"Well, my lands!" said Mrs. White, whilst her daughter said nothing, but got up and went out of the room.
"Yes," said Mrs. Deans, "that's what they say, and I could tell things. But standing in the light of one who's tried to do the best she can for everybody, I never said a word! But there—there's no use talking over them; the point was, I felt it a duty when I heard he was sitting up with your Ann."
Mrs. Deans paused—there was no reply—so she continued: "I felt you ought to know the truth of how things stood; so putting aside my own feelings, as I have to do very often, I came to let you know what sort of a fellow Homer Wilson is."
"To think of it!" said Mrs. White. "Truly 'this life is but a fleeting show!' Homer Wilson! What he has said to Ann I can't say, not knowing; but as for sitting up, whatever sitting up was done was done irregular, now and then, as luck chanced; there was nothing regular, no promising, no conversational lozenges, no buggy drives. No, Ann ain't no call to be worried, though it's terrible to think how he'll suffer when he knows Ann is not for him, can never be his; no, that hope is gone—no, Homer Wilson, thou must go thy ways withouten help from Ann."
Mrs. Deans felt exasperated. "Such stuff and nonsense," she thought. "Homer Wilson would never look at Ann White, if he could get another girl; Ann White, indeed!" She woke from her silence with a start.
"Well, I'm glad it's no worse," she said; "only you'd better tell Ann to be careful, for people are so ready with their tongues."
"Jest let me hear any one mention Ann's name and his'n," said Mrs. White; "jest let me hear 'em, they'll have to prove their sayings! 'Tell it in the country, tell it in the court,' is my motto. I'd never stand no creepin', sneakin' talk about my folks!" Here she was interrupted by her son Bing, who dashed along the veranda, flung himself down on the open door-step, and ejaculated:
"Bats bring bedbugs."
"What?" said Mrs. Deans.
"For the land's sake, Bing, what are you talking about?" asked his mother.
"Bats," said Bing, chattering his words out with his customary rapidity. "Caught one in the back bedroom, between the shatter and the window; bites like the mischief; got round ears that stick up—got fur on it—got leather wings, and bedbugs under 'em."
"Well, it beats all," said his mother, and Mrs. Deans looked at him curiously. But keen as her eyes were, they saw no change in him from the boy of four or five years back. For although Bing was between sixteen and seventeen, he was no larger than a child of twelve: an ill-conditioned, withered, hard little figure. His frame was spare, his little face, with its high cheek-bones, was always flushed, as though fevered by a dry and burning heat; his eyes were very light blue, very small, very cruel-looking. They were set in a network of wrinkles. His hands were horny and thin. He stayed but a moment, then rushed off as quickly as he had come.
"Bing don't grow much," said Mrs. Deans, with a curious intonation in her voice and a covert glance at Mrs. White.
Mrs. White looked a little uncomfortable, and answered rather hastily:
"No, the Whites is all slow growers. Sam grew after we was married, and Sam's brother grew till he began to get bald!"
Mrs. Deans preserved a disagreeable silence.
Young Ann entered the room as composedly as she had left it.
"Where have you been, Ann?" asked her mother, a little sharply.
"Fixing curds for the turkeys," said the girl, placidly.
"Well, I declare, I'd forgotten it entire!" said Mrs. White. "I am glad to find that you have such a thoughtful mind."
"Oh, ma!" said young Ann, in an acme of admiration. Mrs. White smiled, as who should say, "I can't restrain my muse," and continued in the same voice: "Shall we go out and see the feathered tribe eat their humble portion?"
Mrs. Deans rose gladly, and out they went into the sunshine. It was one of those days—so perfect, if one can enjoy it without toil, in darkened rooms or shady nooks—so intolerable, if bodily toil beneath the blazing sun is demanded. They went about leisurely, watched the melancholy young turkeys picking daintily at their food, encouraged to the attack by the solitary little chicken that was domiciled in their coop. When the turkey eggs were hatching, careful poultry-keepers put one hen egg in with them, so that the chicken might "show them how to eat." This one, vigorous little black Spanish chick, certainly performed its duties nobly—its compact little body darting here and there among the turkeys, staggering about on their long, fragile legs. They passed Bing, lying on his back under a chestnut tree.
Mrs. Deans and Mrs. White grew very affable over the poultry, and the clouds dropped down, with the dewy darkness of a moonless summer night, before Mrs. Deans went home.
She was, upon the whole, dissatisfied with her visit. Those Whites were so disgustingly equable—so ridiculously pleased with themselves—and that Bing White! of all the objects! Mrs. Deans slept at last, her brows drawn in the ill-natured pose her thoughts suggested.
The Whites slumbered peacefully, save where Bing lay, his eyes gleaming in the dark, as he dreamt long, waking dreams of ghastly pleasures; but he too slept at last, his fingers twitching as he slept, his lips like two streaks of blood.
Myron Holder slept the too-sound sleep of weariness, her yellow-haired baby on her breast, her face placid and calmed into severe lines of beauty.
Homer Wilson tossed and flung his strong arm above his head and murmured a woman's name, and crossed it with another, clinched his upraised hand; and, murmuring, slept.
Deeper and deeper fell the silence; darker and darker grew the midnight; heavier and heavier sleep sank upon those different hearts; until they all beat with the measured cadence of oblivion—until, albeit delayed by devious paths and difficult gates, they all reached the poppied meadow of deep sleep.
"Lo! where is the beginning, where the end,Of living, loving, longing?"
"But were there ever anyWrithed not at passed joy?To know the change and feel it,When there is none to heal it,Nor numbed sense to steal it,Was never said in rhyme."
It was late summer. The whirring of reaping-machines sounded upon every side; the roads were strewn with grain from the harvest wagons; the air was murmurous with insects; the ground, parched and thirsty; the grass, sere and harsh; the leaves, laden with dust; the birds sang only in the hours of earliest dawn or in the twilight. At noontide, the horses' flanks dripped sweat, and the men's faces and necks were blistered with the heat. The cows stood knee deep in the ponds, and flicked at the flies with their long tails. The ponds were low, and their wide margins of mud were alive with tiny frogs, that hopped about in thousands. Upon the surface of the water was a glaze of curious animalculæ, as red as blood. Clumps of bullrushes and tasselled tufts of reeds grew in the water, and dragon-flies flitted through the green stems, like darting flashes of blue light. The Jamestown children called them darning-needles; and being assured of their propensity for sewing one's ears up, viewed them with serious apprehension. Often the birds, their breasts panting with heat, came to the ponds, and, fluttering to the margin, splashed the water over their little backs. They were timid, though, and liked better to find a spot where the deep imprint of a hoof was filled with water than to bathe in the ponds.
The little streams by the roadside had long since disappeared, and the famous stream on the Wilson farm, that welled up from the "living rock," stole along so sluggishly that it scarce stirred the watercresses that grew along its course.
It was the culmination of the year's endeavors: a hard season on man and beast; from day-dawn to dark was heard the shouting of men, the trampling of horses, the noise of machines—a feverish season, the fruition of a twelvemonth's expectancy.
"A good harvest, and fine harvest weather," said one and all.
It was natural that these weeks of incessant labor should tell upon the men—indeed many of them looked utterly worn out, with red rims encircling their eyes, and faces from which each drop of moisture seemed to have oozed; but Homer Wilson, during the excessive heats of that summer, looked worse than any of his neighbors. His blue jeans hung loose upon him; and when he threw aside his smock, his shoulders seemed sharp and thin under his shirt. The outline of his strong jaw was clearly defined, and by reason of the lack of superfluous flesh the contour of his head was strikingly apparent, and suggested almost unpleasantly the dominant force of his character. His eyes were sunken; and although at the end of a long day's work his face might grow ashen, his muscles twitch nervously, and his strong fingers tremble, yet the fire in his eyes remained undimmed.
