It was so unlike him, the rebuke—he had so ardently worshipped her, even her faults, which were like shining endowments in his estimation—that for the first time she felt the full poignancy of his alienation. He was no longer hers, loving, regretting, always yearning after her, the unattainable! Had he not said only to-day that neither of them had aught to regret? Was this what he had really felt through the long years of their separation? Was it she who had forfeited him, rather than he who had lost her? She sat quite still, almost stunned by the realization, a vague sense of bereavement upon her. A woman's faith in the constancy of a lover is a robust endowment! It withstands change and time and many a coercive intimation.
"I suppose," she said at length, quite humbly, "it is natural that you should say that to me."
"You asked for it," he replied tersely.
Then they were both silent for a space, looking down at the group on the veranda of the bungalow.
"May I have the honor and pleasure of your company, madam?" Briscoe had asked his wife with fantastic formality.
"You maynot!" she rejoined with a gay laugh.
"And why not?"
"I declare, Ned, you live so much up here in the wilderness, with your bears and deer and catamounts and mountaineers, that you are likely to forget all thebienséanceyou ever knew. Don't you perceive that my duties as chaperon to those lovers should lie nearest my heart?"
Then it was that he turned and cast that comprehending glance at the two in the distant observatory. Knowing how far from Bayne's mind was the emotion, the intention, she ascribed to him, that she would fain foster, his face grew rueful and overcast. He shook his head with disconsolate rebuke. "Oh, you woman, you!"
But the reproach did not strike home. Mrs. Briscoe was quite satisfied to be a woman, and was avowedly seeking to add to the normal subtleties of this state the special craft of a matchmaker.
Briscoe desired to avoid being drawn into any confession of his knowledge of Bayne's attitude of mind, and, aware of his own lack of diplomacy, sheered off precipitately from the subject. He turned, beaming anew, to the little boy who was looking on, cherubically roseate, at the sleek mare and the smart groom at her bit.
"Then, Archibald Royston, Esquire, may I hope thatyouwill favor me?"
Archibald Royston, Esquire, suddenly apprehending in the midst of his absorption the nature of the invitation, gave two elastic bounces straight up and down expressive of supreme ecstasy; then, his arms outstretched, he began to run wildly up and down the veranda, looking in at the doors and windows as he passed, seeking his mother and her permission.
"Oh!" cried Lillian, springing to her feet as she watched the dumb-show at the distance. "They want Archie to go to drive. Oh, how can I make them hear me? I am sure Ned will not take him without permission."
She waved her hand, but the distance was obviously too great for the signal to be understood, and Briscoe's attitude was doubtful and perplexed. There was no time to be lost, for it was growing late, and a postponement, as far as Archie was concerned, seemed inevitable.
"Oh, the poor little fellow will be so disappointed! The mare will be off before I can make them understand."
"Wait," said Bayne authoritatively. He sprang upon the bench, and in this commanding position placed both hands megaphone-like to his lips, and as Archie came running along the veranda again, having descried his mother in the distance, and with outstretched arms bleating forth his eager, unheard appeal, Bayne shouted, his voice clear as a trumpet, "Yes, youmay go!"
Not until he was once more on the floor of the observatory did he realize the form of the permission, and what relish its assumption of authority must give the matchmaking Mrs. Briscoe. Apparently, it did not impress Lillian as they stood together and she smilingly watched the group at the bungalow, when Archie was swung to a seat in the dog-cart beside his host. It seemed for a moment that they were off, but Mrs. Briscoe, with womanly precaution, bethought herself to throw a wrap into the vehicle. Throughout the day the close curtaining mists had resisted all stir of air, and the temperature had been almost sultry. Since the lifting of the vapors, the currents of the atmosphere were flowing freely once more, and the crystal clarity that succeeded was pervaded by an increasing chilliness. Before nightfall it would be quite cold, and doubtless the smart little red coat, gay with its Persian embroideries, would be brought into requisition.
For many a month afterward, whenever Lillian closed her eyes, she saw that little red coat. Shutting out the light, the world, brought neither rest nor darkness; instead, the long flaring vistas of gold and russet foliage and gray crags and flaming sunset remained indelible, and amidst it all one vivid point of scarlet hue as the little red coat was tossed through the air like a red leaf flying in the wind.
Now, as all unprescient she watched the group, she thought again they were gone. But no! Fairy-foot was a handful, even for so capital a whip as Briscoe. He obviously considered that the boy would be more secure stowed on the floor of the vehicle, half under the soft rug, and braced by the firm foot planted on either side against the dash-board.
"How considerate!" the watching mother thought with a glow of gratitude, noting the caution.
Suddenly the groom leaped aside; the splendid mare sprang forward; there was a whirl of wheels, a whorl of rays as the gleaming spokes caught the sunshine, and they were gone indeed!
"Oh!" cried Mrs. Royston, her eyes bright and soft with tenderness, "what a delight for Archie! He fairly adores to go with Ned. He owes it to you this time. You always took little things so much to heart."
"And great ones, too, to my sorrow," he said.
Her face changed. She was trembling once more on the brink of tears. She looked up at him with earnest appeal. "I wish, Julian, that we could forget the past."
"I do not," he returned, stern and grave, gazing far away over the landscape.
"No," she cried in a sudden transport of painful emotion; "you hold it against me like a grudge—a grudge that you despise too much to wreak vengeance for its sake. The past will always live in your memory—you hold it like a sword to my throat. You know that I shall always feel the torture of its edge, but in your magnanimity"—with sarcastic emphasis—"you forbear to thrust in the murderous blade."
"Good God, Lillian!" exclaimed Bayne, losing his balance altogether at the accusation. "How have I arrogated magnanimity, or anything else? I assume nothing! I have sought to efface myself while here, as far as might be. For the sake of all concerned—you, the Briscoes,les convenances, myself—I could not run away at the sight of you, like a whipped hound! But I perceive my error. I will get out of this forthwith. Heaven knows it has been anything but a pleasure!"
"Don't let me stand between you and your friends," she sobbed, weeping now in the reaction of sentiment. "Don't let me drive you away."
"Why not?" He sought relief from the pressure of the circumstances by affecting a lighter tone. "By your own account, you have stampeded three men this afternoon. I shall be the fourth! The fugitives are counting up like Falstaff's 'rogues in buckram.' Are you ready to go now? We are leaving Mrs. Briscoe alone."
He did not offer to assist her to rise. Somehow, he could resist aught, all, save the touch of that little hand. It brought back to him as nothing else the girl he had loved, and who had loved him. Oh, he was sure of it once! This woman was a changeling in some mystic sort—the same in aspect, yet how alien to his ideal of yore!
She did not seem to mark the lapse of courtesy. She sat still, with her broad gray hat tilted back on her head, a soft and harmonious contrast with her golden hair and roseate face. Her ungloved hands were clasped in her lap, her eyes were melancholy, meditative, fixed on the distant mountains. "I wish we might reach some mutual calm thought of the past, like the tranquil unimpassioned brightness of the close of this troubled, threatening day. We don't care now for the clouds that overcast the morning. To attain some quiet sentiment of forgiveness——"
"Iask no pardon," he said curtly.
"Oh!"—she gazed up at him with all her soul in her eyes—"youhave no need!"
Had she been warned in a dream, she could have compassed no surer method of reducing his pride than this self-abnegating generosity. But suddenly an alien sound impinged on the quietude. The sharp note of a rifle shattered the silence, the fragmentary echoes clamoring back from the rocks like a volley of musketry.
"How startling that was!" she exclaimed, turning to look in the opposite direction over the placid valley commanded by the observatory, with the purple mountains encircling the horizon. "How this clear air carries the sound!"
"That was not distant," Bayne observed. "Damp air is a better conductor of sound than a clear atmosphere."
