Chapter VII: Part III: The Ambrosial Youth (2)

Jerome shook his head. His visible flesh had a porcelain quality, like the unstained clearness of infancy. His hair glittered in the sun, and he had a long golden mustache, parting in the centre and trailing down his mouth corners below his chin. So strong and manly an ornament sorted strangely with perplexed blue eyes, that, in spite of a puzzling world, laughed with the delicious joy of life. Jerome’s head stood upon a column of slender body. His clothes, to which a few burrs were sticking, would have seemed too fine for his environment if they had not so exactly suited him.

“Lost his hat again!” bantered the father. “That’s the fifth straw hat I’ve bought him this summer.”

“If you will have some breakfast with me, Jerome,” said Lilian, “I will go to your house and eat dinner with you.”

“That’s a bargain, ain’t it, Babe?”

The Babe Jerome looked from one to the other, and smiled, and sat down. His gander, lifting and shaking both wings, quavered a remark and waddled to his feet.

“How white Billy is!” said the young lady, after the cook had brought fresh food and she had helped her guest.

“The’ ain’t a gray quill on Billy,” observed Mr. Marsh, his bearded lips relaxing with contentment.

“And his eyes are blue--blue as the sky! His bill, with such funny nostrils in it, is the purest coral. I didn’t know geese could be so beautiful. You pretty fellow! Will he hiss me?”

“No!” spoke Jerome forcibly, startling her as she stretched a timorous hand to brush Billy’s plumage. It had satin firmness. The gander squatted on his webs and observed in his own language that the caress was agreeable.

Jerome left off eating and leaned on his folded arms to smile. He was a sylvan creature, strayed out of pastoral days into the hazy regions of the Wabash.

He rowed the boat back, his father sitting in idle comfort on the other bench, and Lilian facing the oarsman. She enjoyed the grace of his torso, the veins swelling on his hands, the steady innocence of his gaze, with the same kind of satisfaction given by a scent of sycamore leaves, or the exquisite outline of an island. Billy swam after the boat, the water curling away from his breast; and before it could be beached he had left his web marks on the home sands.

The Marsh double cabin, with central chimney hospitable enough to engulf thousands of swallows, stood on a low bluff. Another and more imposing house was rising near it. The workmen’s noise mingled with stable-yard cackle.

“How I love to hear chickens!” exclaimed Lilian. “They remind me of some wonderfully good time I had when I was a child, though I can’t recall it. You have all the cheerful racket on your side of the river. And how sweet the building wood smells!”

“Some of that’s sweet pine,” explained Mr. Marsh. “The Babe, he carries them chips, and sassafras bark, and spice-wood, and all kinds of woods things, in his pockets.”

The Babe looked at Lilian, repeating slowly what he had told himself many a lonely day, in forest or on river,--

“I--haven’t got--right sense.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” she begged.

The father’s mouth corners fell into leather grooves.

“But Babe’s got idees,” he maintained. “He takes to nice things. So did his mother. I’d have built the new house long ago if she’d lived. And I wouldn’t build it now if it wasn’t for the Babe. Betsey and me like the cabin. We’ll miss the big fireplace, and them hooks in the jice beams. I took Jerome and Betsey down to Shawnytown to stay one winter, and I’d ’a’ died if I hadn’t come back here every two weeks.”

“This is a lovely spot,” said Lilian. “When you are really settled in your new house, you will enjoy it more than ever.”

“I don’t know. It’s just as the Babe turns out to like it. The cabin’s been his cradle. If the new one goes against him I’ll lock it up and bring him back home. Come in,” invited the old man, climbing his doorstep. “Here’s Betsey will be glad to see you.”

From the smoked and chinked interior groped a large woman so delicately and completely white that the blanching appeared to extend through her eyes, for the lids revealed them colorless. She wore a black net cap and a dress and a cape of faded lawn. Her heelless soles made no sound on the bare boards. The palms which she spread before her had the texture of shriveled dogwood petals. The stirring of the lawn clothes set free scarcely detected perfumes,--of apples, and mint, and the old-fashioned roses which grow nowhere now except in remote and dewy country gardens.

“It’s the young lady from the camp, Betsey, come to visit us to-day.”

“That sounds heartsome,” the blind sister responded. Lilian took one of her fluttering hands; the other half unconsciously, with the swiftness of custom, moved up the girl’s shoulder and passed over cheek and head. Lilian noticed in what masses of wrinkles this handsome old face hung, and wondered at the miracle of age; at the childish sweetness that comes back to toothless talk. “I love to have the young around. It’s been missly in the house since Babe’s mother died.”

“Well, take a cheer,” said Mr. Marsh, “and I’ll look into the kitchen and tell Marthy Dempsey who’s for dinner. Marthy she keeps house for us, and she’s a good cook; she used to work in a tavern down at Shawnytown.”

Jerome lingered on the log step while his father performed the sacred rite of seating a guest. Aunt Betsey groped toward him.

“But where’s the Babe?”

“The Babe’s as far in as he likes to come,” said his father. “The Babe’s great for outdoors in summer time.”

“The dew’s off the garden,” spoke Jerome.

“He never disremembers my walk,” chuckled the blind woman. “As soon as the jew is dry he fetches my bonnet.”

