Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“Why, Rilla, I didn’t propose to give her my share of the soap. But it would be cheaply got rid of that way. Yes,” exclaimed Infant, with sudden recklessness, “I would rather _buy_ soap, and pay out money to have this dirty stuff carted off, than ever smell it again while I live. Let us make a new rule, and give our fat and ashes to the Robbs. They have farmed for us ever since father died,” Infant pleaded, “and whatever you say, Rilla, I know you have the greatest confidence in them.”

“The poorhouse wagon is never going to call for me,” said Rilla decidedly. “You can go and build a fire under the kettle, while I carry some more water to pour on the ash-hopper. That lye is strong enough to bear up a setting of eggs, but we may need some more a little weaker.”

“Rilla, I am as firm as the ash-hopper itself. You can’t shake me any more than you could our brick smoke-house. I won’t help make any more soap--especially on rose day,” added Infant to herself. “I don’t see any sense in it.”

“But you can see sense in spoiling dozens of good roses to load yourself up with like a mad Ophelia. You feel above all the associations of wash day, though the Princess Nausicaa didn’t.”

“Oh, Rilla, I don’t feel above anything. I merely feel under that soap kettle, and as if it would crush my soul out, as the shields crushed Tarpeia, if I didn’t throw it off.”

“Well, I am going to make soap,” said Rilla, whitening with intense disapproval of the liberty her twin proposed to grasp. “You are not a minor, and if you were, I’m not your guardian. But if you propose to go to yourself and leave me to myself, we both know what belongs to us, and it is easily done.”

This time-worn hint, which in her girlhood used to startle and distress Infant so much, made but the slightest impression on her hearing now, as she leaned over the veranda railing to look at the roses. There were such abundant stacks of them: she might cut and pile them into a pyramid almost as tall as herself. Such smooth, sweet tea-roses, such crimson velvet-petaled Jacqueminots, blush and white so fragrant you would be willing to drown yourself in a sea of their scent; yellow roses piercingly delightful, Prairie Queens creeping all over the front of the house, old hundred-leaved varieties, having always in their depths a reminder of grandmother’s chests and long, long past days. There were eighteen distinct families of roses, each family a mighty tribe, marshaled before Infant on lawn and dewy stretch of garden. It was rose day. She would not let herself think of anything else.

Rilla would not come to the embowered dinner-table which Infant prepared so carefully, and to which she called her sister exactly as the clock struck twelve.

Rose day never interfered with Infant’s duties. Her conscience acquitted her of shirking. Often in dead winter-time, when the snow piled up, and Enos Robb’s family settled down to the enjoyment of colds and rheumatism, she fed all the stock herself.

Rilla turned her back on Infant’s several approaches, and dipped lye with a savagely noisy gourd to quench Infant’s voice. Slugs and ants in the roses, and even mildew, were no drawback at all to rose day compared to Rilla. Habits of endurance become proof armor to one’s sensibilities in the course of life, however; so Infant wandered off and absorbed the beauty of that day almost as completely as if she did so with Rilla’s approval. There was tremulous heat over the meadows. The huge and strictly tended garden was a world by itself. Beyond that stretched their orchard, having a run of clear water winding through it, all thickly tufted along the margins with mint.

Infant stepped upon the spongy lichens of the fence and rested her arms on the top rail, while she looked along the narrow country thoroughfare. The sweet green world was dear enough to be pressed in her arms. Mingled mint and rose scents were satisfying. The noble strength of their Norman colts pasturing in the stock meadow was beautiful to the eye. Infant loved to hear the pounding of those tufted feet, and to note the brilliant blackness or gray dappling of the young creatures’ coats glistening in the sun. She did not expect anything more unusual to happen on this rose day than her rebellion against Rilla and the splendor of the weather.

But who should come suddenly riding along the road, as if he had an appointment with Infant, and meant to keep it the moment she set her foot on the rail, but the Honorable Truman Condit, who many years before rode as instantaneously out of her sight! She knew him in a flash, although his hair showed gray around the ears, and much experience had added unspeakably to his personality. He was on a Condit horse, evidently riding around to look at his old neighborhood. There was a great tribe of the Condits, all well-to-do, high-headed people. The Honorable Truman had been the local bright young man of his generation. He went west, where, Infant heard, he became a Senator and did tremendous things.

She was suddenly conscious that her rose-studded braid was not wound up in a decent lump as she wore it before her class of young ladies in Sunday-school. She felt contemptible and out of her place in the human procession, although the Honorable Truman turned his horse straight into the fence corner to shake hands with her.

“Pretty nearly the same Infant Baldwin,” he remarked. “But I do see some lines on your face.”

“I suppose I’ve vegetated instead of lived all the time you have been doing so much,” said Infant.

“Oh, I haven’t been doing so much.”

“We heard you had.”

“We means Rilla and you. And you didn’t marry?”

“No,” said Infant, feeling it a stinging indignity that he should mention it, after that courtship so long ago buried. _He_ had married, and raised a family out west. Rilla was probably right when she said one woman was the same as another to a man.

“And how is Rilla? Is she as hard on you as she used to be?”

“Oh, Rilla was never hard on _me_. She is quite well, thank you. You’re coming up to the house to make us a call and take tea, aren’t you?”

“I thought I would.”