"It was like blasting," she submitted.
"It was a rifle-shot," he discriminated. "A still-hunter, probably. The deer come down from the coverts toward evening to drink. Some rock may have fallen along the river-bank, dislodged by the concussion."
A sense of melancholy was in the air, gathering with the gathering darkness. The light was fading out of the west, and the early autumnal dusk was at hand. Lillian was sensible of an accession of lassitude, a realization of defeat in a cause which she felt now it was futile to have essayed. Why should he forgive? How was reparation possible? She could not call back the Past—she could not assuage griefs that time had worn out long ago, searing over the wounds. She was quite silent as she rose and together they took their way down toward the bungalow. While she flagged now and again, she walked without assistance, though he kept close and ready at her side.
Gladys watched their progress expectantly, but her face fell as they drew near and she could discern their listless expression and manner. She did not await their arrival, but turned, disappointed, within. It was already time to dress for dinner, the ladies habitually observing this formality, although Briscoe often went in knickerbockers till midnight. Lillian paused on the veranda and gazed down the road, winding away into the dusky red flare of the fading west, for the drive must needs be short in this season of early nightfall. There was no sign of approach along its smooth and shadowy curves, and at the end of the long vista, where the jagged verges of crags serrated the serene green sky a star shone, white and splendid, amidst the vanishing vermilion suffusions of the sunset-tide.
V.
In the light of after events, one might wonder if the genial, care-free Edward Briscoe remembered any detail of the discarded arrangement of the previous evening for the transportation of his transitory guest, Frank Dean, to Shaftesville; if he realized that at the moment when the revenue officer would have been starting on the journey, as the host had insistently planned it, he was himself at the turn of the road and just beyond the jutting crag; if he divined that the vibrations of the telephone wire had betrayed the matter to a crafty listening ear on the party-line in the vacant hotel across the ravine—or was the time too short for the consideration? Did he even recognize the significance of the apparition when a swift, erect figure stepped openly from under the shadowy boughs of the balsam firs into the middle of the road, that the bead might be drawn straight? Did he appreciate that the flash is sooner sped than the missile and know his fate before the rifle-ball crashed into his skull!—or was the instant all inadequate and did he enter eternity ere he was well quit of this world?
Frightened by the sudden appearance of the man in the middle of the thoroughfare, the funnel-shaped flare of light, the sharp report of the weapon, the mare, trotting at full speed, swerved, plunged, backed, the reins hanging loose about her heels, her driver having fallen forward upon the dashboard. The dog-cart began to careen to one side as the animal continued to back and rear, deterred from flight by the figure standing still directly in the road. Suddenly she sought to turn in the restricted narrow space, and instantly the wheels were over the verge of the precipice.
All useless were the convulsive efforts of the creature to maintain her footing on the rocky brink, the clutching hoofs, the elastic bounds. With the weight of the vehicle, the dead man leaning heavily on the dashboard, it was but a moment of suspense—then like a thunderbolt the whole went crashing down into the valley, the depth to be conjectured by the considerable interval of time before the sound of rending boughs and surging foliage in the air gave token that the wreck was hurtling through the trees on the levels a thousand feet below.
Two other men, armed with rifles, had sprung from among the firs and stood aghast and listening on the verge of the crag. There was no longer a sound. The tragedy was complete, irrevocable, before a word was uttered.
"'T warn'thim!" gasped the youngest—hardly more than a boy indeed. His broad, beardless face was ghastly white, and his lips trembled as violently as his shaking hand.
"Lawd! That wasEdward Briscoe! What a pity,sure! It war a plumb mistake, Copenny," plained an elder man, whose rifle had not been fired. There was a regretful cadence in his voice akin to tears, and he held his long, ragged red beard in one hand as he peered down into the unresponsive depths.
"You oughter hev made sure afore ye teched the trigger, Copenny, that hewarthe revenuer!" cried the young fellow, Alvin Holvey, with a sudden burst of petulance, despite the tragic realization expressed in his quivering face. "Ye're sech a dead shot that ye could hev spared a minute ter make sure of the revenuer, aforehecould hev pulled a shooting-iron."
The man who had fired the fatal shot had seemed hitherto stunned, silent and motionless. Now he exclaimed in self-justification: "Why, I war sure, plumb sure, I thought. We-uns chased that man Dean clear to Briscoe's house last night—his horse went lame and he got lost from his posse—but when I fund he hed sheltered with Briscoe, we-uns went into the empty hotel ter wait and watch fur him ter go. Not knowin' how many men Briscoe hev got thar, we-uns didn't want ter tackle the house. An' whilst at the hotel the Briscoes' tellyfun-bell rung—ye know it's on a party line with the hotel connection—an' I tuk down the thing they call the receiver an' listened. An' that's jes' the way Briscoe planned it: ter send the revenuer down an hour by sun with the dog-cart an' his fine mare. Shucks! Ef Briscoe war minded ter step into Frank Dean's shoes, he hev jes' hed ter take what war savin' up fur the revenuer, that's all!" Once more he relapsed into silent staring at the brink, balked, dumfounded, and amazed.
Suddenly he seemed to respond to some inward monition of danger, of responsibility. "I be enough of a dead shot ter stop all that dad-burned talk of yourn!" he drawled in a languid, falsetto, spiritless voice, but with an odd intimation of a deadly intention. "Ye both done the deed the same ez ef ye hed pulled the trigger; ye holped ter plan it, an' kem along ter see it done an' lend a hand ef needed. Ye both done the deed the same ez me—that's the law, an' ye know it. That is sure the law in Tennessee."
"Waal, now, Phineas Copenny, 't warn't right nor fair ter we-uns ter clumsy it up so," protested the young mountaineer. "Ef it hed been the revenuer, I'd hev nare word ter say. I'd smack my lips, fur the deed would taste good ter me, an' I'd stand ter it. But this hyar Mr. Briscoe—why, we-uns hev not even got a gredge agin him."
"No, nor nobody else that ever I hearn of. Mr. Briscoe war a plum favorite, far an' nigh," said old Jubal Clenk, the eldest of the party. "But shucks!" he continued, with a change of tone and the evident intention of preserving harmony among the conspirators. "'Twar jes' an accident, an' that's what it will pass fur among folks ginerally. Mr. Briscoe's mare skeered an' shied an' backed off'n the bluff—that air whut the country-side will think. Whenst his body is fund his head will be mashed ter a jelly by the fall, an' nobody kin say he kem otherwise by his death—jes' an accident in drivin' a skittish horse-critter."
Whether it was a sound, whether it was a movement, none of the group was accurately aware. It may have been merely that mesmeric influence of an intently concentrated gaze that caused them suddenly to turn. They beheld standing in the road—and they flinched at the sight—a witness to all the proceedings. A small, a simple, object to excite such abject terror as blanched the faces of the group—a little boy, a mere baby, staring at the men with wide blue eyes and unconjecturable emotions. He had doubtless been enveloped in the rug which had fallen from the vehicle as it first careened in the road, and which now lay among the wayside weeds. His toggery of the juvenile mode made him seem smaller than he really was; his scarlet cloth coat, embroidered in Persian effects, was thick and rendered his figure chubby of aspect; his feet and legs were encased in bulky white leggins; he wore a broad white beaver hat, its crown encircled by a red ribbon, and his infantile jauntiness of attire was infinitely incongruous with the cruel tragedy and his piteous plight. Although perhaps stunned at first by the shock of the fall, he was obviously uninjured, and stood sturdily erect and vigilant. He looked alert, inquiring, anxious, resolved into wonder, silently awaiting developments. His eyes shifted from one speaker to another of the strange party.
"Lord! He'll tell it all!" exclaimed Alvin Holvey, appalled and in hopeless dismay.