Miss Brooks herself tipped the sunbonnet at a satisfactory angle over the black net cap, so that its crown sighted the heavens. Jerome helped his aunt to the ground, and guided her around the house, his arm on her waist. He glanced backward often, to draw Lilian along, and she sauntered close, glad to be a part of all this innocent life.

Woods stood at the rear of the garden, and abrupt Indian mounds ruffled their tufts of fern almost overhead. It was growing warm; scarcely a trace of the humid morning remained, even under burdock leaves, which Martha Dempsey prized for her butter. There was a rank hot smell of marigolds in the sun, with a peppery addition of bouncing betties. The sweet-williams were fragrant as honey and long spikes of red or white hollyhocks swayed in the faintest of breezes. Aunt Betsey scented the camomile bed and picked bits of sweet-mary and basil for Miss Brooks. The sound of the workmen’s hammers on the house, the rippling of the river, and the summer call of insects and birds filled the air, until it seemed to tremble over green distances with this weight of pleasant life.

There was a cherry-tree full of ripe black fruit. Martha Dempsey came out bare-armed, but with a sunbonnet pinned shut below her nose, and, with the unconscious arrogance of the country maid, ordered Jerome to pick her some fruit for pies. He pulled down the lowest branches and filled her tin pail. Then his aunt and Miss Brooks sat under the tree and had their laps weighted with ruby globes on platters of burdock leaves.

“I like cherries best of any fruit,” said Lilian, “and these rich red ones most of all. They get a wicked clip on your tongue that is delightful.”

Jerome considered her, and said with conviction, “You look like a cherry.”

“Then these tart fire-drops ought to be my natural food.”

“This is Babe’s tree,” said Aunt Betsey. “He planted it, and it has growed with his growth.”

It was quite dusk when Jerome landed Miss Brooks at the camp. Her brother met her, and she exclaimed to him:--

“I have had a lovely day! And I persuaded Jerome to bring his violin and play for us a while. His playing is wonderful, Eric.”

“So is Long John’s singing,” observed the captain with contempt.

From the men’s quarters came an unmelodious shout of--“Injun puddin’ and a punkin pie! O, Je-ru-sa-lam!” But this wavered and ceased when Jerome took up his violin. His fingers floated along the strings, and the score he played was never set down in any brain but his own.

The moon came up, and he played straight on, tilting his head back and smiling at floating films in the sky. The cook drew near from his tent, and the men, smoking, crept as near as they felt discipline would allow to the captain’s quarters. Jerome, in the full beatitude of his one unspoiled talent, knew no audience. With a final triumphant cry of the strings, he got up and walked off without saying good-night.

“He can sling a bow!” commented one of the listeners. “They say around here he plays the birds off the bushes.”

“He is like a girl,” said Miss Brooks to her brother. “I enjoy having him about almost as unreservedly as if he were a girl.”

“Glad of it,” replied the captain. “He can pilot you through the woods. It’s a pity the poor harmless fellow is daft. He might have been something.”

Jerome came to camp every day, Billy attending him. Miss Brooks in her bathing dress floated on the river, holding to his boat; and he kept a maternal eye on her while she disported herself. He brought her Indian hatchets, and arrow-heads, and a piece or two of pottery left by the Shawnee tribe. The two explored creeks and islands to such extent that Billy frequently left them in disgust. He snipped grass, and quavered to himself, while Miss Brooks read or talked to Jerome.

She talked to Jerome as if he were a rational being. His delight in the woods was even keener than hers, and his knowledge of wild creatures much greater. He taught her skill in fishing. His joyful father brought offerings of eggs and cream and Martha Dempsey’s peach preserves.

“The Babe pretty nigh lives on this side of the river now. I ’low I ought to help victual the camp.”

“We can’t do without him,” said the girl. “He makes all our good times.”

“The Babe seems to be growin’ older-like this summer,” mused his father. “He ain’t to say manlier, but he’s different.”

“Do you think so?” said Miss Brooks, startled. Her color faded to ivory. She was sitting in a hammock, and occasionally stretched out a sandaled foot to propel it. The old man felt her beauty with a dumb jealousy of all bright young creatures who had not been robbed, like his boy, of their birthright.

Jerome came later in the afternoon, and found his daily companion still in her hammock, but changed toward him.

He had just finished an æolian harp for her. It had required days to properly season the wood, and other days to assort the colors and dry the glue which held different layers together. The instrument was a thing of beauty, with even little keys to wind the strings. He had worked over it with all his faculties excited; and now when he stood before her, holding it very tenderly on his arm, she scarcely looked at it.

But Jerome knew what to do. He moved off with his harp and fixed it in the low fork of a tree. Then he raised its bridges, and turned to watch her face. The harp sighed, and began on a high key “The Last Rose of Summer,” but after two or three bars, lost its score in a flood of delicious organ harmonies. Now it rose to a cry in the zenith, and now it returned to the “Last Rose,” and died to a whisper of melody. It was the passionate revelation of a human heart.

Jerome smiled and nodded his head; for the girl’s chin and lips trembled. She let her book slip down the hammock.

“Talks,” insisted Jerome, claiming her attention for the harp. “I made it to talk to you.”

“But it’s so sorrowful,” said Lilian.

“It--isn’t--quite right,” explained Jerome. “Can’t carry its tune.”

“And you made it for me?”

“Yes. I been a month.”

“You do too much for me. I have been very selfish to take so much of your time.”

Jerome put up his lip like a grieved child.

“Don’t do that!” said Miss Brooks sharply, blanching white.