Infant looked anxiously at the westering sun. She hoped Rilla would have the cold soap cut into cakes and boxed, and herself bathed, clothed, and in her right mind, before the Honorable Truman Condit rode up to their door.

“I want to have a talk with you first, though,” he added. “And my way is to go right to the point. Why did you never marry?”

“Come to that,” retorted Infant, a sparkle breaking through her face, “why did _you marry_?”

“In the first place, because you wouldn’t have me, and in the second place, because I found a very good wife where I went. I’ve been a widower now several years, and the boys are settled. I’m loose from business for almost the first time in my life, and back here to look at the old neighborhood before spending some years abroad. Your never marrying has revived certain things. Maybe you’ve forgotten.”

Among her other thoughts, Infant was conscious of recollecting how often she had wished to go abroad if only some happy friend could go along as a cushion betwixt Rilla and her. She unfastened with a furtive hand the rose rope wound about her, but, unwilling to let so many precious roses go, gathered it into loops on her arm.

“Did you ever know,” pursued the Honorable Truman, “that Rilla told me you were going to marry one of the Pierson boys?”

“No!” Infant cried out so suddenly that the horse started.

“She did,” said the Honorable Truman.

“Why,” stammered Infant, “how could you believe it?”

“I was a hot-headed boy with more pride than sense. I wouldn’t say anything to you about it.”

“I remember your quarreling with the Piersons.”

“Weren’t you engaged to one of them?”

“No; which one?”

“Abner.”

“I never was engaged to anybody except you,” she retorted, burning hotly in the face, “and I did not admire that experience when you dropped me and went off. And I don’t yet, though you do lay the blame on poor Rilla.”

Plenty of time had Rilla for all the domestic countermarching she wished to perform before that conference by the fence ended. Unusually stirring were her tactics too, for all the Robbs were haled up from the tenant-house--Mrs. Robb to cook a supper, and the young Robbs not actually farming to run on errands.

It was six o’clock when Enos came riding his plough-horses to the great barn. He had turned off early on purpose to intercept Miss Infant and find out what changes were to be made. Infant hastened up the orchard, while the Honorable Truman hastened to the same destination by the road. She saw him leading his horse up the avenue, and felt impatient at Enos Robb’s interruption.

“Sudden doin’s up to the house,” said Enos, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “’Pears like Miss Rill’s made up her mind about Brother Sanderson at last.”

“Is Brother Sanderson at the house?” inquired Infant.

“He is, for a fact, and the license and the preacher with him. Now what I want to know, and what I ought to been consulted, Miss Infant, seeing how long I been here, is this--what’s you and me going to do afterward? Is it an interference?”

“Enos,” said Infant, with a gasp, “this is _almost_ as sudden to me as it is to you. But considering Rilla’s firm character, do you think she would let any new person interfere with her established plans?”

“No, I don’t,” replied Enos, grinning.

Rilla was standing before the dresser in her room arrayed in her stiffest silk. She looked with composure upon her twin, who shut the bedroom door, and hurried up to embrace her.

“It was the best boiling of soap I ever had,” said Rilla, warding the fading roses away from her silk.

“Rilla dear, you might have told me what you meant to do this evening. But I am so glad! I couldn’t bear the thoughts of leaving you before, but now I can.”

“I saw Truman Condit come into the yard with you,” said Rilla. “He’s grown fat. It must have agreed with him to go west.”

“This has been a great rose day,” said her twin, undoing all traces of the day’s festival, and piling them carefully in a waste-basket where they could make no litter. “Won’t you let me kiss you, Rilla?”

The acquiescent nip which Rilla gave Infant took up a world of forgiveness which Rilla never felt.

“And do you think, dear,” Infant ventured, “we’ll ever wish we hadn’t? We’ve lived so long with each other. Truman Condit and Brother Sanderson are really strangers to our ways.”

“I think,” replied Rilla, with decision, “that Brother Sanderson will never have a rose day while he lives on _my_ farm; and when I say it is soap-boiling day it will _be_ soap-boiling day, and Brother Sanderson will stir the soap.”

KENTUCKY

A KENTUCKY PRINCESS

TIME, 1857

The perfection of summer noon, when acres of corn tassels seemed in a trance and the blueness of far-off hills suggested incense rising, was not without its effect on Miss Sally Vandewater as she rode toward General Poynton’s plantation. The turnpike, stretching its ash-colored ribbon across the greenness of the country, rang like a causeway of rock to the beat of horseshoes.

From this plantation or from that, as hill or sweep of woodland revealed them, shone marble stones in family burial lots.

Occasionally Miss Sally met girls or young men on dashing horses, and these merry people saluted her cordially in passing. But in all that blue-grass region, where each member of every comfortable family had his own gaited saddle-horse, there was not a finer animal than Miss Sally’s Pacer. Cæsar and his fortune were aboard when she mounted. Pacer was her entire capital in life, carrying her on visits among good families whereby she subsisted, and furnishing colts for her pin-money. The camel is not more to the Bedouin. Had Pacer failed Miss Sally in any point, she must have fallen into the straits of a reduced gentlewoman, instead of carrying a high head through all the best houses of the county.

