Kitabı oku: «The Tempering», sayfa 13

CHAPTER XXIII

Boone had stood for a moment in the lighted door, and in that interval the shrewd old eyes of Cyrus Spradling had told him that the boy too had known sleeplessness and that the clear-chiselled features bore unaccustomed lines of misery.

If they had both suffered equally, reasoned the rude philosopher, it augured a quarrel not wholly or guiltily one-sided.

So a few minutes later he watched them walking away together toward the creek bed, where the voice of the water trickled and the moonlight lay in a dreamy lake of silver.

"I reckon," he reassured himself, "they'll fix matters up ternight. Hit's a right happy moon for lovers ter mend th'ar quarrels by."

"Happy," began Boone, with moisture-beaded temples, when they had reached a spot remote enough to assure their being undisturbed, "I reckon I don't need to tell you that I haven't slept much since I saw you. I haven't been able to do anything at all except – just think about it."

"I've thought about it – a good deal – too," was her simple response, and Boone forced himself on, rowelling his lagging speech with a determined will power.

"I see now – that I didn't act like a man. I ought to have told you long ago – that I – that my heart was just burning up – about Anne."

"I reckon I ought to have guessed it… I'd heard hints."

"It seemed a slavish hard thing to write," he confessed heavily. "I tried it – more than once – but when I read it over it sounded so different from what I meant to say that – " There he paused, and even had she been inclined to visit upon him the maximum instead of the minimum of blame, there was no escaping his sincerity or the depth of his contrition. "That, until I saw you – night before last – I didn't have any true idea – how much you cared."

"I didn't aim that you ever should – have any idea."

"Happy," he rose and with the blood receding from his skin looked down at her, as she sat there in the moonlight, "Happy, it seems like I never knew you – really – until now."

She was, in her quietly borne distress, an appealing picture, and the hands that lay in her lap had the unmoving stillness of wax – or death.

It had to be said, so he went on. "I never realized before now how fine you are – or how much too good you are for me. I've come over here tonight to ask you to marry me – if it ain't too late."

The girl flinched as if she had been struck. Not even for a moment did her eagerness betray her into the delusion that this proposal was anything other than a merciful effort to soothe a hurt for which he felt himself blamable.

Just as she had meant to keep from him the extent of her heart's bruising, so he was seeking now to make amends at the cost of all his future happiness. Having blundered, he was tendering what payment lay in possibility.

"No, Boone," she said firmly. "We'd both live in hell for always – unless we loved each other – so much that nothin' else counted."

"I've got to be honest," he miserably admitted. "It wouldn't be fair to you not to be. I've got to go on loving her – while there's life in me, I reckon – loving her above all the world. But she's young – and there'll be lots of men of her own kind courtin' her. I reckon" – those were hard words to say, but he said them – "I reckon you had the right of it when you said I was fixin' to break my heart anyhow. They won't ever let her marry me."

It did not seem to him that it would help matters to explain that even now he felt disloyal to his whole religion of love, and that he had asked her only because he realized that no other man here could bring Happy's life to fulfilment, while Anne could only step down to him in condescension.

The decision which he had reached after tossing in a fevered delirium of spirit lacked sanity. From no point of view would it conform to the gauge of soundness. In giving up Anne, when Anne had told him he might hope, he had construed all the sacrifice as his own. As to Anne's rights in the matter, he was blinded by the over-modest conviction that she was giving all and he taking all and that she could never need him.

He would in later years have reasoned differently – but he had been absorbing too fast to digest thoroughly, and the concepts of his new-found chivalry had become a distorted quixoticism. He meant it only for self-effacing fairness – and it was of course unfairness to himself, to Anne, and even to Happy. But she divined his unconfessed thought with the certitude of intuition.

