Читать книгу Sunlight Patch - Credo Fitch Harris - Страница 8

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She was no longer fearful for his life. Saner deductions had recalled how he was fighting up to the moment Tusk threw him off, and this precluded the probability of a broken neck. The small abrasion over his temple, where it must have struck a desk, could alone be responsible for the unconsciousness which, she now felt assured, would soon be passing.

Had Jane been dressed as a nun, the picture she made with the young mountaineer's head upon her lap would have startled the world. None of those discerning critics who stalk the galleries on varnishing day could have passed a canvas such as this without bending their rusty knees at least one creak in humble reverence. For God had carefully blessed her with a Madonna-like loveliness, a matchless purity, which held enthralled all who came suddenly upon that look. Perhaps it was not known in Heaven where she got her smile. It was this, when rippling from eyes to mouth, and lingering about the ovals of her cheeks, that could have swayed Faith upon its base or chained it thrice firmly to the Rock.

She had first acquired a pleasant suspicion of this years before in the convent up the valley, where the good sisters had given her shelter. Early one morning on mischief bent, at the very peep of dawn, she had filched the garb of old sister Methtune and, supporting its bulky skirt, demurely walked into the Mother Superior's sanctified chamber. What that good woman thought as she raised herself up from her couch is not recorded even in her conscience, but Jane was sent in haste to replace the nun's attire. While passing a glass door in a dimly lit hall she saw, for the first time in her life, her own face. For five, ten minutes she continued to look back into this heretofore undiscovered and sinful reflector, sometimes laughing, sometimes making grimaces. Then for another ten minutes she simply stared. Sister Methune was late getting to her devotions that morning.

But this incident had occurred eight years ago, when she was scarcely thirteen. Until then she had literally grown up like a weed—or a wild rose—a half-savage little creature of the Cumberlands, loving passionately, hating blindly, doing all things with the full intensity of a vivid, whole-souled temperament. She lived in a cabin many miles from the more civilized country where the convent lay, under the questionable protection of a noted feudist father, who was usually making moonshine when not stalking his enemies. Her cherished glimpses of civilization came during one month each year—July—when she picked especially fat and luscious blackberries in remote spots known only to her, and sold them in the valley to Colonel John May, whose white columned house might be seen on clear days from the convent tower.

One of her visits happened upon a day when the place was enlivened by his daughter's approaching wedding. A distinguished house-party had assembled, among whom a city-bred young fellow had been attracted by her wild beauty. Safe from the eyes of his friends he followed her through the woodland pasture, and talked to her; and it had seemed a very natural thing. Mountain girls mature early, and she was a woman for all her tender years; a twelve and a half year old woman, partly savage, masquerading in the guise of a girl. He was dazzling to her and pleasing. But suddenly he kissed her and, infuriated, she flung the empty bucket in his face and fled. The gods may know where she learned the difference between right and wrong.

In a passion of shame and bitter hatred, she hurled back at him every oath her father, in his most prolific moments, had ever used. It was a wondrous collection. Her only idea was to reach home and return with the rifle, and so insistent was this that she ran most of the twelve intervening miles. Reaching at last the cabin clearing, she panted up its steep side, through burnt stumps and sparsely growing corn, to the door; but there across the sill her father lay face down and motionless. He might have been drunk, and so at first she thought, until her approach revealed a little hole in the back of his head. She stared at him like an image of wood, then sank upon the floor, putting her lips close to his ear.

"Pappy," she said, in a quick whisper, "Pappy, tell me who done hit! I know ye air daid—but can't ye tell me jest that?"

Her first impulse was of revenge, but slowly the love—unmerited as it may have been—and the sense of loss, of loneliness, came over her like a great wave, and with her face on his still shoulder she wailed her wretched grief to the silent wilderness. When she looked up it was sundown. She realized that whoever had killed him might come back for her—might now, indeed, be "layin' out" for her; and yet she could not leave him unburied! Her hands grasped his shirt and she frantically tugged, bracing her heels against the roughly hewn log door-step, in a vague way hoping that she might drag him to a spot where the ground would be soft enough to dig. A few minutes of this fruitless effort compelled her to give it up.

"Pappy, can't ye help me, jest a leetle?" she had whispered in despair. And then the tears would flow again.