"Naw, he won't, now," snarled Copenny rancorously. "Thar will be a way ter stop his mouth."
"Why, he is too leetle ter talk. He don't sense nuthin'," cried old Clenk, with an eager note of expostulation, attesting that he was human, after all. "Don't do nuthin' else rash, Phineas Copenny, fur the love of God!"
Jubal Clenk dropped on one knee in front of the little boy, and the two were inscrutably eyeing each other at close quarters. "Hello, Bubby! Whar's yer tongue? Cat got it?" he asked in a grandfatherly fashion, while the other men looked on, grim and anxious, at this effort to gauge the mentality of the child and their consequent danger from him.
Still staring, the little boy began slowly to shake his head in negation.
"What's yer name, Squair? What's yer name?"
But the child still stared silently, either uncomprehending or perceiving that his safety lay in incompetency.
Clenk rose to his feet in sudden relief. "He don't sense nuthin'! He's too little to talk. He can't tell wuth shucks! We will jes' leave him hyar in the road, an' the folks that find what's down thar in the valley will find him too. I wonder somebody ain't passed a'ready. An' sure we-uns oughter be a-travellin'."
But Holvey revolted against this offhand assumption of confidence. He made a supplemental effort on his own account. "Why don't ye tell yer name, Bubby?" he asked cajolingly.
"'Tause," the child answered abruptly, "I tan't talk."
Copenny burst into sudden sardonic laughter, with wondrous little mirth in the tones, and the other miscreants were obviously disconcerted and disconsolate, while the small schemer, whose craft had failed midway, looked affrighted and marvelling from one to another, at a loss to interpret the mischance.
"Dadburn it!" said the mercurial Clenk, as depressed now as a moment earlier he had been easily elated. "We-uns will jes' hev ter take him along of us an' keep him till he furgits all about it."
"An' when will ye be sure o' that?" sneered Copenny. "He is as tricky as a young fox."
Half stunned by the tremendous import of the tragedy he had witnessed, the child scarcely entered into its true significance in his concern for his own plight. He realized that he was being riven from his friends, his own, and made a feeble outcry and futile resistance, now protesting that he would tell nothing, and now piteously assuring his captors that he could not talk, while they gathered him up in the rug, which covered head and feet, even the flaunting finery of his big, white beaver hat.
In the arms of the grandfatherly Clenk he was carried along the bridle-path in the dulling sunset, and presently dusk was descending on the austere mountain wilderness; the unmeasured darkness began to pervade it, and silence was its tenant. As the party went further and further into the woods, the struggles of the child grew fitful; soon he was still, and at last—for even Care must needs have pity for his callow estate—he was asleep, forgetting in slumber for a time all the horror that he had seen and suffered.
But when he came to himself he was a shivering, whimpering bundle of homesick grief. He wanted his mother—he would listen to naught but assurances that they were going to her right away—right away! It was a strange place wherein he found himself—all dark, save for flaring torches. He could not understand his surroundings, and indeed he did not try. He only rubbed his eyes with his fists and said again and again that he wanted his mother. He was seated on a small stone pillar, a stalagmite in a limestone cavern, where there were many such pillars and pendants of like material hanging from the roof, all most dimly glimpsed in the torch-light against an infinitude of blackness. The men who had brought him hither, and others whom he had not heretofore seen, were busied about a dismantled stone furnace, gathering up such poor belongings as had escaped the wreckings of the revenue force. Now and then a glitter from the fragments of the copper still and the sections of the coils of the worm marked the course their ravages had taken, and all the chill, cavernous air was filled with the sickly odor of singlings and the fermenting mash adhering to the broken staves of the great riven tanks, called the beer-tubs. The moonlight came into this dark place at the further end, for this was one of the many caves among the crags that overhang the Little Tennessee River, and once, looking toward the jagged portal, Archie saw a sail, white in the beams on the lustrous current, and asked if they were going in that boat to his mother, for, he said, he knew that she did not live in this cellar.
"Yes, yes," Clenk assured him. They were making ready to leave now, though not in that boat. "An' look-a-hyar! What a pretty! Ye kin hev this ter play with ef ye will be good."
He led the little boy up to a tallow dip blazing on the head of a barrel, that he might have light to examine the token. It was a small bit of the cavernous efflorescence, which, growing on subterranean walls, takes occasionally definite form, some specimens resembling a lily, others being like a rose; the child tried feebly to be grateful, and put it with care into one of the pockets of his little red coat—his pockets in which he had once felt such plethora of pride!
VI.
When next he saw the river the lunar lustre had dulled on the currents. No more the long lines of shimmering light trailing off into the deep shadow of the wooded banks, no more the tremulous reflection of the moon, swinging like some supernal craft in the great lacustrine sweep where the stream broadens in rounding the point. Now a filmy veil was over all, yet the night was so fine that the light filtered through the mist, and objects were still discernible, though only vaguely visible, like the furnishings of a dream. A rowboat was rocking on the ripples among the boulders at the water's edge. As the child made the perilous descent in the practised clasp of the grandfatherly Clenk, he could look up and see the jagged portal of the cave he had left, high above the river, though not so high as the great, tall deciduous trees waving their lofty boughs on the summit of the cliffs. Certain grim, silent, gaunt figures, grotesquely contorted in the mist, the child's wide blue eyes traced out, as the other moonshiners climbed too down the rugged face of the crag, all burdened with bundles of varying size and unimaginable contents—food, clothing, or such appliances of their craft as the hurried revenue raiders had chanced to overlook. The little boy must have contended with fear in this awesome environment, the child of gentlest nurture, but he thought he was going to his mother, or perchance he could not have submitted with such docility, so uncomplainingly. Only when they had reached the rocky marge of the water and he had been uncoiled from the rug and set upon his feet did he lift his voice in protest.
Clenk had stepped into the boat and seated himself, the oars rattling smartly in the rowlocks, the sound sharp on the misty air, as he laid hold on them. "So far, so good," he exclaimed cheerily.
"Won't they be fur trackin' ofhim?" One of the moonshiners, whom the child had not seen before, seemed disposed to rebuke this easy optimism.
"What fur? They will think Bubby went over the bluff too," Clenk declared definitely.
"There's nuthin' ter show fur it, though," Copenny joined the opposite opinion.
"Nuthin' needed in that mixtry of horseflesh an' human carcass an' splintered wood and leather," argued Clenk.
"Yes, they will hev ter gather up them remains in a shovel," acquiesced Holvey.
The shadowy form of the doubter who had introduced the subject, thick-set, stoop-shouldered, showed in its attitude that he was lowering and ill at ease. "Waal, you-uns hev made a powerful botch of the simple little trick of drawing a bead on a revenuer anyhow. Takin' one man fur another—I never dreamed o' the beat! Copenny war so sure o' the man an' the mare!Inever purtended to know either. Seems ter me ye oughter be willin' ter lis'n ter reason now."
"Waal, let's hear reason, then," Copenny's sardonic falsetto tones rasped on the air, and the little head under the broad white, gayly beribboned hat turned up attentively, as the child stood so low down among the big booted feet of the armed moonshiners.
"Why, how easy it would hev been ter throw su'thin' over the bluff——" the counsellor began.
"Good Lord!" Clenk exclaimed angrily, from his seat in the boat, "ain't ye gotnohuman feelin's, Jack Drann? We-uns never went ter shed the innercent blood nohow. We-uns war loaded fur that tricky revenuer, an' Edward Briscoe war kilt by mistake. An' now ye ter be talkin' 'bout heavin' the leetle, harmless deedie over the bluff!"
"What ails yer hearin'?" retorted Drann angrily. "I saidsu'thin'—his coat, his hat—throwsu'thin'over, ter make folks think he war in the accident, too—mare run away and the whole consarn flopped bodaciously over the bluff! They will scour the kentry fur Bubby ef thar ain't su'thin' positive ter make themsureez he be dead, too."