"Boone," she told him, as she rose and laid a tremulous hand on his arm, "you've done tried as hard as a man can to make the best of a bad business. It wasn't anybody's fault that things fell out this way. It just came to pass. I'm going to try to teach some of the right young children over at the school next autumn – so what little I've learned won't be wasted, after all. I want that we shall go on being good friends – but just for a little while we'd better not see very much of each other. It hurts too bad."

That was an unshakeable determination, and when, in obedience to the edict, Boone had not come back for a week, Cyrus asked his daughter briefly:

"When do you an' Boone aim ter be wedded?"

The girl flinched again, but her voice was steady as she replied:

"We – don't – never aim to be."

The old fellow's features stiffened into the stern indignation of an affronted Indian chief. He took the pipe from between his teeth as he set his shoulders, and that baleful light, that had come rarely in a life-span, returned to his eyes.

"Ef he don't aim ter wed with ye," came the slow pronouncement, "thar hain't no fashion he kin escape an accountin' with me."

For a moment Happy did not speak. It seemed to her that the raising of such an issue was the one thing which she lacked present strength to face; but after a little she replied, with a resolution no less iron-strong because the voice was gentle:

"Unless ye wants ter break my heart fer all time – ye must give me your pledge to – keep hands off."

After a moment she added, almost in a whisper:

"He's asked me – and I've refused to marry him."

"You – refused him?" The voice was incredulous. "Why, gal, everybody knows ye've always thought he was a piece of the moon."

"I still think so," she made gallant response. "But I wants ye to – jest trust me – an' not ask any more questions."

The father sat there stiffly gazing off to the far ridges, and his eyes were those of a man grief-stricken. Once or twice his raggedly bearded lips stirred in inarticulate movements, but finally he rose and laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Little gal," he said in a broken voice, "I reckon I've got ter suffer ye ter decide fer yoreself – hit's yore business most of all – but I don't never want him ter speak ter me ergin."

So Boone went out upon the hustings with none of the eager zest of his anticipations. That district was so solidly one-sided in political complexion that the November elections were nothing more than formalities, and the real conflict came to issue in the August primaries.

But with Boone's announcement as candidate for circuit clerk, old animosities that had lain long dormant stirred into restive mutterings. The personnel of the "high court" had been to a considerable extent dominated by the power of the Carrs and Blairs.

Now with the news that Boone Wellver, a young and "wishful" member of the Gregory house, meant to seek a place under the teetering clock tower of the court house, anxieties began to simmer. Into his candidacy the Carrs read an effort to enhance Gregory power – and they rose in resistance. Jim Blair, a cousin of Tom Carr, threw down his gauntlet of challenge and announced himself as a contestant, so that the race began to assume the old-time cleavage of the feud.

On muleback and on foot, Boone followed up many a narrowing creek bed to sources where dwelt the "branch-water folk." Here, in animal-like want and squalor, the crudest of all the uncouth race lived and begot offspring and died. Here where vacuous-eyed children of an inbred strain stared out from the doors of crumbling and windowless shacks, or fled from a strange face, he campaigned among the illiterate elders and oftentimes he sickened at what he saw.

Yet these people of yesterday were his people – and they offered him of their pitiful best even when their ignorance was so incredible that the name of the divinity was to them only "somethin' a feller cusses with" – and he felt that his campaign was prospering.

One day, however, when he returned to his own neighbourhood after an absence across the mountain, he seemed to discover an insidious and discouraging change in the tide – a shifting of sentiment to an almost sullen reserve. An intangible resentment against him was in the air.

It was Araminta Gregory who construed the mystery for him. She had heard all the gossip of the "grannies," which naturally did not come to his own ears.

"I'm atellin' ye this, Boone, because somebody ought ter forewarn ye," she explained. "Thar's a story goin' round about, an' I reckon hit's hurtin' ye. Somebody hes done spread ther norration thet ye hain't loyal ter yore own blood no more. – They're tellin' hit abroad thet ye've done turned yore back on a mountain gal – atter lettin' her 'low ye aimed ter wed with her." She paused there, but added a moment later: "I reckon ye wouldn't thank me ter name no names – an', anyhow, ye knows who I means."

