asked permission to attend her. It seems she went to Hagar with my aunt and proposes to ride back to Hamilton from there. It's my turn now, old man, and I'd like to know what was the necessity of making your visit so very tragic.”
“Oh, I presume I'm an ass,” returned the other, with a noticeable nervous twitching of the mouth and fingers, “and I presume I owe you an apology. I shall probably shoot the man that comes between Mignon and me, if he doesn't shoot first, which is all very asinine.”
“Quite irrespective of what mademoiselle may think about it?”
“Oh, quite.”
“Well,” said Sanderson, after a pause, “I rather sympathize with your way of looking at it. I shouldn't wonder if I had some of that primeval brutality myself.”
“Look here, Sanderson,” said the manager. “Without going into humiliating details as to how I came by the fact, which I don't know why you take so much pains to conceal, I know as well as you do that the issue is between you and me.”
“You don't mean to threaten, do you, Scott?”
“Oh, no. I'm going back to Hamilton. I was looking for a row, and you don't give me enough to go on.”
“Can't do it just now, old man,” said Sanderson, gently, shaking hands with him at the door. “I'll let you know when I can. In that case we 'll have it out between us.”
The manager strode off across the Hollow and down the Gorge to the valley station, and Sanderson mounted and took the road to Hagar. He passed the village about one. The red stallion thundered through the pine avenues at the foot of Windless and swept around the curve into Wyantenaug Valley, but it was not till within a few miles of Hamilton that the speedy little mare, even bothered as she was by her rider's infirmity of purpose, allowed herself to be overtaken. The road there turned away from the river and went covered with crisp autumn leaves through chestnut woods. Mignon looked up and laughed, and the two horses fell sympathetically into a walk.
“Don't you think you owe me an explanation?” asked Sanderson, in a low tone.
“Indeed, sir, I owe you nothing, not even for this ride. It was paid for,” rippled the silken voice, and stopped suddenly in a little sob. Sanderson turned quickly and bent over her.
“By the living God,” he said solemnly, “I swear I love you. What barrier is strong enough to face that?”
“It is because you do not know me, that. Listen, Joe. I have not been what you call good nor pure in the past and shall not in the future. No, hush. I know what I am and what I shall be always. If I swore by your living God that I loved you now, it would not mean that I should to-morrow, and the next day, oh, not at all. There are no deeps in me, nor what you call a faith or principle in life. Listen, Joe. That lady whose portrait I saw is your guardian angel. Look, I reverence now. To-morrow I shall mock both her and you. This that I speak now is only a mood. The wind is now one thing and then quite another, Joe. It has no centre and no soul. I am an artist, sir. I have moods but no character. Morals! I have none. They go like the whiff of the breeze. Nothing that I do lowers or lifts me. It passes through me and that is all. Do you not understand?” which indeed was hard to do, for the brown eyes were very soft and deep.
“If any one else had told me this,” said Sanderson, between his teeth, “man or woman, it would never have been said but once.”
“It is harder for you than for me, for to-morrow I shall not care and you, you will care perhaps a long time. You are fast like these hills. Listen. Now, sir, this is our last ride together. We are a cavalier and his lady. They are gallant and gay. They wear life and love and death in their hair like flowers. They smile and will not let their hearts be sad, for they say, 'It is cowardly to be sad: it is brave only to smile.' Is it not so?”
Sanderson's New England reserve fled far away, and he bent over her hand.
“It shall be as you say.”
And to-morrow seemed far enough away, and an hour had its eternal value. But the steady old hills could not understand that kind of chronology.
The Salem Road is a dusty road. Perhaps it is not really any dustier than other roads, but it is straighter than most roads about Hagar. You can see more of it at a time, and in that way you can see more dust. Along this road one day many years ago came Dr. Wye of Salem in his buggy, which leaned over on one side; and the dust was all over the buggy-top, all over the big, gray, plodding horse, and all over the doctor's hat and coat. He was tired and drowsy, but you would not have suspected it; for he was a red-faced, sturdy man, with a beard cut square, as if he never compromised with anything. He sat up straight and solid, so as not to compromise with the tipping of the buggy.
“Come, Billy,” said the doctor, “no nonsense, now.”
He prided himself on being a strict man, who would put up with no nonsense, but every one knew better. Billy, the gray horse, knew as well as any one.
“Come now, Billy, get along.”
