Part 3 (1/2)

The transition to the glow and cheer of Sim Roxby's fireside was like a rescue, a restoration. The smiling welcome in the women's eyes, their soft drawling voices, with mellifluous intonations that gave a value to each commonplace simple word, braced his nerves like a tonic. It might have been only the contrast with the recollections of the night, with the prospect visible through the open door--the serried lines of rain dropping aslant from the gray sky and elusively outlined against the dark ma.s.ses of leafless woods that encircled the clearing; the dooryard half submerged with puddles of a clay-brown tint, embossed always with myriads of protruding drops of rain, for however they melted away the downpour renewed them, and to the eye they were stationary, albeit pervaded with a continual tremor--but somehow he was cognizant of a certain coddling tenderness in the old woman's manner that might have been relished by a petted child, an unaffected friendliness in the girl's clear eyes. They made him sit close to the great wood fire; the blue and yellow flames gushed out from the piles of hickory logs, and the bed of coals gleamed at red and white heat beneath. They took his hat to carefully dry it, and they spread out his cloak on two chairs at one side of the room, where it dismally dripped. When he ventured to sneeze, Mrs. Roxby compounded and administered a ”yerb tea,” a sovereign remedy against colds, which he tasted on compulsion and in great doubt, and swallowed with alacrity and confidence, finding its basis the easily recognizable ”toddy.” He had little knowledge how white and troubled his face had looked as he came in from the gray day, how strongly marked were those lines of sharp mental distress, how piteously apparent was his mute appeal for sympathy and comfort.

”Mill'cent,” said the old woman in the shed-room, as they washed and wiped the dishes after the cozy breakfast of venison and corn-dodgers and honey and milk, ”that thar man hev run agin the law, sure's ye air born.”

Millicent turned her reflective fair face, that seemed whiter and more delicate in the damp dark day, and looked doubtfully out over the fields, where the water ran in steely lines in the furrows.

”Mus' hev been by accident or suthin'. _He_ ain't no hardened sinner.”

”Shucks!” the old woman commented upon her reluctant acquiescence. ”I ain't keerin' for the law! 'Tain't none o' my job. The tomfool men make an' break it. Ennybody ez hev seen this war air obleeged to take note o'

the wickedness o' men in gineral. This hyer man air a sorter pitiful sinner, an' he hev got a look in his eyes that plumb teches my heart. I 'ain't got no call ter know nuthin' 'bout the law, bein' a 'oman an'

naterally ignorunt. I dun'no' ez he hev run agin it.”

”Mus' hev been by accident,” said Millicent, dreamily, still gazing over the sodden fields.

The suspicion did nothing to diminish his comfort or their cordiality.

The morning dragged by without change in the outer aspects. The noontide dinner came and went without Roxby's return, for the report of the was.h.i.+ng away of a bridge some miles distant down the river had early called him out to the scene of the disaster, to verify in his own interests the rumor, since he had expected to haul his wheat to the settlement the ensuing day. The afternoon found the desultory talk still in progress about the fire, the old woman alternately carding cotton and nodding in her chair in the corner; the dogs eying the stranger, listening much of the time with the air of children taking instruction, only occasionally wandering out-of-doors, the floor here and there bearing the damp imprint of their feet; and Millicent on her knees in the other corner, the firelight on her bright hair, her delicate cheek, her quickly glancing eyes, as she deftly moulded bullets.

”Uncle Sim hed ter s'render his shootin'-irons,” she explained, ”an' he 'ain't got no ca'tridge-loadin' ones lef'. So he makes out with his old muzzle-loadin' rifle that he hed afore the war, an' I moulds his bullets for him rainy days.”

As she held up a moulded ball and dexterously clipped off the surplus lead, the gesture was so culinary in its delicacy that one of the dogs in front of the fire extended his head, making a long neck, with a tentative sniff and a glistening gluttonous eye.

”Ef I swallered enny mo' lead, I wouldn't take it hot, Towse,” she said, holding out the bullet for canine inspection. ”'Tain't healthy!”