She rode at a steady hand gallop through the sultry day, though a young colt whinnied behind her; increasing her speed past one pillared brick house set far up an avenue. The woods about it were close trimmed and free from underbrush, like all Kentucky woodland. Some evergreens made gloom about its eaves, but not such gloom as the reputation of the house itself. There lived a man who was said to have a chain stretched across his cellar. He bought up slaves and handcuffed them in pairs along this chain until he was ready to drive them to market, when a band of musicians was employed to lead their march, cheerfully playing “Yankee Doodle.” The house was worse than haunted. Both whites and blacks hurried past its handsome gate with abhorrence--spot of mystery and abomination on those pleasant corn lands.

Miss Sally was anxious to get out of her riding-skirt at Poynton’s, and bully the black boy who would come to take her bridle. The wealthiest slave-owner in Kentucky could not exact more deference. Everybody humored her. In a country where hospitality was a social religion, her little visits of a month or two were welcomed even when they crowded dearer guests. And in spite of fine traits concealed under the haughty airs of a nomad, well did she know how to crowd people distasteful to her.

When she turned into Poynton’s avenue, the white pillared mansion seemed to doze. The quarters stretched in a long row fieldward. Miss Sally could not see the kitchen, standing by itself behind the great house. No drowsiness had settled there. A stir of preparation was going on, not only for the two o’clock dinner, but for the wedding yet a week distant. Miss Sally had omitted one place in her rounds, and shortened her visit at another, that she might be at Poynton’s in time to gather every detail of the wedding.

A yellow boy skipped out to help her at the mounting-block. He would have lounged to meet his master. Approvingly she saw him pull his hat to her.

“Miss Sally, you sho’ly bake you’se’f to-day!”

“Yes, it’s hot, Peach. And if you’re concerned for me I hope you’ll feel more concern about Pacer.” Miss Vandewater’s anxiety about her property grew in the ratio of its approach to a crib.

“Sam’ll rub her down,” promised Peachy. “I’ll tell Sam to give her a good feed.”

“You attend to it yourself,” commanded Miss Sally.

“I isn’t a stable-boy,” remonstrated Peachy. “I’se a house-boy.”

“House-boy or stable-boy, you mind what I tell you. In my father’s time--and he owned fifty--our boys did whatever they were told to do.”

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“And the poor little colt,” said Miss Sally, making that infant’s discomfort her own,--“I don’t want my colt kicked to death among a lot of wild shod heels.”

“He go with his mammy. No ha’um evah happen to you’ colts on this place, Miss Sally.”

“You see to it that none happens to it this time! All the family at home?” she stopped to inquire, with her riding-skirt gathered in her hand.

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“Has my trunk been carried up? I sent it this morning.”

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“Who’s here?” demanded Miss Vandewater, stiffening her figure.

Peachy followed her eye to the stable-yard, where stood a vehicle she never beheld with calmness. It was the handsome and shining carriage of Judge Poynton, from the county seat.

Peachy grinned. “Miss Judge come out this mawnin’ to spend the day.”

So sore does one’s pride become when chafed by poverty, that Miss Sally hated that plump and opulent woman for naught but being plump and opulent; though she would have given as her reason the airs of a woman married above her wildest expectations.

“You can fetch my riding-skirt to my room, Nancy,” said Miss Sally to the colored girl who admitted her, casting it across the stair-rail as she ascended. “I reckon I go to the same room I always have.”

“Miss Ma’ky’s things is all spread out in that bedroom,” apologized Nancy.

“You can soon move them out of the way.”

“But Miss Maria ’bleeged to have you’ trunk set in the back bedroom fo’ this week, Miss Sally.”

A solicitous hostess, trailing a muslin wrapper--for even Kentucky hospitality may be overpowered by the languors of summer midday--met the guest with outstretched hands. Miss Sally permitted her cheek to be brushed, and at once put the lady into the apologetic attitude of an overcrowded landlord.

“You ought to have sent me word if it was inconvenient to have me now, Mrs. Poynton, and I wouldn’t have skipped the Moores as I did.”

“Miss Sally, it is not inconvenient to have you now!” the delinquent pleaded. “It is never inconvenient. Only America’s things are so spread out, and we are obliged to keep dressing-rooms for the wedding, and the bridesmaids! I thought you would be less annoyed in that back room than anywhere else. I am so glad you have come!”

“The judge’s wife is here?”

“But it is only for the day,” unconsciously conciliated Mrs. Poynton. “She is not staying. Sue Bet Moore has been here, helping America to try on. Her dresses are all done. But Sue Bet has gone.”

“I knew Sue Bet was to be one of the bridesmaids,” said Miss Sally. It was not necessary to mention bridesmaids to a woman of her thorough information.

“We have all been lying down; the day is so sultry. We shall not have America’s things filling up the chambers much longer. I feel like giving her all the rooms in the house--yes, the plantation itself! If you can only make yourself comfortable a few days, we can change your room after the wedding.”

“The back bedroom makes not the slightest difference in the world to me, Mrs. Poynton”--

“O Miss Sally, I am so glad it makes no difference!”

--“but I am sorry I came at such an inconvenient time!”

Thus the duet went on, until Mrs. Poynton accepted as positive beneficence Miss Sally Vandewater’s willingness to descend from the back chamber, dine with the family, and sit down in the parlor.

Miss Sally had kept her sprightliness and her youthful shape. Her muslin dress was cut low, and her shoulders were concealed by a bertha of lace. Fine embroidered undersleeves made delicate frills about her folded hands. The curling-iron had created two large spirals at each temple, but the rest of her hair was pinned in a knot at the back of her head.

