The Mountain Girl Part 23

"Talk about the influence of the beautiful in nature upon the human soul,--it is all very pretty, but I believe the soul must be more or less enlightened to feel it. I've learned a few things among your people up there in the mountains. Strange beings they are."

"It only goes to show that heredity alone won't do everything," said the bishop, placing the tips of his fingers together and frowning meditatively.

"Heredity? It means a lot to us over there in England."

"Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and then, even if they have to come over here for it."

"For that and--your money--yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain people of yours, who are they anyway?"

"Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world--as any you will find at home. They have their heredity--and only that--from all your cla.s.ses over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime."

"How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"

"Circ.u.mstances and environment have kept them to the pure stock, and neglect has left them untrammelled by civilization and unaided by education. Time and generations of ignorance have deteriorated them, and nature alone--as you were but now admitting--has hardly served to arrest the process by the survival of the fittest."

"Nature--yes--how do you account for it? I have been in the grandest, most wonderful places, I venture to say, that are to be found on earth, and among all the glory that nature can throw around a man, he is still, if left to himself, more b.e.s.t.i.a.l than the beasts. He destroys and defaces and defiles nature; he kills--for the mere sake of killing--more than he needs; he enslaves himself to his appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions, follows them wildly, yields to them recklessly; and destroys himself and all the beauty around him that he can reach, wantonly. Why, Bishop Towers, sometimes I've gone out and looked up at the stars above me and wondered which was real, they and the marvellous beauty all around me, or the three hundred reeking humanity sleeping in the camp beneath them.

Sometimes it seemed as if only h.e.l.l were real, and the camp was a bit of it let loose to mock at heaven."

"We mustn't forget that what is transitory is not a part of G.o.d's eternity of spirit and truth."

"Oh, yes, yes! But we do forget. And some transitory things are mighty hard to endure, especially if they must endure for a lifetime."

David was thinking of Ca.s.sandra and what in all probability would be her doom. He had not mentioned her name, but he had come down with the intention of learning all he could about her, and if possible to whom she was "promised." He feared it might be the low-browed, handsome youth bending over the garden beds beyond the hedge, and his heart rebelled and cried out fiercely within him, "What a waste, what a waste!"

Betty Towers, intent on her sewing, felt the thrill that intensified David's tone, and she, too, thought of Ca.s.sandra. She dropped her work in her lap and looked earnestly in her husband's face.

"James, I feel just as Doctor Thryng does--when I think of some things.

When I see a tragedy coming to a human soul, I feel that a lifetime of transitory things like that is hard to endure. Fancy, James! Think of Ca.s.sandra. You know her, Doctor Thryng, of course. They live just below your place. She is the Widow Farwell's daughter, but her name is Merlin."

David arrested his impatient stride and, drawing a chair near her, dropped into it. "What about her?" he said. "What is the tragedy?"

"I think, Betty, the hills must keep their own secrets," said the bishop.

His little wife compressed her lips, glanced over the hedge at the young man who happened at the moment to have straightened from his bent position among the plants and was gazing at their guest, then resumed her sewing.

"Is it something I must not be told?" asked David, quietly. "But I may have my suspicions. Naturally we can't help that."

"I think it is better to know the truth. I don't like suspicions. They are sure to lead to harm. James, let me put it to the doctor as I see it, and see what he thinks of it."

"As you please, dear."

"It's like this. Have you seen anything of that girl or observed her much?"

"I certainly have."

"Then, of course, you can see that she is one of the best of the mountain people, can't you? Well! She has promised to marry--promised to marry--think of it! one of the wildest, most reckless of those mountain boys, one that she knows very well has been in illicit distilling. He is a lawbreaker in that way; and, more than that, he drinks, and in a drunken row he shot dead his friend."

"Ah!" David rose, turned away, and again paced the piazza. Then he returned to his seat. "I see. The young man I tried to help off when I first arrived."

"Yes. There he is."

"I see. Handsome type."

"He's down here now, keeping quiet. How long it will last, no one knows.

