The Choir Invisible Part 10

"You can't go now!" she exclaimed. "Uncle has the horses in the field."

Mrs. Falconer turned to her with simple earnestness.

"I hoped you would lend me your horse?"

"But he is tired; and beside I want to use him this afternoon: Kitty and I are going visiting."

"Tell your uncle when he comes in," said Mrs. Falconer, turning in the doorway a minute later, and speaking rapidly to her niece, but without the least reproach, "tell your uncle that his friend is badly hurt. Tell him that we do not know how badly. Tell him that I have gone to find out and to do anything for him that I can. Tell him to follow me at once. He will find me at his bedside. I am sorry about the dinner."

XII

SEVERAL days had slipped by.

At John's request they had moved his bed across the doorway of his cabin; and stretched there, he could see the sun spring every morning out the dimpled emerald ocean of the wilderness; and the moon follow at night, silvering the soft ripples of the mult.i.tudinous leaves lapping the sh.o.r.es of silence: days when the inner noises of life sounded like storms; nights when everything within him lay as still as memory.

His wounds had behaved well from the out-set. When he had put forth all his frenzied despairing strength to throttle the cougar, it had let go its hold only to sink its fangs more deeply into his flesh, thus increasing the laceration; and there was also much laceration of the hand. But the rich blood flowing in him was the purest; and among a people who for a quarter of a century had been used to the treatment of wounds, there prevailed a rough but genuine skill that stood him in good stead. To these hardy fighting folk, as to him, it was a scratch and he would have liked to go on with his teaching. Warned of the danger of inflammation, however, he took to his bed; and according to our own nervous standards which seem to have intensified pain for us beyond the comprehension of our forefathers, he was sick and a great sufferer.

Those long cool, sweet, brilliant days! Those long still, lonely, silvery nights! His cabin stood near the crest of the hill that ran along the southern edge of the settlement; and propped on his bed, he could look down into the wide valley--into the town. The frame of his door became the frame of many a living picture. Under a big shady tree at the creek-side, he could see some of his children playing or fishing: their shouts and laughter were borne to his ear; he could recognize their shrill voices--those always masterful voices of boys at their games. Sometimes these little figures were framed timidly just outside the door--the girls with small wilted posies, the boys with inquiries. But there was no disguising the dread they all felt that he might soon be well: he had felt himself once; he did not blame them.

Wee Jennie even came up with her slate one day and asked him to set her a sum in multiplication; he did so; but he knew that she would rub it out as soon as she could get out of sight, and he laughed quietly to himself at this tiny casuist, who was trying so hard to deceive them both.

Two or three times, now out in the sunlight, now under the shadow of the trees, he saw an old white horse go slowly along the distant road; and a pink skirt and a huge white bonnet--two or three times; but he watched for it a thousand times till his eyes grew weary.

One day Erskine brought the skin of the panther which he was preparing for him, to take the place of the old one under his table. He brought his rifle along also,--his "Betsy," as he always called it; which, however, he declared was bewitched just now; and for a while John watched him curiously as he nailed a target on a tree in front of John's door, drew on it the face of the person whom he charged with having bewitched his gun, and then, standing back, shot it with a silver bullet; after which, the spell being now undone, he dug the bullet out of the tree again and went off to hunt with confidence in his luck.

And then the making of history was going on under his eyes down there in the town, and many a thoughtful hour he studied that. The mere procession of figures across his field of vision symbolized the march of destiny, the onward sweep of the race, the winning of the continent. Now the barbaric paint and plumes of some proud Indian, peaceably come to trade in pelts but really to note the changes that had taken place in his great hunting ground, loved and ranged of old beyond all others: this figure was the Past--the old, old Past. Next, the picturesque, rugged outlines of some backwoods rifleman, who with his fellows had dislodged and pushed the Indian westward: this figure was the Present--the short-lived Present. Lastly, dislodging this figure in turn and already pushing him westward as he had driven the Indian, a third type of historic man, the fixed settler, the land-loving, house-building, wife-bringing, child-getting, stock-breeding yeoman of the new field and pasture: this was the figure of the endless Future. The retreating wave of Indian life, the thin restless wave of frontier life, the on-coming, all-burying wave of civilized life--he seemed to feel close to him the mighty movements of the three. His own affair, the attack of the panther, the last encounter between the cabin and the jungle looked to him as typical of the conquest; and that he should have come out of the struggle alive, and have owed his life to the young Indian fighter and hunter who had sprung between him and the incarnate terror of the wilderness, affected his imagination as an epitome of the whole winning of the West.