A tall, dusty, black-bearded man rose up beside the road, and Billy stopped immediately.
A large pack lay against the bank.
“You ain't seen a yeller dog?”
“No,” said the doctor, gruffly. He was provoked with Billy. “There aren't any yellow dogs around here.”
“He hadn't no tail,” persisted the stranger, wistfully. “And there were a boy a-holdin' him. He chopped it off when he were little.”
“Who chopped it off?”
“Hey? He's a little cuss, but the dog's a good dog.”
“Get up, Billy,” growled the doctor. “All boys are little cusses. I have n't seen any yellow dog. Nonsense! I wonder he did n't ask if I'd seen the tail.”
But somehow the doctor could not get rid of the man's face, and he found himself looking along the roadside for boys that were distinctly “little cusses” and yellow dogs without tails, all the rest of the day.
In the evening twilight he drove into Salem village. Very cool and pleasant looked the little white house among the trees. Mother Wye stood on the porch in her white apron and cap, watching for him. She was flying signals of distress—if the word were not too strong—she was even agitated. He tramped up the steps reassuringly.
“Oh,” whispered Mother Wye, “you've no idea, Ned! There's a boy and a dog, a very large dog, my dear, on the back steps.”
“Well,” said the doctor, gallantly, “they've no business to be anywhere frightening my little mother. We'll tell them to do something else.” The doctor tramped sturdily around to the back steps, Mother Wye following much comforted.
The dog was actually a yellow dog without any tail to speak of—a large, genial-looking dog, nevertheless; the boy, a black-eyed boy, very grave and indifferent, with a face somewhat thin and long. “Without doubt,” thought the doctor, “a little cuss. Hullo,” he said aloud, “I met a man looking for you.”
The boy scrutinized him with settled gravity. “He's not much account,” he said calmly. “I'd rather stay here.”
“Oh, you would!” grumbled the doctor. “Must think I want somebody around all the time to frighten this lady. Nice folks you are, you and your dog.”
The boy turned quickly and took off his cap. “I beg your pardon, madam,” he said with a smile that was singularly sudden and winning. The action was so elderly and sedate, so very courtly, surprising, and incongruous, that the doctor slapped his knee and laughed uproariously; and Mother Wye went through an immediate revulsion, to feel herself permeated with motherly desires. The boy went on unmoved.
“He's an easy dog, ma'am. His name's Poison, but he never does anything;”—which started the doctor off again.
“They said you wanted a boy.”
“Ah,” said the doctor, growing grave, “that's true; but you're not the boy.”
The boy seemed to think him plainly mistaken. “Stuff!” growled the doctor, “I want a boy I can send all around the country. I know a dozen boys that know the country, and that I know all about. I don't want you. Besides,” he added, “he said you were a little cuss.”
The boy paid no attention to the last remark. “I'll find it out. Other boys are thick-headed.”
“That's true,” the doctor admitted; “they are thick-headed.” Indeed this young person's serenity and confidence quite staggered him. A new diplomatic idea seemed to occur to the young person. He turned to Mother Wye and said gravely: “Will you pull Poison's ear, ma'am, so he'll know it's all right?”
Mother Wye, with some trepidation, pulled Poison's ear, and Poison wagged the whole back end of himself to make up for a tail, signifying things that were amicable, while the doctor tugged at his beard and objected to nonsense.
“Well, young man, we'll see what you have to say for yourself. Tut! tut! mother,”—to Mrs. Wye's murmur of remonstrance,—“we'll have no nonsense. This is a practical matter;” and he tramped sturdily into the house, followed by the serious boy, the amicable dog, and the appeased, in fact the quite melted, Mother Wye.
“Now, boy,” said the doctor, “what's your name?”
“Jack.”
“Jack what? Is that other fellow your father?”
“I reckon maybe he is,” returned Jack, with a gloomy frown. “His name's Baker. He peddles.”
The doctor tugged at his beard and muttered that “at any rate there appeared to be no nonsense about it. But he's looking for you,” he said. “He'll take you away.”
“He's looking for the dog,” said Jack, calmly. “He can't have him.”