America Poynton came into the parlor in her tight-fitting habit of black velvet, and sat down with the guests, holding her riding-whip, her gauntlets, and tall hat.

“Are you going to ride in this heat?” inquired her aunt, the judge’s wife.

“We always ride Thursday afternoons, about four o’clock, if the weather is fine,” America replied.

She looked no less cool and white in the heavy fabric than in a gold dotted vaporous tissue which she had worn at dinner. Her black eyes moved with languid interest from speaker to speaker as the visiting chat ran on. America Poynton was called the proudest girl who ever appeared in the county seat from surrounding plantations. The manners of this tall beauty were considered too quiet by romping young people who danced, drove, and flirted to the limit of their privileges; yet she was sovereign among them, and ruled by a look while others expended noisy effort. It was told of her that she often sat veiled in her room to save her complexion from sun glare and wind, so matchless was it. She had a robe of black curls in which she could wrap herself when her maid let it down to brush. America was General Poynton’s only child. She had inherited from her grandmother a plantation adjoining her father’s, with more than a hundred slaves. When she went to boarding-school in the county town, one of her servants led to her every pleasant Friday evening a milk-white mule, saddled and bridled with silk, fine leather, and silver.

Though above such pastime as flirtation, America had more offers than any other girl in her set. Her low, slow voice never recounted these conquests, but the victims published themselves, wondering whom America Poynton would marry, since she was so hard to suit. When she accepted Ross Carr, therefore, the astonishment was general. He was good enough for some girls, but hardly good enough for America Poynton. He had also been a wild youth, but people said he was settling down. The Carrs ranked somewhat below the Poyntons, and Ross had no plantation of his own. Yet when the community thought it over, they were willing to accept him as America’s husband if he proved a credit to her.

“Miss Maria,” said Nancy, coming to the door with a face full of meaning, “Miss Becky Inchbald’s done lighted down by the quarters, and tied her horse.”

“What does she want?” inquired Mrs. Poynton, disturbed.

“Dunno, Miss Maria.”

“Why doesn’t she come to the house?”

“She hardly ever came to the house in her best days,” murmured the judge’s wife.

“Perhaps she’s sick,” continued Mrs. Poynton. “Some of you run and see.”

“Peachy done been down to her, and she say she just waitin’ there in the shade. Miss Becky got her baby ’long with her.”

The general’s wife heard this with rising dignity.

“Don’t annoy her,” she commanded. “Let the poor girl alone.”

“Law, Miss Maria, nobody won’t say nothin’ to Miss Becky. But all the little niggehs has come out to look at her.”

“Go yourself and see if she needs anything.”

“I have heard,” remarked Miss Vandewater, through the silence which followed, “that Becky Inchbald, for all she was so close-mouthed at first, threatens now to carry her child to its father.”

Mrs. Poynton, with an instant’s pause on the subject, hoped he could be found and made to do his duty. The judge’s wife heard with a mere lifting of the eyebrows. She thought it scarcely a fit topic to mention before America. But America’s plane was so much above Becky Inchbald that she had never even disapproved of the girl.

Becky Inchbald’s people were not poor whites, for they owned land and slaves; but their raw unfitness for encountering the old stock held them on the verge of society. That Becky was uneducated was her own fault. She had become the mother of a hapless baby and the scandal of the neighborhood before America Poynton’s engagement was announced.

“She’s spiteful about that baby,” pursued Miss Sally. “There’ll be trouble somewhere before sundown, if she’s started out with it.”

“I do not see that Inchbald’s affairs need disturb us,” suggested the judge’s wife, making dimples at the finger roots of one hand as she smoothed her polished hair.

“Some women are never disturbed about any of the sin in the world,” said Miss Vandewater incisively, “until it comes into their houses and takes their children by the throat.”

“That can never be said of you, Miss Sally,” the judge’s indolent wife responded, smiling. Though she generally bore Miss Sally’s attacks as a lady should, and felt indulgent sympathy for the migratory spinster, she sometimes allowed herself to retort.

“Aunt and Miss Sally, kiss and make up,” said America, with the deliberate accent that gave weight to all her words. But without response one of the combatants sat glowering, while the other, waving a lazy fan, indicated through the window Ross Carr cantering to his appointment, man and steed moving like one, so perfect was his horsemanship.

America’s mother, impatiently anxious to go on recounting to Miss Sally the silver and linen bought for America’s new home, resigned herself for a few moments. Ross Carr threw his bridle to the groom, who was walking Miss Poynton’s saddled thoroughbred.

He entered the room. America gave him her hand with a light word, and he stood holding his hat, talking to her elders.

It was the culminating moment of her betrothal, a dot of time separating ease and care-free thoughts from what followed.

The young man chatted idly with four women, when another screamed out behind him:--

“Here it is, Ross Carr! So you’ve got to take it, and no words betwixt us--for I won’t take care of it any longer!”

“Why, Miss Becky!--why, Miss Becky!” Mrs. Poynton herself ran gasping forward to interpose between such scandalous outcry and America’s lover. “Come away with me, Miss Becky, and let me help you with your baby--and don’t speak that way before the gentlemen!”