Jubal Clenk, so readily cast down, meditated dolorously, as he sat still in the boat, on this signal omission in the chain of evidence. "It would sure hev made it all 'pear a heap mo' like an accident," he said disconsolately. Then, with suddenly renewing hopefulness, "But 't ain't too late yet—good many hours 'fore daylight. We kin send the coat an' hat back an' toss them over the bluff long before it is light good."
Thus it was that the moonshiners laid hold on the boy's simple possessions, and thus it was that Archie fought and contended for his own. He clutched at the cuffs as Copenny dragged the sleeves over his wrists; he held on to his hat with both hands, despite the grip of the elastic under his chin, and he stamped and screamed in a manner that he had heretofore known to inspire awe and respect in the nursery and disarm authority. Alack, it had lost its efficacy now! Most of the men took no notice whatever of his callow demonstrations of wrath, though old Clenk, with a curious duality of mental process, laughed indulgently at his antics of infantile rage, despite his own absorptions, his sense of danger, his smart of loss and wreck of prospects.
It was Copenny who undertook to carry the coat and rug back to the spot, and they willingly agreed to this on the score that he knew best the precise locality where the catastrophe had befallen. Secretly, however, he had resolved not to rejoin his companions at a named rendezvous, for he had bethought himself that if all fled but him, remaining in his accustomed home, he would necessarily avoid implication in the crime with them. The boat had been provisioned with a view to their escape by water when the ambush of the revenue officer had been planned, and they were now congratulating themselves on their foresight as they prepared to embark. Clenk had an ill-savored story to tell of the apprehension of a malefactor through the coercion of hunger, constrained to stop and beg a meal as he fled from justice, and Drann had known a man whose neck was forfeited by the necessity of robbing a hen-roost, the cackling poultry in this instance as efficient in the cause of law and order as the geese that saved Rome. Copenny, listening sardonically, could not be thankful for such small favors. His venture as a moonshiner at all events was, so to speak, a side line of employ. He was trained a blacksmith, and had a pretty fair stake in the world, according to the rating of a working-man of this region, now in jeopardy of total loss. The rest had nothing to lose, and as ever and anon they fell to canvassing the opportunities of beginning anew in a fresh place the dubious struggle for bare subsistence, his determination to slip free of them was confirmed. The morrow would see him in his appointed place—nay, he perceived a sure means of hoodwinking any possible suspicion of the authorities by finding a conspicuous position in the searching parties who would go out, he knew, as the night wore on and the alarm was given that the owner of the bungalow had not returned.
The boat with the others embarked was far up the river before the child had ceased to sob and plain for his precious gear. He began to listen curiously to the splash of the oars as they marked time and the boat rode the waves elastically. There was no other sound in all the night-bound world, save once the crisp, sharp bark of a fox came across the water from the dense, dark riparian forests. The mists possessed all the upper atmosphere, but following the boat were white undiscriminated presentments on the sombre surface of the river, elusive in the vapor and suggestive of something swimming in pursuit. Once Archie pointed his mittened hand at this foaming wake, but the question died on his lips as the dank autumnal air buffeted his chill cheek. He shivered in his thin little white linen dress, meant for indoor wear only, with its smart red leather belt clasped low and loose about it, and the hardship of cold and hunger tamed him. He was glad to nestle close to the pasty-faced Holvey, who had not yet recovered the normal glow of complexion, and to stick his yellow head under the moonshiner's arm for warmth while he steered the craft. Indeed, when the boat was at length run into one of the small, untenanted islands and the party disembarked, the little boy began to chirp genially and to laugh for joy as a fire was kindled amidst the rocks and brush of the interior, invisible from the shores. He basked in the blaze and grew pink and gay, and even sought to initiate a game of peek-a-boo from behind his white mittens with one of the ruffians; and although a bit dashed when the surly, absorbed eyes stared unresponsively at him, he plucked up spirit to ask if they were going to have supper, and to say that he wanted some, and that he was a very good boy.
"Breakfast, Bub—this is the 'tother end of the day," Clenk explained, preparing to broil slices of meat on the coals. There was soon a johnny-cake baked on a board set up before the flames, but the pork was evidently a new proposition to the small captive, and although he eyed it greedily he could make no compact with it. Now and again he licked with a grimace of distaste the unsavory chunk given him, and desisted, to watch with averse curiosity the working jaws of the men and the motion of the muscles in their temples as they hastily gobbled the coarse fare which they cut with their clasp-knives. The fire duplicated their number with their shadows, and occasionally he eyed these semblances speculatively as they stretched on the sandy ground or skulked in the underbrush behind their unconscious principals. Once or twice he lifted his own arm with an alert gesture in imitative energy, and looked over his shoulder at his squat little image, to note its obedience to his behest. One might have thought he had put the greater part of the fat meat in smears about his rosy cheeks and fresh baby lips, and certainly the pleated bosom of his immaculate linen suit had received a generous remembrance. The remnant was still in his hand when he began to nod in the drowsy influences of the heat of the fire; he had collapsed into insensibility long before the coals were raked apart to dull and die. He had no knowledge of the fact when he was borne away by Holvey, who had been delegated to assume charge of him, and who sulked in disaffection under the responsibility and his doubts of the success of their plan.
Once more in the boat, the chill of the dank river atmosphere awakened little Archie. He sent forth a peevish, imperative call, "Mamma!" so shrill and constraining, reaching so far across the dark water, that a hand before his lips smothered its iteration in his throat. "Bee-have!" Holvey hissed in his ear, and as the child struggled into a sitting posture his involuntary bleat, "Mamma!" was so meekened by fear and plaintive recollection and submissive helplessness that it could scarcely have been distinguished a boat's length distant.
The moon was down, but the morning star was in the sky, splendid, eloquent, charged with a subtle message expressed in no other sidereal scintillation, heralding not only the dawn, but palpitant with the prophecy and the assurance of eternal day. There was a sense of light about the eastern mountains, albeit so heavily looming. And suddenly, all at once, the faces of the shadowy men who had borne him hither were fully revealed, and as he sat and shivered in his thin little dress he eyed them, first one for a long time, and then another, and he shivered throughout with a fear more chilly than the cold. Perhaps it was well for the equilibrium of his reason that fear so acute could not continue. He presently began to cough, and when he sought to reply to a question he could only wheeze. An infantile captive wields certain coercions to fair treatment peculiar to nonage. The moonshiners had suddenly before their eyes the menace of croup or pneumonia, and, to do them justice, the destruction of the child had not been part of their project. There ensued gruff criminations and recriminations among them before the baby was rolled up in a foul old horse-blanket, and a dose of the pure moonshine whisky, tempered with river water, was poured down his throat. It may have been the slumber induced by this potent elixir, or it may have been the effects of fever, but he was not conscious when they reached the forks of the Tennessee and were pulling up the Oconalufty River. He only knew vaguely when once more they had disembarked, though now and then he sought vainly to rouse himself to the incidents of a long march. Finally he was still and silent so long in old Clenk's arms as to excite immediate fears. Now and again as they forged along at the extreme limit of their endurance they took the time to shake up the poor baby and seek by suggestion to induce him to say that he felt better. But his head had begun to roll heavily from side to side, and they could not disguise from themselves that he looked at them with uncomprehending eyes, and, left to himself, sank immediately into stupor that simulated slumber.
"Fellows," said old Clenk drearily, "I believe this leetle chap be agoin' ter make a die of it!"