He could not sleep. At night he used to go to the lake—very solitary then, when the fishing season was past—and plunging into the water swim far out in the moonlight. Sometimes he beat his arms upon the water at each stroke, striving to communicate his own excitement to the water, that shone up with such maddening placidity to the stars. Sometimes he would swim out until the shore behind him was but a dimness, seeming as unsubstantial as the clouds; then, turning on his back, he would float there, silent, his eyes searching the sky. The harvest moon—
"The loveliest moon that ever silver'd o'erA shell for Neptune's goblet; she did soarSo passionately bright,"
floated above him. Silence was upon the face of the water, and he, in the embrace of the wave and the night, was alone indeed.
"The lidless train of planets" passed him by; the moon drew a mantle of mist about her and sailed away. A premonitory shiver crept along his limbs; he reached the shore, chilled to the bone; but the heat at his heart still parched him with thirst, for there had awakened within him a great longing for loving eyes, a great hunger for woman's touches, a great dread of his own solitariness, a great disgust of himself. He was realizing slowly, numbly, his own decadence, groping for some rope by which he might pull himself up out of the abyss into which he had fallen.
It is doubtless nobler to dispense with the rope and climb out of the pit unaided; the rockiest precipice may be hewn into painful steps, but in shifting sands who can form a stairway?
"Seems to me, Homer," said Mrs. Wilson one day, as she stood moulding her bread in the early morning, "seems to me you need something; now there's yarbs just hanging up and spilin' for the want of drinking; there ain't anything more buildin' than yarbs is—'The yarbs of the field,' it says in the Bible, which means all yarbs, and I have them mostly there." Here she glanced at the long row of paper bags which, tied round the stems of the dried plants, hung along one side of the kitchen. "Maybe it's ague workin' on you, or m'laria you're sickening for; I'll make up some boneset agin noon and——"
"Don't make any brews for me, mother," said Homer. "I don't need any; it's the heat." He was putting oatmeal into the water-pails for the men to take to the field.
"There," said his mother, "I knowed it! I'd no hope as you'd be led by me in this any more'n anything else. Well, it's to be expected, I suppose. I know who the nursin' and settin' up will fall on, but I kin stand it; I've had to bear with a good deal in my time, and the Lord 'll give me strength for this, too—but it does seem hard." She sniffed, and, wiping away an imaginary tear with her floury apron, left a smudge of white upon her rubicund countenance.
"It is hard," said Homer, very quietly, and went out, pails in hand, to where the horses stood ready harnessed for the day. The hired men were sticking branches of walnut leaves on their bridles and in the backhands, and bathing their flanks and breasts with smartweed oil, to keep off the flies.
Homer gave the men their pail of oatmeal and water, and went to his own team. As he passed his horses, he put out his hand to take the nearest one by the bridle. It started and swerved nervously from his extended hand. His face lowered for an instant; the next moment it flushed as though his swarthy cheek felt the impatient blow he had given the horse the day before. He took the lid off his pail and let the horses drink the contents, giving them the pail alternately; each pushed its nose down through the cool water to get at the meal at the bottom, making a great sucking as it did so, and resisting stubbornly the efforts of the other to usurp the pail. They made short work of the draught, but were loath to give up the pail, and stretched their noses after Homer as he hung it upon a fence-stake. He took their bridles and proceeded to the field, their harness-chains clinking, the leaves on their heads and backs rustling, their noses quivering as they licked at the grains of oatmeal sticking to their bits.
Homer was reaping the west field. A forty-acre expanse of growing grain it had been a few days before, but now it was all down save a little square in the hollow, at one corner of which stood the self-binder, an ungainly affair, with its windmill-like arrangement for pushing the sheaves along.
The shocks of grain stood round and round this square of standing wheat, as if they fain would protect it from the fate that had laid them low; but Homer and his horses threaded their ranks, and soon the lumbering machine was in motion, leaving a track of prostrate sheaves that presently the men would take in pairs, and, putting eight together, leave them for the sun to dry.
Through all that long forenoon Homer thought of his mother. It was not "yarb tea" he needed, but
"To take in draughts of life from the gold fountOf kind and passionate looks."
The heat grew intense. The horses were panting, the sweat lathering from beneath the harness-straps; a stifling dust was rising from the wheels and covering Homer's face with a grayish veil; the grasshoppers fled in thousands before the machine; the grain gleamed dizzily golden in the sun. It was just the color of her hair—perhaps the feverishness of the heat made the thought unpleasant. That hair had been bright enough to drive him almost mad, but it was not brightness he wanted now, nor gayety, nor laughter; he wanted the benison of calm eyes, the shadow of cool hair, the tenderness of tears, the strength of a tried soul, and out of this chaos of longing was slowly evolved a figure.
Beginning with a dark cloud, that hovered for a time before him and then floated away fragment by fragment till all was gone save enough to halo round a pale and steadfast face, with dark locks of hair, and the face at first only outlined by the curving tresses, gradually assumed features—dark eyes and
"most tender brows,Meant for men's lips, to make them glad of GodWho gives them such to kiss"—
pale, sorrowful lips, and a chin which told of strength to endure, yet pleaded most eloquently against a test; and then came patient shoulders and the bosom of a mother. He gazed at this figure long—or so it seemed. It eased his eyes, and the heat was really blinding; even this vision could not blot it out. He closed his eyes. The next moment frightful sounds confused his ears, he felt a sharp pain in his head, heard a cry—surely from the lips he had just seen in his waking dream.... With a great gasp, Homer Wilson came back from his momentary swoon to find himself lying on the ground, his machine a few yards in advance, and Myron Holder bending with tears raining down her white lace.
"Oh, Homer—Homer," she cried, "are you killed?"
"What is it, Myron?" he said, and tried to put his hand to where the pain was—but failing to reach his head, it faltered and fell upon one of Myron's arms, over which it closed. He realized that her arm was under his head, and that he was leaning heavily upon her. He tried to gather himself together, but one of his feet was held fast. He looked at her inquiringly. At that moment she was the source of life—knowledge—everything to him. The blood was streaming from a cut in his temple. She replied to his unspoken question promptly.
"The reins are tangled round your feet," she said. "Oh, I thought I couldn't get here in time! I thought they would surely drag you to death; and you fell so near the wheels, I——" here she gave way to a paroxysm of tears. She tried to stifle them. The sight set Homer's manhood for a moment again upon its throne. He untied the neckerchief he wore, clumsily dried her tears, and then applied it to his own head. She rose. Just then two men came in sight; they had been on their way home to dinner. Turning at the gate, they had seen something was wrong, and hastened back. As they approached, Myron snatched up her sunbonnet from where it had fallen and tied it on with trembling fingers.
"How was it, Homer? What's up?" called the men as they drew near. Homer's evanescent strength was gone; he was supporting himself on one elbow, upon which he seemed to be whirling, as on a pivot. He looked at Myron, and she answered for him:
"I was looking for Mrs. Deans' turkeys; they've strayed," she said. "As I came over the knoll, I saw him drop the reins and fall; I ran as hard as I could and stopped the horses; they were dragging him; he must have struck on a stone when he fell." She paused; her voice was trembling. "It's the sun," she said; and, turning, was over the crest of the knoll, her sunbonnet disappearing among the stacks on the opposite side, before the men made any comment.