“What must I do?”

“Sit down here, and let me read to you.”

He sat on the grass and she read austerely, the weird heart-cry of the wind harp curving around her voice or whipping it with ravelings of sweetness. She read while the sun slipped lower and lower, and dared not look at the rapt face watching her. Then she shut the book and said with careful modulation:--

“Thank you very much for the wind harp. I shall take it home with me, and whenever it plays I shall think of you.”

His grieved lip instantly smiled. “If you fasten it in your window it will play all the time!”

“There is one other thing I would love to have, and that is a feather from Billy.”

Jerome stretched out an arm and drew his familiar toward him. Billy twitched his short tail and curved a suspicious neck while his master stretched one glistening pinion.

“Do you want his whole wing?” inquired Jerome, groping for a knife.

“Not for the world!” exclaimed Miss Brooks. “Only one of dear Billy’s tiniest feathers, to put away and look at.”

Jerome plucked a quill and handed it to her.

“You may have him all, if you want him.”

“But what would you do without Billy?”

He repeated, “Do without?” several times, turning the suggestion in his mind, and gazing at her.

A couple of hours later Miss Brooks said to her brother:--

“Eric, I believe I will go home at once.”

“Guess not,” responded the captain. “We shift camp next week. I want you to stay until then. Aren’t you having a good time?”

“I’ve been bathing too much in the river, perhaps. Mr. Marsh says it’s aguish. I shall have ague if I stay.”

“The doctor is coming,” said her brother.

“I must go home, Eric; indeed, I must!”

“You can’t wait until Jack arrives, I suppose?”

“Jack! Is Jack coming?”

“We were going to surprise you; one of the men rowed to the station for him this afternoon.”

Miss Brooks’s face expressed lively anticipation.

“Jack is coming! Then I may run back with him to-morrow, without waiting longer for Marie.”

“Don’t you want to give the poor fellow any taste of the camp?” demanded her indignant brother.

The wind harp, rousing from silence, burst out again with the bars it would never finish, and meandered into saddening minors.

“What machine is making that doleful sound?”

Lilian turned her tragic face away. Before Jack arrived she had taken down Jerome’s offering, wrapped it carefully, and hid it in the heart of her luggage. The spirit of the Wabash gave this large and engaging young arrival its cold shoulder. Not a drop of rain had tarnished the sunshine in a month; but he reached camp in a chill drizzle. The wind became so sharp that evening fires were built. The river hissed against its banks; and the cook reported a broken trot-line, and consequent failure in the catch of fish.

“This is fine!” commented Jack, turning up his collar as he smoked with the captain, and Lilian huddled to the fire. “Every letter has been full of the pleasures of camp life; and now I experience them myself!”

“Give the camp a chance,” remonstrated Eric. “You couldn’t drag me back to town! Six months in a year, thank heaven! I am a man! I live outdoors, free from the trammels of a soft civilization!”

“We don’t mind the trammels of a soft civilization, do we, Jack?” said the girl, snugly slipping her hand into her lover’s.

Jerome appeared at the other side of the campfire, looking through thin smoke at her. He had his violin bag on his shoulder.

“Hello!” the civil engineer hailed him. “Pull up a chunk, and sit down, Jerome.”

Lilian ran to her own tent for another camp-chair. But Jerome stood still, outside the wilderness hearth, and looked at the stranger whose every imposing line was illuminated by the fire, and who acknowledged his presence with a nod.

“One of our neighbors from the Illinois side,” explained the captain.

“Isn’t the river rough to-night?” inquired Miss Brooks.

Jerome heard the tremor in her voice. He answered “Yes.”

“It was so good of you to come. I wanted to hear you play once more. We may go home to-morrow.”

“Sit down, boy,” urged the captain; while Jack smoked peacefully.

“No,” said Jerome. “I’ll play out there.”

“Out where?”

“Out there; on the moving water.”

“But I want to talk to you!” exclaimed Lilian, following him a step, relaxing under the eye of the man she was to marry. “I want to send messages to your father and aunt--I may not see them again.”

“Singular chap,” observed Jack as Jerome walked on into darkness.

“Half witted,” explained Eric.

“He’s not half witted!” vehemently denied Lilian.

“Quarter witted, then,” amended her brother.

“He’s an unfortunate child, lost out of paradise, at the mercy of careless, cruel wretches like us below. I never saw a woman with a nature so spotless.”

“It occurs to me you’re partial to your Wabash angel,” observed Jack.

Jerome began to play. He was evidently in his boat plunging with the current. One could imagine him pressing against his neck the instrument which holds the saddest possibilities of sound. It wailed down river, and ceased. After an interval it began again up river. Jerome had rowed back against the current, and he went floating past the camp once more, pouring through the violin the vagaries of a mind in double darkness.

“If the trot-line wasn’t already broken, he’d break it,” remarked Captain Eric, “raking back and forth.”

“Fine cheerful banshee for a night like this,” said Jack.

Lilian huddled by the end of a log, where she could hear the oozing sap complain. Again the music died on the river, and again it began farther up, with an orchestral support of lashing water and gathering weather.

“I can’t stand it!” she cried out, rising from her place. “I’m going to my tent.”

“Why did you set Jerome on?” inquired her brother in surprise. “He never knows when to quit. I’ll put a stop to it.”