But the dog, perceiving the nature of the commodity, drew back with a look of deep reproach, rose precipitately, and with a drooping tail went out skulkingly into the wet gray day.

”Towse can't abide a bullet,” she observed, ”nor nuthin' 'bout a gun. He got shot wunst a-huntin', an' he never furgot it. Jes show him a gun an'

he ain't nowhar ter be seen--like he war cotch up in the clouds.”

”Good watch-dog, I suppose,” suggested Dundas, striving to enter into the spirit of her talk.

”Naw; too sp'ilt for a gyard-dog--granny coddled him so whenst he got shot. He's jest vally'ble fur his conversation, I reckon,” she continued, with a smile in her eyes. ”I dun'no' what else, but he is toler'ble good company.”

The other dogs pressed about her, the heads of the great hounds as high as her own as she sat among them on the floor. With bright eyes and knitted brows they followed the motions of pouring in the melted metal, the lifting of the bullets from the mould, the clipping off of the surplus lead, and the flash of the keen knife.

Outside the sad light waned; the wind sighed and sighed; the dreary rain fell; the trees clashed their boughs dolorously together, and their turbulence deadened the sound of galloping horses. As Dundas sat and gazed at the girl's intent head, with its fleecy tendrils and its ma.s.sive coil, the great hounds beside her, all emblazoned by the firelight upon the brown wall near by, with the vast fireplace at hand, the whole less like reality than some artist's pictured fancy, he knew naught of a sudden entrance, until she moved, breaking the spell, and looked up to meet the displeasure in Roxby's eyes and the dark scowl on Emory Keenan's face.

That night the wind s.h.i.+fted to the north. Morning found the chilled world still, ice where the water had lodged, all the trees incased in glittering garb that followed the symmetry alike of every bough and the tiniest twig, and made splendid the splintered remnants of the lightning-riven. The fields were laced across from furrow to furrow, in which the frozen water still stood gleaming, with white arabesques which had known a more humble ident.i.ty as stubble and crab-gra.s.s; the sky was slate-colored, and from its sad tint this white splendor gained added values of contrast. When the sun should s.h.i.+ne abroad much of the effect would be lost in the too dazzling glister; but the sun did not s.h.i.+ne.

All day the gray mood held unchanged. Night was imperceptibly sifting down upon all this whiteness, that seemed as if it would not be obscured, as if it held within itself some property of luminosity, when Millicent, a white ap.r.o.n tied over her golden head, improvising a hood, its superfluous fulness gathered in many folds and pleats around her neck, fichu-wise, stood beside the ice-draped fodder-stack and essayed with half-numbed hands to insert a tallow dip into the socket of a lantern, all incrusted and clumsy with previous drippings.

”I dun'no' whether I be a-goin' ter need this hyar consarn whilst milkin' or no,” she observed, half to herself, half to Emory, who, chewing a straw, somewhat surlily had followed her out for a word apart.

”The dusk 'pears slow ter-night, but Spot's mighty late comin' home, an'

old Sue air fractious an' contrairy-minded, and feels mighty anxious an'

oneasy 'boutn her calf, that's ez tall ez she is nowadays, an' don't keer no mo' 'bout her mammy 'n a half-grown human does. I tell her she oughtn't ter be mad with me, but with the way she brung up her chile, ez won't notice her now.”

She looked up with a laugh, her eyes and teeth gleaming; her golden hair still showed its color beneath the spotless whiteness of her voluminous headgear, and the clear tints of her complexion seemed all the more delicate and fresh in the snowy pallor of the surroundings and the grayness of the evening.

”I reckon I'd better take it along,” and once more she addressed herself to the effort to insert the dip into the lantern.

Emory hardly heard. His pulse was quick. His eye glittered. He breathed hard as, with both hands in his pockets, he came close to her.

”Mill'cent,” he said, ”I told ye the t'other day ez ye thunk a heap too much o' that thar stranger--”