A shaker bonnet fell back from the girl’s hot and furious face. She had narrow sunken temples like a hen’s. Her entire profile was chicken beaked, yet a fluff of golden down made her comely. The wrathful rings in her eyes sent out their fires toward Ross Carr.

“He thinks he’s a great gentleman, and he thinks he’s going to get a great lady”--

“Becky Inchbald, sit down in that chair!” commanded America, standing at the other side of the room. Her hat and gloves and whip lay on the floor. The other women, even her mother, waited, sitting blanched.

Carr remained with his hand on the back of the chair, like a frozen figure, while Becky Inchbald placed herself in it and stretched the baby across her lap. Her first courage leaving her, she began to cry.

The men of the west do not cower when found out in their sins. Ross Carr stood six feet and one inch high; a handsome, light-haired Kentuckian, the man most abundant in vitality, and the best horseman in Bourbon County. A culprit waiting to be shot, he looked his death in the face, erect, but blighted through every outline. He had carried this guilt a long time, trying to shape it for disclosure; while day after day continued to separate him farther from the Ross Carr of the past, and to make more incomprehensible the deeds which he inherited from that miserable wretch.

When you or I stand, on our day of judgment, to be looked at through the dark medium of our basest moments, may some eye among our contemners discern the angel shape struggling in remorse and anguish behind the bar.

“Is this your child?” America demanded of her lover, pointing to it for his identification.

The baby, oppressed by the jaunt, under arm, or on lap, according to its mother’s convenience in riding, was covered all over its visible surface by that prickly rash which nurses call “heat.” It was gowned in pink calico, and diffused a sour odor.

Ross Carr looked down at it with the slighting masculine eye, which since Saturn has seen little to admire in extremely young offspring. He controlled the muscles of his lips to reply.

“I reckon it is.”

“Answer me on your word as a man--is this your child?”

“Yes. It is.”

“He knows it’s his, and he’s got to take care of it and support it--it’s his place to take care of it, not mine,” sobbed Becky, her head wagging.

America directed her face to Becky. “Do you intend to turn it off entirely?”

“Yes. I do! It’s his, and he ought to keep it!”

“But you are its mother!”

“I won’t be its mother!” exploded Becky, flinging the ill-kept and wretched infant about on her knees with a vicious grip. “I’ll leave it on a doorstep first!”

The child put up a piteous lip and uttered those cries by which bruised infancy protests against tormentors whom it feels but does not know.

America stared at the girl; her alabaster face was suddenly drained of horror at the wrong done a woman, and filled with passionate contempt.

“Then I’ll be its mother! Give it to me.”

She gathered it off Becky’s lap and laid its heat-blotched face against her shoulder. The tiny creature discharged a mouthful of its wretchedness there. America stanched the spot, and made a softer rest for its cheek with her rose-scented handkerchief. Her unconscious sweep of figure in taking the child and standing up publicly with it, thrilled beholders like piercing music or the sight of great works of art. The mother-spirit, which has brooded for centuries over this world--the passion to foster and protect and train--shone white and large in her face. She was that fair impersonation men call the Goddess of Liberty, holding the outcast to her breast. She was Mother Mary, with a reminder of the Heavenly Infant in her arms.

No one remonstrated or spoke a word to her as she moved from the room.

Becky Inchbald, pulling her shaker over her face, went out and mounted her horse.

America was at the top of the stairs when she heard Ross Carr speak hoarsely at the foot. She stood looking at him over the balustrade. The baby was quiet.

“One word, America!--It’s all over--between us?”

He could hear his watch ticking; and outdoor sounds buzzed in his ears.

“No,” answered America. “It is not all over between us.”

Ross Carr dropped his groping hand on the stair newel, his next sentence also coming in fragments.

“There won’t be any use--Shall I come here--for the ceremony--next Thursday?”

“Thursday,” spoke the low, slow voice above him, “at two o’clock, was the time we set.”

The culprit lifted his eyes to her and exclaimed:--

“America, tell me what you want me to do!”

“I want you,” she said, “to be a father to your child!” Her mouth struggled. She flung out the rest in a wail--“and never speak to me of this again!”

Not fit to prostrate himself before her virgin motherhood, the tarnished man hid his face on his arm against the stair-rail. She carried his child out of sight.

There was scarcely a negro on the plantation who did not know what had happened when Ross Carr staggered out of the house and passed his chafing horse and the groom as if he had forgotten his own property.

Baseless mountains which had been piling lucent peak over peak, now seemed to sink in smoke to the effacement of the sun. Stretches of forest and road, plantation and dimpled hill, from horizon to horizon, ceased smiling; for the day’s heat was about to pass off in drenching rain.

This cloudy interval before the thunder-burst was just the time for stealing corn to roast at the quarters in the evening. So Peachy crept on all fours down narrow avenues to avoid agitating the corntops, such telltales are the tassel fingers. His sack already bulged; but unexpectedly he came against a man stretched out in the dirt face downward--Miss Ma’ky’s Mist’ Ross Carr!

Peachy backed away from the spectacle, the grinding of teeth and the swelling of veins on a man’s neck! Not until many cornstalks screened him had Peachy the courage to burst recklessly down a slim alley, spilling his stolen ears, while corn leaves slashed his face with their edged sabres. The superstitious African instinctively fled from anguish so dumb and dreadful.