So going close to the shore he shouted such a peremptory request as virile man offers to weaklings. He patronized Jerome also, representing that the water was too rough for a boy, and recommending the boy to go home.

Yet hours afterwards when the campfire smouldered, and the trees were wrestling, Lilian, sobbing and smothering her face with her pillow, heard the violin once more, playing softly in imitation of the wind harp.

Next morning the river was a valley of black and sulphurous vapors, like a smoking volcanic fissure. The ague season had undoubtedly set in. Captain Eric and a squad of his men rowed their departing guests and the young lady’s luggage up river to the steamboat landing, and from this the party walked to a station in the woods.

There was a bustle about tickets and checking. The station-master hurried out of his small general store with the mail-bag on his arm, for the train was already in sight.

Miss Brooks’s hair clung in damp rings to her face. She turned to impress woods and water stretches upon her mind in one last glance, and her lips went white. Behind her stood Jerome, the porcelain quality of his face increased tenfold, the blueness of his eyes pierced by the keen anguish of a man. She crossed the platform to him, took his head between her hands, and rising on tiptoe kissed his forehead.

Immediately afterwards she was handed up the railway carriage steps, and Jack was making a place for her and her traveling bag. The little station slid away. She had forgotten to wave to Eric one of the hands which trembled as she adjusted her belongings over and over.

“Don’t say a word to me,” she commanded, meeting her lover’s eyes. “I didn’t know I was going to do it. I intend to marry you, Jack, because I would rather have you for a husband than any other man in the world. But he was my playmate. He brought back my childhood to me, and in return I gave him a wound!”

Quite a year passed before she had further news of the Babe Jerome. Her brother moved his camp two days after her departure, and stayed out until November. The following summer Lilian and her husband came face to face with Mr. Marsh in that magic White City which stood a brief season beside Lake Michigan. The blue cape was not around his shoulders, but some other incongruous garment marked him. Lilian grasped his hand. He greeted the young pair. His hairy cheeks were sunken, and the keenness of his eye appeared dulled.

“Are Jerome and his Aunt Betsey with you?”

“The Babe has gone off with the quick consumption that took his mother,” said the old man, and Lilian became aware that her nails must be cutting his hand. She gasped, but could not say a word.

“Yes; Betsey and me’s alone now,” he pursued. “I brung her up to the World’s Fair to turn her mind off it.... He never done well in the new house. I locked it up and carried him back to his log cradle. But the Babe had to go. I took him to Floridy, and I took him to Colorado.... I hadn’t orto repine at affliction. He was a good Babe.... He made a wind harp, like, and put it in the winder, in the teeth of the air; and that was all his interest, to listen while it played.”

Lilian found her husband supporting her, while water and sky and white palaces and hurrying people swam giddily in a far-off circle. She said “Thank you,” and clutched his arm.

“Sis here, she liked the Babe,” continued the old father, forced to wipe his eyes on the corner of a red handkerchief which he drew half way out of his side pocket. “And the Babe he liked her. I reelly thought he was pinin’ sometimes for young folks; for he done well while you was there.... Billy--you recollect Billy the gander? He takes it to heart like a dog.... I’m glad I seen you. I was goin’ along feelin’ too bitter in my thoughts about the Babe.”

Silently parting company, the old man walked on amidst wonders which he scarcely noticed, and the young pair turned aside from the crowds.

“Oh Jack!” said Lilian, when she could control her weeping, “I have killed the Babe Jerome!”

THE CALHOUN FIDDLER

TIME, 1890

November frost lay on the ferns and mosses along the Calhoun bluffs, and on that castellated mass of rock with round turrets which hangs over the cove known as French Hollow. From a divide in wooded hills a small stream came down unfrozen, quivering over pebbles and clean sand. Crossing an alluvial plat of ground, it turned beside a cabin to meet the broad and whispering Illinois.

In all Calhoun County, that long narrow ridge isolated between two great rivers, there was not on height or in cove such another cabin. It was fifty-two feet square and two stories high, with a Norman projection of the eaves. The house, with its back to a road winding at the foot of the bluffs, sat facing the historic Illinois--a river now yellow and wrathful with floods, now spreading in blue or seashell tints away to the opposite forest.

In the days of old Antoine Dejarnet, the builder of this log-house and the first Frenchman who ever set foot in Calhoun County, hospitality had overflowed the now silent place. Then there was dancing every Sunday after mass, in the undivided lower story like a feudal hall; and the family violin was coaxed to heavenly tunes by Antoine Dejarnet himself.

But long before this November afternoon the French colony in Calhoun County had dwindled to a remnant; the forty goats which used to climb those heights or stand captive to half old Antoine’s many daughters while the rest milked them, had not a single descendant; and the last Dejarnet carried his name locally disfigured into De Zhirley.

Jeanne Sattory, following a road beside the stream, was coming down the hollow. The mail-carrier cantered below her toward Kampsville, riding a nervous pony, and having the letter pouch strapped behind him. Twice a week he thus carried news through Calhoun County, where there are neither railroads nor telegraph lines, neither banks nor thieves. But such a courier feels his freedom and importance; he impudently kissed his merry finger-tips to the pretty girl up the slope. She hid behind a rock until he was out of sight. The mail-carrier had seen this girl before, and desired to have a closer look at her. The usual type in Calhoun County was the broad Dutch maid, whose stock had superseded the French. But Jeanne Sattory felt a dread rising to terror of all men. Her first recollection was of a stepfather who had made her take to trees like a cat, every time he approached the dwelling. Her next was of his son, who finished the small rites of her mother’s funeral by taking the orphan’s ear in his grip, leading her to the limit of the garden patch, and dismissing her, with the threat of a kick if she ever came back there again. He kept her mother’s own household goods and the few belongings left by her father, and nobody took it in hand to interfere with him. She came back across the Illinois River to her native county, but even yet shrank from old Henry Roundcounter, whose family afforded her a home.

