"Shall I call Hoke?" she asked, moving toward the door.
David did not want her to leave them, loving the sight of her. "Don't go. I saw him as I came along," he said.
But she went on, and sat herself on a seat under a huge locust tree. Tardiest of all the trees, it had not yet leaved out. Later it would be covered with a wealth of sweet white blossoms swarming with honey-bees, and the air all about it would be filled with its lavish fragrance and the noise of humming wings.
Presently Hoke came plodding up from the field, and smiled as he passed her. "Doc inside?" he asked.
She nodded. When David came out, he found her still seated there, her head resting wearily against the rough tree. She rose and came toward him.
"I thought I wouldn't leave until I knew if there was anything more I could do," she said simply.
"No, you've done all you can. She'll be all right. Where's your horse?"
"I walked."
"Why did you do that? You ought not, you know."
"Hoyle rode the colt down to see could Aunt Sally come here for a day or two, until Miz Belew can do for herself better." She turned back to the house.
"Come home now with me. Ride my horse, and I'll walk. I'd like to walk," urged David.
"Oh, no. Thank you, Doctor, I must speak to Azalie first. Don't wait."
She went in, and David mounted and rode slowly on, but not far. Where the trail led through a small stream which he knew she must cross, he dismounted and allowed the horse to drink, while he stood looking back along the way for her to come to him. Soon he saw her white dress among the glossy rhododendron leaves as she moved swiftly along, and he walked back to meet her.
"I have waited for you. You are not used to this kind of a saddle, I know, but what's the difference? You can ride cross-saddle as the young ladies do in the North, can't you?"
"I reckon I could." She laughed a little. "Do they ride that way where you come from? It must look right funny. I don't guess I'd like it."
"But just try – to please me? Why not?"
"If you don't mind, I'd rather walk, please, suh. Don't wait."
"Then I will walk with you. I may do that, may I not?" He caught the bridle-rein on the saddle, leaving the horse to browse along behind as he would, and walked at her side. She made no further protest, but was silent.
"You don't object to this, do you?" he insisted.
"It's pleasanter than being alone, but it's right far to walk, seems like, for you."
"Then why not for you?" She smiled her mysterious, quiet smile. "You must know that I am stronger than you?" he persisted.
"I ought to think so, since that day we rode over to Cate Irwin's, but I was right afraid for you that time, lest you get cold; and then it was me – " she paused, and looked squarely in his eyes and laughed. "You wouldn't say 'it was me,' would you?"
He joined merrily in her laughter. "I never corrected you on that."
"You never did, but you didn't need to. I often know, after I've said something – not – right – as you would say it."
"Do you, indeed?" he walked nearer, boyishly happy because she was close beside him. He wanted to touch her, to take her hand and walk as children do, but could not because of the subtile barrier he felt between them. He determined to break it down. "Finish what you were saying? And then it was me – what?"
"And then it was I who gave out, not you."
"But you were a heroine – a heroine from the ground up, and I love you." He spoke with such boyish impulsiveness that she took the remark as one of his extravagances, and merely smiled indulgently, as if amused at it. She did not even flush, but accepted it as she would an outburst from Hoyle.
David was amazed. It only served to show him how completely outside that charmed circle within which she lived he still was. He was maddened by it. He came nearer and bent to look in her face, until she lifted her eyes to look fairly in his.
"That's right. Look at me and understand me. I waited there only that I might tell you. Why do you put a wall between us? I tell you I love you. I love you, Cassandra; do you understand?"
She stood quite still and gazed at him in amazement, almost as if in terror. Her face grew white, and she pressed her two hands on her heart, then slowly slid them up to her round white throat as if it hurt her – a movement he had seen in her twice before, when suffering emotion.
"Why, Cassandra, does it hurt you for me to tell you that I love you? Beautiful girl, does it?"
"Yes, suh," she said huskily.
He would have taken her in his arms, but refrained for very love of her. She should be sacred even from his touch, if she so wished, and the barrier, whatever it might be, should halo her. He had spoken so tenderly he had no need to tell her. The love was in his eyes and his voice, but he went on.
