"That's fine," said David with enthusiasm, thinking regretfully of their two or three acres.
"Good hemp lands are going to rent for twenty or twenty-five dollars an acre in the spring," continued his father, watching the effect of his words.
David got up, and going to the door, reached around against the wall for two or three sticks of the wood he had piled there. He replenished the fire, which was going down, and resumed his seat.
For a while father and son discussed in a reserved way matters pertaining to the farm: the amount of feed in the barn and the chances of its lasting; crops to be sown in the spring, and in what fields; the help they should hire—a new trouble at that time. For the negroes, recently emancipated, were wandering hither and thither over the farms, or flocking to the towns, unused to freedom, unused to the very wages they now demanded, and nearly everywhere seeking employment from any one in preference to their former masters as part of the proof that they were no longer in slavery. David's father had owned but a single small family of slaves: the women remained, the man had sought work on one of the far richer estates in the neighborhood.
They threshed over once more the straw of these familiar topics and then fell into embarrassed silence. The father broke this with an abrupt, energetic exclamation and a sharp glance:—
"If hemp keeps up to what it is now, I am going to put in more."
"Where?" asked the son, quietly. "I don't see that we have any ground to spare."
"I'll take the woods."
"FATHER!" cried David, wheeling on him.
"I'll take the woods!" repeated his father, with a flash of anger, of bitterness. "And if I'm not able to hire the hands to clear it, then I'll rent it. Bailey wants it. He offered twenty-five dollars an acre. Or I'll sell it," he continued with more anger, more bitterness. "He'd rather buy it than rent."
"How could we do without the woods?" inquired the son, looking like one dazed,—"without the timber and the grazing?"
"What will we do without the woods?" cried his father, catching up the words excitedly. "What will we do without the FARM?"
"What do you mean by all this, father? What is back of it?" cried David, suddenly aroused by vague fears.
"I mean," exclaimed the father, with a species of satisfaction in his now plain words, "I mean that Bailey wants to buy the farm. I mean that he urges me to sell out for my own good! tells me I must sell out! must move! leave Kentucky! go to Missouri—like other men when they fail."
"Go to Missouri," echoed the wife with dismal resignation, smiling at her husband.
"Have you sold it?" asked David, with flushed, angry face.
"No."
"Nor promised?"
"No!"
"Then, father, don't! Bailey is trying again to get the farm away from you. You and mother shall never sell your home and move to Missouri on my account."
The son sat looking into the fire, controlling his feelings. The father sat looking at the son, making a greater effort to control his. Both of them realized the poverty of the place and the need of money.
The hour was already past the father's early bed-time. He straightened himself up now, and turning his back, took off his coat, hung it on the back of his chair, and began to unbutton his waistcoat, and rub his arms. The mother rose, and going to the high-posted bed in a corner of the room, arranged the pillows, turned down the covers, and returning, sat provisionally on the edge of her chair and released her breastpin. David started up.
"Mother, give me a candle, will you?"
He went over with her to the closet, waited while she unlocked it and, thrusting her arm deep into its disordered depths, searched till she drew out a candle. No good-night was spoken; and David, with a look at his father and mother which neither of them saw, opened and closed the door of their warm room, and found himself in the darkness outside at the foot of the cold staircase.
XIII
A bed of crimson coals in the bottom of the grate was all that survived of his own fire.
He sat down before it, not seeing it, his candle unlighted in his hand, a tragedy in his eyes.