"I know," he said, in a very quiet and deliberate voice. "Please go on – and, as you say, it ain't needful to call no names."

"These witch-tongued busybodies," concluded the woman, her eyes flaring into indignation, "is spreadin' hit broadcast thet ye plumb abandoned thet gal fer a furrin' woman – thet wouldn't skeercely wipe her feet on ye – ef ye laid down in ther road in front of her!"

Boone's posture grew taut as he listened, and it remained so during the long-ensuing silence. He could feel a furious hammering in his temples, and for a little time blood-red spots swam before his eyes. But when at length he spoke, it was to say only, "I'm beholden to you, Araminty. A man has need to know what his enemies are sayin'."

It was one of those sub-surface attacks, which Boone could not discuss – or even seem to recognize without bringing into his political forensics the names of two women – so he must face the ambushed accusation of disloyalty without striking back.

In Marlin Town, one court day, Jim Blair was addressing a crowd from the steps of the court house, and at his side stood Tom Carr, his kinsman. Boone was there, too, and when that speech ended he meant to take his place where his rival now stood, and to give back blow for blow. At first Jim Blair addressed himself to the merits of his own candidacy, but gradually he swung into criticism of his opponent, while the opponent himself listened with an amused smile.

"Ther feller that's runnin' erginst me," confessed the orator, "kin talk ter ye in finer phrases then I kin ever contrive ter git my tongue around. I reckon when he steps up hyar he'll kinderly dazzle ye with his almighty gift of speech. I've spent my days right hyar amongst ye in slavish toil – like ther balance of you boys – hev done. My breeches air patched – like some o' yourn be. He's done been off ter college, l'arnin' all manner of fotched-on lore. He's done been consortin' with ther kind of folks thet don't think no lavish good of us. He's done been gettin' every sort of notion savin' them notions thet's come down in our blood from our fore-parents – but when he gits through spell-bindin' I wants ye all ter remember jest one thing: I'll be plumb satisfied if I gits ther vote of every man thet w'ars a raggedy shirt tail and hes a patch on the seat of his pants. He's right welcome ter ther balance."

Boone joined in the salvo of laughter that went up at that sally, but the mirth died suddenly from his face the next moment, for the applause had gone to Blair's head like liquor and fired him to a more philippic vein of oratory.

"I reckon I might counsel this young feller ter heed ther words of Scripture an' 'tarry a while in Jericho fer his beard ter grow.' Mebby by thet day an' time he mout l'arn more loyalty fer ther men – yea, an' fer ther women, too – of his own blood and breed!"

Once more the red spots swam before Boone Wellver's eyes, but for a hard-held moment he kept his lips tight drawn. There was a tense silence as men held their breath, waiting to see if the old Gregory spirit had become so tamed as to endure in silence that damning implication; but before Blair had begun again Boone was confronting him with dangerously narrow eyes, and their faces inches apart.

Blair was a short, powerfully built man with sandy hair and a red jowl swelling from a bull-like neck. Standing on the step below, Boone's eyes were level with his own.

"Either tell these men what you mean," commanded the younger candidate in a voice that carried its ominous level to the farthest fringe of the small crowd, "or else tell 'em you lied! Wherein have I been disloyal to my blood?"

"You'll hav yore chancet ter talk when I gits through here," bellowed Blair. "Meanwhile, don't break in on me."

"Tell 'em what you mean – or take it back – or fight," repeated Boone, with the same fierce quietness.

It was no longer possible to ignore the peremptory challenge, and the speaker was forced into the open. But he was also enraged beyond sanity and he shouted out to the crowd over the shoulders of the figure that confronted him, "Ef he fo'ces me ter name ther woman I'll do hit. Hit's – "

But the name was never uttered. With a lashing out that employed every ounce of his weight and strength, Boone literally mashed the voice to silence, and sent the speaker bloody-mouthed down the several steps into the dust of the square.