One morning while the earth was still fresh with dew, the great Boone came to inquire for him, and before he left, drew from the pocket of his hunting shirt a well-worn little volume.

"It has been my friend many a night," he said. "I have read it by many a camp-fire. I had it in my pocket when I stood on the top of Indian Old Fields and saw the blue gra.s.s lands for the first time. And when we encamped on the creek there, I named it Lulbegrud in honour of my book. You can read it while you have nothing else to do;" and he astounded John by leaving in his hand Swift's story of adventures in new worlds.

He had many other visitors: the Governor, Mr. Bradford, General Wilkinson, the leaders in the French movement, all of whom were solicitous for his welfare as a man, but also as their chosen emissary to the Jacobin Club of Philadelphia. In truth it seemed to him that everyone in the town came sooner or later, to take a turn at his bedside or wish him well.

Except four persons: Amy did not come; nor Joseph, with whom he had quarrelled and with whom he meant to settle his difference as soon as he could get about; nor O'Bannon, whose practical joke had indirectly led to the whole trouble; nor Peter, who toiled on at his forge with his wounded vanity.

Betrothals were not kept secret in those days and engagements were short.

But as he was sick and suffering, some of those who visited him forbore to mention her name, much less to speak of the preparations now going forward for her marriage with Joseph. Others, indeed, did begin to talk of her and to pry; but he changed the subject quickly.

And so he lay there with the old battle going on in his thoughts, never knowing that she had promised to become the wife of another: fighting it all over in his foolish, iron-minded way: some days hardening and saying he would never look her in the face again; other days softening and resolving to seek her out as soon as he grew well enough and learn whether the fault of all this quarrel lay with him or wherein lay the truth: yet in all his moods sore beset with doubts of her sincerity and at all times pa.s.sing sore over his defeat--defeat that always went so hard with him.

Meantime one person was pondering his case with a solicitude that he wist not of: the Reverend James Moore, the flute-playing Episcopal parson of the town, within whose flock this marriage was to take place and who may have regarded Amy as one of his most frisky wayward fleeces. Perhaps indeed as not wearing a white spiritual fleece at all but as dyed a sort of merino-brown in the matter of righteousness.

He had long been fond of John--they both being pure-minded men, religious, bookish, and bachelors; but their friendship caused one to think of the pine and the palm: for the parson, with his cold bleak face, palish straight hair put back behind white ears, and frozen smile, appeared always to be inhabiting the arctic regions of life while John, though rooted in a tropical soil of many pa.s.sions, strove always to bear himself in character like a palm, up-right, clean-cut; having no low or drooping branches; and putting forth all the foliage and blossoms of the mind at the very summit of his powers.

The parson and the school-master had often walked out to the Falconers'

together in the days when John imagined his suit to be faring prosperously; and from Amy's conduct, and his too slight knowledge of the s.e.x, this arctic explorer had long since adjusted his frosted faculties to the notion that she expected to become John's wife. He was sorry; it sent an extra chill through the icebergs of his imagination; but perhaps he gathered comforting warmth from the hope that some of John's whiteness would fall upon her and that thus from being a blackish lambkin she would at least eventually turn into a light-gray ewe.

When the tidings reached his far-inward ear that she was to marry Joseph instead of his friend, a general thaw set in over the entire landscape of his nature: it was like spring along the southern fringes of Greenland.

The error must not be inculcated here that the parson had no pa.s.sions: he had three-ruling ones: a pa.s.sion for music, a pa.s.sion for metaphysics, and a pa.s.sion for satirizing the other s.e.x.