The Rencontres had held land under the first Dejarnet. As Roundcounters, and farmers of their own small holding, they now kept up hereditary interest in that last De Zhirley who, since his mother’s death, had lived solitary in the great square cabin. Mrs. Roundcounter baked bread for him; and once a week she went down the bluff to tidy his bachelor hall, except when rheumatism detained her. This afternoon Jeanne Sattory was sent reluctantly to the task.

The last De Zhirley was a ferryman; and it must be owned that voices calling him from the other side of the river were often drowned in the music of his fiddle. In clear summer nights he walked a sandy strip in front of his cabin, hugging the fiddle beneath his chin and playing tunes which had come down from his forefathers.

The ferryboat could now be seen at the farther bank of the Illinois. Jeanne knew she might do her work before it could again cross the current. The cabin door is always left unfastened in that primitive county. She noticed a fresh coon skin nailed on the logs beside the door, as with shrinking she entered this haunt of man.

The imposing old dancing-hall of the De Zhirleys gave her a welcome from its ruddy fireplace hooded with a penthouse. Jeanne’s first care was to push the embers together, heap on more of the wood which lay ready, and clean the stone hearth. She then hung a pot on the crane, and filled it with spring water. Before the water was scalding hot there was time to sweep the floor and beat up a feather-bed which had grown as hard as a mat on its corner bedstead.

An unrailed stairway mounted beside the front wall. Jeanne had heard Mrs. Roundcounter tell how many little rooms were overhead, and what stores of family goods were piled there, disregarded by a young man who cared for no wife but his fiddle.

No attention could be given to the upper rooms. Amid all her services, the girl was full of starts and panics, turning her head and widening her eyes at any stir without. She mopped the broad boards worn by foot-marks of dead dancers; she washed log imbedded windows and an accumulation of yellow bowls and pewter; and drew the only easy chair to the hearth. Something in a green bag hung on the wall farthest from the fire, which Jeanne knew to be the De Zhirley fiddle. She touched it carefully with a turkey-wing duster, recoiling from its faint ting as if some charm had been ignorantly worked.

Dried meat and scarlet peppers, a gun and powderhorn hung on the richly smoked hewn joists. She felt keen, quiet delight in the place, and reluctance to leave it. The jollity of former times, perhaps, lingered, making a fit atmosphere for girlhood.

But she was standing with her shawl over her head, casting back a last look, when some hand blundered at the latch outside. She sprang upstairs and put the first door between her and the intruder on the lightning of impulse. Some person entered and seemed to pause and listen suspiciously. Her heart labored like the beating of a steamer, and she expected to hear feet following her up the stairs. But after uncertain shuffling the comer dragged a chair, and, with a suggestion of effort, sat down.

Jeanne knew it could not be young De Zhirley, whom she had just seen through a window fighting the current in midriver. He had a loaded wagon and a pair of restless mules on board; and he ran back and forth outside the railing of his boat, now poling, now steering, and now pulling with a wing-like oar. Jeanne could have been at the top of the bluff before his return. And here she was, trapped in an upper room, vaguely ashamed; unable to come down and face eyes which might insult her, yet terrified by the prospect of indefinite hiding.

Daylight’s gradual fading out was of more interest to her than the accumulation of De Zhirley things around her. She listened for the crunch of the ferryboat prow on gravel; and voices and departing wheels at last moved by the cabin, and the proper owner entered. She stealthily unlatched her door and set it ajar, so the crack intersected the hearth. There in the seat she had taken thought to set ready sagged the drunken person of her stepbrother.

“You here, Billy Aarons?” said young De Zhirley, as he approached the fire; and his voice had no joy in it. His blind eye was toward the stair door, for the Calhoun fiddler was a one-eyed man. This defacement scarcely marred the beauty of the athletic man thrown out by firelight. Jeanne Sattory had, indeed, never seen him without pitying people who were two-eyed. His misused skin yet held the milk and wine flush of childhood, and his fleece of red-gold rings was a gift not to be spoiled.

“Yes, I’m here, Theodore,” said the man in the chair thickly.

“Mother Roundcounter has been here too,” added De Zhirley, as he looked about. “It makes a feller feel good to see his house clean and smell new bread.”

He hung a teakettle on the crane, and thrust a fork through some bacon to toast on the polished hearthstone. Then he drew his table toward the fireplace, and Jeanne could see his appreciative touch on the yellow ware she had washed.

“What do you want, Billy? Did you come in to take a bite with me?”

“No.” Aarons stirred from his doze. “I’m buyin’ cattle, Theodore.”

“No cattle to sell here.”

“I know it, Theodore. You’re a poor man by the side of me.”

Indifferent to this fact, De Zhirley turned his bacon and proceeded to make coffee.

“You’re a poor man, Theodore,” repeated the heavy guest, “and I’ve got all my father had.”