The East End Road, which circles the eastern end of the Cattle Ridge, is not at all like the Salem Road. It is wilder and crookeder, to begin with, but that is a superficial matter. It passes through thick woods, dips into gullies, and changes continually, while along the Salem Road there is just the smoky haze on the meadows and dust in the chalices of the flowers; there too the distance blinks stupidly and speculation comes to nothing. But the real point is this: the Salem Road leads straight to Hagar and stops there; the East End Road goes over somewhere among the northern hills and splits up into innumerable side roads, roads that lead to doorways, roads that run into footpaths and dwindle away in despair, roads of which it must be said with sorrow that there was doubt in Salem whether they ever ended or led anywhere. Hence arose the tale that all things which were strange and new, at least all things which were to be feared, came into Salem over the East End Road; just as in Hagar they came down from the Cattle Ridge and went away to the south beyond Windless Mountain.
Along this road, a month later than the last incident, came the black-bearded peddler with his pack, whistling; and indeed his pack, though large, seemed to weigh singularly little; also the peddler seemed to be in a very peaceful frame of mind. And along this road too came the plodding gray horse, with the serious boy driving, and the yellow dog in the rear; all at a pace which slowly but surely overtook the peddler. The peddler, reaching a quiet place where a bank of ferns bordered the brushwood, sat down and waited, whistling. The dog, catching sight of him, came forward with a rush, wagging the back end of himself; and Billy, the gray horse, came gently to a standstill.
“How goes it?” said the peddler, pausing a moment in his whistling. “Pretty good?”
“Mostly.”
The peddler took a cigar-case from his pocket, a cigar wrapped in tin-foil from the case, and lay back lazily among the ferns, putting his long thin hands behind his head. “My notion was,” he murmured, “that it would take a month, a month would be enough.”
The serious boy said nothing, but sat with his chin on his fists looking down the road meditatively.
“My notion was,” went on the peddler, “that a doctor's boy, particularly that doctor's boy, would get into all the best houses around—learn the lay of things tolerably neat. That was my notion. Good notion, wasn't it, Jack?” Jack muttered a subdued assent. The peddler glanced at him critically. “For instance now, that big square house on the hill north of Hagar.”
Jack shook his head. “Nothing in it. Old man, name Map, rich enough, furniture done up in cloth, valuables stored in Hamilton; clock or two maybe; nothing in it.”
“Ah,” said the other, “just so;” and again he glanced critically through his half-closed eyes. “But there are others.” Again Jack muttered a subdued assent.
“Good?”
“Good enough.”
The apparent peddler smoked, quite at his ease among the ferns, and seemed resolved that the boy should break the silence next.
“Are you banking on this business, dad?” said the latter, finally.
“Ah—why, no, Jack, not really. It's a sort of notion, I admit.” He lifted one knee lazily over the other. “I'm not shoving you, Jack. State the case.” A long silence followed, to which the conversation of the two seemed well accustomed.
“I never knew anything like that down there,” nodding in the direction of Salem. “Those people.—It's different.”
“That's so,” assented the apparent peddler, critically. “I reckon it is. We make a point not to be low. Polish is our strong point, Jack. But we're not in society. We are not, in a way, on speaking terms with society.”
“It ain't that.”
“Isn't,” corrected the other, gently. “Isn't, Jack. But I rather think it is.”
“Well,” said Jack, “it's different, and”—with gloomy decision—“it's better.”
The apparent peddler whistled no more, but lay back among the ferns and gazed up at the drooping leaves overhead. The gray horse whisked at the wood-gnats and looked around now and again inquiringly. The yellow dog cocked his head on one side as if he had an opinion worth listening to if it were only called for.
“I suppose now,” said the apparent peddler, softly, “I suppose now they're pretty cosy. I suppose they say prayers.”
“You bet.”.
“You mean that they do, Jack. I suppose,” he went on dreamily, “I suppose the old lady has white hair and knits stockings.”
“She does that,” said Jack, enthusiastically, “and pincushions and mats.”
“And pincushions and mats. That's so.”
The lowing of cattle came up to them from hidden meadows below; for the afternoon was drawing near its close and the cattle were uneasy. The chimney and roof of a farmhouse were just visible through a break in the sloping woods. The smoke that mounted from the chimney seemed to linger lovingly over the roof, like a symbol of peace, blessing the hearth from which it came. The sentimental outcast puffed his excellent cigar meditatively, now and again taking it out to remark, “Pincushions and mats!” indicating the constancy of his thoughts.
The serious boy motioned in the direction of Salem. “I think I'll stay there,” he said. “It's better.”