As she disappeared, Homer's long-tried elbow gave way, and his head sank upon the stubble.
The men untied the leather rein from his foot, tied up his head as well as they could, steadied him as he rose to his feet, and helped him to mount the gray horse.
A day's rest set him right. The touch of sunstroke had been neutralized by the cut, whose bleeding had relieved the pressure on the brain and in a measure from his heart, for he no longer battled with intangible desires and maddening uncertainties of purpose; he yearned with his whole heart for the clasp of Myron's Holder's arms.
His mother heard the story of his accident and by whom a much more serious one was averted. She was thoroughly enraged and excited. She harped upon the one string until Homer's new-found store of patience reached an end, and he was fain to betake himself out of doors in the evenings until sleep stilled his mother's tongue.
It was a week or so after his fall—the wound on his temple had already healed in the wholesome skin—when, one night as dusk fell, he was beset with desire to see Myron. The vision he had had in the field returned to him often now; that strange vision—compound of reality and dream, part wrought of the needs of his own heart, part woven of the glimpses his reeling eyes caught of the woman's figure in the distance. As he had emerged from the chaos of indefinite yearnings to a definite desire, so he had put aside all women for one woman; to his credit be it told, he thought of Myron Holder as she was—the disgraced mother of a fatherless child. He could draw no fine distinction between letter and spirit, deduce no hair-splitting arguments to bear out his views, being only a rough countryman, unused to subtle mental processes. But he decided for himself that it was not muttered rites and outward forms that made the mother, but all the dolorous agonies of maternity. Which of them had this woman not endured? What jot or tittle of woman's horrible heritage had not been hers? And what more holy than a mother?
"God knows," he said to himself, as he strode along that night to the village, "a woman needs to be pretty bad before she's not good enough for the average man!" He had reached the fence round the Holder cottage—that fence in which the gaps grew greater and greater as old Mrs. Holder used the pickets for kindling-wood—and was just about to enter quietly, when Gamaliel Deans drove up. He recognized Homer and called out:
"Hi, there! Ho! What are you lookin' for?"
"A lift out to old Carroll's," said Homer promptly, cursing Gamaliel in his heart.
"Well, I'm yer man, then," said Gamaliel. "I'm just goin' for the vet. The sorrel mare's bad—sunstroke."
"Too bad," said Homer, springing into the light wagon. "Who was driving her?"
"I was—worse luck," said Gamaliel, sulkily. "I seen her stagger, but I thought she could make it to the end of the swathe; but she dropped in her tracks, and there she's laid since, with us pouring water on her head. It don't seem to do her much good, though, and she was beginning to kick out when I hitched up and started."
"Well," said Homer, and he had a grim satisfaction in saying it, "if she was beginning to strike out, you may as well go home, for she'll die!"
"I guess she will," said Gamaliel, philosophically; "but things was gettin' pretty hot round there, and I thought it safe to make tracks. Marm's in a regular ramp over it!"
"No wonder," said Homer severely; "she's a fine mare."
The twinkling lights of Mr. Carroll's window were in view. They neared them swiftly. Gamaliel half-pulled up and Homer sprang out.
"So 'long!" said Gamaliel. "This is a matter of life and death, ye know," he added, chuckling at his own wit. He drove on quickly, speculating as to whether the mare was dead. She was.
Homer meanwhile stood a moment irresolute, as the wagon disappeared. He had spoken upon impulse when, in answer to Gamaliel's inquiry, he said he was going to Mr. Carroll's. It was the first name that entered his head, and chosen for that reason.
Homer had once gone a great deal to old Mr. Carroll's, but never had resumed the visits since his return to the farm. He shrank morbidly from observation then, and old Mr. Carroll's eyes were sharp. This night, however, he decided to go in; he feared no man's eyes now. He rapped at the door and waited. He could hear the tapping of the old man's cane, then saw a light beneath the door, as Mr. Carroll called out in well-rounded tones for so old a man:
"Who goes there?"
"Homer Wilson!" shouted Homer.
"Pass Homer Wilson!" said the old soldier, and pulling back the simple bolt, let his visitor enter. Through a dusky narrow hall, to a room with very heavy wooden rafters and whitewashed walls, he led the way.
Those walls were a great saving of paper to him, Mr. Carroll was wont to say; and that there was reason in his statement could be readily seen, for all the farm accounts, the taxes, the mill accounts, the dates of any events he wished to remember, with any stray memorandum of a chance reflection or idea he wished to see in words, were pencilled upon the walls.
On the last night of the old year, Mr. Carroll had the walls whitewashed, and began a "clean sheet with four big pages," as he said, every New-Year's.
One of his pleasantest reflections was that he had never yet needed to begin the new year with any debts staring him in the face, "and no one owing me, either," he would say, as though that too were a triumph; but certain people said old Mr. Carroll was a fool in this; he was so set on carrying out his whim that he whitewashed over accounts that were still due him, because, of course, it was for his own selfish gratification, and not from any generosity that he forgave certain needy families the little debts they owed for flour, and hams, and chicken-feed!
Mrs. Deans considered this sinful; and, impelled by her usual sense of self-sacrificing duty, spoke to him upon the subject once, saying, to clinch her argument, that "he'd have more money for foreign missions, if he didn't throw his substance away on those miserable, ailing, complaining paupers over Stedham way." But Carroll had speedily brought the discussion to a close by demanding, with some heat, what possible interest he could have in "a batch of naked niggers, ma'am"—an irreverent way of referring to the interesting heathen, surely.
"Sit down, Homer; sit down!" said his host, pushing a chair toward him with a gesture of genuine hospitality; "sit down, and we'll have a glass of something."
He went to a cupboard, whose diamond-shaped glass panes were backed by faded green silk, produced an old-fashioned heavy glass decanter, two glasses, some sugar and old silver spoons—talking all the time. His lameness necessitated several trips to the cupboard, and as he brought each object and set it down on the table he would pause a moment, feign a start, and say—"Tut—tut—how forgetful I am!" and jauntily journey back, until he had all the requisites for a brewing of hot whiskey. So well he did the little by-play that he almost believed himself that it was forgetfulness that caused him to make repeated trips for the few articles and not the necessity for a cane, which left him only one free hand.
"A cold drink for a cold day, and a hot drink for a hot day; that's my idea," said the old man, settling himself into his chair with a suppressed twinge as he twisted his lame leg. "So now, you put a match to the fire, and we'll see if it's a good one."
Homer lit the fire, already laid, and the copper kettle placed upon the stove soon began to sing. Homer had talked readily enough at first, but he was growing absent-minded, his thoughts wandering back to that dilapidated cottage in the village. Presently the glasses of hot whiskey steamed between them. During the process of concoction Mr. Carroll related, with many strong expressions and much richness of detail, the idiocy of Male Deans, by whom he had sent to town for lump sugar. Lump sugar was an unknown commodity to Male, and he insisted there was no such thing, and declared Mr. Carroll couldn't "get the laugh on him that way." At last Mr. Carroll resorted to strategy. He wrote out a list of things he wanted from the grocery store, and smuggling loaf sugar in at the bottom of the list, gave it to Male and told him the grocery man would have all ready for him as he passed from the mill. So he got the lump sugar. Homer was a little hazy himself as to the existence of, or necessity for, lump sugar, but evidently it was of vital import to Mr. Carroll.
