Judith of the Cumberlands. MacGowan Alice

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СКАЧАТЬ cool, unmatched thrush voice. Not elaborate the song like the bobolink, nor passionate like the nightingale, nor with the bravura of the oriole; but low or loud, its pure tones are always penetrating, piercing the heart of their hearer with exquisite sweetness.

      The girl lay long in the dark listening, and it seemed to her half awakened consciousness that this voice in the April dawn was like Creed Bonbright. These notes, lucid, passionless, that yet always stirred her heart strangely, and the selfless personality, the high-purposed soul that spoke in him, they were akin. The crystal tones flowed on; Judith harkened, the ear of her spirit alert for a message. Yes, Creed was like that. And her feeling for him too, it partook of the same quality, a thing to climb toward rather than concede.

      And then after all her tremulous hopes, her plannings, the dozen times she had taken a certain frock from its peg minutely inspecting and repairing it, that it might be ready for wear on the great occasion, the first meeting with Creed found Judith unprepared, happening in no wise as she would have chosen. She was at the milking lot, clad in the usual dull blue cotton gown in which the mountain woman works. She had filled her two pails and set them on the high bench by the fence while she turned the calves into the small pasture reserved for them and let old Red and Piedy out.

      He approached across the fields from the direction of his own house, and naturally saw her before she observed him. It was early morning. The sky was blue and wide and high, with great shining piles of white cloud swimming lazily at the horizon, cutting sharply against its colour. Around the edges of the cow-lot peach trees were all in blossom and humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning insects, over a plum thicket near the woods—half-wild, brambly things, cousin on the one hand to the cultivated farm, and on the other to the free forest—while beyond, through the openings of the timber, dogwood flamed white in the sun.

      Judith came forward and greeted the newcomer, all unaware of the picture she made, tall and straight and pliant in her simple blue cotton, under the wonderful blue-and-white sky and the passionate purple pink of the blossoms, with the scant folds of her frock outlining the rounded young body, its sleeves rolled up on her fine arms, its neck folded away from the firm column of her throat, the frolic wind ruffling the dark locks above her shadowy eyes. There were strange gleams in those dark eyes; her red lips were tremulous whether she spoke or not. It was as though she had some urgent message for him which waited always behind her silence or her speech.

      “I thought I’d come over and get acquainted with my neighbours,” Bonbright began in his impersonal fashion.

      “Uncle Jep and the boys has gone across to the far place ploughing to-day,” said Judith. “They’s nobody at home but Jim Cal and his wife—and me.” She forebore to add the name of Huldah Spiller, though her angry eye descried that young woman ostentatiously hanging wash on a line back of the Jim Cal cabin.

      “I won’t stop then this morning,” said Bonbright. “I’ll get along over to the far place. I wanted to have speech with your uncle. He was at Aunt Nancy’s the other day and we had some talk; he knows more about what I’m aiming at up here then I do. A man of his age and good sense can be a sight of help to me.”

      “Uncle Jep will be proud to do anything he can,” said Judith softly. “Won’t you come in and set awhile?”

      She dreaded that the invitation might hurry him away, and now made hasty use of the first diversion that offered. He had broken a blooming switch from the peach-tree beneath which he stood, and she reproached him fondly.

      “Look at you. Now there won’t never be no peaches where them blossoms was.”

      He twisted the twig in his fingers and smiled down at her, conscious of a singular and personal kindness between them, aware too, for the first time, that she was young, beautiful, and a woman; before, she had been merely an individual to him.

      “My mother used to say that to me when I would break fruit blows,” he said meditatively. “But father always pruned his trees when they were in blossom—they can’t any of them bear a peach for every bloom.”

      She shook her head as though giving up the argument, since it was after all a matter of sentiment. Her dark, rich-coloured beauty glowed its contrast to his cool, northern type.

      At present neither spoke more than a few syllables of the spiritual language of the other, yet so powerful was the attraction between them that even Creed began to feel it, while Judith, the primitive woman, all given over to instinct, promptly laid about her for something to hold and interest him.

      “The young folks is a-goin’ to get up a play-party at our house sometime soon,” she hazarded. “I reckon you wouldn’t come to any such as that, would you?”

      “I’d be proud to come,” returned Creed at once. But he spoiled it by adding, “I’ve got to get acquainted with people all over again, it’s so long since I lived here; and looks like I’m not a very good mixer.”

      “Will you sure come?” inquired Judith insistently, as she saw him preparing to depart.

      “I sure will.”

      “You could stay over night in your own house then—ain’t you comin’ back, ever, to live there?”

      “Why, yes, I reckon I might stay there over night, but it’s too far from the main road for a justice’s office.”

      “Well, if you’re going to try to sleep in the house, it ort to be opened up and sunned a little; you better let me have the key now,” observed Judith, assuming airs of proprietorship over his inept masculinity.

      Smiling, he got the key from his pocket and handed it to her. “Help yourself to anything you want for the party, or any other time,” he said in mountain fashion.

      She looked down at that key with the pride of one to whom had been given the freedom of a city. Its possession enabled her to bear it with a fair degree of equanimity when Huldah Spiller, having “jest slung her clothes anyway onto that line,” as Judith phrased it to herself, came panting and laughing across the slope between the two houses and called a gay “Howdy!” to the visitor. The lively little red haired flirt professed greatly to desire news of certain persons in Hepzibah, and as Creed was departing sauntered unconcernedly beside him as far as the draw-bars, detaining him in conversation there as long as possible. She had an instinctive knowledge that Judith, looking on, was deeply disturbed.

      Creed set his justice’s office about a hundred yards from Nancy Card’s cabin, on the main road that led through the two Turkey Track neighbourhoods out to Rainy Gap and the Far Cove settlement. The little shack was built of the raw yellow boards which the new saw-mill was ripping out of pine trees over on the shoulder of Big Turkey Track above Garyville. Most of the mountain dwellers still preferred log houses, and the lumber was sent down the mountain by means of a little gravity railway, whose car was warped up after each trip by a patient old mule working in a circular treadmill.

      God knows with what high hopes the planks of that humble shanty were put in place, with what visions sill and window-frame were shaped and joined, Aunt Nancy going out and in at her household tasks calling good counsel over to him; Beezy, the irrepressible, adding shaving curls to her red frazzle; Little Buck, furnished with hammer and tacks, gravely assisting, pounding his fingers only part of the time. Hens were coming off. Old Nancy had a great time with notionate mothers hatching out broods under the floor or in the stable loft, and the plaintive cheep-cheep! СКАЧАТЬ