"Then I must be cruel and hurt you. I love you all the days and the nights – all the moments of the days – I love you."
In very terror, she flung out her hands and placed them on his breast, holding him thus at arm's-length, and with head thrown back, still looked into his eyes piteously, imploringly. With trembling lips, she seemed to be speaking, but no voice came. He covered her hands with his, and held them where she had placed them.
"You have put a wall between us. Why have you done it?"
"I didn't – didn't know; I thought you were – as far – as far away from us as the star – the star of gold is – from our world in the night – so far – I didn't guess – you could come so – near." She bowed her head and wept.
"You are the star yourself, you beautiful – you are – "
But she stopped him, crying out. She could not draw her hands away, for he still held them clasped to his heart.
"No, no! The wall is there. It must be between us for always, I am promised." The grief wailed and wept in her tones, and her eyes were wide and pleading. "I must lead my life, and you – you must stay outside the wall. If you love me – Doctor, – you must never know it, and I must never know it." Her beating heart stopped her speech and they both stood thus a moment, each seeing only the other's soul.
"Promised?" The word sank into his heart like lead. "Promised?" Slowly he released her hands, and she covered her face with them and sank at his feet. He bent down to her and asked almost in a whisper: "Promised? Did you say that word?"
She drooped lower and was silent.
All the chivalry of his nature rose within him. Should he come into her life only to torment and trouble her? Ought he to leave the place? Could he bear to live so near her? What had she done – this flower? Was she to be devoured by swine? The questions clamored at the door of his heart. But one thing could he see clearly. He must wait without the wall, seeking only to serve and protect her.
With the unerring instinct which led her always straight to the mark, she had seen the only right course. He repeated her words over and over to himself. "If you love me, you must never know it, and I must never know it." Her heart should be sacred from his personal intrusion, and their old relations must be reëstablished, at whatever cost to himself.
With flash-light clearness he saw his difficulty, and that only by the elimination of self could he serve her, and also that her manner of receiving his revelation had but intensified his feeling for her. The few short moments seemed hours of struggle with himself ere he raised her to her feet and spoke quietly, in his old way.
He lifted her hand to his lips. "It is past, Miss Cassandra. We will drop these few moments out of your life into a deep well, and it shall be as if they had never been." He thought as he spoke that the well was his own heart, but that he would not say, for henceforth his love and service must be selfless. "We may be good friends still? Just as we were?"
"Yes, suh," she spoke meekly.
"And we can go right on helping each other, as we have done all these weeks? I do not need to leave you?"
"Oh, no, no!" She spoke with a gasp of dismay at the thought. "It – won't hurt so much if I can see you going right on – getting strong – like you have been, and being happy – and – " She paused in her slowly trailing speech and looked about her. They were down in a little glen, and there were no mountain tops in sight for her to look up to as was her custom.
"And what, Cassandra? Finish what you were saying." Still for a while she was silent, and they walked on together. "And now won't you say what you were going to say?" He could not talk himself, and he longed to hear her voice.
"I was thinking of the music you made. It was so glad. I can't talk and say always what I think, like you do, but seems like it won't hurt me so here," she put her hand to her throat, "where it always hurts me when I am sorry at anything, if I can hear you glad in the music – like you were that – night I thought you were the 'Voices.'"
"Cassandra, it shall be glad for you, always."
She looked into his eyes an instant with the clear light of understanding in her own. "But for you? It is for you I want it to be glad."
CHAPTER XIV
IN WHICH DAVID VISITS THE BISHOP, AND FRALE SEES HIS ENEMY
The bishop was seated in a deep canvas chair on his wide veranda, looking out over his garden toward a distant line of blue hills. His little wife sat close to his side on a low rocker, very busy with the making of buttonholes in a small girl's frock of white dimity and lace. Betty Towers loved lace and pretty things.
The small girl was playing about the garden paths with her puppy and chattering with Frale in her high, happy, childish voice, while he bent weeding among the beds of okra and egg-plant. His face wore a more than usually discontented look, even when answering the child with teasing banter. Now and then he lifted his eyes from his work and watched furtively the movements of David Thryng, who was pacing restlessly up and down the long veranda in earnest conversation with the bishop and his wife.
