The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories Part 18

"W-a-al," she drawled, looking away at the skies, her unthinking eyes arrested, too, by the blazing comet, "I _did_ 'low wunst I would. But a man with eddication would suit me bes', an' ye hain't got none."

"No more hev ye," he argued warmly. He was clinging for dear life to his vanishing hope of happiness. He did not realize depreciation in his words--only the facts that made them suited to each other. "Ye know ye _wouldn't_ take l'arnin' at school--an' I _couldn't_ git it; 'pears ter me we air 'bout ekal."

"It air a differ in a 'oman," said Theodosia, quickly. "A 'oman hev got no call to be l'arned like a man."

This very subordinate view failed in this instance of the satisfaction it is wont to give to the masculine mind.

"Waal, ye didn't git enough l'arnin' ter hurt ye," he retorted. Then, relenting, he added, "But I don't find no fault with ye fur that nuther."

The color flared into her face. How she resented his clemency to her ignorance! She still sat in her lowly posture on the step, leaning her bare head against the column of the porch, for her bonnet lay on the floor beside her; but there was a suggestion of self-a.s.sertion in her voice.

"I ain't expectin' ter live all my days in the woods, like a deer or suthin' wild. I expec' ter live in town with eddicated folks, ez be looked up ter, an' respected by all, an' kin make money, an' hev a sure-enough house." Her ambitious eyes swept the shadowy gables down the street.

He broke out laughing; his voice was softer; his face relaxed.

"Laws-a-ma.s.sy! Dosia," he exclaimed, "yer head's plumb turned by one day's roamin' round town. Ye won't be in sech a hurry ter turn me off whenst we git back ter the mountings."

"I ain't goin' back ter the mountings!" she cried; "I be a-goin' ter marry a town man ez hev got position, an' eddication, an' place." She paused, stung by the fancied incredulity in his eyes. "Why not? Ain't I good-lookin' enough?"

She had risen to her feet; her eyes flashed upon him; her beautiful face wore a look of pride. It might have elicited from another man a protest of its beauty. He stared at her with an expression of alarm that was almost ghastly.

"Other men like me fur my looks, ef ye don't, Justus Hoxon," she said in indignation.

"Ef they jes' likes ye fur yer looks they won't like ye long," Hoxon said severely. "I'll like ye when yer brown head is ez white ez cotton--ez much ez I like ye now--more!--_more_, I'll be bound! O 'Dosia," with a sudden renewal of tenderness, "don't talk this hyar cur'ous way! I dunno what's witched ye. But let's go home ter the mountings, ter yer mother, an' see ef she can't straighten out any tangle yer feelin's hev got inter."

It needed only this--the allusion to her commonplace mother, the recollection of the forlorn little mountain home, the idea of her mother's insistent championship of Justus Hoxon--to bring the avowal so long trembling on her lips.

"I won't! I ain't likin' ye nowadays, Justus Hoxon, nor fur a long time past. I ain't keerin' nothin' 'bout ye."

There was something in her tone that carried conviction.

"Air ye in earnest?" he said, appalled.

"Dead earnest."

He gazed at her in the ever dulling light, that yet was clear enough to show every lineament--even the long black eyelashes that did not droop or quiver above her great blue eyes.

"Then thar's no more to be said." He spoke in a changed voice, calm and clear, and she stared at him in palpable surprise. She had expected an outburst of reproach, of beseechings, of protestation. She had braced herself to meet it, and she felt the reaction. She was hardly capable of coping with seeming indifference. It touched her pride. She missed the tribute of the withheld pleadings. She sought to rouse his jealousy.

"It's another man I like," she said, "better--oh, a heap better--than you-uns."

"That's all right, then."

He wondered to hear the words so glibly enunciated. His lips seemed to him stiff, petrifying. He looked very white about them. She did not heed. She was angered, wounded, perplexed, by his acquiescence, his calmness, his taciturnity. A wave of anxiety that was half regret went over her. She felt lost in the turmoil of these complex emotions.

With that destructive impulse to hurl down, to tear, to strike, that is an element of a sort of blind irritation, she went on tumultuously:

"He is a man ez hev got eddication, an' a place, an' a fine chance an'

show in life--it's--it's--yer brother Walter."