While the county was shocked by America Poynton’s adoption of Ross Carr’s child, her beauty as a bride softened all critics. She went to live with her husband on her plantation, and there the baby grew into robust and happy boyhood. Reticence on the subject of Becky Inchbald was diffused through her small world. At that date a small world held all the acts of many lives.

Even Miss Sally Vandewater, swelling her visiting list with another hospitable home, grew into complete harmony with the judge’s wife on this delicate subject.

Becky Inchbald went on a long visit to Tennessee. News came back that she had married there; and in the course of years that she had died.

So far as human knowledge goes, Ross Carr’s wife took no shrewish revenge, though a woman of her nature must have suffered from the blot. She always spoke of his son as “our eldest boy,” and he grew up among brothers and sisters without noting that he was part alien, until some neighbor dropped the fact in his ear. Personally he was much like his father, whose sin matured its bitterest fruit when that child threw himself on the ground to sob in secret agony because the beautiful and tender woman he loved with such devotion was really not his mother.

INDIANA

THE FAIRFIELD POET

TIME, 1881

Tragedy, which is never far from the most prosperous lives, continually trod upon the tenderest-hearted woman in Fairfield. She hated Fairfield as a background to her existence, but there had fate nailed her for life. It was the forlornest of Indiana railroad stations, looking like a scar on the face of a beautifully wooded country, peopled by the descendants of poor white Carolinians and Tennesseeans. The male portion of the community sat on the railroad platform in yellow jeans, sprawling their naked toes to the sun, whittling, and jetting with the regularity of fountains upon the meerschaum-colored boards. The women might have lived lives of primitive simplicity, dignified by child-bearing and neighborly sympathy with one another; but they stained their human kindness with trivial disagreements.

This one among them all felt the progress of the age tearing her heartstrings out while her circumstances kept her at a standstill. I do not say her life would have been more symmetrical or her experience richer if she had lived in the whirl. She was a plain, ground-loving woman who enjoyed the companionship of her fruit-trees and flowers, and worked with her hands. Indeed, crowds annoyed her, and she was undecided what toilets ought to be made for a large public. The striped silk dresses of her prosperous days, the fringed crape shawls and gimp-edged mantillas, agreed ill with bonnets of the passing season, and she had more respect for what was rich and old than for new inventions. But she was fiercely ambitious for her children, especially her eldest son, and for him in spite of his misfortune. The younger boy and girl were still leaping like colts upon their few remaining acres, sound in limb and wind, with the hopes of a future sheathed in their healthy present, when Willie was tall as a man, and far up in his teens.

His mother had a picture of him taken when he was going to school in Cincinnati, under his uncle’s care. At that time his auburn curls were unshorn, and he was beautiful.

A few days before cottons took their terrific rise during the civil war, Mr. Harbison had stocked in thousands of yards. Those were Fairfield’s best days, and he kept a general store, making money so rapidly that the lazy people around him felt helplessly injured. He began his fine brick house, building on a generous and artistic plan, at the edge of Fairfield, where he could surround himself with fruit-trees, and have fields for his cattle. Whether it is a more distinct misery to build the temple of your home and see someone else inhabit it, or to shelter yourself for years in a house you have not the power of finishing, the latter fate was reserved for the Harbisons. With a crash they came down from what had been Fairfield’s opulence nearly to a level with Fairfield’s poverty. They kept the house and grounds and a meadow, but under such weight of mortgages that it was comparatively no grief at all to see the ornamental cornices lying around the partly plastered parlors, balustrades and newel-post standing on end beside the skeleton stairway, and to find the bathroom useless except as a rubbish closet. The man who had employed half of Fairfield was now obliged to become himself an employee, and the general verdict of the world against those who fail was emphasized by communistic envy.

But the habit of being a woman of consideration is not easily forgotten. Mrs. Harbison still made the village respect her. She had something to give to the poorest. She was the wife of a man who had made a fortune before he lost it, and sat in the state Senate. More than all, she had her children, the eldest of them a continual surprise to her. He seemed born to stir her pride and tenderness to their depths. He was tall, fair, and Roman-featured, shy as a girl toward every one but his mother, and so ravenous in mind that he was partly through college when his father’s reverses brought him home.

Then he was seized with a spotted fever, and approached the next world so close that he left part of his faculties there, and was never the same Willie he had been before. He could hear nothing, and seldom spoke an audible word--Mrs. Harbison’s boy, who was made to take the world by storm--and what had been the shyness of a country-bred youth became the set-apart seclusion of a hoofed and goat-eared faun. Willie Harbison was to be seen whirring as noiseless as a bat upon his bicycle across the open ground at dusk. He was met coming from the woods, silent as an Indian, and his eyes were on everything in earth or sky except the human beings just before him.

Whatever were the faults of Fairfield, it loved and respected Willie Harbison, and humored his self-withdrawal. And he loved Fairfield with a partiality which saw mere picturesqueness in the row of whittling men, and various forms of motherhood or sisterhood in the women. He would dismount from his wheel to let the boys tilt with it at the old warehouse. He loved the woods; he loved Wild-cat and Kitten creeks, which ploughed rock-bedded channels through the woods; and what joy in life he fished out of those waters only Willie himself knew. He loved to watch from the mill, on a clear morning, that plume of steam the south-bound train sent around the curve, to watch another plume roll over the first, and finally to see the train stand suddenly on the summit of the grade, sharp-cut against the sky. All common life was pleasant to him. Who but his mother could be witness that a double nature dwelt under his floury mill clothes?