The two in the garden could not understand what was being said at the house, but each party could hear the voices of the other, and by calling out a little could easily converse across the dividing hedge and the intervening space.
"Talk about the influence of the beautiful in nature upon the human soul, – it is all very pretty, but I believe the soul must be more or less enlightened to feel it. I've learned a few things among your people up there in the mountains. Strange beings they are."
"It only goes to show that heredity alone won't do everything," said the bishop, placing the tips of his fingers together and frowning meditatively.
"Heredity? It means a lot to us over there in England."
"Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and then, even if they have to come over here for it."
"For that and – your money – yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain people of yours, who are they anyway?"
"Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world – as any you will find at home. They have their heredity – and only that – from all your classes over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime."
"How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"
"Circumstances and environment have kept them to the pure stock, and neglect has left them untrammelled by civilization and unaided by education. Time and generations of ignorance have deteriorated them, and nature alone – as you were but now admitting – has hardly served to arrest the process by the survival of the fittest."
"Nature – yes – how do you account for it? I have been in the grandest, most wonderful places, I venture to say, that are to be found on earth, and among all the glory that nature can throw around a man, he is still, if left to himself, more bestial than the beasts. He destroys and defaces and defiles nature; he kills – for the mere sake of killing – more than he needs; he enslaves himself to his appetites and passions, follows them wildly, yields to them recklessly; and destroys himself and all the beauty around him that he can reach, wantonly. Why, Bishop Towers, sometimes I've gone out and looked up at the stars above me and wondered which was real, they and the marvellous beauty all around me, or the three hundred reeking humanity sleeping in the camp beneath them. Sometimes it seemed as if only hell were real, and the camp was a bit of it let loose to mock at heaven."
"We mustn't forget that what is transitory is not a part of God's eternity of spirit and truth."
"Oh, yes, yes! But we do forget. And some transitory things are mighty hard to endure, especially if they must endure for a lifetime."
David was thinking of Cassandra and what in all probability would be her doom. He had not mentioned her name, but he had come down with the intention of learning all he could about her, and if possible to whom she was "promised." He feared it might be the low-browed, handsome youth bending over the garden beds beyond the hedge, and his heart rebelled and cried out fiercely within him, "What a waste, what a waste!"
Betty Towers, intent on her sewing, felt the thrill that intensified David's tone, and she, too, thought of Cassandra. She dropped her work in her lap and looked earnestly in her husband's face.
"James, I feel just as Doctor Thryng does – when I think of some things. When I see a tragedy coming to a human soul, I feel that a lifetime of transitory things like that is hard to endure. Fancy, James! Think of Cassandra. You know her, Doctor Thryng, of course. They live just below your place. She is the Widow Farwell's daughter, but her name is Merlin."
David arrested his impatient stride and, drawing a chair near her, dropped into it. "What about her?" he said. "What is the tragedy?"
"I think, Betty, the hills must keep their own secrets," said the bishop.
His little wife compressed her lips, glanced over the hedge at the young man who happened at the moment to have straightened from his bent position among the plants and was gazing at their guest, then resumed her sewing.
"Is it something I must not be told?" asked David, quietly. "But I may have my suspicions. Naturally we can't help that."
"I think it is better to know the truth. I don't like suspicions. They are sure to lead to harm. James, let me put it to the doctor as I see it, and see what he thinks of it."
"As you please, dear."
"It's like this. Have you seen anything of that girl or observed her much?"
"I certainly have."
"Then, of course, you can see that she is one of the best of the mountain people, can't you? Well! She has promised to marry – promised to marry – think of it! one of the wildest, most reckless of those mountain boys, one that she knows very well has been in illicit distilling. He is a lawbreaker in that way; and, more than that, he drinks, and in a drunken row he shot dead his friend."
"Ah!" David rose, turned away, and again paced the piazza. Then he returned to his seat. "I see. The young man I tried to help off when I first arrived."
"Yes. There he is."
"I see. Handsome type."