But he was still alive the following morning when the chill, clouded day broke, and a happy thought occurred to old Clenk. Throughout his illness the child had instinctively refused the coarse food proffered him, and this was brought anew to their notice when they paused to eat their scanty rations in a deep, secluded dell. A stream ran foaming, crystal clear, amidst great rocks hemming it in on every side, save where a jungle of undergrowth made close to the verge. A sudden sound from these bosky recesses set every nerve of the fugitives a-quiver. Only the tinkle of a cow-bell, keen and clear in the chill rare air! There was the exchange of a sheepish grin as the tones were recognized, when suddenly Clenk arose, a light as of inspiration on his dull old face. "Soo, cow, soo!" he called softly; then listened intently for a responsive stir in the bushes. A muttered low—and he pressed into the covert in the direction of the sound. The docile animal lifted her head at an approach, then calmly fell a-grazing again. She let down her milk readily, though looking over her shoulder questioningly during the process, for Clenk was no practised hand. He contrived, however, to fill a "tickler" in which there was a small residue of whisky, which possibly aided the efficacy of the milk, for the child was perceptibly revived after the first draught was forced down his throat, and when an hour or two afterward the bottle was put to his lips he voluntarily drank a few swallows with obvious relish.
"Ye leetle old toper," cried Clenk delightedly, waxing jocose in his relief, "ye been swindling me! Ye hev been playin' sick to trick me out 'n this fine milk punch!"
Archie did not comprehend the banter, but he smiled feebly in response to the jovial tone, and after a time babbled a good deal in a faint little voice about a train of steam-cars, exponent of a distant civilization, that with a roar of wheels and clangor of machinery and scream of whistles and clouds of smoke went thundering through the wild and wooded country. To the old man's delight, he sought to lift himself to a sitting posture in Clenk's arms, and asked if they were to travel soon on the "choo-choo train." Yes, indeed, he was assured, and he seemed to experience a sort of gratified pride in the prospect. With this fiction in mind, he presently fell into a deep and refreshing slumber.
Suddenly the child was all himself again, glad, hopeful, expectant, with the sense of being once more under a roof, touched by a woman's hand. Then he looked keenly into the face before him—such a strange face! He was tempted to cry out in terror; but the mind is plastic in early youth: he had learned the lesson that now his protests and shrieks availed naught. A strange face, of a copper hue, with lank black hair hanging straight on both sides, a high nose, a wide, flat, thin-lipped mouth, and great, dark, soft eyes amidst many wrinkles. He could not have thus enumerated its characteristics, nor even described its impression on his mind; but he realized its fundamental difference from all the faces he had ever seen, and its unaccustomed aspect appalled him. He was petrified by his uncomprehending amazement and an intensity of grief that was not meet for his tender years in this extreme. He could hardly realize his own identity. He did not seem himself, this child on the floor in front of a dull wood fire, squalid, wrapped in an old horse-blanket, facing this queer woman, sitting opposite him on the uneven flagging of the hearth.
All at once his fortitude gave way. He broke forth into sobs and cries; his heart was heavy with the sense of desertion, for he wept not for his home, his mother, his kind friends, Ned and Gad-ish—on these blessings he had lost all hold, all hope. He mourned for his late companions, forsooth!—the big men, the boat, the river, the star. They had so cruelly forsaken him, and here he was so poignantly unfamiliar and helpless. When the woman held out a finger to him and smiled, he bowed his head as he wept and shook it to and fro that he might not see her, for her yellow teeth had great gaps among them, and as she laughed a strange light came into her eyes, and he was woe—woe!—for his comrades of the rowlocks and the Tennessee River.
It would have seemed a strange face to others as well as to the poor baby. For this was indeed an Indian woman. A late day, certainly, for a captive among the Cherokees, but the moonshiners felt that they had scored a final victory when they left the little creature within the Qualla Boundary, the reservation where still lingers a remnant of that tribe, the "Eastern Band," on the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains, a quaint survival of ancient days amidst the twentieth century. The moonshiners had represented the little boy as the son of one of their party, recently a widower. They stated that they were seeking work among the laborers employed in a certain silver mine beyond the Qualla Boundary, and that they had lost his kit with the rest of his clothes in the Oconalufty River hard by. Leaving some goods, purchased at a cross-roads store on the way, to supply this need, with a small sum of money for his board in advance, and fixing an early day for their return, they departed.
Their story excited no suspicion at Quallatown: the craft of the Cherokees is an antiquated endowment, and has not kept pace with modern progress. Even the woman, who arrogated a spirit of prophecy and had long practised the devices of a fortune-teller, thus accustomed to scan the possibilities and in some degree versed in the adjustment of the probabilities, accorded the homely verisimilitude of their worldly-wise representations the meed of a simple and respectful credulity. The mountaineers were ignorant indeed in their sort, but far too sophisticated to entertain aught but the most contemptuous disbelief in her pretensions of special foresight and mysterious endowment. They did not fear her discrimination, and told their story, through an interpreter, with a glib disregard of any uncanny perspicacity on her part. She was one of the many Indians of the reservation who speak no English. Her cabin was far from Quallatown, and indeed at a considerable distance from any other dwelling. With her and her few associates, the moonshiners thought the child would soon forget his name, his language, and his terrible experience, and they promised themselves that when all was buried in oblivion they would come and reclaim him and place him more suitably among themselves, and see to it that he should have some chance, some show in the world to make a man of himself. All of this had served to soothe the vague pricks of conscience, which from time to time had harassed them as the attractions of the child began to make an impress even on their indurated hearts, and all was forgotten as soon as they caught the first glimpse of the red clay embankment of the new railroad, crawling across the valley country far away in one of the adjoining States; for they sought employment in the construction gangs here, and the silver mines of their pretended destination held all its treasures unmolested for any pick or shovel of their wielding.
VII.
The discovery of the catastrophe came late to the inmates of the bungalow on the crag. The suave resplendent sunset drew slowly to a majestic close. The color deepened and glowed in the red west, even while the moon made speed to climb the eastern mountains. Long burnished silver shafts were all aslant in the woods, the dense autumnal foliage still visibly russet and yellow, before Mrs. Briscoe came out on the veranda where Bayne lounged in the swing, although no longer able to scan the pages of the magazine in his hand.
"Don't you think it is odd that Ned is so late?" she asked.
"I don't know his habit," he rejoined carelessly. "But it is almost as light as day in the road."
"He is usually so particular about detaining the servants," she said uneasily, evidently a bit disconcerted. "Dinner has been ready to serve for nearly an hour."
She returned indoors after a little, but Bayne still swung languidly to and fro, all unprescient of the impending disclosure. Presently he glanced through the window of the hall near at hand, noting how the tints of the pretty gowns of the two women now before the fire imparted a rich pictorial effect to the interior, the one costume being of a canary tint, with bretelles and girdle of brown velvet, while Mrs. Briscoe's striking beauty was accentuated by the artistic blending of two blues. In the interval, while his attention was diverted from the scene without, a change had supervened there, and he experienced a sudden disquieting monition as he observed that the groom, who had been hovering in the road at some distance, had been joined by another stable-man, and that the butler, easily distinguishable from the others in the gathering gloom by his white shirt front, was swiftly crossing the lawn toward them. Bayne sprang from the swing, leaped silently from the veranda into the grass, and walked quickly toward the group. They had already descried his approach, and eagerly met him half way—in a state verging on panic, he found to his own fright and dismay.