A comfortless room. Rag carpeting on the floor. No rug softening the hearth-stones. The sashes of the windows loose in the frames and shaken to-night by twisty gusts. A pane of glass in one had been broken and the opening pasted over with a sheet of letter paper. This had been burst by an indolent hand, thrust through to close the shutters outside; and a current of cold air now swept across the small room. The man felt it, shook himself free of depressing thoughts, rose resolutely. He took from a closet one of his most worthless coats, and rolling it into a wad, stopped the hole. Going back to the grate, he piled on the wood, watching the blaze as it rushed up over the logs, devouring the dried lichens on the bark; then sinking back to the bottom rounds, where it must slowly rise again, reducing the wood to ashes. Beside him as he sat in his rush-bottomed chair stood a small square table and on this a low brass candlestick, the companion of the one in the dining room. A half-burnt candle rose out of the socket. As David now lighted it and laid the long fresh candle alongside the snuffers, he measured with his eye the length of his luminaries and the amount of his wood—two friends. The little grate had commenced to roar at him bravely, affectionately; and the candle sputtered to him and threw sparks into the air—the rockets of its welcoming flame.
It was not yet ten o'clock: two hours of the long winter evening remained. He turned to his treasury.
This was a trunk in a corner, the trunk he had bought while at college, small and cheap in itself, not in what it held. For here were David's books—the great grave books which had been the making of him, or the undoing of him, according as one may have enough of God's wisdom and mercy to decide whether it were the one or the other.
As the man now moved his chair over, lifted the lid, and sat gazing down at the backs of them, arranged in a beautiful order of his own, there was in the lofty, solemn look of him some further evidence of their power over him. The coarse toil of the day was forgotten; his loved dependent animals in the wind-swept barn forgotten; the evening with his father and mother, the unalterable emptiness of it, the unkindness, the threatening tragedy, forgotten. Not that desolate room with firelight and candle; not the poor farmhouse; not the meagre farm, nor the whole broad Kentucky plateau of fields and woods, heavy with winter wealth, heavy with comfortable homesteads—any longer held him as domicile, or native region: he was gone far away into the company of his high-minded masters, the writers of those books. Choosing one, he closed the lid of the trunk reluctantly over the rest, and with the book in one hand and the chair in the other, went back to the fire.
An hour passed, during which, one elbow on the table, the shaded side of his face supported in the palm of his hand, he read, scarce moving except to snuff the wick or to lay on a fresh fagot. At the end of this time other laws than those which the writer was tracing began to assert their supremacy over David—the laws of strength and health, warmth and weariness. Sleep was descending on him, relaxing his limbs, spreading a quiet mist through his brain, caressing his eyelids. He closed the pages and turned to his dying fire. The book caused him to wrestle; he wanted rest.
And now, floating to him through that mist in his brain, as softly as a nearing melody, as radiantly as dawning light, came the image of Gabriella: after David had pursued Knowledge awhile he was ready for Love. But knowledge, truth, wisdom before every other earthly passion—that was the very soul of him. His heart yearned for her now in this closing hour, when everything else out of his way, field-work, stable-work, wood-cutting, filial duties, study, he was alone with the thought of her, the newest influence in his life, taking heed of her solely, hearkening only to his heart's need of her. In all his rude existence she was the only being he had ever known who seemed to him worthy of a place in the company of his great books. Had the summons come to pack his effects to-morrow and, saying good-by to everything else, start on a journey to the congenial places where his mighty masters lived and wrought, he would have wished her alone to go with him, sharer of life's loftiness. Her companionship wherever he might be—to have just that; to feel that she was always with him, and always one with him; to be able to turn his eyes to hers before some vanishing firelight at an hour like this, with deep rest near them side by side!
He lingered over the first time he had ever seen her; that memorable twilight in the town, the roofs and chimneys of the houses, half-white, half-brown with melting snow, outlined against the low red sunset sky. He had not long before left the room in the university where his trial had taken place, and where he had learned that it was all over with him. He was passing along one of the narrow cross streets, when at a certain point his course was barred by a heap of fresh cedar boughs, just thrown out of a wagon. Some children were gay and busy, carrying them through the side doors, the sexton aiding. Other children inside the lighted church were practising a carol to organ music; the choir of their voices swelled out through the open doors, and some of the little ones, tugging at the cedar, took up the strain.