“And all his second wife had,” added young De Zhirley, with a one-eyed glance of contempt, at which Aarons made a fist. “You go upstairs and sleep off what’s the matter with you, after I give you some coffee.”

“That’s not what I come for. You’re a poor man, Theodore.”

“Well, don’t let that keep you awake; it don’t me.”

“You hain’t got no cattle, nor much land, nor even two eyes.”

“And what do _you_ want on my blind side, Billy?”

“But you’ve got a fiddle. Yes; you’ve got a fiddle.”

De Zhirley moved back and took his violin off the wall with a jealous motion. It was his custom to play while his supper cooked; but as he felt the bow with his thumb, and fitted the instrument to his neck, he looked distrustfully at Aarons.

The first sweet long cry filled the cabin. The fiddler gradually approached the hearth, playing as he came, and Aarons’s head, hands, and feet responded to the magic.

De Zhirley’s back was toward Jeanne, but she saw joy in his whole bearing, and herself felt the piercing rapture of sound.

“Let me see that fiddle,” demanded Aarons, when the young man finished and put down his bow, and brought the coffee-pot to set on the coals.

De Zhirley turned a distrustful eye, but no precious violin toward his guest.

“Let me see that fiddle, I say,” repeated Aarons, rising up.

“Behave yourself,” said the young man, standing a head above him, and humoring him as a child might be humored by half granting his request.

The fellow handled its ancient body, and looked at Stradivari’s inscription.

“What’s that there, Theodore?”

“That’s the maker’s name.”

“Seventeen hunderd and--what’s them figgers?”

“That’s the year it was made.”

“Then it’s a mighty poor old thing, ain’t it?”

The fiddler said nothing, but tried to recover his violin, to which the tormentor hung with both hands.

“I can sell it for you, Theodore. It’s worth fifty dollars.”

De Zhirley’s face expressed impatience to regain his instrument.

“Yes, it’s worth a hunderd dollars. I’ve been talkin’ with a man, Theodore; that’s why I come in. You give this fiddle to me, and I’ll make some money for you. You’re a poor man, Theodore.”

“Let go of it,” exclaimed De Zhirley. “I don’t want to sell my fiddle.”

“It’s worth five hunderd dollars.”

“Let go of it! You don’t know what you’re doing. You ain’t fit to do anything now. Let go,” cried De Zhirley, as he felt the greedy, drunken hands crushing his treasure. “If you don’t let go, I’ll kill you!”

The two men struggled, and there was a crackling, twanging sound, followed by Aarons’s curses. Then De Zhirley caught him by the neck, dragged him to the cabin door, and kicked him far out into the dusk.

Jeanne hid her face. She heard her stepbrother battering at the fastened door, and finally a stone dashed through the window, to fall with splintered glass upon the floor. A storm of drunken curses surrounded the house and died away in mutterings along the bluff road. Through this clamor an awful silence made its void in the cabin.

De Zhirley had set his foot upon a chair, and was nursing the mangled instrument on his knee, examining every part. His tense face denied despair; but the broken neck hung down by its strings, the chest was crushed, the back split, the bridge lay beside his foot. Jeanne watched him, forgetting the darkness of the bluffs and her dreadful ambush.

When De Zhirley first came in she had decided to let herself down from an upper window rather than face him. When he recommended her stepbrother to a sleeping-room upstairs, she looked about in panic for something which could be made an immediate rope or ladder. But when she saw the violin’s destruction, it was to hang outside that tragedy in a passion of sympathy. She had been the most solitary creature in Calhoun County, but this supreme sharing of the young fiddler’s anguish broke the shell of her dumbness; she felt her soul spreading out its crumpled wings like a new butterfly.

He laid the violin on the chair, and with a sudden abandonment of all restraint shook his fists above his head, wailing and sobbing:--

“Oh, my Lord, my Lord! What will I do now?”

It was the agony of an artist, of a lonely soul, of unspeakable bereavement.

Jeanne wept in her shawl. She had thought her hunger for the unknown best thing in the world a singular experience. She waited until his tears and hers could be wiped off, and then opened the door and came lightly downstairs.

De Zhirley huddled his violin again in his arms, as if dreading the descent of more drunken men, and, in the embarrassment and anguish of a man whose weakness has been spied upon, turned his face to the hearth. Jeanne stopped at the foot of the stairs and drew her shawl over her head. They continued in silence while the coffee bubbled up and firelight flickered on the wall.

De Zhirley understood her errand into his cabin with the simplicity of primitive manhood. He knew she always took to flight when her stepbrother appeared. When he could speak without a sob, he said, acknowledging all she had done for his comfort that afternoon:--

“I’m much obleeged.”

Jeanne, on her part, ignored the services.

“Is it bad hurt?” she murmured, with unconscious maternal pathos.

He offered to yield the wreck to her hands, and, drawn from her place, she went and stooped on one knee to the firelight. De Zhirley dropped on one knee beside her, and they tried to fit the mangled parts in place again.

“It’s such a spite,” said Jeanne, and her trembling voice comforted him as a mother comforts her child. He had instant anxiety to make the calamity appear less to her than it really was.

“Mebby by patchin’ and glue I can put it together again--though I don’t know whether it’ll sound the same. I’ve always thought so much of it,” he apologized.

“I wish he had broke my neck instead of this fiddle’s,” said the girl with passion.

“I’d like to see him try such a thing as that,” responded the fiddler sternly. “I’d killed him as ’twas, if I hadn’t been bigger than him.”