She went stealthily to the edge of the corn patch and listened. A lingering afterglow touched the broken rows of skyward-pointing tassels, but the valley below her lay shrouded in gloom. Night was creeping up the mountain side; she could see it, feel it in the horrible silence. All alone in that stark vastness of crags, disregarding those who might be "layin' out" for her, she put her hands to her mouth and called; then leaned forward, holding her breath and listening. There was not even an echo. So she turned wearily back to the cabin and tenderly covered that which she was leaving with a quilt from her own bed, whispering:

"Gawd, nor nobody, don't seem ter heah me tonight—ye poh, ole Pappy!"

The only cabin where she might hope for help was three miles away; the home of a partial friend—at least no enemy. Reaching it after a perilous walk through a roadless, bridgeless wilderness, she stood outside the crooked gate and called "Hallo." Again and again she called till, in desperation scoffing at the risk—for it is never wise to approach the Kentucky mountaineer's home nearer than his front gate without an invitation—she walked boldly to the door. It was open, and she peered into the darkness. No fire had been lighted for supper. She kneeled on the sill and felt around with her hand. First she touched an overturned chair, then a piece of broken lamp chimney, then a man's foot; but the man was not standing, the toes were up. Her heart turned to ice, yet the need of help was too imperative to turn away from any hope, so again she reached for the clumsy boot and fearfully moved it to see if he might be merely asleep, or drunk. The leg was stiff, and, with another shudder, she turned and fled.

By early morning she had dragged herself down from the mountains and staggered through the convent gate. Here, at least, in one of those modest retreats, which generations ago slipped into the remoter valleys of young Kentucky for their voluntary exile, she would find help! Many an afternoon when the world was blithe she had been wont to stop and listen to the mellow peal of its bell floating across her mountains on an easterly evening breeze, and in all of this torturing night of wandering she imagined it was calling. The good sisters gathered her in as though she were that more treasured lamb than the ninety and nine, nor would they hearken to her leaving. The sheriff soon came to their call, and in his honest, gruff voice promised reverently to perform the last services at her cabin. Then she began to find peace.

But after three years here, when she had absorbed all that their patient teaching could impart, her mind grew disturbed with a new restlessness. It may have been that life was becoming monotonous; or that pictures of the great world, of which she had only had a glimpse, whetted her curiosity to go forth and see; or, more than these, it may have been her innate love for those mountains, and those mountain people—after all, her people. For she had come to learn that the blow she suffered had been struck through simple ignorance, and from this knowledge gradually developed a resolution, inspiring her with courage to approach the Mother Superior for permission to go back into the world and teach. She reminded the good woman that she had taken no vows, and horrified her by admitting that she had accepted no creed, save that of help to fellow man. After an hour of tearful, never-to-be-forgotten argument, the Mother gave signs of yielding.

It happened that upon this same afternoon Colonel May arrived, bringing some of his guests to see the convent. He was held in very high esteem by these nuns, although differing from their religious views, and if he did not quite atone for this by the frequent intervals with which the bounties of his farm added to their modest comfort, he did, at least, merit their impersonal affection. So it followed that the good Mother, being perplexed and sore in mind over her duty to the girl, led him aside.

He was deeply affected by her story, and recalled the child who suggested faint memories of toothsome berries. Conscious of the pressing need for more schools in the rural districts of his State—especially in the neighborhood of his own home—and spontaneously in sympathy with her ambition, he so earnestly espoused her cause with promises to keep her under his protection, that the last doubt vanished from the good woman's eyes.

What the sisters had been unable to do for her, the generous Colonel fully accomplished. She was taken away to a most excellent school and, after five years, returned to him a thoroughly proficient young lady. Graceful, possessing a finish and magnetism which her wild origin made more peculiarly attractive, sympathetic, frank, normal, and exceedingly good to look upon, she excelled even those hopes which he had built during her absence. A fortnight later the quail and whip-poor-wills, near the thicket where the wounded mountaineer's mare now stood, had been startled by the rat-tat of hammers and the song of saws; and that September she found herself, at nearly twenty-one, in possession of a well equipped schoolhouse, whose fame spread far during this, its first year of existence. But while her own years of study and acquiring culture had charmingly toned the surface of her nature, the earlier intensity, the freedom of thought and behavior which are the natural heritage of those born in wild places, still simmered like a resting volcano.