Justice is lax in the mountains. His father shot three or four men before he died himself of a gunshot wound which he received while resisting the officers of the law. If there's a man left in the family to follow this thing up, Frale will be hunted down and arrested or shot; otherwise, when things have cooled off a little up there, he will go back and open up the old business, and the tragedy will be repeated.

James, you know how often after the best you could do and all their promises, they go back to it?"

"I admit it's always a question. They don't seem to be content in the low country. I think it is often a sort of natural gravitation back to the mountains where they were born and bred, more than it is depravity."

"I know, James, but that excuse won't help Ca.s.sandra."

"Why did she do it?" asked David. "She must have known to what such a marriage would bring her."

"Do it? That is the sort of girl she is. If she thought she ought, she would leap over that fall there."

"But why should she think she ought? Had she given her--promise--" David saw her as she appeared to him when she had said that word to him on the mountain, and it silenced him, but only for a moment. He would learn all he could of her motives now. He must--he would know. "I mean before he did this, before she went away to study--had she made him such a--promise?"

"No. You tell him about it, James. You have seen her and talked with her. They were quarrelling about her, as I understand, and she thinks because she was the cause of the deed she must help him make retribution. Isn't that it, James? She knows perfectly well what it means for her, for she has had her aspirations. I can see it all. Frale says he was not drunk nor his friend either. He says the other man claimed--but I won't go into that--only Ca.s.sandra promised him before G.o.d, he says, that if he would repent, she would marry him. And when she was here she used to talk about the way those women live. How her own mother has worked and aged! Why, she is not yet sixty. You have seen how they live in their wretched little cabins, Doctor; that's what Frale would doom her to. He never in life will understand her. He'll grow old like his father,--a pa.s.sionate, ignorant, untamed animal, and worse, for he would be drunken as well. He's been drunk twice since he came down here. James, you know they think it's perfectly right to get drunk Sat.u.r.day afternoon."

"Yes, it seems a terrible waste; but if she has children, she will be able to do more for them than her mother has done for her, and they will have her inheritance; so her life can't be wholly wasted, even if she is not able to live up to her aspirations."

"James Towers! I--that--it's because you are a man that you can talk so!

I'm ashamed, and you a bishop! I wish--" Betty's eyes were full of angry tears. "I only wish you were a woman. Slowly improve the race by bearing children--giving them her inheritance! How would she bear them? Year after year--ill fed, half clothed, slaving to raise enough to hold their souls in their bodies, bringing them into the world for a brute who knows only enough to make corn whiskey--to sell it--and drink it--and reproduce his kind--when--when she knows all the time what ought to be!

Oh, James, James, think of it!"

"My dear, my dear, you forget, he has promised to repent and live a different life. If he does, things will be better than we now see them.

If he does not change, then we may interfere--perhaps."

"I know, James. But--but--suppose he repents and she becomes his wife, and puts aside all her natural tastes, and the studies she loves, and goes on living with him there on the home place, and he does the best he can--even. Don't you see that her nature is fine and--and so different--even at the best, James, for her it will be death in life.

And then there is the terrible chance, after all, that he might go back and be like his father before him, and then what?"

"Well, their lives and destinies are not in our hands; we can only watch out for them and help them."

"James, he has been drunk twice!"

"Yes, yes, Betty, my little tempest, and if he gets drunk twice more, and twice more, she will still forgive him until seventy times seven. We must make her see that unless he keeps his promise to her, she must give him up."

"Of course. I suppose that's all we can do. I--don't know what you'll think of me, Doctor Thryng; I'm a dreadful scold. If James were not an angel--"

"It's perfectly delicious. I would rather hear you scold than--"

"Than hear James preach," laughed the bishop. "I agree with you."

"I agree with her," said David, emphatically. "It ought to be stopped if--"

"If it ought to be, it will be. What do you think she said to me about it when I went to reason with her? 'If Christ can forgive and stand such as he, I can. It is laid on my soul to do this.' I had no more to say."

"That is one point of view, but we mustn't lose sight of the practical, either. To be his wife and bear his children--I call it a waste, a--"