She was standing on the low steps of the church, in charge of the children. In one hand she held an unfinished wreath, and she was binding the dark, shining leaves with the other. A swarm of snowflakes, scarce more than glittering crystals, danced merrily about her head and flecked her black fur on one shoulder. As David, not very mindful just then of whither he was going, stepped forward across the light and paused before the pile of cedar boughs, she glanced at him with a smile, seeing how his path was barred. Then she said to them:—
"Hurry, children! The night comes when we cannot work!"
It was an hour of such good-will on earth to men that no one could seem a stranger to her. He instantly became a human brother, next of kin to her—that was all; she was wholly under the influence of the innocence and purity within and without.
As he made no reply and for a moment did not move, she glanced quickly at him, regretting the smile. When she saw his face, he saw the joy go down out of hers; and he felt, as he turned off, that she went with him along the black street: alone, he seemed not alone any more.
Though he had been with her many times since, no later impression had effaced one line of that first picture. There she stood ever to him, and would stand: on the step of the church, smiling in her mourning, binding her wreath, the jets of the chandelier streaming out on her snow-sprinkled shoulder, the children carolling among the fragrant cedar boughs scattered at her feet; she there, decorating the church, happy to be of pious service. Ah, to have her there in the room with him now; to be able to turn his eyes to hers in the vanishing firelight, near sleep awaiting them, side by side.
There was the sound of a scratching on David's window shutters, as though a stiff brush were being moved up and down across the slats. He became aware that this sound had reached him at intervals several times already, but as often happens, had been disregarded by him owing to his preoccupation. Now it was so loud as to force itself positively upon his attention.
He listened, puzzled, wondering. His window stood high from the ground and clear of any object. In a few moments, the sound made itself audible again. He sprang up, wide awake now, and raising the sash, pushed open the shutters—one of them easily; against the other there was resistance from outside. This yielded before his pressure; and as the shutter was forced wide open and David peered out, there swung heavily against his cheek what felt like an enormous brush of thorns, covered with ice. It was the end of one of the limbs of the cedar tree which stood several feet from his window on one side, and close to the wall of the house. Before David was born, it had been growing there, a little higher, more far-reaching laterally, every year, until several topmost boughs had long since risen above the level of the eaves and dropped their dry needles on the rotting shingles. Now one of the limbs, bent over sidewise under its ice-freighted berries and twigs, hung as low as his window, and the wind was tossing it.
Sleet! This, then, was the nature of the threatening storm, which all day had made man and beast foreboding and distressed. David held out his hand: rain was falling steadily, each drop freezing on whatsoever it fell, adding ice to ice. The moon rode high by this time; and its radiance pouring from above on the roof of riftless cloud, diffused enough light below to render large objects near at hand visible in bulk and outline. A row of old cedars stretched across the yard. Their shapes, so familiar to him, were already disordered. The sleet must have been falling for hours to have weighed them down this way and that. A peculiarity of the night was the wind, which increased constantly, but with fitful violence, giving no warning of its high swoop, seizure, and wrench.
Sleet! Scarce a winter but he had seen some little: once, in his childhood, a great one. He had often heard his father talk of others which HE remembered—with comment on the destruction they had wrought far and wide, on the suffering of all stock and of the wild creatures. The ravage had been more terrible in the forests, his father had thought, than what the cyclones cause when they rush upon the trees, heavy in their full summer-leaves, and sweep them down as easily as umbrellas set up on the ground. So much of the finest forests of Kentucky had been lost through its annual summer tempests and its rarer but more awful wintry sleets.
No work for him in the hemp fields to-morrow, nor for days. No school for Gabriella; the more distant children would be unable to ride; the nearest unable to foot it through the mirrored woods; unless the weather should moderate before morning and melt the ice away as quickly as it had formed—as sometimes was the case. A good sign of this, he took it, was the ever rising wind: for a rising wind and a falling temperature seldom appeared together. As he bent his ear listening, he could hear the wild roar of the surges of air breaking through the forest, the edge of which was not fifty yards away.
David sprang from his chair; there was a loud crack, and the great limb of the cedar swept rattling down across his shutters, twisted, snapped off at the trunk, rolled over in the air, and striking the ground on its back, lay like a huge animal knocked lifeless.