And now, as her handkerchief went mechanically from the pail to the forehead of the wounded man, a shadowy procession of these thoughts glided by in a fantastic panorama. In the stillness of the place ghosts of the old life reached out and clasped hands with actualities of the new; clasped hands, and danced, and arabesqued before her fancy until it seemed as if her entire life were performing there upon the dusky floor. If only her future could perform! She pressed the handkerchief more firmly to the wound, and waited.

Some distance along the road two men were hurriedly driving. The breeze carried this sound to her quick ears and, gently lowering the mountaineer's head, she went to the door. The whip-poor-wills abruptly hushed, for they, too, had caught the sound; and amidst that strained expectancy of woods life, which grows so tense as daylight fails, she waited.

When the approaching buggy came out of the dusk she saw what she had been expecting, Colonel May driving a powerful chestnut, and, with him, Bob Hart; not so great in stature, but resembling the older man in grace and manner as though he might in fact have been his son, instead of his daughter's husband.

A groan from the room made her hesitate on the point of rushing out to meet them, so she halloed between her hands while they alighted. A smile of extreme relief crossed her face as they came up.

"Oh, I'm so glad you're here," she cried, with pretended lightness.

"And you, my dear," the Colonel panted in his eagerness to reach her, "are more welcome still to us! What has happened that kept you?"

"Don't be alarmed," she answered, touched by the anxiety in his voice. "There's a man hurt in here. He's been unconscious for an hour—but just groaned!"

"Stabbed or shot?" Bob asked, pushing in and lighting the kerosene ceiling lamp. Its flame rose stupidly, but soon cast a luminous circle that framed the man, the bucket, the sodden handkerchief and splashes of blood-stained water on the floor, in a tragic, still-life picture.

"Stabbed or shot?" the Colonel repeated after Bob.

"Neither," she murmured. "He fought Tusk Potter, but I'm sure it's no worse than a blow on the head as he fell."

"My word! My word!" the old gentleman exploded. "I've always been concerned about your permitting that half-witted outlaw to come here! Where is he now?" He glared into the dark corners with the light of battle in his eyes.

The unconscious man mumbled and stirred, moving as one asleep will sometimes shift to a more comfortable position. Bob, already by him on the floor, looked up, saying:

"He's coming about all right. What shall we do, Colonel?"

"Leave him down the road," the Colonel snapped. "Tom Hewlet's house'll be good enough, and I'll pay the rascal's niece to nurse him, if he requires it. Why did they fight?" He turned abruptly to Jane.

"He—he resented something Tusk said."

"Something Tusk said to you?" The old warrior looked more ferocious than ever.

She nodded.

The Colonel's jaws came together with a snap. "By God, sir," he exclaimed to Bob, "we'll take him home, sir! He shall have the best room in Arden, sir, and all the doctors in the county! No gentleman can defend you, my dear," he took her hand, "and be left at run-down hovels on the roadside. The very suggestion, sir," he turned his frowning brows again on Bob, "is unworthy, sir!"

The young planter burst into a spontaneous laugh.

"It was certainly careless of me," he admitted, "and when our friend here perks up I'll apologise. I say, old chap," taking one of the inert wrists, "can't you come to for awhile?"

There was a slight twitching about the mouth, then the eyes opened, wearily at first, but the next moment wide with surprise. The Colonel bent over him.

"You have met with a mishap, sir," he said most gently. "If you've no friends hereabouts I offer you the hospitality of my home, which I trust you will honor me by accepting."

The mountaineer slowly raised himself to a sitting position, passed a hand over his forehead, and asked:

"What's hospitality?"

The question, the drawling quality of his voice which sounded as mellow as though someone had struck a chord upon a harp, surprised them out of an answer. Rousing further, he continued:

"I hain't got no friends 'round hyar—lest, as Ruth says, all things is friends."

"Must be a Shaker," Bob whispered, and the Colonel, with an indulgent smile, remarked:

"I bow to the charity of Miss Ruth's opinion, though I should scarcely expect so prompt an indorsement from one in your present position. But come, sir, and we'll help you to our buggy."