“I must go back,” exclaimed Jeanne, stirring to rise from this post-mortem. “They’ll think I’ve fell in the river.”

“I’ll go with you,” said De Zhirley. “It’s dark now, and that fellow ain’t gone far.”

“No,” objected Jeanne, with sudden terror of what her neighborhood called a beau. “I don’t want no one with me.”

De Zhirley took up his cap with gentle insistence like the courtliness of a great seignior. He smiled at Jeanne, and she gave him back a look of which she was unconscious.

“Your supper’s all ready,” she reminded him.

“I ain’t hungry like I was when I come in from the ferry. Won’t you set down and take supper with me?” invited the young man sincerely.

The mere suggestion sent Jeanne Sattory to the door. Their hands mingled upon the latch, and she slid hers away, loath to part from a touch which she yet eluded.

De Zhirley made the door pause while he looked down at her and said, with a shaking voice:--

“If it hadn’t been for you--there ain’t no tellin’.”

Jeanne had no reply to this acknowledgment of sympathy, but drew her shawl together under her chin. Chin and mouth corners were tempting even to a one-eyed man, but he continued with gentle courtesy:

“Spite of my fiddle’s gettin’ broke, I b’lieve this is the best day this cabin ever seen.”

“What makes you say that?”

“’Cause it’s the first time you ever come to the house.”

“I’m obleeged for your politeness,” trembled Jeanne, turning scarlet; and she lifted a laughing dark glance. “If you’ll be a little politer and let me out, I won’t come no more.”

“Then I’ll go where you are,” declared the Calhoun fiddler. “I’ll foller you from this time on.”

“You’ll have to walk on the other side of the road if you do,” said Jeanne Sattory; and they stepped out and took the way up the bluff, two figures indistinct in darkness, with a width of wagon-track between them.

A MAN FROM THE SPANISH WAR

_A conversation in Egypt, which is an undefined region of Southern Illinois_

TIME, 1898

Miss Lucy Mills waited with three early arrivals in her sitting-room. The rest of the people would not gather for half an hour. Her wide house, venerable for the region in which it stood, hugged by vines and mossy roofed, was in perfect order; and sheaves of flowers exhaled fragrance around an object placed in the centre of her parlor. Neighbors no longer trod about on tiptoe, for everything was ready, and the minister might arrive at any moment.

Miss Lucy sat a dignified spinster, whose sympathies ramified through the entire human race. She was so homely that strangers turned to look at her as at a beauty. Mr. Sammy Blade was in his thirties, but she considered him a youth, having helped his mother to nurse him through measles and whooping-cough. Mr. Sammy had a protruding pointed beard and rolled his silly bald head on his shoulders when he talked. He had studied medicine but, failing of practice, was turning his attention to the peddling of fruit-trees. Coming home and hearing the news, he hastened to appear at Miss Lucy’s house.

Mr. and Mrs. Plankson had returned to the neighborhood to visit. The husband was a frisky gray little man, and his wife was a jimp woman in stiff black silk with large lips and shifty eyes.

All three of Miss Lucy’s callers coughed and made the unconscious grimaces of plain people who have not learned the art of expression. They sat with their hands piled on their stomachs. Yet while they longed to get at facts which only Miss Lucy knew, they approached these facts roundabout, bringing newsy bits of their own, and avoiding by common instinct the subject of war with Spain.

“Have you heard that Emeline Smith’s oldest girl has experienced religion?” inquired Mr. Sammy solemnly, breaking the silence of the down-sitting after greetings.

“No, I hadn’t heard it,” responded Miss Lucy, in the soft slow drawl which her candid speech made its vehicle.

“Law me!” exclaimed Mrs. Plankson, “Emeline Smith was always a great hand for revivals. If she had went less to meetings and had saw more to do in her own house, her children would be better brung up.”

“Seem-me-like there is some spite-work against Emeline Smith amongst the women,” observed Mr. Plankson. “I was a beau of Emeline’s onct. I went to see her the other day, and she laughed, and waved the broom, and acted so glad Jane can’t get over it.”

“You orto married her,” said Mrs. Plankson crisply. “You’d be richer than you are. Her mother was the savin’est person I ever heard of. She give a tea-party one time, and the milk floated in lumps on top the cups. She said she didn’t see how it could be sour, when she had put saleratus in it and boiled it twice! Them Smiths got their money from a rich old aunt, that used to cut up squares of tissue paper to make handkerchiefs. I seen her one time myself, when she was a-visiting the Smiths, come to meeting with a wreath of live geranium leaves around her bonnet, in winter, and them leaves all bit black with the cold! We’ve heard she would set before the parlor fire in city hotels where she boarded, with her dress turned up on her knees, showing her little sticks of legs in narrow pantalets and white stockings, just to save fire in her room--and young ladies obliged to receive young men, with her a-setting there!”

Mr. Sammy coughed gently, for Mrs. Plankson had overlooked his presence in her wrath against Emeline Smith’s relations.

To cover the situation her husband directly inquired, “What’s become of them Ellison girls, seven sisters, that all dressed alike and carried umberellas the same color? They used to walk into church in Indian file. I never in my life seen them go two or three abreast.”

“They all live where they used to and look like they always did. For they was born old-like. Carline,” said Miss Lucy, “took to herb doctorin’. Along about the time that President Garfield was shot, Carline got very dissatisfied. ‘I know just what would fetch that bullet out,’ she used to say, ‘and the only thing that would fetch it out.’”