Dropping in one afternoon and glancing with delicate indirection at John's short shelf of books, he inquired whether he had finished with his Paley.

John said he had and the parson took it down to bear away with him. Laying it across his stony knees as he sat down and piling his white hands on it,

"Do you believe Paley?" he asked, turning upon John a pair of the most beautiful eyes, which looked a little like moss agates.

"I believe St. Paul," replied John, turning his own eyes fondly on his open Testament.

"Do you believe Paley?" insisted the parson, who would always have his questions answered directly.

"There's a good deal of Paley: what do you mean?" said John, laughing evasively.

"I mean his ground idea-the corner stone of his doctrine -his pou sto. I mean do you believe that we can infer the existence and character of G.o.d from any evidences of design that we see in the universe "

"I'm not so sure about that," said John. "What we call the evidences of design in the universe may be merely certain laws of our own minds, certain inward necessities we are under to think of everything as having an order and a plan and a cause. And these inner necessities may themselves rest on nothing, may be wrong, may be deceiving us."

"Oh, I don't mean that!" said the parson. "We've got to believe our own minds. We've got to do that even to disbelieve them. If the mind says of itself it is a liar, how does it know this to be true if it is a liar itself? No; we have to believe our own minds whether they are right or wrong. But what I mean is: can we, according to Paley, infer the existence and character of G.o.d from anything we see?"

"It sounds reasonable," said John.

"Does it! Then suppose you apply this method of reasoning to a woman: can you infer her existence from anything you see? Can you trace the evidences of design there? Can you derive the slightest notion of her character from her works?"

As the parson said this, he turned upon the sick man a look of such logical triumph that John, who for days had been wearily trying to infer Amy's character from what she had done, was seized with a fit of laughter--the parson himself remaining perfectly grave.

Another day he examined John's wound tenderly, and then sat down by him with his beautiful moss-agate eyes emitting dangerous little sparkles.

"It's a bad bite," he said, "the bite of a cat--felis concolor. They are a bad family--these cats--the scratchers." He was holding John's wounded hand.

"So you've had your fight with a felis. A single encounter ought to be enough! If some one hadn't happened to step in and save you!--What do you suppose is the root of the idea universal in the consciousness of our race that if a man had not been a man he'd have been a lion; and that if a woman hadn't been a woman she'd have been a tigress? "

"I don't believe there's any such idea universal in the consciousness of the race," replied John, laughing.

"It's universal in my consciousness," said the parson doggedly, "and my consciousness is as valid as any other man's. But I'll ask you an easier question: who of all men, do you suppose, knew most about women?"

"Women or Woman?" inquired John.

"Women," said the parson. "We'll drop the subject of Woman: she's beyond us!

"I don't know," observed John. "St. Paul knew a good deal, and said some necessary things."

"St. Paul!" exclaimed the parson condescendingly. "He knew a few n.o.ble Jewesses--superficially--with a scattering acquaintance among the pagan sisters around the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. As for what he wrote on that subject--it may have been inspired by Heaven: it never could have been inspired by the s.e.x."

"Shakspeare, I suppose," said John.

"The man in the Arabian Nights," cried the parson, who may have been put in mind of this character by his own attempts to furnish daily entertainment.

"He knew a thousand of them--intimately. And cut off the heads of nine hundred and ninety-nine! The only reason he did not cut off the head of the other was that he had learned enough: he could not endure to know any more.

All the evidence had come in: the case was closed."

"I suppose there are men in the world," he continued, "who would find it hard to stand a single disappointment about a woman. But think of a thousand disappointments! A thousand attempts to find a good wife--just one woman who could furnish a man a little rational companionship at night. Bluebeard also must have been a well-informed person. And Henry the Eighth--there was a man who had evidently picked up considerable knowledge and who made considerable use of it. But to go back a moment to the idea of the felis family. Suppose we do this: we'll begin to enumerate the qualities of the common house cat.

I'll think of the cat; you think of some woman; and we'll see what we come to."

"I'll not do it," said John. "She's too n.o.ble."

"Just for fun!"