"Yes," the old man said, splashing another lump into his second glass of hot whiskey, "the ass! I've no doubt he'd put filthy loose sugar in this—floor-sweepings." Then came silence. Homer felt he must say something; he cast about for a subject; an accident of the day suggested itself.
"We killed a copperhead snake in the rye, to-day," he said; "the first I've seen in years. I was cutting a road round the field for the machine with the cradle, and it darted at me. I killed it with a fence-rail. It was an ugly beggar, and a good three-foot long."
"A snake!" said old Carroll. "A snake! There's many kinds of snakes. Copperheads are dangerous, and rattlesnakes are, but there's worse snakes than either. You killed it with a stick? Did I ever tell you about the man I knew who killed so many snakes?"
"No," said Homer, looking at him, for his tone was strange. "No. Who was he?"
"He was a man," said Mr. Carroll, looking fixedly at his guest, "he was a man that overcame many snakes of many different kinds, and how he fared at last I'll tell you."
He rose, snuffed the two candles, snipping off their wicks adroitly with a pair of old brass snuffers, and sat down, again fixing his gaze upon Homer's face. The tinderwood fire in the stove had died away to a mere glow of crisping embers; the kettle sang in dying cadence; its steam and the steam from the glasses floated athwart Homer's vision of Mr. Carroll's body, seeming to give greater keenness to the alert face, and the eyes which, always bright, seemed to glint to-night with absolute brilliancy.
"It was some time ago," said Mr. Carroll, "that this man I speak of used to kill the snakes. He had a peculiar dislike to all snakes, for a friend of his had had the life squeezed out of him in the folds of a serpent, and another friend had been bitten by one, so that he too died, having first gone mad; and another had the very breath of life sucked from him by a sly snake, so that he died—died himself, body and soul, and never knew it: only his friends saw the corpse of his old self, and knew their friend to be gone from their midst and only his semblance left, and they rejoiced much when at last this semblance died also, and they could bury it decently, like other corpses.
"There was no wonder my friend hated snakes.
"He waged war upon them; and it was his method when he found one, to take it by the tail and, with a sudden jerk, snap its head off. He killed a great many in this way; and it was always his habit to search for the head. He longed to look into the eyes, and learn wherein the power lay by which they deceived and deluded men until they stung them; but he never could find the head. Between disappointment at this, and despair because the more snakes he destroyed the more there seemed to be, my friend grew very sad. He had a horrible pain at his heart too, that no drug could ease. Time went on and the pain grew no better—it even shot through his head sometimes; but my friend persevered, and no snake escaped him.
"Well, one day he was walking in his garden, under his own trees, within his own walls, where it would be thought no snake could come, when a snake, more brilliant in color than any he had ever seen, crossed his path. For the first time, he understood a little of the feeling that makes a man spare a snake because it is beautiful; but he put the thought from him, and, catching it by the tail, jerked off its head and flung aside the body. Then he began to search for the head, feeling if he could but look into the jewel eyes of that snake that all the mystery of men's delusions would be revealed to him; and, knowing the secret of their delusions, surely he could dispel them.
"He bent to his search, but felt such a great pain in his heart that he stood up, casting his eyes down upon himself, for the pain was so great it seemed his heart would burst the bonds of his ribs; and as he looked, he saw the swelled eyes and forked tongue of the snake's head, for it had fastened on his breast above his heart. He looked again; it was gone. With wild haste, he tore off his coat.
"It was not there. His waistcoat—no sign of it. He dragged his clothing from him till he stood like Adam in the garden, and then he knew that that snake's head and all the others were in his own heart. Standing naked in his garden, he felt the snakes in his heart, and knew that his labor for mankind was vain—knew that not till he could rend and read his own living heart would he understand and dispel the delusions of men. The disappointment made him mad. It was the disappointment, nothing else—not the pain of the snakes, for many men have snakes in their breasts, she snakes, that amuse themselves by seeing how tight they can tie their hair about the heart."
The old man drained his glass. Homer was glad there was a little left in his tumbler—he swallowed it hastily.
"Rattlesnake oil is a grand thing for weak eyes," Mr. Carroll said, composedly; "and for horses' eyes it hasn't any equal."
"That's true," said Homer, "but it's pretty expensive—five dollars an ounce."
"Yes," returned his host, "old Dargo used to try out the oil and then eat the cracklings; but the best oil for medicine is got after letting the snake hang a while."
"So they say," said Homer; "but I never could bring myself to have anything more to do with a snake than to smash it with the first thing I could catch hold of."
They talked on a little longer, then Homer rose. "I must be getting along," he said; "I've quite a walk before me."
"Well, come back soon," said Mr. Carroll, lighting him to the door with a wavering candle. Homer had his hand on the latch, when the old man said suddenly:
"Hold the candle a minute." He felt in his pocket, and drew forth a small black case, opened it, and thrust it before Homer's eyes. "Look at it," he said, "look at it well, and then you'll know a snake the next time you see one—one of the dangerous kind, not a simple copperhead, or a gentle rattler." In the midst of the glow of a golden background, dimmed here and there by a pearl, was a painted face—fair enough to woo a king, false enough to sell a kingdom. Homer looked, and somehow understood all its beauty and treachery.
"LOOK AT IT," HE SAID, "LOOK AT IT WELL!""LOOK AT IT," HE SAID, "LOOK AT IT WELL!"
Mr. Carroll shut the case with a snap, took the candle, and Homer let himself out.
"Good-night, Homer," called the old man. "Come back soon."
"Good-night. I will," said Homer, and the door closed between them.
"Pleasure is oft a visitant, but painClings cruelly to us—"
"Whoso encampsTo take a fancied city of delight—Oh, what a wretch is he!"
Church was in. That meant that all the respected and self-respecting people of Jamestown had come forth, morally and physically clothed in their best, and bestowed themselves as comfortably as circumstances permitted in the wooden pews of Jamestown's only church.
From the preacher's desk, the congregation looked like a human theme with variations, the original motif being a stolid, expressionless mask of flesh, unanimated, immobile, with rudely carven features, and no decided tints. Upon this primitive scale nature had rung every change her shackled hands could compass; but between the highest note, struck perhaps in Ossie Annie Abbie Maria White, whose face was inoffensive, and the lowest personified by old Ann Lemon, whose countenance was a mere mass of flesh, there was but a short thought. The men were sandy-haired, meagre, undersized; or heavy, florid, dark, with lack-lustre eyes and coarse lips.
It was a delightful autumnal day—a day more provocative of tears than laughter, more suggestive of retrospect than anticipation; a day to dream old dreams, feel old heartaches, read old books, tell old tales, hear bygone singing, recall lost voices; a pure, sweet day—the air rarefied by the first touch of frost; a day, in short, to remind one of the sweet, the sad, the strange in life; but withal, a day to perfect the tint on the apples, mellow the juices of the late grapes, and promising a "fine spell of good weather for the fall ploughing," as each male member of the congregation had said to each other male member that morning.
Mother Earth got but little rest at the hands of these eager seekers. Hardly had her bosom been shorn of its crop of a yellow grain before the keen ploughshares were again plunged into the soil and it was lacerated afresh, and the man looked best content that morning behind whose plough there lay the greatest number of brown furrows, for the fall ploughing was of great furtherance when the rush of the spring came on; so the horses, loosed from the lumbering reaping machine, were yoked to the plough, that most graceful of all farmer's implements, and strained at their collars as it turned the furrow, sending its earthy fragrance to mingle with the fruity savor from the vineyards.
