Tiverton Tales Part 10

The pool has been still for many years. Not within the memory of aged men has the trout turned fin or flashed a speckled side; but he is to this day an historical present. He has lived, and therefore he lives always.

Those who do not pause upon the Gully Road, but keep straight on into the open, will come into the old highway leading up and up to Horn o'

the Moon. It is an unshaded, gravelly track, pointing duly up-hill for three long miles; and it has become a sober way to most of us, in this generation: for we never take it unless we go on the solemn errand of getting Mary Dunbar, that famous nurse, to care for our sick or dead.

There is a tradition that a summer visitor once hired a "shay," and drove, all by herself, up to Horn o' the Moon, drawn on by the elusive splendor of its name. But she met such a dissuading flood of comment by the way as to startle her into the state of mind commonly a.s.sociated with the Gully Road. Farmers, haying in the field, came forward, to lean on the fence, and call excitedly,--

"Where ye goin'?"

"Horn o' the Moon," replied she, having learned in Tiverton the value of succinct replies.

"Who's sick?"

"n.o.body."

"Got any folks up there?"

"No. Going to see the place."

The effect of this varied. Some looked in amazement; one ventured to say, "Well, that's the beater!" and another dropped into the cabalistic remark which cannot be defined, but which has its due significance, "Well, you _must_ be sent for!" The result of all this running commentary was such that, when the visitor reached the top of the hill where Horn o' the Moon lies, encircled by other lesser heights, she was stricken by its exceeding desolation, and had no heart to cast more than a glance at the n.o.ble view below. She turned her horse, and trotted, recklessly and with many stumblings, down again into friendly Tiverton.

Horn o' the Moon is unique in its melancholy. It has so few trees, and those of so meagre and wind-swept a nature, that it might as well be entirely bald. No apples grow there; and in the autumn, the inhabitants make a concerted sally down into Tiverton Street, to purchase their winter stock, such of them as can afford it. The poorer folk--and they are all poor enough--buy windfalls, and string them to dry; and so common is dried-apple-pie among them that, when a Tivertonian finds this makeshift appearing too frequently on his table, he has only to remark, "I should think this was Horn o' the Moon!" and it disappears, to return no more until the slur is somewhat outworn.

There is very little gra.s.s at the top of the lonely height, and that of a husky, whispering sort, in thin ribbons that flutter low little songs in the breeze. They never cease; for, at Horn o' the Moon, there is always a wind blowing, differing in quality with the season. Sometimes it is a sighing wind from other heights, happier in that they are sweet with firs. Sometimes it is exasperating enough to make the March breezes below seem tender; then it tosses about in s.n.a.t.c.hing gusts, buffeting, and slapping, and excoriating him who stands in its way.

Somehow, all the peculiarities of Horn o' the Moon seem referable, in a mysterious fashion, to the wind. The people speak in high, strenuous voices, striving to hold their own against its wicked strength. Most of them are deaf. Is that because the air beats ceaselessly against the porches of their ears? They are a stunted race; for they have grown into the habit of holding the head low, and plunging forward against that battling element. Even the fowl at Horn o' the Moon are not of the ordinary sort. Their feathers grow the wrong way, standing up in a ragged and disorderly fashion; and they, too, have the effect of having been blown about and disarranged, until nature yielded, and agreed to their permanent roughness.

Moreover, all the people are old or middle-aged and possibly that is why, again, the settlement is so desolate. It is a disgrace for us below to marry with Horn o' the Mooners, though they are a sober folk; and now it happens that everybody up there is the cousin of everybody else. The race is dying out, we say, as if we considered it a distinct species; and we agree that it would have been wiped away long ago, by weight of its own eccentricity, had not Mary Dunbar been the making of it. She is the one righteous among many. She is the good nurse whom we all go to seek, in our times of trouble, and she perpetually saves her city from the odium of the world.

Mary was born in Tiverton Street. We are glad to remember that, we who condemn by the wholesale, and are a.s.sured that no good can come out of Nazareth. When she was a girl of eighteen, her father and mother died; and she fell into a state of spiritual exaltation, wherein she dreamed dreams, and had periods of retirement within her house, communing with other intelligences. We said Mary had lost her mind; but that was difficult to believe, since no more wholesome type of womanhood had ever walked our streets. She was very tall, built on the lines of a beauty transcending our meagre strain. n.o.body approved of those broad shoulders and magnificent arms. We said it was a shame for any girl to be so overgrown; yet our eyes followed her, delighted by the harmony of line and action. Then we whispered that she was as big as a moose, and that, if we had such arms, we never'd go out without a shawl. Her "mittins"

must be wide enough for any man!

Mary did everything perfectly. She walked as if she went to meet the morning, and must salute it worthily. She carried a weight as a G.o.ddess might bear the infant Bacchus; and her small head, poised upon that round throat, wore the crown of simplicity, and not of pride. But we only told how strong she was, and how much she could lift. We loved Mary, but sensibility had to shrink from those great proportions and that elemental strength.

