Читать книгу The Summit House Mystery; Or, The Earthly Purgatory - L. Dougall - Страница 9

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The sisters made all their expeditions on horseback, and, on the upward ride, the horses were commonly breathed on the zigzag of the road which abutted on the mine. Miss Smith, who was disposed to be offended by Durgan's quick change of residence, was dry and formal when he greeted them; but Bertha bent kind glances upon him, and always made time to chat. Her manner to men had the complete frankness and dignity which is more usually acquired by older women; and she always appeared to be on perfectly open terms with her sister. Her talk was always replete with interest in the passing events of Deer.

For the first week that Durgan delved he supposed that there were no events on Deer Mountain. Bertha aided him to discover them. She had fraternized closely with her solitudes, not only by directing all things concerning the garden, fields, meadows, and live-stock of the little summit farm, but also by extending her love and sympathy to the whole mountain of Deer and to all the changes in the splendid panorama round about.

"'Nothing happens!'" cried she, playfully, echoing Durgan. "Open your eyes, Master Miner, lest by burrowing you become a veritable mole! Can you only recognize the thrill of events when they are printed in a vulgar journal?"

So Durgan's observation was stimulated.

First, there were the events of the weather—what Bertha called the "scene-shifting."

To-day the veil of blue air would be so thin that, in a radius of many miles, the depth of each gorge, the molding of each peak, was so clear that the covering forest would be revealed like a carpet of fern, each tree a distinct frond when the eye focussed upon it. The rocky precipices would declare each cave and crevice in sharply outlined shadow, and emerald forms far off would look so near that house and fence and wandering paths were seen. At such an hour the Cherokee ridges would stand like the great blue-crested waves of ocean, and the "Great Smokies" be like clouds, turquoise-tinted, on the northern horizon.

The next day the azure mists that lay always on the Georgian plain would have crept, embracing the very spurs of Deer, hiding the modeling of even the adjacent mountains as with a luminous gauze. Then only a screen of mountainous outline could be seen, standing flat against emptiness, of uniform tint, colored like a blue-jay's wing.

Again there was nothing but vapor to be seen, here towering black, here moving fringed with glory and lit within. May showers winged their silver way among the mist-clouds and cleft a passing chasm for the sun.

Or again, following or preceding thunder, there would be an almost terrible clearness of the sun, and big cloud-shadows would flap from range to range like huge black bats with sharply outlined wings.

Secondly, apart from the weather, came startling events in the sphere of what Bertha called "the crops." The term did not relate chiefly to her cultivated land, but to all the successive forms of vegetation upon Deer.

The joy of the opening leaf rose nearer the mountain-top. Already, about Deer Cove, the trees held out a delicate fretwork of tiny leaves between earth and sky, and the under thickets were tipped at every point with silver-green. All along the village street a double row of marsh maples stood, their roots drinking at the millstream. The marsh maple differs from its patient sisters, who are glorified by autumn, and, like Passion in the house of the Interpreter, insists upon having its good things early. These now dressed themselves gorgeously in leaflets of crimson and pink. For a day or two this bright display, seen from afar through the branches that surrounded Durgan's mine, looked like a garden of tulips. Then his landscape narrowed; his own trees opened their leaves. There were days of warm, quick rain. Suddenly the gray forest was glorious with green; serried ranks of azure stars stood out in every bank of moss, and the gray earth was pied with dandelion, heart's-ease, and violet.

Said Durgan, as the sisters rode by, "Summer passed me in the night, dripping and bedraggled. She was going on to you with leaps and bounds."

"'Dripping,' but not 'bedraggled,'" corrected Bertha, shaking the mist out of her riding-gloves.

"Somewhat bedraggled," insisted Durgan. "Her skirts of wild flowers and meadow grass are already too long."

But more exciting still were the events of animal life in the purlieus of Deer. The beetles were rolling their mud-balls on the earth; the tadpoles in the mountain ponds were putting forth feet, and the squirrels and birds were arranging their nurseries in different nooks of the greenery above. The polecats prowled boldly to find provender for their wives and little ones. A coon and its cubs were seen. But more interesting than these, because more fully interpreted, were the members of the baby farm over which Bertha reigned. She had calves and kids, litters of pigs and litters of pups, a nest of gray squirrels, nests of birds, and the kit of a wildcat, which a hunter had brought her. This last, a small, whiskered thing, gray as a fox and striped like a tiger, had only just opened its eyes, and must needs be fed from Bertha's hand.

"I am only the grandmother of the others, for they have their own parents," said she; "but I seem to be this one's mother, for it cries continually when I leave it."

For some weeks she carried the kit with her everywhere, even when riding; it curled contentedly in a bag on her lap, and bid fair to be tame.

If Bertha rode out twice a day she paused four times by the mine to exhibit the growing tameness of her pet, or to recount fresh instances of the sagacity or prowess displayed by child or parent in her menagerie.

Durgan went up often to inspect the infant prodigies, and advise (altho he knew nothing) about their upbringing.

Durgan's own work lay exclusively in the "mineral kingdom," and he advanced from ignorance to some degree of skill in auguring from the bowels of the rock. Each day's work brought its keen daily interest, each night's sleep its quota of health and increasing cheerfulness.