He forgot bed and sleep and replenished his fire. His ear, trained to catch and to distinguish sounds of country life, was now becoming alive to the commencement of one of those vast appalling catastrophes in Nature, for which man sees no reason and can detect the furtherance of no plan—law being turned with seeming blindness, and in the spirit of sheer wastage, upon what it has itself achieved, and spending its sublime forces in a work of self-desolation.
Of the two windows in his room, one opened upon the back yard, one upon the front. Both back yard and front contained, according to the custom of the country, much shrubbery, with aged fruit trees, mostly cherry and peach. There were locusts also at the rear of the house, the old-time yard favorite of the people; other forest trees stood around. Through both his windows there began to reach him a succession of fragile sounds; the snapping of rotten, weakest, most overburdened twigs. On fruit tree and forest tree these went down first—as is also the law of storm and trial of strength among men. The ground was now as one flooring of glass; and as some of these small branches dropped from the tree-tops, they were broken into fragments, like icicles, and slid rattling away into the nearest depressions of the ground. Starting far up in the air sometimes, they struck sheer upon other lower branches, bringing them along also; this gathering weight in turn descended upon others lower yet, until, so augmented, the entire mass swept downward and fell, shivered against crystal flooring.
But soon these more trivial facts held his attention no longer: they were the mere reconnaissance of the elements—the first light attack of Nature upon her own weakness. By and by from the surging, roaring depths of the woods, there suddenly reverberated to him a deep boom as of a cannon: one of the great trees—two-forked at the mighty summit and already burdened in each half by its tons of timber, split in twain at the fork as though cleft by lightning; and now only the pointed trunk stood like a funeral shaft above its own ruins. For hours this went on: the light incessant rattling, closest around; the creaking, straining, tearing apart as of suffering flesh, less near; the sad, sublime booming of the forest.
Now the man would walk the floor; now drop into his chair before the fire. His last bit of candle flickered blue, deep in the socket, and sent up its smoke. His wood was soon burnt out: only red coals in the bottom of the grate then, and these fast whitening. More than once he strode across and stood over his trunk in the shadowy corner—looking down at his books—those books that had guided him thus far, or misguided him, who can say?
When his candle gave out and later his fire, he jerked off his clothes and getting into bed, rolled himself in the bedclothes and lay listening to the mournful sublimity of the storm.
Toward three o'clock the weather grew colder, the wind died down, the booming ceased; and David, turning wearily, over, with an impulse to prayer, but with no prayer, went to sleep.
XIV
When David awoke late and drowsily the next morning after the storm, he lay awhile, listening. No rending, crashing, booming in the woods now, nor rattling of his window-frames. No contemplative twitter of winter birds about the cedars in the yard, nor caw of crow, crossing the house chimneys toward the corn shocks. All things hushed, silent, immovable.
Following so quickly upon the sublime roar and ravage of the night before, the stillness was disturbing. He sprang up and dressed quickly—admonished by the coldness of his room—before hurrying to his window to look out. When he tried the sash, it could not be raised. He thrust his hand through the broken pane and tugged at the shutters; they could not be shaken. Running downstairs to the kitchen and returning with hot water, he melted away the ice embedding the bolts and hinges.
A marvel of nature, terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and a great frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before, enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roof of gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; and in this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped and hung in silver. Tree, bush, and shrub in the yard below, the rose clambering the pillars of the porch under his window, the scant ivy lower down on the house wall, the stiff little junipers, every blade of grass—all encased in silver. The ruined cedars trailed from sparlike tops their sweeping sails of incrusted emerald and silver. Along the eaves, like a row of inverted spears of unequal lengths, hung the argent icicles. No; not spun silver all this, but glass; all things buried, not under a tide of liquid silver, but of flowing and then cooling glass: Nature for once turned into a glass house, fixed in a brittle mass, nowhere bending or swaying; but if handled roughly, sure to be shivered.