Something had happened, they averred. Mr. Briscoe was never late like this. He had too much consideration for his household. He would not risk occasioning Mrs. Briscoe anxiety. He would not keep little Archie out in the night air—he was very particular about little Archie. Oh, Fairy-foot was all right—there was not a horse in Tennessee that Mr. Briscoe could not handle. They had no fear at all about the mare. But after Mr. Briscoe had driven away, the groom who had been ordered to investigate the hotel had found signs of intrusion in the vacant building. Broken victuals were on the hearth of the serving-room adjoining the great dining-hall, and an old slouched hat was lying in that apartment, evidently dropped inadvertently near one of the tables. A rude lantern with a candle burned down almost to the socket was in an upper chamber, usually illuminated by acetylene gas, as was all the building. Bayne remembered, according the circumstance a fresh and added importance, the fleeing apparition in the vacant hotel that had frightened Lillian, and Mrs. Briscoe's declaration that a light had flashed the previous night from the interior of the deserted building. But this intrusion was not necessarily of inimical significance, he argued. Tramps, perhaps, or some belated hunter stealing a shelter from the blinding fog, or even petty thieves, finding an unguarded entrance—it might mean no more. In fact, such intrusion was the normal incident of any vacant house in remote seclusion, unprotected by a caretaker. But this reasoning did not convince the servants. Something had happened, they reiterated; something terrible had happened!
Bayne, flouting fear as a folly, yet himself feeling the cold chill of dismay, dared not dismiss their anxieties as groundless. He hastily arranged for a patrol of the only road by which Briscoe could return, incongruously feeling at the moment absurd and shamefaced in view of his host's indignation and ridicule should he presently appear. Bayne had ordered the phaeton with the intention of himself rousing the country-side and organizing a search when, to his consternation, the two ladies, who had observed the colloguing group, issued on the veranda, frantic with terror, pale and agonized. Both had grasped the fact of disaster, albeit unformulated, yet both hoped against hope.
"Take me with you!" Lillian cried, seizing Bayne's wrist in a grip like steel. "Take me to my child!"
He could not be rid of her importunacy, and he came to think it was well that the two should be separated, for Mrs. Briscoe had not abandoned all self-control, and her gallant struggle for composure appealed for his aid.
"No," she had said firmly; "Ned would expect me to wait for him here. Dead or alive, he will come back to me here."
He was glad to get Lillian out of her sight and hearing. With every muscle relaxed, almost collapsed, curiously ghastly in her gay gown, she was lifted bodily into the vehicle, repeating constantly with bloodless lips and a strange, false, mechanical voice, "Take me to my dead child!"
Once as they spun swiftly through the misty sheen and dewy shadow, the moisture-laden boughs that thrust across the narrow roadway now and again filliping them on the cheeks with perfumed showers, she turned that death-smitten face toward him and said in her natural, smooth tones, "You have your revenge at last. It couldn't be a heavier blow!"
"I want you to be still!" he cried with vehement rudeness. "I can't drive straight if you rattle me. I am taking you to your child."
And once more broke forth the eerie shrilling anew: "Take me to my child! Take me to my dead child!"
At the first house that Bayne roused, he was encumbered and harassed by her strange intolerance that they should speak of Briscoe at all; for the summer sojourner was a favorite with his humble neighbors, and a great tumult of concern ensued on the suggestion that he had encountered disaster in some sort.
It all seemed to the jealous mother-heart to minimize her own sacred grief. "But he had my child with him, my dead child!" she would shrill out. And the slow rustic's formulation of a suggestion or a plan must needs tarry in abeyance as he gazed awestruck at this ghastly apparition, decked in trim finery, mowing and wringing her hands, shown under the hood of the phaeton in the blended light of the moon and the mountaineer's lantern, while his household stood half-clad in the doorway and peered out, mute and affrighted, as at a spectre.
The scanty population of the district turned out to the last man. The woods of the vicinity were pervaded with exploring parties, now and again hallooing their signals, till the crags rang with the melancholy interchange of hail and hopeless response. In fact, the night was nearly spent before a hunter, roused by the echoing clamors, joined the search with the statement that he had been at a "deer stand" in the valley during the afternoon, and had noted at a distance some object crash down from the summit of a certain crag. He had fancied it only a fragment of the rock falling, and had not the curiosity to leave his occupation and go so far to investigate the nature of a circumstance seemingly of so little significance.
Thus it came about that the inquisition of the coroner's jury resulted in a verdict of death by accident. It was supposed that the little child's body was crushed indistinguishably in the mangled mass of horse and man, themselves scarcely to be disintegrated in the fall from so stupendous a height. The big white beaver hat of the child was found floating on the surface of a deep pool hard by, half quagmire, half quicksand, and would in itself have sufficed to dispel any doubts of his fate, had doubt been entertained. The burial was accomplished as best might be, and the dolorous incident seemed at an end. But throughout the dry, soft Indian summer the little boy's jaunty red coat swung in the wind, unseen, unheeded, on the upper boughs of a tree in the valley, where it had chanced to lodge when the treacherous Copenny had cast it forth from the bluff above to justify the hypothesis of the fall of the little fellow from those awful heights.
Gradually the catastrophe ceased to be the paramount sensation of the country-side. Bayne's interests of necessity had drawn him back to his city office. He had remonstrated against the decision of the two bereaved women to remain in the bungalow for a time. He had advocated change, travel, aught that might compass a surcease of the indulgence of sorrow and dreary seclusion, that are so dear and so pernicious to the stricken heart. But in their affliction the two clung together and to the place endeared by tender associations of the recent habitation of the beloved and vanished. They said that none could feel for them as each for the other, and, in fact, their awful tragedy had cemented an affection already almost sisterly. Thus the bungalow caged through the opening of wintry weather these tenants of woe who had come like the birds for sunshine and summer only. Since the community continued in absolute ignorance that any crime had been committed, there was no sense of insecurity or apprehension of danger, other than might menace any country house, isolated and secluded in situation. The normal precautions were taken, the household was strengthened, and Mrs. Marable, Lillian's aunt, or rather her uncle's wife, who had come to her at the first news of her affliction, had consented to remain during her stay. Owing to the discovery of the intrusion into the hotel, with no other fear than material injury to the property by frisky boys of the vicinity, the management had installed there a caretaker with his family, who was also, as weather favored, to superintend some repairs to the building. It had been arranged by Bayne, previous to his departure, that the eldest son, a stalwart youth of twenty, should sleep in a room at the bungalow, having his rifle loaded and pistols at hand, provided against any menace of disturbance. Thus the winter closed in upon a seclusion and solitude of funereal intimations.
The winds were loosed and rioted through the lonely recesses of the craggy ravines and the valley with a wild and eerie blare; the leaves, rustling shrilly, all sere now, so long the weather had held dry, fled in myriads before the gusts. Soon they lay on the ground in dense masses, and in the denudation of the trees the brilliant tints of the little coat, swinging so high in the blast, caught the eye of a wandering hunter. At first sight, he thought it but a flare of the autumnal foliage, and gave it no heed, but some days afterward its persistence struck his attention. It seemed a tragic and piteous thing when he discovered its nature. He cut the tree down, too high it was lodged for other means to secure it, and after the county officials had examined it, he brought it to the mother.
Over it Lillian shed such tears as have bedewed the relics of the dead since first this sad old world knew loss, since first a grave was filled. How unavailing! How lacerating! How consoling! She began to feel a plaintive sympathy for all the bereaved of earth, and her heart and mind grew more submissive as she remembered that only for this cause Jesus wept, albeit a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."
The little coat, so gayly decorated, reminded her of another coat of many colors, its splendor testimony of the gentlest domestic affection, brought stained with blood to another parent long ago, to interpret the cruel mystery of a son's death. And after all these centuries she felt drawn near to Jacob in the tender realization of a common humanity, and often repeated his despairing words, "I shall go down into the grave unto my son mourning."
Then her heart was pierced with self-pity for the contrast of his gratuitous affliction with her hopeless grief. So happy in truth was he, despite his thought of woe, that he should have lamented as dead his son, who was so full of life the while, whose future on earth was destined to be so long and so beneficent. She spoke of this so often and so wistfully that it seemed to Gladys to precipitate an illusion, which afterward absorbed her mind to the exclusion of all else.