Light mists, prophetic of the later haze, floated in shreds and wisps across the fields, and gathered and lingered about the trunks of the trees in the woodland.
The birds were silent, and daily V-shaped flights of ducks and wild geese passed over the village, winging their way to the south.
Service went on in the church, to the staid and sedate measure of well-understood and long-established usage.
Ann Lemon was nodding off the intoxication of the night before in a pew well to the front. Ann felt she needed to assert her religious feelings lest there be some doubt of their existence.
Behind her sat Mr. and Mrs. White, young Ann, and Bing—the first three mentioned of the family looking as gloomy and downcast as their self-complacency permitted. Bing blinked wickedly in his corner, making sly swoops at the sluggish flies, and tearing them in bits when he captured any.
Across the aisle Clem Humphries flourished. Clem was one of those world-worn wrecks that are cast away and left stranded in nearly every small village the world over. How they drift there no one knows; whence they come no one cares; why they stay they could not tell themselves. Fate rattles us all in her dice-box, and we lie where we fall.
Clem was by turns a fisherman, Mr. Muir's assistant, a knife-grinder, a peddler; he had superior skill in making axe-handles, and out of wire he could twist and twine the cunningest of traps. He was acute and wise in his day and generation—at heart a scoffing old vagabond; yet he professed to be most religious, and evidenced it in the same way as the people about him did, by going to church with painful regularity, where he sat, a sore rock of offence to Mrs. Deans, for Clem was fain to relieve the tedium of the service and aggravate Mrs. Deans (whom he hated) by a succession of tricks that irritated her almost beyond endurance.
Mrs. Deans sat immediately behind Clem, and pursed her already pursed-up mouth, sniffed her already pinched-in nose, and glared at him fiercely from her chronically inflamed eye, but all to no effect. He was full of offence, and Mrs. Deans had several times accused him in after-meeting of "conduct misbecoming in a Christian," but Clem had answered to the charge so volubly, so diplomatically, so humbly that the rest of the church members, and particularly Mr. Prew, the minister (to whom Clem always ostentatiously removed his hat), decided that Mrs. Deans had "a pick" at Clem, and regretted a little that such a pious woman should stain her noble record by such complaints as she made against this humble follower.
He had an evil habit of setting his stout stick upright beside him in the pew, balancing it with a skill all the boys of Jamestown emulated in vain, and then placing his hat upon it, so that in full sight of the congregation, it stood perilously balanced, but never falling, during the entire time of service.
A strange minister had once been sadly disconcerted by the sight of the immovable hat in that pew. He could see nothing of what supported it, and could hardly restrain his wrath at the irreverence of the dwarfish individual who sat covered in the Lord's house. Animated by the thought, he seized the sword of the Spirit and began to fight against this evil one. He dilated upon the perils of irreverence until the majority of his listeners dared hardly breathe. He thundered forth the denunciation of the wicked and stubborn of heart until all the women wept, led by Ann Lemon, who, by reason of excessive piety and much gin, had no nerves left at all, and who showed her emotion by a series of subdued howls. He exhausted vituperation and himself, and sat down—a beaten man, for the hat was unmoved, whilst Clem beside it was rolling up his eyes and trying to induce a tear—an effort beyond even his art.
When the preacher discovered the true state of affairs, which he did when he saw Clem pick up the cane and its burden, carry it to the door, give it a jerk, bending his head at the same time, and so receive the hat at his own peculiar angle, he felt as if all good was but a dream and a delusion.
Clem every Sunday produced a large and not over-clean handkerchief tied in many intricate knots. These he untied painfully and laboriously with teeth and fingers, until he reached the last, which, when untied, disclosed a copper cent, which was his weekly contribution. This performance he made an absolute torment to Mrs. Deans, but with the cent he made her life a burden. He dropped it, and scrambled around on his hands and knees for it. He polished it on his trousers until it seemed as if he might wear the fabric through. Worst of all, he put it on the back of the seat before him, where Mrs. Wilson's plump back must inevitably knock it off. Mrs. Wilson, despite her many trials and the multitude of diseases she believed were concealed about her person, was very stout, and therefore subject to all the fatigues incident to bearing such a burden of flesh. In spite of this, however, Mrs. Wilson was animated by an eager desire to do her duty as became a "mother in Israel," and by her deportment convey the impressive lesson of example to the less holy members of the flock. With this end in view, she strove to attain an upright and rigid position of an uncomfortable piety; but the flesh is weak. Presumably the weakness increases in ratio to the flesh, for before the first prayer was over Mrs. Wilson was beginning to settle. When the preacher announced his text, she usually took a fresh grip of her failing resolution, and assumed a ramrod-like pose, but it was of short duration. She gradually collapsed, her shoulders drooped, the back of the pew dented further and further into the broad black expanse that leaned against it.
Clem's penny crept nearer and nearer the edge as the encroaching back advanced. Presently Mrs. Wilson, worn out in her efforts to listen to the sermon and fight against her own lassitude at one and the same time, gave way, and, with a sigh, leaned back restfully. The penny flew off, and Clem, whilst apparently gazing at the preacher so attentively as to be oblivious of all else, reached forward and caught it adroitly, to place it again in jeopardy, and then again to lose sight of its peril. This performance, being repeated a half-dozen times during one service, enraged Mrs. Deans beyond expression. One unlucky day, she prodded Clem in the back with a rigid forefinger, and upon his turning round, which he did with an exaggerated start that vibrated through the whole congregation, she made a sharp gesture of withdrawal, and gazing at the offending penny, just then trembling on the edge, left the rest to Clem's understanding—a perilous thing to do, for Clem chose to interpret the signal in quite a different way than she intended.
Down Mrs. Wilson's black merino back there strayed a long light brown hair. To Mrs. Deans' consternation, Clem reached gingerly forward, took the hair, and, with the suddenness Mrs. Deans' gesture had indicated, withdrew his hand. Now the hair had merely strayed, and was not lost from Mrs. Wilson's knot, hence the sharp jerk brought a smothered exclamation and a sudden start from her—a start which sent the detestable copper spinning. Clem caught the coin dexterously with one hand, whilst he turned to offer Mrs. Deans the hair with the other. That worthy woman looked positively apoplectic, and, giving Clem just one look, turned her attention markedly to the preacher. Clem turned, with a fine expression of bewildered disappointment upon his face, replaced the hair on Mrs. Wilson's shoulder and the coin on the ledge, and lost himself in pious meditation.
This occurred some time before this autumn Sunday, but Mrs. Deans had suffered in silence since then. She was prone to leave church with her temper thoroughly on edge. Clem was surpassing himself that day: he wore a long-tailed coat of the fashion of many years before, and, when he arrived, which he did just as the first psalm was announced, he deliberately stood up, and, pulling round first one coat-tail and then the other, emptied them of a multitude of small articles—tobacco, pipes, balls of twine, lead sinkers, little twists of wire, a big jack-knife, stray nails, and a varied assortment of bits of iron and buttons. Having put these all on the seat beside him, he deposited himself with the air of a man who puts aside worldly things to listen to better. Hardly was he seated before he imagined the flies were troubling him. He made several spasmodic slaps at his bald head, and then drawing forth his handkerchief, folded it carefully in four and laid it on the top of his head. Thus adorned, he rose to sing, knelt to pray, and finally listened with reverential attention to the sermon.
"Few are thy days, and full of woe,O man, of woman born;Thy doom is written, 'Dust thou artAnd shalt to dust return.'"