Her aim was true that time. Her shaft struck in the very core of his heart: but the satisfaction of this knowledge was denied her. He looked very white, it is true, but the pale moonlight was on his face; and he only said in an undertone:

"Walter!"

She laughed aloud, a sort of mockery of glee. She had expected to enjoy the revelation, and her laughter was an incident of the scene as she had planned it.

"We war a-courtin' consider'ble o' the time whilst ye war off electioneerin'," she said, with the side glance of her old coquetry.

She saw his long shadow on the pavement bend forward and recoil suddenly. She did not look at him.

"An' so ter-night," she went on briskly,--she had truly thought it a very good joke,--"whilst you-uns war a-star-gazing an' sech, Wat an'

me jes stepped inter the register's office thar, an' the Squair married us. We 'lowed ye didn't see nothin' of it through the tellingscope, did ye? So Wat said I must tell ye, ez _he_ didn't want ter tell ye."

She could not see his face, the light was dulling so, and he had replaced his wide hat. There was a moment's silence. Then his voice rang out quite strong and cheerful, "Why, then thar's no more to be said."

He stood motionless an instant longer. Then suddenly he turned with a wave of his hand that was like a gesture of farewell, and she marked how swiftly his shadow seemed to slink from before him as he walked away, and pa.s.sed the corner of the house, and disappeared from view.

She gazed silently after him for a moment. Then, leaning against the column, she burst into a tumult of tears.

Daylight found Justus Hoxon far on the road to the mountains. In the many miles, as he fared along, his thoughts could hardly have been pleasant company. As he sought to discover fault or flaw in himself, search as he might, he could find naught that might palliate the flippant faithlessness of his beloved, or the treachery of his brother. His ambition might have been too worldly a thing, but not a pulse of that most vital emotion beat for himself. He realized it now--he realized his life in looking back upon this completed episode, as he might have done in the hour of death. He had so expended himself in the service of others that there was naught left for him. He had no gratulation in it, no sense of the virtue of unselfishness, no preception of achievement; it only seemed to him that his was the most flagrant folly that ever left a man in the world, but with no place in it. A sorry object for pride he seemed to himself, but he quivered, and scorched, and writhed in its hot flames. His one object was to take himself out of the sight and sound of Colbury, till he might have counsel within himself, and perfect his scheme of revenge--not upon the woman. Poor Theodosia, with her limitations, could hardly have conceived how she had shattered the ideal to which her image had conformed in his mind, as she had stood on the porch and vaunted her beauty, and her belief in its power, and her pitiful ambitions. The woman was heartily welcome to the lot she had chosen. But the treacherous man,--it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed, albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This, however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of a.s.sault and battery. But Walter had many a weak point in his armor, glaringly apparent now to the once fond brother.

Only a surly, bitter word he had for greeting to the few neighbors whom he met, and who went their way in the conviction that his brother had lost his election; for none ascribed any emotion of Justus Hoxon's to his own sake.

He reached in the evening the little cabin where the padlock hung on the door, and the heavy, untrodden dust of the drought lay without; and so it was that the old days when "Fambly" had struggled through their humble experiences came back to him with that incomparable sweetness of the irrevocable past. Hardships! How could there be, with fond faith in one another, and in all the world! Poverty--so rich they were in love! Life, after all, is more than meat, and there is no hunger like that of a famished heart. He reviewed that forlorn, anxious, struggling orphanage, transfigured in the subtle glow of regretful, loving memory, as one might gaze into the rich glamours of a promised land. Alas, that our promised land should be so often the land we made haste to leave! As he sat down on the step he saw the ragged cl.u.s.ter of children troop down the road from twenty years agone, almost as if he actually beheld them, himself at the head. He could still feel their plump palms clinging to his hand at the first suggestion of danger. He had led them a right th.o.r.n.y path, each to a successful goal. And now could he turn against "Fambly"? Should he denounce the treachery of one of the little group that he could see huddling together for warmth on the meagre hearthstone, while outside the snows of a long-vanished winter were a-whirl? Should he pull down the temple on Walter's success--the pride of them all? He remembered how his sisters, with that feminine necessity of hero-worship in their untaught little hearts, had clung about Walter. He remembered too that almost every thought of his own life had been given to this man, who had ruthlessly and secretly robbed him of all that was dear to him, and in such wise as to hold him up to ridicule, a scoffing jest, a very good joke! So Walter considered it, and so doubtless would all Colbury. It would have surprised Walter, but his sometime mentor's cheek burned with shame for him.