One snowy morning, Mary's spiritual vision called her out of our midst, to which she never came back save as we needed her. The world was very white that day, when she rose, in her still house, dressed herself hastily, and roused a neighbor, begging him to harness, and drive her up to Horn o' the Moon. Folks were sick there, with n.o.body to take care of them. The neighbor reasoned, and then refused, as one might deny a person, however beloved, who lives by the intuitions of an unseen world.

Mary went home again, and, as he believed, to stay. But she had not hesitated in her allegiance to the heavenly voice. Somehow, through the blinding snow and unbroken road, she ploughed her way up to Horn o' the Moon, where she found an epidemic of diphtheria; and there she stayed.

We marveled over her guessing how keenly she was needed; but since she never explained, it began to be noised abroad that some wandering peddler told her. That accounted for everything and Mary had no time for talk. She was too busy, watching with the sick, and going about from house to house, cooking delicate gruels and broiling chicken for those who were getting well. It is said that she even did the barn work, and milked the cows, during that tragic time. We were not surprised. Mary was a great worker, and she was fond of "creatur's."

Whether she came to care for these stolid people on the height, or whether the vision counseled her, Mary gave up her house in the village, and bought a little old dwelling under an overhanging hillside, at Horn o' the Moon. It was a nest built into the rock, its back sitting snugly there. The dark came down upon it quickly. In winter, the sun was gone from the little parlor as early as three o'clock; but Mary did not mind.

That house was her temporary sh.e.l.l; she only slept in it in the intervals of hurrying away, with blessed feet, to tend the sick, and hold the dying in untiring arms. I shall never forget how, one morning, I saw her come out of the door, and stand silent, looking toward the rosy east. There was the dawn, and there was she, its priestess, while all around her slept. I should not have been surprised had her lips, parted already in a mysterious smile, opened still further in a prophetic chanting to the sun. But Mary saw me, and the alert, answering look of one who is a messenger flashed swiftly over her face. She advanced like the leader of a triumphal procession.

"Anybody want me?" she called. "I'll get my bunnit."

It was when she was twenty, and not more than settled in the little house at Horn o' the Moon, that her story came to her. The Veaseys were her neighbors, perhaps five doors away; and one summer morning, Johnnie Veasey came home from sea. He brought no money, no coral from foreign parts, nor news of grapes in Eshcol. He simply came empty-handed, as he always did, bearing only, to vouch for his wanderings, a tanned face, and the bright, red-brown eyes that had surely looked on things we never saw. Adam Veasey, his brother, had been paralyzed for years. He sat all day in the chimney corner, looking at his shaking hands, and telling how wide a swathe he could cut before he was afflicted. Mattie, Adam's wife, had long dealt with the problem of an unsupported existence. She had turned into a flitting little creature with eager eyes, who made it her business to prey upon a more prosperous world. Mattie never went about without a large extra pocket attached to her waist; into this, she could slip a few carrots, a couple of doughnuts, or even a loaf of bread. She laid a lenient tax upon the neighbors and the town below. Was there a frying of doughnuts at Horn o' the Moon? No sooner had the odor risen upon the air, than Mattie stood on the spot, dumbly insistent on her toll. Her very clothes smelled of food; and it was said that, in fly-time, it was a sight to see her walk abroad, because of the hordes of insects settling here and there on her odoriferous gown. When Johnnie Veasey appeared, Mattie's soul rose in arms. Their golden chance had come at last.

"You got paid off?" she asked him, three minutes after his arrival, and Johnnie owned, with the cheerfulness of those rich only in hope, that he did get paid, and lost it all, the first night on sh.o.r.e. He got into the wrong boarding-house, he said. It was the old number, but new folks.

Mattie acquiesced, with a sigh. He would make his visit and go again, and, that time, perhaps fortune might attend him. So she went over to old Mrs. Hardy's, to borrow a "riz loaf," and the wanderer was feasted, according to her little best.

Johnnie stayed, and Horn o' the Moon roused itself, finding that he had brought the antipodes with him. He was the teller of tales. He described what he had seen, and then, by easy transitions, what others had known and he had only heard, until the intelligence of these stunted, wind-blown creatures, on their island hill, took fire; and every man vowed he wished he had gone to sea, before it was too late, or even to California, when the gold craze was on. Johnnie had the tongue of the improvisator, and he loved a listener. He liked to sit out on a log, in the spa.r.s.e shadow of the one little grove the hill possessed, and, with the whispering leaves above him tattling uncomprehended sayings brought them by the wind, gather the old men about him, and talk them blind. As he sat there, Mary came walking swiftly by, a basket in her hand.

Johnnie came bolt upright, and took off his cap. He looked amazingly young and fine, and Mary blushed as she went by.

"Who's that?" asked Johnnie of the village fathers.

"That's only Mary Dunbar. Guess you ain't been here sence she moved up."

Johnnie watched her walking away, for the rhythm of her motion attracted him. He did not think her pretty; no one ever thought that.