So they sang; and the wailing air, upborne by the harsh, untrained voices, reverberated from the bare walls of the church, its jangling cadence pierced by one pure and bell-like voice, for Bing White, with the heart of a vulture, had the voice of a lark.
One passing outside smiled—half amusedly, half sadly—as he heard the singing, and went on his way with the music following him in ever fainter notes, forcing itself upon him.
* * * * * *
On Sunday Myron Holder had her only relaxation. Her grandmother, preserving the prejudices of the little Kentish village from which she had come, detested all other religions save the Episcopal. Her folks had all been strong for Church and State, and she scorned the idea of going to the Methodist church, or, as she contemptuously said, "to chapel." Her vocabulary knew no more derisive epithet than "a Methody." This in itself was enough to isolate the Holders in the midst of a community that regarded Episcopalians as being "next door to out-and-out Catholics," and Catholics as surely doomed. As Mrs. Holder did not go to church herself, neither did she allow Myron to go after the work for the day was done, so she was free to lavish her heart on her child. It was her custom, whilst church was in and the streets empty, to take the boy and go out into the fields or lanes with him, severing herself from the house that had held such agony for her and from the woman whose stinging tongue kept her wound raw. Once with her boy—alone in the air and sunshine—she gave herself up to introspective soul-searchings. Upon one side she set herself, and upon the other all things good; in the great gulf between there hovered the shade of the man to whom she owed her misery. In the abandonment of her self-abasement, she did not place herself even upon his level, whilst as for little My—he shone amongst the holiest of those things to which it seemed to her she was herself in such direct opposition and contradiction. The great marvel of her life was this child, who owed its existence to her. She looked at it with eyes of adoration—touched it almost humbly, as the Madonna we are told of may have tended the Christ-child on her breast. The child seemed to embody all the dead delight of her own girlhood, to have absorbed all the peace, all the calm, all the gayety she had lost. There seemed no varying moods to cross its baby mind; it was the embodiment of trusting love.
Myron, in the face of this miracle, this perfect blossom which sunned itself in her eyes only and expanded beneath her tenderness, was bewildered and amazed. She began to ponder over the matter, and presently to wonder if there was any phase of the entire situation that made her less blameless—to ask herself in what way she could possibly obliterate shame from her record for his sake.
"Are your garments spotless?Are they white as snow?Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
The words came to her as a personal and crushing query as the congregation energetically sang them. Little My clapped his hands and laughed delightedly; the music pleased him. So Myron stood outside until the voices died away, and the murmur of prayer succeeded; then taking My up in her arms, that they might make greater speed, she went rapidly out of the village. She turned to her left, and, going a short distance along the road, lifted My over the fence into Mr. Warner's grass meadow. Through the centre of this field ran a deep ditch, to carry off the surface drainage in spring. Its course was marked by a thick growth of low-growing shrubs, among which grew short stubby oaks, whilst here and there great graceful elms sprang up in lofty columns, crowned with drooping branches; parasitic vines, sucking the life-juice of the tree they adorned, crept up these elms; their delicate leaves, already scarlet, showed vividly against the gray bark of the trees, and looked like thin streams of blood trickling down. Particularly was this the case where, upon one of the elms, the creeping-vine had reached the point where a branch had been broken off by the wind. The semblance was thus complete: there was the wound—there the blood, and above, the sighing leaves deplored the pain. At the foot of this tree was a huge and brightly green mound, which, as Myron approached, seemed almost artificial, so close were the leaves set, so impenetrably were the tendrils woven together; for this mound was formed of two oak trees over which, completely hiding them, grew a huge wild grape vine, forming a perfect canopy of dense green, and, more honest than the vine that sapped the elm tree, the grapevine, by its luxuriant growth and the vigor of its stem and branches, seemed to proclaim its settled purpose to smother the trees that supported it if possible.
To this Myron bent her footsteps. Pressing into the shrubs some distance below, she won her way through them until she came to the foot of the elm tree, and entered the green tent formed by the grapevine. Between the trunks of the two scrubby oaks was a space of heavy green grass, which, springing up before the vine leaves had shut off the sun, kept green and fresh in their shadow through all the heats of summer. Here she and her child sat down; they were completely shielded from observation—the grape garlands at their backs, before them the masses of shrubs on the other side of the ditch.
Myron took a biscuit from her pocket and gave it to the boy, and then, clasping her hands about her knees, lost herself in dreams. She had cast aside her sun-bonnet, and the light, with difficulty piercing the shade, shone upon her in pearly lights and gleams—a colder radiance than shone elsewhere.
The soft characterless face of the young girl had been frozen into the enforced calm of passionless despair. Her face gave a strange impression, as of features that would remain unchanged no matter how long time endured for their possessor; as if the voice of pain and shame had bade her life stand still, nor evidence its aging in her countenance. No network of wrinkles, no deep marks of care, could have been half so sad as these youthful outlines veiled by such grief. Her eyes were heavy; her mouth would have been bitter, but that the patience of the face belied all bitterness save that of self-contempt. Underneath this mask of arrested life, vivifying it with tragic meaning and rendering it inexpressibly sad, burned an intense suppressed expectancy, as of one who doth
"EspyA hope beyond the shadow of a dream."
This lent her face the artistic value of motive, and transformed what might, without it, have been but a sad-faced woman, such as the world holds in countless thousands, into a creature of tragic force.
Myron pondered in the shadow, whilst her child played at her side. It was very still. The child's soft breathing as he plucked at the soft grass was the only sound that broke the listening silence; opposite her was a little maple tree; a single leaf near the top was whirling round and round, caught in some miniature tempest that left unmoved the leaves on either side. In the midst of universal calm, this lonely leaf was tossed and troubled, singled out for unrest, as Myron Holder had been set apart for pain. But Myron's thoughts were not upon the leaf, albeit she saw it fluttering. She was struggling against a futile wrath, which welled up in her heart and at times nearly mastered reason—a hot rage against herself—him—the village. Her cheeks flushed—her hands involuntarily closed.
Why had this lot been meted out to her? In what was she different from these other women whose fault had been no less than hers? Why was continual bitterness her portion whilst they dwelt at ease? Simply because, though tardily, their children had been given a name. She felt a bitter wish spring up within her breast that all those jibing at her were such as she; that all those cruel women might feel the touch of shame; that they might be brought low, and taste the bitter bread that was her portion, and drink the cup they held to her lips. And then she sank into an evil dream. In it she beheld herself sitting in the judgment seat of respectability and meting out judgment to those who so lately had been her judges; for, in her dream, he had returned and justified her; she had risen, and all the rest had fallen; and as they toiled along the thorny path her feet had known, she beheld herself pass by on the other side. How she would withdraw from them (her eyes grew cold)! How she would avert her head (her lips were scornful)! How she would look them up and down with contemptuous condemnation, and turn and whisper her verdict into willing ears. That would bring the blood to their cheeks. That would—she paused, arresting her thoughts with a sudden knowledge of their shame; the cold eyes filled with tears, the scornful lips drooped and trembled; she realized the horrible wickedness of her own thoughts—thoughts—no hope, she owned to herself, and crying aloud, "I am wicked, shameless!" she flung herself upon her face in the grass and wept out the bitterness of her soul. The child crept to her side and strove to turn her face toward him; she kept it hidden, but stretched forth her arm and clasped his little form.