VIII.
One sinister day when the slate-hued clouds hung low, and the valley was dark and drear with its dense leafless forests, when the mountains gloomed a sombre purple and no sound but the raucous cawing of crows broke upon the sullen air, Lillian's paroxysms of grief seemed to reach a climax. Their intensity alarmed her two companions, and the forced composure and latent strength of character of Gladys were tried to the utmost to sustain her own equilibrium. But as the afternoon wore away Lillian grew calmer, though her mind never deviated from the subject. The trio had ceased to sit in the large reception hall, for its gun-rack and rods and reels, its fur rugs, its trophies of sport, its mandolin and flute and piano, were now pathetically reminiscent of the vanished presence of its joyous and genial owner. They used instead the small library which opened from it, where a spacious bay-window gave ample light in the dreary days, and the big wood fire sent its flash and fragrance to the remotest corner. It filled with a rich glow the fabric of the little red coat as the mother held the sleeve to her lips and then turned it to readjust the cuff creased in folding. "He used to look so pretty in it. My beauty! My baby! My own!" she cried out in a voice muffled, half-smothered, by her choking throat. "And he thought it so fine! He valued it beyond all his other possessions," she continued presently with a melancholy smile, even while the tears, so bitter that they stung her cheeks, coursed down her face; for she had begun to find a languid, sad pleasure now and then in discursive reminiscence, and Gladys, who knew the little fellow so well, could respond with discretion and stimulate this resource for the promotion of calm and resignation. "You remember, Gladys, don't you, how he delighted in these pockets? You were with me when he first got the coat. He doubted if he were really going to have pockets, because there were none in his little white reefer. Do you remember how he looked when I lifted the flap—isn't the embroidery lovely?—and put his dear little hand into his first pocket? How surprised he was when I showed him this pocket between the facing and the lining! I wanted him to have enough pockets—he admired them so! He had never dreamed of finding one here. I told him it was his inside pocket—he called it his 'shy pocket.'"
"A good name for it, too," commented Gladys. "Nobody would ever think to find a pocket there."
Lillian had suddenly ceased to speak. She had suited the action to the word and slipped her own fingers into the pocket. There was something within. She drew it forth, startled, her pale face all contorted and ghastly. It was a bit of stone, of white stone, fashioned by curious nature in the similitude of a lily, wrought in the darkness, the silence of the depths of the earth. Lillian had previously seen such things; she recognized the efflorescence of a limestone cavern. She sprang up suddenly with a scream that rang through the room with the force and volume of a clarion tone.
"This child has been in a cave!" she shrilled, remembering the raid on the moonshiners' cavern. "He is not dead. He is stolen,stolen!"
The logic of the possibilities, cemented by her renewal of frantic hope, had constructed a stanch theory. She was reasoning on its every phase. The coercion of this significant discovery had suggested the truth. "This coat was left as a blind, a bluff, to cover the tracks of a crime. Gladys, Gladys, think—think!"
But poor Gladys, in her deep mourning gown, all her splendid beauty beclouded by grief, sadly shook her head, unconvinced. The child had possibly found the stone, she argued.
"Would he not have shared his joy with every creature in the household?" demanded Lillian. "Did he ever have a thought that I did not know?"
"It might have been given to him," Gladys sadly persisted.
"Remember his disposition, Gladys, his grateful little heart. He would have worn us all out, showing the gift and celebrating the generosity of the giver. How flattered he was, always, to be considered! He never seemed in the least to care for the value of the thing. He would cherish an empty spool from a friend's hand. It was wonderful how he loved to be loved. I feel sure, Iknow, that coat was taken from him; and he is alive,stolen."
And from this conviction she would not depart. It was a folly, a frenzy, her two friends contended. Its indulgence would threaten her sanity. They besought her to consider anew. The discovery of such a stone in this mountain region was altogether devoid of significance. Right reason and religion alike dictated submission to the decrees of Providence.
These arguments were all thrown away. Neither could urge aught to restrain her. With a swift strength of gait that seemed amazing to those who had witnessed her feeble dragging about the house for weeks past, Lillian flashed through the door, and suddenly there was the keen tinkle of a bell in the darkening, chill spaces of the unused hall. The other two, startled, appalled, as in the contemplation of the aberrations of acute mania, scarcely knowing whether to follow or to call for help, remained motionless, gazing at each other in pallid agitation, awaiting developments, of which they could divine naught.
Lillian, however, was perfectly calm as she called up "Long Distance" and gave the address of Julian Bayne in the city of Glaston—the number of his office and his residence as well.
The two women in the firelight glanced at each other in mute significance. Then Lillian urged the operator at Shaftesville to the utmost diligence. "Find him wherever he is. Send special messenger. Get him to the 'phone at once. Emergency call! Make them understand that at the Glaston exchange."
Mrs. Marable, a little, precise, wrinkled old lady, with a brown taffeta gown and a Marie Stuart lace cap, cherished the traditions of the old school of propriety, and the controlling influence proved strong even amidst this chaos of excitements. As Mrs. Royston returned in a state of absolute exaltation to the fireside, "Lillian," said Mrs. Marable coldly, "the officers of the law are the proper parties for you to appeal to, if you are going to pursue this obsession. Why should you call up that—man? Why don't you call the sheriff of the county?"
"Because I want Julian Bayne. I believe in him! I can trust him! It is almost like the hand of omnipotence—there is help in the very thought of him."
There were no more tears. She sat strong, elate, her head held high, her hands folded calmly on the crape pleats of the black gown she wore for the child's sake, ready to wait the evening through. But there was a prompt response. When the telephone-bell jarred out suddenly in the dim stillness of the hall, Gladys sprang up with a sharp cry, her hands to her ears, as if to shut out the sound. But Lillian ran lightly out of the room, and the two heard in wonder the sure vibrations of her clear composed accents. "Yes, Long Distance, this is Mrs. Royston." Then suddenly her tones were pervaded with embarrassment: "Oh, Mr.JohnBayne.... Oh, the father of Mr. Julian Bayne.... No, no, no commands.... Thank you very much. Only the present address of Mr. Julian Bayne."
Once more the two in the library exchanged a glance expressive of more than either would have been willing to put into words. For there was a very definite interval of delay at the telephone, and it would need no sorcerer to divine that the father might deem that this lady, who had so signally befooled his son heretofore, had no beneficent concern to serve with his address. But the old gentleman was evidently the pink of punctilio. Moreover, Julian Bayne had already proved himself man enough to be safely chargeable with his own affairs.
"At Crystal?... Thirty miles from Shaftesville?... Telephone exchange there?... So much obliged! Good-by!"