Despite his middle-aged bulk, Jim Blair had lost none of his catlike activity, and while the more timid members of the crowd, in anticipation of gunplay, hastily sought cover or threw themselves prone to the ground, he came to his feet with a revolver ready-drawn and fired point-blank. But, just as of two lightning bolts, one may have a shade more speed than the other, so Boone was quicker than Jim. He struck up the murderous hand, and the two candidates grappled. An instant later, Boone stood once more over a prostrate figure, that was this time slower in recovering its feet. Wellver broke the pistol and emptied it of its cartridges, then contemptuously he threw it down beside its owner in the dust of the court house yard.

But as he turned, Tom Carr was standing motionless at arm's length away, and Boone was looking into Tom's levelled revolver.

"Ye hain't quite done with this matter yet," snarled that partisan, as his eyes snapped malignantly. "Ye've still got me ter reckon with. Throw up them hands, afore I kills ye!"

Boone did not throw them up. Instead, he crossed them on his breast and remained looking steadily into the passionate face of the black-haired leader of Asa's enemies.

"Shoot when you get ready, Tom; I haven't got a gun on me," he said calmly. "But if you shoot – you'll be breaking the truce – that you pledged your men to, when you and Asa shook hands. If the war breaks out afresh, today, it will be your doing." Other hands now were fondling weapons out there in front of the two; men who were mixed between Gregory and Carr sympathies and who were rapidly filtering themselves out of a conglomerate mass into two sharply defined groups.

"Hain't ye a'ready done bust thet truce – jest now?" demanded Tom, and Boone shook his head.

Again there was a purposeful ring in his voice.

"No, by God – I handled a liar – like he ought to be handled – and if there are any Gregories out there that wouldn't do the same – I hope they'll line up with you!"

CHAPTER XXIV

Slowly and grudgingly Tom sheathed his weapon. He knew that to fire on an unarmed man in the tensely overwrought gathering would mean wholesale blood-letting. Black looks told of a tempest brewing; so, with a surly nod, he stepped back and helped Jim Blair to his place again. Blair, dust covered and bruised, with a dribble of blood still trickling from his mashed lip, made an effort to complete his speech which ended in anticlimax. To Boone he said nothing more, and to the interrupted subject he gave no further mention.

That episode had rather strengthened than hurt Wellver's prospects, and he would have gone away somewhat appeased of temper had he not met Cyrus Spradling face-to-face in the court house yard, and halted, with a mistaken impulse of courtesy, to speak to him.

But the old friend, who had become the new enemy, looked him balefully in the eye and to the words of civil greeting gave back a bitter response: "I don't want ye ter speak ter me – never ergin," he declared. "But I'm glad I met up with ye this oncet, though. I promised ye my vote one day – an' I'm not a man thet breaks a pledge. I kain't vote fer ye, now, with a clean conscience, though, and I wants ye ter give me back thet promise."

Boone knew without delusion that this public repudiation of him by the neighbour who had expected to be his father-in-law had sealed his doom. He knew that all men would reason, as he had done, that Cyrus would give no corroboration to belittling gossip concerning his daughter, unless the wound were deep beyond healing and the resentment righteous beyond concealment.

"Of course," responded the young candidate gravely, "I give back your promise. I don't want any vote that isn't a willing one." But he mounted his horse with a sickened heart, and it was no surprise to him, when the results of the primaries were tallied, to find that he was not only a beaten man but so badly beaten that, as one commiserating friend mournfully observed to him, "Ye mout jest as well hev run on ther demmycrat ticket."

Boone went back to McCalloway's house that afternoon and sat uncomforted for hours before the dead hearth.

His eyes went to the closet wherein was locked the sword which Victor McCalloway had entrusted to his keeping, but he did not take it out. In the black dejection of his mood he seemed to himself to have no business with a blade that gallant hands had wielded. He could see only that he had messed things and proven recreant to the strong faith of a chivalrous gentleman and the love of two girls.