Willie worked in the mill with his father, where the roar of grinding and bolting and the whir of belts made silent liveliness around him. This had been bitterness to his mother--her Willie should work with his head alone; but she accepted it as the result of his physical misfortune.

The parlors were Willie’s workshop, in which he sawed, hammered, and glued, or put noiseless inventions together. A carpenter’s bench was set before two uncased windows, and his father’s old store desk had fallen to his unmercantile use. Its lock was never opened unless Willie had something which he could force himself to show to his mother. That ripe instant arriving, he sought her in her kitchen, her garden, or at her spinning-wheel upstairs, and seized her by the hand. She went with him to the parlors, they fastened the doors, Willie undid his desk, and placed his paper in her fingers. The paper itself was sometimes brown, sometimes the blue cap left from the store, sometimes gilt-edged note having penciled landscapes along the margins, or the flowers he rhymed of done in water-colors; for his hand was as skillful as his eye was discerning. The poems were usually short, and sensitive in rhyme and rhythm. Willie’s themes were the common sights and the common pathos or humor of the situations in which he found the people around him: his interpretation of the flicker’s feelings; his delight in certain thick fleeces of grass; the panorama of sky and field as it marched across his eye; the grotesque though heartily human family party made by old man Persons and his wife, where half of their descendants, unable to get into the small house, sat on the fence while the rest ate dinner. Willie was deaf, but he had inward music. Every smooth and liquid stanza was like wine to his mother. She compared his poems to Burns’s, and could not find the “Mountain Daisy” a whit better than her poet’s song about the woods in frost.

Even Mr. Harbison thought well of Willie’s performances. They were smuggled to him by the mother, and carefully returned to their place when the poet was out of the house. Mr. Harbison knew all that was going on in the world. A dozen times a year he left the grinding of the mill to meet his old chums at the capital, or to quicken the action of his blood in Chicago. A couple of stimulating days tinctured and made endurable his month of mill work. A man of luxurious tastes cannot lose his tastes with his means. He was a judge of poets, and said Willie might as well take to poetry as to anything, for business did not pay a man of sound faculties in these days.

The hum of bees could be heard all around this unfinished brick house growing mossy at the gables, and its shadow was long on the afternoon sunshine. It was that alert and happy time of year when the earth’s sap starts new from winter distillation.

You could hear the voices of children calling in play as they loitered home from school; the days were so long that the cows would not come up the pasture until nearly seven o’clock.

Willie trudged across lots to supper. Mrs. Harbison met him at the north side of the house, having her garden knife and rake in her hands. She put them on the stepless front-door sill, which had never been and never would be pressed by the foot of an arriving guest. This stone sill was high enough for a seat, and she sat down, tilting her sunbonnet back, and smiling at Willie. He was floured from head to foot. Little of his boyish beauty except its clear innocence remained to him. His nose was large for his head, and on his head the auburn curls were shorn to a thin crisping layer.

His young sister was putting supper on the table in the dining-room, his brother was fisting with another boy on the railroad, and up the cow lane came his father with the slow step and somewhat of the ponderous white presence of the walking statue in “Don Giovanni.” But closest knit of all this family, mother and son talked together in silence, some birds in the mulberry-tree over their heads making the only calling and replying that could be heard. Before Willie reached her, he held up his hands and signed in the deaf-mute language:--

“The preacher has come back.”

Mrs. Harbison raised her hands and darted her fingers into various shapes, saying thereby, “Did you see him?”

“No,” Willie replied as swiftly; “I only saw his coffin in the wagon, and Nancy Ellen sitting beside it. She had to bring him the whole twenty miles from where he died, in a wagon.”

“Because it wasn’t on a railroad?”

Willie nodded.

His mother wove on: “Poor Nancy Ellen! Her father wouldn’t let her have the preacher for so long, and turned her off when she did marry him. Now she’s a widow in her honeymoon, and old man Morton saying he told her a preacher as old as himself wasn’t any match for her. Did you see her father? How did he act?”

“He got into the wagon by the driver,” said Willie’s fingers.

“Well, that was something for him.”

“And they drove to his place.”

“I suppose he’ll let her come back and live at home now.”

“I wish you had seen Nancy Ellen.”

“I’m going to see her after the milking is done.”

“Seen her by the preacher,” insisted Willie’s passes. “She looked like a captive coming in chains to Rome.”

“Yes, I’ll be bound she did. Every jolt of that twenty miles is stamped in _her_ mind.”

“I wish,” flashed Willie, “I knew what the preacher sung to himself all along the road.”

“What a notion! You’ll have to fix it up in poetry now, won’t you?”

Willie shook his head many times and reddened.

“You said the preacher used to sing home from meeting in the dark.”

“Yes, he did,” affirmed Mrs. Harbison. “And Nancy Ellen used to listen for him to go by their place.”

Their talk paused, and Willie looked up at the birds in the mulberry. Having afterward caught his mother’s eye, he wove out slowly:--

“When in the tree above his head
The sap goes tingling through the bark,
She will remember it was dead,
And hear him singing in the dark.”

“Oh, Willie, is that the first verse or the last? Have you written it down?”