The bitter disappointment! The torturing delay! Gladys dreaded to witness their effects on Lillian, baffled at the outset in this miserable delusion that her child still lived, because of a bit of stone in the pocket of a coat he had worn. It would debilitate her as completely as if her belief were founded on cogent reason. But Lillian, with a singularly fresh aspect, with a buoyant energy, swept into the room after calling up Crystal, cool, collected, as competent of dealing with delay and suspense as factors in her plan as if it were some commonplace matter of business, and naturally dependent on the contingencies which environ the domain of affairs. The lamps came in and filled the room with a golden glow, as she sat in a majestic assurance that gave her an aspect of a sort of regal state. Her hair, ill-arranged, disordered in lying down throughout the day in her reclining chair, showed in its redundance the splendor of its tint and quality; her face, lately so wan and lean and ghastly, was roseate, and the lines had strangely filled out in soft curves to their wonted contour; her hands lay supple and white and quiet in her lap, with not a tense ligament, not a throbbing fibre—delicate, beautiful hands—it seemed odd to her companions to think how they had seen her wring them in woe and clench them in despair. Her black gown with its heavy folds of crape had an element of incongruity with that still, assured, resolved presence, expressing so cheerful a poise, so confident a control of circumstance. She did not expend herself in protest when at ten o'clock they besought her to go to bed, to be called should the telephone-bell ring. Her negation was so definite that they forbore futile importunacy. She did not even waste her strength in urgency when they declared that they would keep the vigil with her. She merely essayed a remonstrance, and, since it was obviously vain, she desisted. She would not discuss the theme. She had no words. It even seemed that she had no thoughts, no fears, no plans. She was annulled in waiting—waiting for the moment, the opportunity to take action. While the time went by, she sat there as under a spell of suspended animation, fresh, clear, capable, tireless, silent. The housemaid came in once and mended the fire, but later Gladys, mindful of the curiosity of servants, forbore to ring the bell and threw on the logs herself; then sat down to gaze again into the depths of the coals, flickering to a white heat at the end of the glowing red perspective, and wonder what was to come to them all—indeed, what was this strange thing that had already befallen them in the obsession of this silent woman, who sat so still, so suddenly endued with vigor, so brilliant with health and freshness, out of a state of mental anguish bordering on nervous prostration? Was it all fictitious?—and was there something terrible to ensue when it should collapse? And what action was incumbent on her hostess, left to face this problem in this lonely country house in the dead hours of night?
IX.
The wind had risen; the swaying of the great trees outside was partially visible as well as drearily audible to the group, for Gladys had postponed ordering the shutters closed, and then had forgotten them. The gigantic dim shapes of the oaks surged to and fro in an undiscriminated shadowy turmoil. It was a dark night, and cloudy. Vast masses of vapor were on the march, under the coercion of the blast that followed fast and scourged and flouted the laggards. Mrs. Marable noted now and again a light and tentative touch on the panes, and began to wonder how far the illumined window could be seen down the road. Was it not calculated to allure marauders and nighthawks to this lonely house? She was moved to hope that the stalwart son of the hotel caretaker, who occupied a room at the bungalow for the greater security of its occupants, was not a heavy sleeper; though from the stolid, phlegmatic appearance of the young man, of a sluggish temperament, she drearily thought it possible that he could be roused by no less means than applying a torch to his bed furniture to bring him out in a light blaze. She experienced a great revulsion of relief when she began to recognize the mysterious sound that had attracted her attention. It was sleet—no longer slyly touching the glass here and there, but dashing with all the force of the wind in tinkling showers against it. The sound had its chilly influence even before the warm fire.
Suddenly the shock of the bell, jangling out its summons in the dark cold hall! Again Lillian's composed, swift exit in response. Crystal had answered, and here was Mr. Julian Bayne at the hotel and on the wire. Could he come to her at once, at her utmost need, and by the first train? Oh! (at last a poignant cadence of pain) there was no train? Crystal was not on a railroad at all? (A pause of silent, listening expectancy, then the keen vibration of renewed hope.) Oh, could he? Could he really drive across country? But wasn't it too far? Oh, a fast horse? Fifty miles? But weren't the roads dreadful?
"Oh—oh, Gladys, he has rung off! He was in such a hurry I could hardly understand him. I could hear him calling out his orders in the hotel office to have his horse harnessed, while he was talking to me."
The effort was triumphantly made, and Julian Bayne was coming, but as she returned from the chill hall to the illumined, warm room the tinkle of ice on the window-pane caught her attention for the first time.
"Snow?" she said, appalled; then, listening a moment: "And there is sleet! I wonder if it is more than a flurry."
She ran to the window, but, already frozen, the sash refused to rise. She pressed her cheek to the pane and beheld aghast a ghostly and sheeted world, so fast had the snowflakes fallen, and still the sleet sent its crystal fusillade against the glass.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, "Julian Bayne can never come safely through this ice storm and up the mountain. Listen—listen! It is hailing now! Oh, he will break his neck! Remember what a wild and savage thing it is that Julian Bayne calls a fast horse! He will lose his way in the woods and freeze to death; and after all, it is perhaps for nothing. I can wait—I can wait—time is notsoessential. Oh, I will postpone his coming! I will call him up again! Run, Gladys, ring the bell! Call up Long Distance! I can't get there quickly enough."
And indeed it seemed some feeble old woman hirpling through the shadows, rather than the vigorous commanding presence of a few minutes ago. Gladys felt that the reaction was ominous as Lillian held the receiver with a hand that shook as with palsy. All had feared the usual delay, but while they were still in the hall the bell jangled, and the night-clerk of the hotel in Crystal responded—little to a cheering effect to the listener, though of this he was unaware. Mr. Bayne had already set out, he stated glibly. He must be five miles away by this time (the clerk evidently thought that he pleased his interlocutor by his report of the precipitation with which Mr. Bayne had obeyed her summons). Mr. Bayne was a good judge of horse-flesh, and the clerk would venture to say that he had never handled the ribbons over a higher-couraged animal than the one he had between the shafts to-night. Pretty well matched, horse and driver—ha! ha! ha! If anything could get through the ice-storm to-night, it was those two! Oh, yes, it had been snowing hard at Crystal for two hours past.
So he rang off jauntily, fancying that Julian Bayne's presence was much desired at some house-party or romantic elopement, or other lightsome diversion in the upper country.
"How could I? How could I, Gladys?" Lillian said again and again, white, wild-eyed, and haggard, so limp and nerveless that she could not have reached the library had not the other ladies supported her between them, half carrying her to her reclining chair. "You both think I was wrong, don't you?" She looked up at them with agonized eyes, pleading for reassurance.
"Well, dear, time is not an element of importance just now, it would seem, to be considered against other disadvantages—so many weeks having already passed. A day or two more would not have mattered," returned Mrs. Marable, fatally candid.
Once again the blast drove against the windows with elemental frenzy, shaking the sashes, that being hung loosely, rattled in their casings. No more the dark, glossy spaces between the long red curtains reflected fragmentary bits of the bright, warm room within, or gave dull glimpses of the bosky grove and the clouded sky without. The glass was now blankly white, opaque, sheeted with ice, and only the wind gave token how the storm raged. It was indeed a wild night for a drive of fifty miles through a mountain wilderness, over roads sodden with the late rains, the deep mire corrugated into ruts by the wheels of travel and now frozen stiff.
But the roads might well be hopelessly lost under drifts of snow, and the woods were as uncharted as a trackless ocean. Many water-courses were out of the banks with the recent floods. Gladys remembered that the county paper had chronicled the sweeping away of several bridges; others were left doubtless undermined, insecure, trembling to their fall. Julian would be often constrained to trust his life to his plucky horse, swimming when out of his depth, and dragging after him, as best he might, the vehicle, heavy with its iron fixtures, and reeking with the water and the tenacious red clay mire. And then, too, the mountain streams were beset with quick-sands—indeed, every detail of the night journey was environed with danger. He could scarcely be expected to win through safely, and Gladys felt a rush of indignation that he should have attempted the feat. Must a man be as wax in a woman's hands—especially a woman whom he knew unreliable of old, who had failed him when his whole heart was bound up in her? At her utmost need, she had said, to be sure, but he had not canvassed the urgency of the necessity, he had not even asked a question! He had simply rushed forth into the blizzard. But even while she contemned his foolhardiness, she was woe for Lillian!—to entertain a hope, even though the folly of illusion, as an oasis in her deep distress, a sentiment so revivifying, so potent, that it seemed to raise her as it were from the dead; and yet within the hour to be battered down by self-reproach, an anguish of anxiety, of torture, of suspense, for the fate of the man she had so arbitrarily called to her aid, to make the hope effective in the rescue of her child. Poor little Archie! It was difficult indeed to think of him as dead! Gladys felt that she must find some way to sustain Lillian.