“And what was that?” inquired Mr. Sammy, rounding his lips and stretching his short neck forward.

“Spearmint tea!”

Mrs. Plankson beat her right palm softly on her left forearm and leaned over, shaking. It would not have been decorous to cackle out loud. The American flag and its Cuban little sister, draped together around the wide doorway of the parlor, swayed in the air. She glanced through the open portal, her oblique eyes slanting up to Miss Lucy’s hanging lamp decorated with feathery asparagus.

“Carline told my niece,” Mrs. Plankson added to the Ellison subject, “why she never got married.”

“Did she have a disappointment?” inquired Mr. Sammy, as one of the younger generation, who fully sensed a woman’s loss in not obtaining a companion like himself.

“No. ‘Do you know,’ says she to my niece, ‘why I never got married?’ ‘No,’ says my niece, ‘I don’t.’--‘Tew skittish!’ says Carline.”

“I never seen such a neighborhood as this is for old maids!” exclaimed Mr. Plankson.

Miss Lucy regarded him with a virgin’s pitying tolerance. Homely as she was, she thought it would have been impossible for her to have taken up with the likes of William Plankson in his best days.

“There has been too much marryin’ and givin’ in marriage in this neighborhood,” she declared with her soft drawl.

“Seem-me-like you ain’t no good judge of that, Lucy,” bantered Mr. Plankson.

“It’s Emeline Smith that’s the judge,” thrust in his wife.

Miss Lucy contemplated silently.

“I was thinkin’ of Jaw-awn and Sue Emma,” she said; and the other three composed themselves to hear the facts concerning the man from the Spanish war. With a rustle like that of a congregation settling to the sermon after preliminaries, they moved their feet and hands and waited on Miss Lucy.

“I was against the match, for Sue Emma had been married, and was through with it. Her man died and left her with a farm and two children; and a widow well fixed is a sight better off than a married woman.”

Mrs. Plankson gave involuntary assent and then glanced with oblique apprehension at her husband, whose will was made in her favor.

“But Sue Emma wasn’t of Yankee stock like the Ellison girls. She felt pestered to get along by herself.”

“Seem-me-like a man always is needed on a farm,” put in Mr. Plankson.

“Sue Emma thought that-a-way. But I talked reel plain to her when she took up with Jaw-awn. I hadn’t nothing against Jaw-awn, except he was a man. He was without property, but he was mighty good to Sue Emma and the children. Seem-like he thought as much of the children as he did of her. And when they had been married a couple of years and the new baby come, Jaw-awn would have been tickled to death if it hadn’t been for losin’ it and Sue Emma. Now that woman might have been livin’ to-day if she had let men alone. But Jaw-awn was a great hand for his folks. I thought he would go crazy. Seem-like he could neither lay nor set when he come home from buryin’ Sue Emma and the baby; but just wandered around, Lolly Loo and the little boy holdin’ one onto each of his hands.”

“Lolly Loo?” challenged Mrs. Plankson. “What-for name is that?”

“Laura Louise; but they called her Lolly Loo. Jaw-awn nacherly had to have folks to do for. I believe he would have got along reel well with the children, if he had been let alone; for he was a good manager.

“But Sue Emma’s father and mother moved right onto the place after the funeral, and the first thing they done was to turn Jaw-awn out. I suppose he had rights in law, but he didn’t make no stand for rights; what he seemed to want was folks. He’d been an orphan-like, without father or mother, and knocked around the world and got kind of homesick clean through. Gettin’ Sue Emma and her children was the same to him as comin’ into a fortune, and when he was throwed out of them he give up.

“The children, they felt terrible, for they thought so much of Jaw-awn; and cried and begged.

“‘Jaw-awn won’t be no trouble, grammaw,’ says Lolly Loo. ‘I can cook enough for Jaw-awn to eat, if you let him stay.’

“But the old couple, they up and throwed him out. And when he stopped here on his way to Springfield I could see the man was clean broke down.

“The very next thing, along come this excitement about war with Spain, and I seen Jaw-awn’s name among the volunteers. I knowed he wouldn’t ever get through the war. Sure enough, word come--. I telegraphed to have him sent here. I knowed the children’s grandpaw and grandmaw wouldn’t do it. And I sent them word, but they don’t want to excite the children, so none of that family will come.

“I don’t say nothing about the expense: I have some means. But when I think of them children that he was a father to--him being so wrapped up in his folks--and them slippin’ to the bars like they do to see if Jaw-awn is comin’ back and not even knowin’ that he lays a soldier in his coffin in that parlor--without any folks to drop a tear on him--I feel like as if things was wrong!”

Miss Lucy arose and entered the parlor. She rearranged the American and Cuban flags which draped the plain casket, and touched the flowers and a huge wreath bearing the initials G. A. R.

Her three guests followed her in silent awe. She had wiped her eyes and was ready to add,--

“The minister has took for his text, ‘He setteth the solitary in families.’ I hope everybody will turn out. The weather is nice. Some will come because he is the first soldier buried here from the Spanish war, and the Grand Army Post has took it up and will march and fire a salute over his grave. I don’t know as the dead care anything about it, but I’d kind of like to see Jaw-awn have as nice a funeral as if he had folks.”

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.
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The Riverside Press
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CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.