"He's down here now, keeping quiet. How long it will last, no one knows. Justice is lax in the mountains. His father shot three or four men before he died himself of a gunshot wound which he received while resisting the officers of the law. If there's a man left in the family to follow this thing up, Frale will be hunted down and arrested or shot; otherwise, when things have cooled off a little up there, he will go back and open up the old business, and the tragedy will be repeated. James, you know how often after the best you could do and all their promises, they go back to it?"
"I admit it's always a question. They don't seem to be content in the low country. I think it is often a sort of natural gravitation back to the mountains where they were born and bred, more than it is depravity."
"I know, James, but that excuse won't help Cassandra."
"Why did she do it?" asked David. "She must have known to what such a marriage would bring her."
"Do it? That is the sort of girl she is. If she thought she ought, she would leap over that fall there."
"But why should she think she ought? Had she given her – promise – " David saw her as she appeared to him when she had said that word to him on the mountain, and it silenced him, but only for a moment. He would learn all he could of her motives now. He must – he would know. "I mean before he did this, before she went away to study – had she made him such a – promise?"
"No. You tell him about it, James. You have seen her and talked with her. They were quarrelling about her, as I understand, and she thinks because she was the cause of the deed she must help him make retribution. Isn't that it, James? She knows perfectly well what it means for her, for she has had her aspirations. I can see it all. Frale says he was not drunk nor his friend either. He says the other man claimed – but I won't go into that – only Cassandra promised him before God, he says, that if he would repent, she would marry him. And when she was here she used to talk about the way those women live. How her own mother has worked and aged! Why, she is not yet sixty. You have seen how they live in their wretched little cabins, Doctor; that's what Frale would doom her to. He never in life will understand her. He'll grow old like his father, – a passionate, ignorant, untamed animal, and worse, for he would be drunken as well. He's been drunk twice since he came down here. James, you know they think it's perfectly right to get drunk Saturday afternoon."
"Yes, it seems a terrible waste; but if she has children, she will be able to do more for them than her mother has done for her, and they will have her inheritance; so her life can't be wholly wasted, even if she is not able to live up to her aspirations."
"James Towers! I – that – it's because you are a man that you can talk so! I'm ashamed, and you a bishop! I wish – " Betty's eyes were full of angry tears. "I only wish you were a woman. Slowly improve the race by bearing children – giving them her inheritance! How would she bear them? Year after year – ill fed, half clothed, slaving to raise enough to hold their souls in their bodies, bringing them into the world for a brute who knows only enough to make corn whiskey – to sell it – and drink it – and reproduce his kind – when – when she knows all the time what ought to be! Oh, James, James, think of it!"
"My dear, my dear, you forget, he has promised to repent and live a different life. If he does, things will be better than we now see them. If he does not change, then we may interfere – perhaps."
"I know, James. But – but – suppose he repents and she becomes his wife, and puts aside all her natural tastes, and the studies she loves, and goes on living with him there on the home place, and he does the best he can – even. Don't you see that her nature is fine and – and so different – even at the best, James, for her it will be death in life. And then there is the terrible chance, after all, that he might go back and be like his father before him, and then what?"
"Well, their lives and destinies are not in our hands; we can only watch out for them and help them."
"James, he has been drunk twice!"
"Yes, yes, Betty, my little tempest, and if he gets drunk twice more, and twice more, she will still forgive him until seventy times seven. We must make her see that unless he keeps his promise to her, she must give him up."
"Of course. I suppose that's all we can do. I – don't know what you'll think of me, Doctor Thryng; I'm a dreadful scold. If James were not an angel – "
"It's perfectly delicious. I would rather hear you scold than – "
"Than hear James preach," laughed the bishop. "I agree with you."
"I agree with her," said David, emphatically. "It ought to be stopped if – "
"If it ought to be, it will be. What do you think she said to me about it when I went to reason with her? 'If Christ can forgive and stand such as he, I can. It is laid on my soul to do this.' I had no more to say."
"That is one point of view, but we mustn't lose sight of the practical, either. To be his wife and bear his children – I call it a waste, a – "
"Yes, yes. So it is." And what more could the bishop say? After a little, he added, "But still we must not forget that he, too, is a human soul and has a value as great as hers."