“Reckon I know how you feel, Jack,—know how you feel. Give me my lowly thatched cottage, and that sort of thing.” After a longer silence still, he sat up and threw away his cigar. “Well, Jack, if you see your way—a—if I were you, Jack,” he said slowly, “I wouldn't go half and half; I'd go the whole bill. I'd turn on the hose and inquire for the ten commandments, that's what I'd do.” He came and leaned lazily on the carriage wheel. “That isn't very plain. It's like this. You don't exactly abolish the old man; you just imagine him comfortably buried; that's it, comfortably buried, with an epitaph,—flourishy, Jack, flourishy, stating”—here his eyes roamed meditatively along Billy's well-padded spine—“stating, in a general way, that he made a point of polish.”
The serious boy's lip trembled slightly. He seemed to be seeking some method of expression. Finally he said: “I'll trade knives with you, dad. It's six blades”; and the two silently exchanged knives.
Then Billy, the gray horse, plodded down the hill through the woods, and the apparent peddler plodded up. At one turn in the road can be seen the white houses of Salem across the valley; and here he paused, leaning on the single pole that guarded the edge. After a time he roused himself again, swung his pack to his shoulder, and disappeared over the crest of the hill whistling.
The shadows deepened swiftly in the woods; they lengthened in the open valley, filling the hollows, climbed the hill to Salem, and made dusky Dr. Wye's little porch and his tiny office duskier still. The office was so tiny that portly Judge Carter of Gilead seemed nearly to fill it, leaving small space for the doctor. For this or some other reason the doctor seemed uncomfortable, quite oppressed and borne down, and remonstrating with the oppression. The judge was a man of some splendor, with gold eye-glasses and cane.
“There really is no doubt about it,” he was saying, with a magnificent finger on the doctor's knee, “no doubt at all.”
The conversation seemed to be most absorbing. The doctor pulled his beard abstractedly and frowned.
The serious boy drove by outside in the dusk, and after a while came up from the bam. He sat down on the edge of the porch to think things over, and the judge's voice rolled on oracularly. Jack hardly knew yet what his thoughts were; and this was a state of mind that he was not accustomed to put up with, because muddle-headedness was a thing that he especially despised. “You don't exactly abolish the old man,” he kept hearing the peddler say; “you just imagine him comfortably buried—with an epitaph—flourishy—stating—”
“Clever, very,” said the judge. “Merriwether was telling me—won't catch him, too clever—Merri-wether says—remarkable—interesting scamp, very.” The doctor growled some inaudible objection.
“Why did he show himself!” exclaimed the judge. “Why, see here. Observe the refined cleverness of it! It roused your interest, didn't it? It was unique, amusing. Chances are ten to one you would n't have taken the boy without it. Why, look here—”
“Stuff!”—Here the doctor raised his voice angrily. “The boy ran away from him, of course.”
“Maybe, doctor, maybe,” said the judge, soothingly. “But there are other things—looks shady—consider the man is known. Dangerous, doctor, dangerous, very. You ought to be careful.” Then the words were a mere murmur.
Jack sat still on the porch, with his chin on his hands. Overhead the night-hawks called, and now and then one came down with a whiz of swooping wings. Presently he heard the chairs scrape; he rose, slipped around to the back porch and into the kitchen.
The little bronze clock in the dining-room had just told its largest stint of hours,—and very hard work it made of it. It was a great trial to the clock to have to rouse itself and bluster so. It did not mind telling time in a quiet way. But then, every profession has its trials. It settled itself again to stare with round, astonished face at the table in the centre of the room.
Jack sat at the table by a dim lamp, the house dark and silent all around him, writing a letter. He leaned his head down almost on a level with the paper.
“I herd him and you,” he wrote in a round hand with many blots. “I lied and so did he I mean dad. I can lie good. Dad sed I must learn the ten comandments. The ten comandments says diferent things. You neednt be afrad. There dont anithing happen cep to me. I do love Mother Wye tru.” The clock went on telling the time in the way that it liked to do, tick-tick-tick. Overhead the doctor slept a troubled sleep, and in Gilead Judge Carter slept a sound sleep of good digestion.
Far off the Salem Road led westward straight to Hagar, and stopped, and the moonlight lay over it all the way; but the East End Road led through the shadows and deep night over among the northern hills, and split up into many roads, some of which did not seem ever to end, or lead anywhere.
Jack dropped from the window skilfully, noiselessly, and slid away in the moonlight. At the Corners he did not hesitate, but took the East End Road.