My, frightened at the silence with which his overtures were met and at his mother's unusual attitude, and shaken by her sobs, began to cry. Myron roused herself, and taking him in her arms, held him to her breast, rocking back and forth in the abandonment of her grief. The motion soothed and reassured the already drowsy child, and in a few moments he slept, whilst his mother, stilling her sobs that she might not disturb his slumber, bent above him a face wrung by pain.
She mused over her late vision of retaliation. With what cruelty had she hit upon the mode of showing her revenge! Alas, the lesson had been well taught her, for she had known the averted gaze, the scornful lip, the contemptuous regard. She had simply chosen those means from which she herself had suffered moat keenly. There came back to her the memory of an early morning, when, standing in the doorway, she had looked out into the dawn and had seen
"The horizontal sunHeave his bright shoulders o'er the edge of the world,"
and had vowed herself to the service of others, and to the atonement of her sin, and hoped for an early death.
Here, under the cold rays, of the autumnal sun, and abased before the memory of her late musings, she renewed those vows and scourged her soul with stripes of self-reproach.
When My woke, they went forth from their refuge, across the fields, up the street to the village; the streets were empty. A shambling figure in the distance, bespeaking Clem Humphries by the length of the coat-tails and the thinness of the legs, was making toward the lake. It was indeed Clem, going to indulge in a little surreptitious sport as an antidote to the sermon. Clem looked upon his churchgoing as one of his many professions, like the making of wire snares and the digging of graves. "Only," he said to himself as he reflected upon the matter, "give me a grave to dig for choice."
Homer Wilson passed the church that day just as they were singing that lugubrious paraphrase. He smiled a little to himself, and went on, saying, "Very cheerful that—very; but they haven't anymore idea of returning to dust than I have, at least not for a while." But it seemed he could not get beyond the echo of the singing. The voices followed him far through the rarefied air; there came to him little snatches of the gloomy words, persistently forcing themselves upon him. He quickened his pace, and was soon beyond the farthest-reaching note, and yet it seemed to vibrate in his ears. Once clear of the village, he struck across country.
The sorrel showed red, the ragweed white, between the short stalks of the yellow stubble; here and there in the lanes and by the gateways were spots of bright green verdure, looking unhealthily brilliant among these dull browns and yellows.
This was where the over-ripe grain, falling to earth, had sprung up to wither at the touch of the first frost. Homer frowned a little at this. It bespoke careless management, and the instinct of the farmer was strong in him; but his brow speedily cleared, for his thoughts were of far other things. His walk was very silent; the earth had indeed "grown mute of song," and all these resting fields were dumb; no crisping cricket, no whirring insect, no singing bird, nothing disturbed the serenity of the hour. It seemed a hiatus in the processes of nature—a suspension of all activity, a breathless pause of ecstasy or pain, like the instant before a first kiss or the moment before a final farewell.
Under these conditions thought was easy, and Homer went on and on, his mind dwelling upon the one all-absorbing theme.
"Myron—Myron," he said once, aloud, but his voice seemed at fret with the quietude, and he walked on swiftly, to escape its cheerless echo. Presently he found himself entering the woodland, and knew he was a full ten miles from Jamestown. A straight course through the woodland brought him to the margin of the lake, which bayed in here in a sharp curve.
Close to the margin lay great prostrate logs, whitened by wind and weather till they looked like huge bleached bones. Beyond these were stones and a narrow strip of gravelly beach, broken here and there by boulders, against which the water lapped softly in a thousand ripples, wearing away the rock into tiny cells, and honey-combing them with gentle but resistless touches. Stretching out into the water, a succession of large stones showed their stubborn heads, leading by irregular steps out to where the last one, large enough to be a tiny rocky islet, showed two feet high above the encircling water.
Homer made his way across these perilous stepping-stones, until he reached the largest; sitting down, he sank into a reverie so profound that he scarcely seemed to breathe. His face grew pale as he sat there minute after minute, the water lap-lapping among the rocks, the trees silent behind him, the sky mute above. Once he murmured a few words, paraphrased with no thought of irreverence: "As a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so she opened not her mouth." His voice faltered in what might have been a sob, but was resolutely forced back.
The sun began to fall behind the trees before Homer rose. As he did so, he cast a look at the rock upon which he had been resting; there, caught in a crevice, lay an old-fashioned bullet. He picked it up and looked at it lying in his palm. One could scarcely imagine it speeding through the air upon a hurtful mission. It had wandered on to find a victim, until, its impetus spent, it had fallen ingloriously to lie upon this rock, mocked by the sunlight which it had been meant to darken forever for some living creature. Homer slipped it into his pocket and began to make his way shoreward, leaping lightly from stone to stone. As he sprang to land again, he said between his teeth, "I'd like to hear any she-cat in the crowd open her lips to my wife!" It will be seen his reverie had developed its subject.
Homer held his way home happily, his eyes alight, his face aglow with his old generous spirit. He was once more the Homer of the past. Realizing this, he recognized the debt he owed Myron Holder, and paid homage to that strong soul whose mute endurance of ignominy and betrayal had shamed his own sleeping soul into life. It is plain to us that Myron Holder's shame was Homer Wilson's salvation. It is an ugly thought, but inevitable, that such instances may not be rare. But may not that virtue we hold "too high and good for human nature's daily food"—may not even that be bought too dear? What an ugly complexion it would put upon our intolerant attitude to those fallen ones, if we dreamed for one moment that our immaculate virtue was preserved by their vice! It would be hard to ask us to renounce heaven, but if heaven for one meant hell for another, it were at least well for us not to blow the fire.
But Homer Wilson was not thinking of any generalizations; he was simply concerned with the debt he owed Myron Holder and how to pay it; for, and be it told with no thought of disparaging Homer Wilson, he felt he would bestow an inestimable benefit upon Myron Holder by making her his wife. He believed he would, at one blow, free her from the shackles of shame. He never thought of the woman-soul that strove to justify itself by rigid adherence to those vows that had seemed so sacred, uttered, as they were, by lips that were almost divine to the listening heart they had betrayed.
It must be remembered that Homer was nothing but a plain countryman. It was therefore natural that he should look upon himself somewhat in the light of a deliverer when he considered himself in relation to Myron; and yet, inarticulate but existent, there was a hesitancy in his heart, not born of self-conceit or paltry self-seeking, but rooted in the knowledge of his own weakness in time of trial. But he put aside all this; and as he pushed on towards Jamestown mused happily upon the happiness that was his, for he loved Myron Holder. Poor Homer!
"Whoso encampsTo take a fancied city of delight,Oh, what a wretch is he!"
"For thy life shall fall as a leaf, and be shed as the rain;And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain."
It was late autumn. The grapes were all out, although their aroma still filled the air, for stray bunches, super-ripened by the frost, hung visible now upon the leafless stems where they had been concealed by the foliage from the cutters. The late apples were all picked, and in the orchards were great piles of new barrels ready to be filled.
Bright green fields checkered the face of the sombre countryside with vivid squares, showing the advance of the fall-sown wheat. The chestnut-burs had opened in the woods, and the hickory-nuts were strewn thick beneath the trees. All the boys in Jamestown had brown-stained fingers, from the shelling of walnuts and butternuts. The Indian corn was being cut and bound into tent-shaped shocks, so that the fields had the appearance of a plain, set thick with tiny wigwams. Now and then, along the roads, a great wagon passed, piled high with apples, windfalls and culls going to the cider mills. Their drivers went out to Ezra Harmon's and loitered about in his big barn where the cider press stood, and watched their apples poured into the wide hopper, heard them grinding and groaning between the wheels, and saw their juices drain out through the clean rye straw into the pails beneath.