"According to your viewpoint, but not to mine – not to mine. If a man is enslaved to his own appetites, he has no right to enslave another to them."
The following day David took himself back to his hermitage, setting aside all persuasions to remain.
"Don't make a recluse of yourself," begged the bishop's wife. "The amenities of life can't always be dispensed with, and we need you, James and I, you and your music."
David laughed. "I'm too fatally human to become a recluse, and as for the amenities, they are not all of one order, you know. I find plenty of scope for exercising them on others, and I often submit to having them exercised on me, – after their own ideas." He laughed again. "I wish you could look into my larder. You'd find me provided with all the hills afford. They have loaded me with gifts."
"No wonder! I know what your life up there means to them, taking care of their mothers and babies, and sitting up with them nights, going to them when they are in trouble, rain or shine, and visiting them in their bare, wretched, crowded homes."
"It wouldn't be so bad often, if it weren't that when a family is in serious trouble or has a case needing quiet and care, the sympathies of all their relatives are roused, and they come crowding in. In one case, the father was ill with pneumonia. I did all I could for him, and next day – would you believe it? – I found his sister and her 'old man' and their three youngsters, his old mother and a brother and a widowed sister, all camped down on them, all in one room. The sister sat by the fire nursing her three-months-old baby, his mother was smoking at her side, and the sick man's six little children and their three cousins were raising Ned, in and out, with three or four hounds. Not one of the visitors was helping, or, as they say up there, 'doing a lick,' but the wife was cooking for the whole raft when her husband needed all her care. Marvellous ideas they have, some of them."
"You ought to write out some of your experiences."
"Oh, I can't. It would seem like a sort of betrayal of friendship. They have adopted me, so to speak, and are so naïve and kind, and have trusted me – I think they are my friends. I may be very odd – you know."
"I know how you feel," said Betty.
The bishop's little daughter had assumed the proprietorship of the doctor. She even preferred his companionship to that of her puppy. She clung to his hand as he walked away, pulling and swinging upon his arm to coax him back. He took her in his arms and carried her out upon the walk, the small dog barking and snapping at his heels, as David threatened to bear his tyrannical young mistress away to the station.
"Doggie wants you to leave me here," she cried, pounding him vigorously with her two little fists.
He brought her back and placed her on the broad, flat top of the high gate-post. "Very well, doggie may have you. I will leave you here."
"Doggie wants you to stay, too." She held him with her small arms about his neck.
"Well, doggie can't have me." He unclinched her chubby hands, crossed them in her lap, and held them fast while he kissed her tanned and rosy cheek. "Good-by, you young rogue," he said, and strode away.
"Come and lift me down," she wailed. But he knew well she could scramble down by herself when she chose, and walked on. She continued to call after him; then, spying Frale in the wood yard, she imperatively summoned him to her aid, and trotted at his side back to the woodpile, where they sat comfortably upon a log and visited together.
They were the best of friends and chattered with each other as if both were children. In the slender shadow of a juniper tree that stood like a sentinel in the corner of the wood yard they sat, where a high board fence separated them from the back street.
The bishop's place was well planted, and this corner had been the quarters of the house servants in slave times. It was one of Frale's duties to pile here, for winter use, the firewood which he cut in short lengths for the kitchen fire, and long lengths for the open fireplaces.
He hated the hampered village life, and round of small duties – the weeding in the garden, cleaning of piazzas and windows, and the sweeping of the paths. The woodcutting was not so bad, but the rest he held in contempt as women's work. He longed to throw his gun in the hollow of his arm and tramp off over his own mountains. At night he often wept, for homesickness, and wished he might spend a day tending still, or lying on a ridge watching the trail below for intruders on his privacy.
The joy of life had gone out for him. He thought continually of Cassandra and desired her; and his soul wearied for her, until he was tempted to go back to the mountains at all risks, merely for a sight of her. Painfully he had tried to learn to write, working at the copies Betty Towers had set for him, – and certainly she had done all her conscientious heart prompted to interest him and keep him away from the village loungers. He had even progressed far enough to send two horribly spelled missives to Cassandra, feeling great pride in them. And now he had begun to weary of learning. To be able to write those badly scrawled notes was in his eyes surely enough to distinguish him from his companions at home; of what use was more?