The ground under every tree in the yard was strewn with boughs; what must be the ruin of the woods whence the noises had reached him in the night? Looking out of his window now, he could see enough to let him understand the havoc, the wreckage.
He went at once to the stable for the feeding and found everything strangely quiet—the stilling influence of a great frost on animal life. There had been excitement and uneasiness enough during the night; now ensued the reaction, for man is but one of the many animals with nerves and moods. A catastrophe like this which covers with ice the earth—grass, winter edible twig and leaf, roots and nuts for the brute kind that turns the soil with the nose, such putting of all food whatsoever out of reach of mouth or hoof or snout—brings these creatures face to face with the possibility of starving: they know it and are silent with apprehension of their peril; know it perhaps by the survival of prehistoric memories reverberating as instinct still. And there is another possible prong of truth to this repression of their characteristic cries at such times of frost: then it was in ages past that the species which preyed on them grew most ravenous and far ranging. The silence of the modern stable in a way takes the place of that primeval silence which was a law of safety in the bleak fastnesses, hunted over by flesh eating prowlers. It is the prudent noiselessness of many a species to-day, as the deer and the moose.
The sheep, having enjoyed little shelter beside the hayrick, had encountered the worst of the storm. When David appeared in the stable lot, they beheld him at once; for their faces were bunched expectantly toward the yard gate through which he must emerge. But they spoke not a word to one another or to him as they hurried slipping forward. The man looked them over pityingly, yet with humor; for they wore many undesirable pendants of glass and silver dangling under their bellies and down their tails.
"You shall come into the barn this night," he vowed within himself. "I'll make a place for you this day."
Little did he foresee what awful significance to him lay wrapped in those simple words. Breakfast was ready when, carrying his customary basket of cobs for his mother, he returned to the house. One good result at least the storm had wrought for the time: it drew the members of the household more closely together, as any unusual event—danger, disaster—generally does. So that his father, despite his outburst of anger the night previous, forgot this morning his wrongs and disappointments and relaxed his severity. During the meal he had much to recount of other sleets and their consequences. He inferred similar consequences now if snow should follow, or a cold snap set in: no work in the fields, therefore no hemp-breaking, and therefore delay in selling the crop; the difficulty of feeding and watering the stock; no hauling along the mud roads, and little travel of any sort between country and town; the making of much cord wood out of the fallen timber, with plenty of stuff for woodpiles; the stopping of mill wheels on the frozen creeks, and scarcity of flour and meal.
"The meal is nearly out now," said David's mother. "The negroes waste it."
"We might shell some corn to-day," suggested David's father, hesitatingly. It was the first time since his son's return from college that he had ever proposed their working together.
"I'll take a look at the woods first," said David; "and then I want to make a place in the stable for the sheep, father. They must come under shelter to-night I'll fix new stalls for the horses inside where we used to have the corn crib. The cows can go where the horses have been, and the sheep can have the shed of the cows: it's better than nothing. I've been wanting to do this ever since I came home from college."
A thoughtless, unfortunate remark, as connected with that shabby, desperate idea of finding shelter for the stock—fresh reminder of the creeping, spreading poverty. His father made no rejoinder; and having finished his breakfast in silence, left the table.
His mother, looking across her coffeecup and biscuit at David, without change of expression inquired,—
"Will you get that hen?"
"WHAT hen, mother?"
"I told you last night the cook wanted one of the old hens for soup to-day. Will you get it?"
"No, mother; I will not get the hen for the cook; the cook will probably get the hen for me."
"She doesn't know the right one."
"But neither do I."
"I want the blue dorking."
"I have a bad eye for color; I might catch something gray."
"I want the dorking; she's stopped laying."
"Is that your motive for taking her life? It would be a terrible principle to apply indiscriminately!"
"The cook wants to know how she is to get the vegetables out of the holes in the garden to-day—under all this ice."
"How would she get the vegetables out of the garden under all this ice if there were no one on the place but herself? I warrant you she'd have every variety."