Willie smiled shyly, putting his head down toward one shoulder, without making any reply. His mother urged, with eager fingers:--

“Print it in some place when you get it done. Nancy Ellen would be pleased.”

“I’m not an obituary poet,” wove Willie.

“But that’s so good.” Mrs. Harbison moved her lips, repeating it to herself. “And ain’t you ever going to publish anything you write? I’ve heard of people getting money for it.”

Willie uttered a gentle sneer. He laughed at his mother in a way that always made her laugh with him.

“But if you would let your father fix up your writings,” she continued, repeating an old plea, “and send them to some publishing house, I know they would put them in a book for you.”

The gate, weighted by a stone, slammed to behind his father coming to the evening meal. But before his mother rose, Willie found time to make dance before her eyes the characters indicating this promise:--

“Some day I’ll get on my bicycle and ride and ride until I come to a publisher. If you miss me, you’ll know where I’ve gone. You can just say to yourself, ‘He’s off having his poems published.’ Wait till then, mother; that will be soon enough.”

“You’ll never do it,” said his mother, having no idea how near the time was.

She gave her family their supper and helped to milk the cows. She thought of Willie’s stanza when the milk first sang in the pail, and kept repeating it until the rising froth drowned all sounds of the lashing streams quite at her pail’s brim.

When the house was tidy and full of twilight stillness, Mrs. Harbison put on a clean apron and took her sunbonnet to make her call of condolence. It was likely they would want watchers at Morton’s, and she was ready to do anything. She had helped bear the burden of life and death so long in Fairfield that illness, a new baby, or the mysterious breathless presence in any house was a peremptory invitation to her.

The boys were playing hide-and-seek around the warehouse, and as she crossed the open lot she saw the usual line of wise men sitting on the edge of the platform with their legs across the rail, as if they had all agreed to make an offering of their feet to the Juggernaut of the next passing train.

Willie darted like a bat or a night bird on his bicycle far up and far down the smooth wagon road. Now he took a turn, and came spinning among the boys, scattering them before him, and escaping as often as they chased him. In one of these excursions he crossed his mother’s way.

The last red streaks and high sunset lights were not gone out of the sky. She lifted up her hands and spelled, “Are you starting out to hunt a publisher now?”

And Willie laughed and nodded and made her a sign of good-by.

The pleasant stillness of the evening fell around her like a blessing as she went on. Fireflies were filling one field, as if a conflagration under that particular ground sent up endless streams of sparks. She smelled the budding elders, and was reminded of tile-like bits in her past, fitted oddly together.

Morton lived but a few steps beyond the village. She had been talking a mere moment with Nancy Ellen, and had not yet entered the room where the preacher lay when another neighbor came in with excitement, and said aloud, over the whispered talk of the mourning house, that something was wrong down at the station.

“That express has run into something again,” proclaimed the neighbor, “and looks, by the way folks run, as if it wasn’t a cow this time. Enough cows and pigs has been killed by that railroad.”

“I haven’t seen the express,” said Mrs. Harbison, feeling her head full of wheels. “It was all quiet when I was there a minute ago.”

“The express has stopped. Good reason! There’s something on the track, I tell ye,” insisted the neighbor.

Willie’s mother was sure it could not be Willie. He was conscious of his infirmity, and so cautious that she had long ceased to be anxious about him. He knew the times of all the trains with nice exactness, also. Yet she started from the house without speaking another word, and ran until she reached the crowd.

The engine stood hissing; it confronted her with the glare of its eye, a horrid and remorseless fate, ready to go its way with bell-clanging and all cheerful noise, no matter who had been ground under its wheels.

The conductor was just stepping on board, for time and orders wait for nothing. The engineer had already climbed back to his cab; he saw a running woman kneel down on the platform and draw the boy up from the boards to rest in her arms. Having seen that much, the engineer turned away his head and wept out loud; and the train moved on, bearing pale faces that looked backward as long as they could discern anything.

Mrs. Harbison had stumbled over Willie’s bent wheel first. When she found him indeed laid in the midst of the crowd, she did not believe it. He was not mangled. His bones were sound--she felt them with a fiercely quick hand. There was no mark about him excepting a dirty-looking spot on one temple.

“Willie,” she cried, shaking him. “Willie! Willie!”

“We’ll have to carry him home,” said her husband at her side, his voice sounding far off as if it came strained through some dense medium.

She looked up, and could not understand it.

“He’s knocked senseless,” she claimed. “Why doesn’t somebody bring water?”

“He never knowed what hurt him,” cautiously said one villager to another. “The train was goin’ so fast, and he come up from among the houses onto it so fast, that it was done in a flash.”

“And I don’t never want to see no better boy than Willie Harbison was,” responded the other.

But only his mother--when she had him at home lying in that pomp of death with which we all shall impress beholders--could have pronounced the true oration over him. Through her dumb tragedy she wanted to make deaf-mute signs to some intelligence that here lay one of Nature’s poets, with a gift virgin and untarnished.

He had never hunted a public. His public was the woods and sky, and his critic one fond woman. Not a line of unsatisfied ambition marked his placid face. He had lived an humble, happy life, and sung for the sake of expression, not for the sake of praise. He had, after all, only gone to find the best publisher, and his mother could always hear him “singing in the dark.”

T’FÉRGORE

A PASTORAL IN THREE PARTS

TIME, 1883