"What's that you are tossing up in the air? Let me see it," demanded the child, as Frale tossed and caught again a small, bright object. He kept on tossing it and catching it away from the two little hands stretched out to receive it. "Give it to me. Give it to me, Frale. Let me see it."
He dropped it lightly in her palm. "Don't you lose hit. That thar's somethin' 'at's got a charm to hit."
"What's a 'charm to hit'? I don't see any charm."
Then Frale laughed aloud. He took it with his thumb and forefinger and held it between his eye and the sun. "Is that the way you see the 'charm to hit'? Let me try."
But he slipped it in his pocket, first placing it in a small bag which he drew up tightly with a string. "Hit hain't nothing you kin see. Hit's only a charm 'at makes hit plumb sure to kill anybody 'at hit hits. Hit's plumb sure to hit an' plumb sure to kill, too."
"Oh, Frale! What if it had hit me when you threw it up that way – and – killed me? Then you'd be sorry, wouldn't you, Frale?"
"Hit nevah wouldn't kill a girl – a nice little girl – like you be. Hit's charmed that-a-way, 'at hit won't kill nobody what I don't want hit to."
"Then what do you keep it in your pocket for? You don't want to kill anybody, do you, Frale?"
"Naw – I reckon not; not 'thout I have to."
"But you don't have to, do you, Frale?" piped the child.
He rose, and selecting an armful of stove wood carried it into the shed and began packing it away. Dorothy sat still on the log, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, meditating. A tall man slouched by and peered over the high board fence at her. His eyes roved all about the place eagerly, keen and black. His matted hair hung long beneath his soft felt hat. The child looked up at him with fearless, questioning glance, then trotted in to her friend.
"Frale, did you see that man lookin' over the fence? You think he was lookin' for you, Frale? Come see who 'tis. P'r'aps he's a friend of yours."
"Dorothy, Dorothy," called her mother from the piazza, and the child bounded away, her puppy yelping and leaping at her side. The tall man turned at the corner and looked back at the child.
The bishop's place occupied one corner of the block, and the fence with a hedge beneath it ran the whole length of two sides. Slowly sauntering along the second side, the gaunt, hungry-eyed man continued his way, searching every part of the yard and garden, even endeavoring, with backward, furtive glances, to see into the woodhouse, where in the darkness Frale crouched, once more pallid with abject fear, peering through the crack where on its hinges the door swung half open.
As the man disappeared down the straggling village street, Frale dropped down on the wheelbarrow and buried his haggard face in his hands. A long time he sat thus, until the dinner-hour was past, and black Carrie had to send Dorothy to call him. Then he rose, but in the place of the white and haunted look was one of stubborn recklessness. He strolled to the house with the nonchalant air of one who fears no foes, but rather glories in meeting them, and sat himself down at his place by the kitchen table, where he bantered and badgered Carrie, who waited on him reluctantly, with contemptuous tosses of her woolly head. From the day of his first appearance there had been war between them, and now Frale knew that if the stranger asked her, she would gladly and slyly inform against him.
The afternoon wore on. Again Frale sat on the wheelbarrow, thinking, thinking. He took the small bag from his pocket and felt of the bullet through the thin covering, then replaced it, and, drawing forth another bag, began counting his money over and over. There it was, all he had saved, five dollars in bills, and a few quarters and dimes.
He did not like to leave the shelter of the shed, and his eyes showed only the narrow glint of blue as, with half-closed lids, he still peered out and watched the street where his enemy had disappeared. Suddenly he rose and climbed with swift, catlike movements up the ladder stairs behind him, which led to his sleeping loft. There he rapidly donned his best suit of dyed homespun, tied his few remaining articles of clothing in a large red kerchief, and before a bit of mirror arranged his tie and hair to look as like as possible to the village youth of Farington. The distinguishing silken lock that would fall over his brow had grown again, since he had shorn it away in Doctor Thryng's cabin. Now he thrust it well up under his soft felt hat, and, taking his bundle, descended. Again his eyes searched up and down the street and all about the house and yard before he ventured out in the daylight.