It happened, then, that he spent two or three evenings at the Hardys', where Mary went, every night, to rub grandmother and put her to bed; and while she sat there in the darkened room, soothing the old woman for her dreary vigil, she heard his golden tales of people in strange lands. It seemed very wonderful to Mary. She had not dreamed there were such lands in all the world; and when she hurried home, it was to hunt out her old geography, and read it until after midnight. She followed rivers to their sources, and dwelt upon mountains with amazing names. She was seeing the earth and its fullness, and her heart beat fast.

Next day she went away for a long case, giving only one little sigh in the going, to the certainty that, when she came back, Johnnie Veasey would be off on another voyage to lands beyond the sea. Mary was not of the sort who cry for the moon just because they have seen it. She had simply begun to read a fairy tale, and somebody had taken it away from her and put it high on the shelf. But on the very first morning after her return, when she rose early, longing for the blissful air of her own bleak solitude, Mattie Veasey stood there at her door. Mary had but one first question for every comer:--

"Anybody sick?"

"You let me step in," answered Mattie, a determined foot on the sill. "I want to tell you how things stand."

It was evident that Mattie was going on a journey. She was an exposition of the domestic resources of Horn o' the Moon. Her dress came to the tops of her boots. It was the plaid belonging to Stella Hardy, who had died in her teens. It hooked behind; but that was no matter, for the enveloping shawl, belonging to old Mrs. t.i.tcomb, concealed that youthful eccentricity. Her shoes--congress, with world-weary elastics at the side--were her own, inherited from an aunt; and her bonnet was a rusty black, with a mourning veil. There was, at that time, but one new bonnet at Horn o' the Moon, and its owner had sighed, when Mattie proposed for it, brazenly saying that she guessed n.o.body'd want anything that set so fur back. Whereupon the suppliant sought out Mrs. Pillsbury, whose mourning headgear, bought in a brief season of prosperity, nine years before, had become, in a manner, village property. It was as duly in public requisition as the hea.r.s.e; and its owner cherished a melancholy pride in this official state. She never felt as if she owned it,--only that she was the keeper of a sacred trust; and Mattie, in asking for it, knew that she demanded no more than her due, as a citizen should. It was an impersonal matter between her and the bonnet; and though she should wear it on a secular errand, the veil did not signify.

She knew everybody else knew whose bonnet it was; and that if anybody supposed she had met with a loss, they had only to ask, and she to answer. So, in the consciousness of an armor calculated to meet the world, she skillfully brought her congress boots into Mary's kitchen, and sat down, her worn little hands clasped under the shawl.

"You've just got home," said she. "I s'pose you ain't heard what's happened to Johnnie?"

Mary rose, a hand upon her chair.

"No! no! He don't want no nussin'. You set down. I can't talk so--ready to jump an' run. My! how good that tea does smell!"

Mary brought a cup, and placed it at her hand, with the deft manner of those who have learned to serve. Mattie sugared it, and tasted, and sugared again.

"My! how good that is!" she repeated. "You don't steep it to rags, as some folks do. I have to, we're so nigh the wind. Well, you hadn't been gone long before Johnnie had a kind of a fall. 'T wa'n't much of a one, neither,--down the ledge. I dunno how he done it--he climbs like a cat--seems as if the Old Boy was in it--but half his body he can't move.

Palsy, I s'pose; numb, not shakin', like Adam's."

Mary listened gravely, her hands on her knees.

"How long's he been so?"

"Nigh on to five weeks."

"Had the doctor?"

"Yes, we called in that herb-man over to Saltash, an' he says there ain't no chance for him. He's goin' to be like Adam, only wuss. An'

I've been down to the Poor Farm, to tell 'em they've got to take him in." Her little hands worked; her eager eyes ate their way into the heart. Mary could see exactly how she had had her way with the selectmen. "I told 'em they'd got to," she repeated. "He ain't got no money, an' we ain't got nuthin', an' have two paraletics on my hands I can't. So they told me they'd give me word to-day; an' I'm goin' down to settle it. I'm in hopes they'll bring me back, an' take him along down."

"Yes," answered Mary gravely. "Yes."

"Well, now I've come to the beginnin' o' my story." Mattie took that last delicious sip of tea at the bottom of the cup. "He's layin' in bed, an' Adam's settin' by the stove; an' I wanted to know if you wouldn't run in, long towards noon, an' warm up suthin' for 'em."

"Yes, indeed," said Mary Dunbar. "I'll be there."

She rose, and Mattie, albeit she dearly loved to gossip, felt that she must rise, too, and be on her way. She tried to amplify on what she had already said, but Mary did not seem to be listening; so, treading carefully, lest the dust and dew beset her precious shoes, she took her way down the hill, like a busy little ant, born to scurry and gather.

Mary looked hastily about the room, to see if its perfect order needed a farewell touch; and then she drank her cup of tea, and stepped out into the morning. The air was fresh and sweet. She wore no shawl, and the wind lifted the little brown rings on her forehead, and curled them closer. Mary held a hand upon them, and hurried on. She had no more thought of appearances than a woman in a desert land, or in the desert made by lack of praise; for she knew no one looked at her. To be clean and swift was all her life demanded.