On the mantle-shelf was a small bust of Napoleon Bonaparte in marble – the trifle that Anne had brought across the "ocean-sea" to be an altar-effigy in his conquest of life! Boone looked at it, and laughed bitterly.

"That's my pattern – Napoleon!" he said, under his breath. "I'm a right fine and handsome imitation of him. The first fight I get into is my Waterloo!"

He met Happy in the road a few days later, and she stopped to say that she was sorry. She had heard, of course, of how decisively he had been beaten, but he drew a tepid solace from reading in her eyes that she did not know the part her father had played in his undoing. He hoped that she would never learn of it.

It was early in September when Boone set the log house in order, nailed up its windows and put a padlock on the door. He carried the key over to Aunt Judy's, and then on his return he sat silently on the fence gazing at its square front for a long while in the twilight.

Before him lay new battles in the first large city he had yet seen – a city which until now he had seen only once when he went there to visit its jail. But his preternaturally solemn face at length brightened. Anne was there, and Colonel Wallifarro had said, "A warm welcome awaits you."

In due course Boone presented himself at the office door in Louisville with the three names etched upon its frosted glass, and was conducted by a somewhat supercilious attendant to the Colonel's sanctum.

The Colonel came promptly from his chair with an outstretched hand.

"Well, my boy," he exclaimed heartily, "I'm right glad to see you."

Morgan sat across the desk from his father. Some matter of consultation had brought him there, and the fact that the Colonel had permitted young Wellver's arrival to interrupt it annoyed him.

"So you lost your race up there, didn't you?" Colonel Wallifarro laughed. "I wouldn't take it too seriously if I were you. After all, it's not the only campaign you'll ever make."

But the eyes of the young mountaineer held the sombreness of his humourless race. "Mr. McCalloway was right ambitious for me, sir," he said. "I hate to have to tell him – that the first fight I ever went into was a – Waterloo."

"Still, my boy, it's better to have your Waterloo first and your Austerlitz later – but I know General Prince will want to see you." The lawyer rang a bell and said to the answering boy: "Tell General Prince that Mr. Boone Wellver is in my office."

As they sat waiting, Boone inquired: "How is Anne – Miss Masters?"

At the mention of the name, Morgan bridled a little, and cast upon him a glance of disapproving scrutiny, but the Colonel, still glancing at the memorandum which he held, replied with no such taint of manner, "Anne's taking a year at college by way of finishing up. I guess you'll miss her after being her guide, counsellor and friend down there in Marlin."

"Yes, sir, I'll miss her."

So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live.

The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer example of the Old South – which was now the New South as well; but one friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange world of its loneliness.

At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize – only the bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and others – that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to conceal – until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront.

He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and manners.

Morgan was consistently polite – but it was a detached politeness which often made Boone's blood quicken to the impulse of belligerent heat. Morgan palpably meant to ignore him with a disdain masked in the habiliments of courtesy. When Boone went reluctantly to dine at Colonel Wallifarro's home he felt himself a barbarian among cultivated people – though that feeling sprang entirely from the new sensitiveness. As a matter of fact, he bore himself with a self-possessed dignity which Colonel Wallifarro later characterized as "the conduct of a gentleman reduced to its simplest and most natural terms."

But for the most part of that first winter in town his life, outside the office, was the life of the boarding house in downtown Third Street; the life of slovenly but highly respectable women with a penchant for cheap gossip; of bickerings overheard through division walls; of disappointed men who should, they were assured, if life stood on all fours with justice, be dwelling in their own houses. In short, it was the dreary existence of unalleviated obscurity.

But to Boone it was something else. In his third-floor room was a window and a gas jet.

The window looked across to another world where, behind a fine old sycamore that took on alluring colour of bole and bark and leaf, stood a club through whose colonial doors men like Morgan Wallifarro went in and out.