No; the claims of "Fambly" were paramount. He gave it precedence, as in the old days he had denied himself when "Fambly" dined at the skillet, and the bone and the broken bit he took for his share. He could not bring discredit upon it. He would not lift his hand against it. It was the object of a lifelong allegiance, and he only marveled that, since the uses of the loyalty were at an end, the empty life should go on. He gazed mechanically at the padlock as he sat there with his dreary thoughts, remembering with what different heart he had turned the key. Ah, Happiness--to pa.s.s out from a door, and knock there never again!

He rose at last, his burden adjusted to his strength. He had never worked for thanks. It hardly mattered to him now how his efforts were requited. And though he encountered treachery at close quarters,--of his own household,--it was not in his heart to be a traitor to "Fambly" and its obvious interests. So he too went out from the door in the footprints of Happiness--likewise to return no more.

Walter Hoxon had not altogether ill-gauged the general proclivity to deem all fair in love or war. He was accounted to have performed something of a feat in the clever outwitting of his unsuspecting rival, and to the minds of the many there was an element of the romantic in this hasty wedding of the damsel of his choice almost under the eyes of the expectant bridegroom. He had added to the prestige of success in politics the l.u.s.tre of valiance in the lists of love, and he encountered laughing congratulations from his friends and political supporters, which served much to rea.s.sure him and to banish a vague and subtle anxiety as to public opinion that had begun to gnaw at his heart. They all seemed to think he had done a very fine thing, and that it was a very good joke, and he was soon most jauntily of their persuasion. He could not know that here and there people were saying to one another, aside, the words he had feared to hear in reproach--that the swain whom he and his lady-love had conspired to dupe was his brother, who had done everything for him--had, as a mere child, encountered and vanquished poverty, had clothed and educated this man and his sisters, had served his every interest with a perfect self-abnegation all his life; that it was his brother who had won his election, being a man of much influence and untaught eloquence, and of great native tact and intelligence; that the secrecy, the conspiracy, and the publicity of the dramatic denouement, in lieu of an open rivalry, rendered it a case of the most flagrant ingrat.i.tude, and argued much unworthiness in the people's choice.

But suddenly a doubt began to prevail as to whether he were the people's choice. In the returns from the farthest districts, not heard from till quite late in the day, in which Walter Hoxon had felt secure, Quigley developed unexpected strength. In great perturbation Walter swiftly patrolled the town in search of Justus; unprecedented developments were imminent, and he hardly dared face the emergency without his valiant backer at hand. Justus had disappeared as utterly as if the night had swallowed him up.

"Consarn the tormentin' critter!" exclaimed Walter, mopping his brow as he stood at the little gate of Mrs. Elmer's yard, returning thither, after his fruitless searching, in the hope of finding his brother among the familiar faces. "Mad ez a hornet, I'll be bound, an'

lef' me in the lurch. Beat arter all, I'll bet!"

Theodosia listened, tremulous, aghast. All the fine prospects that had seemed so near, into whose charming perspectives she might in another moment have stepped as actually as upon that path to the gate, were drawing away, dissolving, as tenuous, as intangible, as those morning sunlit mists shifting and rising from before the ma.s.sive blue ranges of the Great Smoky Mountains, and dallying with the distances into invisibility.

"I tole ye ag'in an' ag'in ye bes' not be _too sure_," she said, a sob in her throat, with an obvious disposition to wreak her disappointment upon him.

It was crushed in the moment.

He turned a frowning face full upon her. "Hold yer jaw!" he cried violently. "Ef 't warn't for you-uns I'd hev Justus hyar, an' I'll be bound _he_ could fix it. Ye miserable deceitful critter--settin' two own brothers at loggerheads! I'll take no word from _you-uns_--sure!"

He shook his head indignantly at her, clapped his hat upon it, and turned desperately away as a man came running up. "Have ye found Justus?" Wat exclaimed.