"It's a pity we are not able to hire a man. If we could hire a man to help her, I wouldn't ask you. It's hard on the cook, to make her suffer for our poverty."
"A little suffering in that way will do her a world of good," said David, cheerily.
His mother did not hesitate, provocation or no provocation, to sting and reproach him in this way.
She had never thought very highly of her son; her disappointment, therefore, over his failure at college had not been keen. Besides, tragical suffering is the sublime privilege of deep natures: she escaped by smallness. Nothing would have made her very miserable but hunger and bodily pains. Against hunger she exercised ceaseless precautions; bodily pains she had none. The one other thing that could have agitated her profoundly was the idea that she would be compelled to leave Kentucky. It was hard for her to move about her house, much less move to Missouri. Not in months perhaps did she even go upstairs to bestow care upon, the closets, the bed, the comforts of her son. As might be expected, she considered herself the superior person of the family; and as often happens, she imposed this estimate of herself upon her husband. The terrifying vanity and self-sufficiency of the little-minded! Nature must set great store upon this type of human being, since it is regularly allowed to rule its betters.
But his father! David had been at home two months now, for this was the last of February, and not once during that long ordeal of daily living together had his father opened his lips either to reproach or question him.
Letters had been received from the faculty, from the pastor; of that David was aware; but any conversation as to these or as to the events of which they were the sad consummation, his father would not have. The gulf between them had been wide before; now it was fathomless.
Yet David well foreknew that the hour of reckoning had to come, when all that was being held back would be uttered. He realized that both were silently making preparations for that crisis, and that each day brought it palpably nearer. Sometimes he could even see it threatening in his father's eye, hear it in his voice. It had reached the verge of explosion the night previous, with that prediction of coming bankruptcy, the selling of the farm of his Kentucky ancestors, the removal to Missouri in his enfeebled health. Not until his return had David realized how literally his father had begun to build life anew on the hopes of him. And now feel with him in his disappointment as deeply as he might, sympathy he could not openly offer, explanation he could not possibly give. His life-problem was not his father's problem; his father was simply not in a position to understand. Doubt anything in the Bible—doubt so-called orthodox Christianity—be expelled from the church and from college for such a reason—where could his father find patience or mercy for wilful folly and impiety like that?
Meantime he had gone to work; on the very day after his return he had gone to work. Two sentences of his father's, on the afternoon of his coming home, had rung in David's ears loud and ceaselessly ever since: "WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK HERE?" And "I ALWAYS KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING IN YOU?" The first assured him of the new footing on which he stood: he was no longer desired under that roof. The second summed up the life-long estimate which had been formed of his character before he had gone away.
Therefore he had worked as never even in the old preparatory days. So long as he remained there, he must at least earn daily bread. More than that, he must make good, as soon as possible, the money spent at college. So he sent away the hired negro man; he undertook the work done by him and more: the care of the stock, the wood cutting, everything that a man can be required to do on a farm in winter. Of bright days he broke hemp. Nothing had touched David so deeply as the discovery in one corner of the farm of that field of hemp: his father had secretly raised it to be a surprise to him, to help him through his ministerial studies. This David had learned from his mother; his father had avoided mention of it: it might rot in the field! In equal silence David had set about breaking it; and sometimes at night his father would show enough interest merely to ask some questions regarding the day's work.
Yet, notwithstanding this impending tragedy with his father, and distress at their reduced circumstances caused by his expenses at college, David, during these two months, had entered into much new happiness.
The doubts which had racked him for many months were ended. He had reached a decision not to enter the ministry; had stripped his mind clean and clear of dogmas. The theologies of his day, vast, tangled thickets of thorns overspreading the simple footpath of the pious pilgrim mind, interfered with him no more. It was not now necessary for him to think or preach that any particular church with which he might identify himself was right, the rest of the human race wrong. He did not now have to believe that any soul was in danger of eternal damnation for disagreeing with him. Release from these things left his religious spirit more lofty and alive than ever.