People began to talk about the threshing of the grain, to bank up their cellars, and to speak of the portents of a severe winter. The leaves were all down. They lay a foot deep along the roads, where the maples grew in regular avenues, and rustled, wind-blown, between the tree trunks in the woodland. The squirrels skimmed about in their efforts to secure their winter hoard. In the woods, great heaps of hickory-nut hulls and emptied chestnut-burs, showed where, with their sharp teeth and persistent paws, they had removed the superfluous covering before storing away the nuts.
The horses were growing shaggy and the dogs' fur lengthening. In short, winter was drawing near.
In Homer Wilson's orchard all was noise, confusion, and work. Homer himself was packing the apples—putting in a layer of newspapers, then carefully "laying" by hand several rows of apples, before emptying in the pailfuls of picked fruit that were brought to him, for the bottom of a barrel in the orchard is the top of the barrel when it is opened by the dealers. Next in order to Homer was Sam Warner, who was heading the barrels, the tap-tapping of his hammer ringing clear in the frosty air, Homer shouting out directions every now and then in a sepulchral voice from the depths of the barrel. There was a great gathering in the orchard of the neighbors, for a fruit dealer had bought up all the apples in Jamestown to send to England, and they were to be shipped by the car-load upon a certain date. So, following the suggestion of the buyer (to whom time meant money), they had agreed to help each other with the fruit. This was not a usual custom in Jamestown; there was too much jealousy to admit of such interchange of labor.
It was Homer Wilson's benefit this day, and both outside in the orchard and within doors all was happy, hurrying confusion. There was nothing remarkable about the day or the scene; but exactly a year after this, Homer Wilson was to act in a somewhat different scene, and after he played his part in that his neighbors recalled this day "just a year ago." They said, "Who would have thought it?"
Bing White was in the Wilson orchard, and Si Warner, and other of their cronies. No one ever expected Bing to work; his idleness was looked upon with tolerant indifference, a perilous indication in this neighborhood, where to be a hard worker and a good church-goer meant perfection, and to fail in either grace was to be utterly lost. People began to look at Bing White attentively now and then, and shake their heads with ominous import, for the son and heir of the Whites was daily becoming more elfish-looking, more evil-eyed, more mocking of speech, more stubborn of purpose. After racing here and there over the orchard, he climbed (not without scratched hands and torn clothes) into the heart of a juniper tree that grew in the corner, and, hidden there, began to make what was known among school children in Jamestown as a "wolf-bite" upon his arm. This he did simply by baring the arm, putting his lips to the flesh, and sucking at it until the blood showed in red pin-points at every pore; this was a wolf-bite. There was a thread of savagery running through these Jamestown children—hardly one of them but had a mark of this kind upon his arm. But Bing White's meagre arms looked hideously repulsive—like raw flesh almost—so completely was the skin disfigured by his vampire-like amusement. The fading marks were of an ugly unhealthy color, like a livid bruise, the fresh ones fierily encarnadined and inflamed; for Bing pursued this pastime to a perilous pitch.
Another custom indulged in every now and then by the boys and girls in Jamestown was the making of "fox-bites," which meant simply the rubbing with a moistened finger of a spot upon the back of the hand until the skin was worn away and a spot of red flesh left; this was a fox-bite—no cut, burn, or bruise took so long to heal, and in the little schoolhouse there were always some of those hungry-looking sores, attesting the perseverance and fortitude of the sufferers. Rather grewsome pastimes these seem—sprung perhaps from some Indian custom, witnessed by some early settler, described by him to his breathless circle of little ones, by them to be practised in their play and perpetuated in the mysterious manner that makes a meaningless mummery survive as a sacred rite.
Myron Holder's grandmother had been failing during the entire summer. She sank rapidly as the autumn advanced, her strength ebbing as the days shortened. Myron went no more to Mrs. Deans', but stayed at home to wait upon her grandmother. The old woman was a querulous invalid, with no specific disease, only a gradual decline of her vitality. Myron waited upon her untiringly, giving her every possible comfort she could devise out of their scanty means and her scantier knowledge. Bitter as her grandmother's tongue had been, harsh as had been her rule, Myron yet shrunk with a sick feeling of defenselessness from the hour when that tongue would be forever silenced, from the moment when, that rule ceasing, she would be left rudderless.
In these days of autumn quietude, little My grew dearer and dearer to his mother; she caught him to her in the pauses of her work, to kiss him for a moment.
"O soft knees clinging,O tender treadings of soft feet,Cheeks warm with little kissings—O child, child, what have we made each other?"
This was the translation of her heart's mute cry above her boy. Myron Holder, denied the religion of those about her, given no other in its place, founded for herself a new sect, and created for herself a god, and the god was this yellow-haired child, and the worship she accorded him was expressed in every tender tendance of her loving hand. He chattered away to her ceaselessly when he was awake, and the echo of his uncertain tones mingling with her grandmother's bitter words robbed them of their sting.
Mrs. Holder sank daily. Her tongue was silent now, save for murmurs of discontent or chiding, for her strength did not permit of much speech; but her eyes shone balefully as they followed Myron's figure about the room; and sometimes, when Myron bent over her, their depths were lighted by malignant mirth, for her thoughts were turned to that little plot in the graveyard where two tiny pine stakes stood now, marking a new boundary.
The day the first snow fell, Mrs. Holder's mind, hitherto fixed solely upon her sorrows and Myron's shame, began to wander. She too, like her dead son, began to speak of England, but not so sweetly as he. Old bits of village scandal, flashes of old spites against this one or that, the expression of old dislikes, broke from her lips with painful force, together with reflections upon household affairs and daily needs, which told that she was in spirit back amid the old manners and the old people.
One day Myron watched her fall asleep, and then crept out to the kitchen to steal a look at the boy, who was also sleeping. She returned in an instant, but in that time a change had come to her grandmother's bewildered brain. She was awake again, and her eyes met Myron's with cruel scorn, as she paused involuntarily upon the threshold of the bedroom; it was an expression that spoke not only of dislike, but loathing, fury, hatred. Myron would have approached to replace the coverlets that were falling from the couch, but her grandmother grew furious if she advanced a step.
"Out of my sight, Myron Kind!" she cried. "Out wi' ye! What? Ye'll follow my son within his own doors, to win him? Out, you! Go—ou—out——"
Myron retreated, seeing her grandmother was confusing her with the memory of her mother. Thrice she tried to enter, and thrice withdrew before the rage that seemed to shake the sick woman's frail form so cruelly. Then, feeling she must have aid, Myron hurried to the street, and going to the nearest house, which happened to be Mrs. Warner's, knocked at the door.
"Will you come over?" she said, when Mrs. Warner answered her knock. "Grandmother's out of her head; she thinks I'm my mother, and won't let me go near her."
"Poor old woman!" said Mrs. Warner, catching at a clean white apron. "Poor old woman! You've made her life a burding to her between you, I'll be bound."
In a few moments they were in the cottage again, and Mrs. Warner installed herself in the sickroom, somewhat disconcerted because Mrs. Holder persisted in calling her "Bet," but delighted that circumstances had brought her to the front at such a time, for Mrs. Warner was one of the matrons of the village who, not yet attained to the elect, like Mrs. Deans, Mrs. White and Mrs. Wilson, was yet far in advance of the young wives in experience, and thought herself quite capable of sustaining any responsibility.