At night too that mean room was to him sanctuary, for then there was the gas jet, and the gas jet stood, to a cabin-bred boy, for adventuring into all the world of literature of which McCalloway had talked.

Boone had the list written down, and the public library had the books.

So while the couple in the next room debated the question of separation and divorce, their voices carrying stridently through lath and plaster, Boone was ranging the world with Darwin, with Suetonius and his "Lives of the Caesars," with the whole bright-panoplied crew: Plutarch, Thackeray, Dumas, Stevenson, Macaulay, and Kipling.

Then, too, there were visits to the jail where a kinsman lay in durance. But when summer came he heaved a sigh of vast relief.

As the train took him back through flat beargrass and swelling bluegrass, through the beginnings of the hills, where he saw the first log booms in the rivers – his heart seemed to expand and his lungs to broaden out and drink deep where they had been only sipping before.

Dutifully and promptly upon his arrival at the McCalloway cabin, Boone went over to see Happy, and as he drew near, for all the assurance of a courage, by no means brittle, he halted in the road and braced himself before he crossed the stile.

To go there was something of an ordeal. To stay away, without making the effort, would leave him guiltily recreant to an old friendship which, on one side, had been love.

"It's Boone Wellver. Can I come in?" he shouted from the road, and Cyrus, who looked aged and hunched his shoulders more dejectedly than of old, rose slowly from his hickory-withed chair on the porch and stood upright.

At first he did not speak. Indeed, he did not speak at all until he had come with deliberate steps down to the stile, where he faced the visitor across the boundary fence, as a defending force might parley over a frontier. Then raising a long arm and a pointed finger down the road, he spoke the one word, "Begone!"

"I came to see Happy," said the visitor steadily. "I don't think she is nursing any grudge."

"No," the old fellow's eyes flashed dangerously; "women folks kin be too damn fergivin', I reckon. Hit war because she exacted a pledge from me to keep hands off thet I ever let matters slide in ther first place. I don't know what come ter pass. She hain't nuver told me – but I knows you broke her heart some fashion. Many a mountain war has done been started fer less."

Boone straightened a little and his chin came up, but still there was no resentment in his voice:

"Then I can't see your daughter – at your house? Will you tell her that I sought to?"

In a hard voice Cyrus answered: "No – ef she war hyar I wouldn't give her no message from ye whatsoever – but since she ain't hyar thet don't make no great differ."

"Where is she?"

"Thet's her business – and mine. Hit hain't none o' yourn – . An' now, begone!"

Boone turned on his heel and strode away, but it was only from other neighbours that he learned that a second school, similar to the one which the girl herself had attended, was being started some forty miles away in a district that had heard of the first, and had sent out the cry, "Come over into Macedonia and help us!"

To that school Happy had gone – this time as a teacher of the younger children.

But before the summer ended Anne came to Marlin Town, and though she had been at an Eastern college Boone found no change in her save that her beauty seemed more radiant and her graciousness more winning. He had been a trifle afraid of meeting her, this time, because he felt more keenly than in the past how many allowances her indulgence must make for his crudities.

But Anne knew many men who had the superficial qualities that Boone coveted – and little else. What she did see in her old playmate was a fellow superbly fitted for companionship out under the broad skies, and, above all, she loved the open places and the freedom of the hills where the eagles nested in their high eyries.

"I love it all," she exclaimed one day, with an outsweep of her arms. "I believe that somewhere back in my family tree there must have been an unaccounted-for gipsy. I've not been here so very much, and yet I always think of coming here as of going home."

"God never made any other country just like it, I reckon," Boone answered gravely. "It's fierce and lawless, but it's honest and generous, too. Men kill here, but they don't steal. They are poor, but they never turn the stranger away. It's strange, though, that you should love it so. It's very different from all you've known down there."

"I guess there's a wild streak in me, too," she laughed. "Those virtues you speak of are the ones I like best. When I go home I feel like a canary hopping back into its cage, after a little freedom."