Judith of the Cumberlands. MacGowan Alice

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СКАЧАТЬ vast world forces move with our movements, pluck us uncomprehending from the station we had struggled for, and make our sorrowful meat of our attained desires! The stars in their courses pivot and swing on these subtle attractions, ancient as themselves. Judith Barrier, tearing the gaudy ribbon from her hat and casting it upon the road under her horse’s feet, stood to learn what the priests of Isis knew thousands of years ago, that red is the symbol of pleasure and of mere animal comfort, while blue is the colour of pure reason.

      Halfway up the trail they rode into a cloud that rested trembling on the mountain-side, passed through it and emerged upon fitful sunlight. Near the top there came a sudden shower which descended with the souse of an overturned bucket. It won small attention from Judith, but Pete and Beck resented it in mule fashion, with a laying back of ears and lashing out of heels. These amenities were exchanged for the most part across the intervening sorrel nag and his rider, and Selim replied promptly and in kind, almost unseating Judith.

      “You Selim!” she cried jerking the rein. “You feisty Pete! You no-account Beck! What ails you-all? Cain’t you behave?” and once more she lapsed into dreaming. It was Selim who, wise and old, stopped at Aunt Nancy Card’s gate and gave Judith an opportunity to descend if such were her preference.

      On the porch of the cabin sat a tall, lean, black-eyed old man smoking his pipe, Jephthah Turrentine himself. Nancy Card, a dry, brown little sparrow of a woman, occupied a chair opposite him, and negotiated a pipe quite as elderly and evil-smelling as his own.

      The kerchief folded about her neck was notably white; her clean check-apron rustled with starch; but the half-grey hair crinkling rebelliously from its loose coil was never confined by anything more rigorous than a tucking comb. In moments of stress this always slipped down, and had to be vigorously replaced, so that stray strands were apt to be tossing about her eyes—fearless, direct blue eyes, that looked out of her square, wrinkled, weather-beaten little face with the sincere gaze of an urchin. Back of her chair lay a bundle of white-oak splits for use in her by-trade of basket-weaver; above them hung bundles of drying herbs, for Nancy was a sick-nurse and a bit of an herb-doctor. She had made a hard and a more or less losing fight against poverty—the men folk of these hardy, valiant little women seem predestined to be shiftless.

      It came back to Judith dimly as she looked at them—she was in a mood to remember such things—that her uncle had courted Nancy Card when these two were young people, that they had quarrelled, both had married, reared families, and been widowed; and they were quarrelling still! Acrimonious debate with Nancy was evidently such sweet pain that old Jephthah sought every opportunity for it, and the sudden shower in the vicinity of her cabin had offered him an excuse to-day.

      Nancy did not confine her practice to what she would have called humans, but doctored a horse or a cow with equal success. One cold spring a little chicken had its feet frozen in the wet barnyard so badly that it lost one of them, and Nancy, who had taken the poor mite into the house and nursed it till she loved it, constructed for it a wooden leg consisting of a small, light peg strapped to the stump. And thereafter Nicodemus, a rooster who must now belie the name since he could not cling to a perch with his single foot, became an institution in the Card household.

      Jephthah Turrentine was a natural bone-setter, and was sent for far and near to reduce a dislocation or bandage a broken limb. In the pursuit of this which came to be almost a profession, he acquired a good knowledge of tending upon the sick, and the bitterness of rival practitioners was added to the score between him and Nancy. The case of Nicodemus furnished the man with a chance to call the woman a chicken doctor, and the name appealing to the humorous side of mountain character stuck to her, greatly to her disgust.

      Aunt Nancy’s dooryard was famous for its flowers, being a riot of pied bloom from March till December. Even now fire-in-the-bush and bridal wreath made gay the borders.

      “Good land, Jude Barrier!” called Nancy herself. “You’re as wet as a drownded rat. ’Light and come in.”

      Old Turrentine permitted his niece to clamber from Selim, and secure him and both mules.

      “Whar’s the boys?” he inquired in a great, sonorous bass, the deep, true-pitched voice promised by the contours of strong bony arches under heavy brows and the strong nose-bridge.

      “In jail,” responded Judith laconically, turning to enter the gate. Then, as she walked up the hard-trodden clay path between the tossing, dripping heads of daffodils, “Uncle Jep, did you know Creed Bonbright’s daddy?”

      “In jail!” echoed Nancy Card, making a pretence of trying to suppress a titter, and thereby rendering it more offensive. “Ain’t they beginnin’ ruther young?”

      Tall old Jephthah got to his feet, knocked the ashes from his pipe and put it in his pocket.

      “Who tuck ’em?” he inquired briefly, but with a fierce undernote in his tones. “What was they tuck fer?”

      “I never noticed,” said Judith, standing on the step before them, wringing the wet from her black calico riding skirt. “Nobody named it to me what they was tuck fer. I was talkin’ to Creed Bonbright, and he ’lowed to find out. He said that was his business.”

      “Creed Bonbright,” echoed her uncle; “what’s he got to do with it? He’s been livin’ down in Hepzibah studyin’ to be a lawyer—did he have Jeff and Andy jailed?”

      Judith shook her head. “He didn’t have nothing to do with it,” she answered. “He ’lowed they would be held for witnesses against some men Haley had arrested. But he’s goin’ to come back and live on Turkey Track,” she added, as though that were the only thing of importance in the world. “He says we-all need law in the mountings, and he’s a-goin’ to bring it to us.”

      “Well, he’d better let my boys alone if he don’t want trouble,” growled old Jephthah but half appeased.

      “I reckon a little touch of law now an’ agin won’t hurt yo’ boys,” put in Nancy Card smoothly. “My chaps always tuck to law like a duck to water. I reckon I ain’t got the right sympathy fer them that has lawless young ’uns.”

      “Yo’ Pony was arrested afore Andy and Jeff,” Judith remarked suddenly, without any apparent malice. “He was the first one I seen comin’ down the road, and Dan Haley behind him a-shootin’ at him.”

      Jephthah Turrentine forebore to laugh. But he deliberately drew out his old pipe again, filled it and stepped inside for a coal with which to light it.

      “Mebbe yo’ sympathies will be more tenderer for me in my afflictions of lawless sons after this, Nancy,” he called derisively over his shoulder.

      “Hit’s bound to be a mistake ’bout Pony,” declared the little old woman in a bewildered tone. “Pone ain’t but risin’ sixteen, and he’s the peacefullest child——”

      “Jest what I would have said about my twin lambs,” interrupted old Jephthah with twinkling eye, as he appeared in the doorway drawing mightily upon the newly lighted pipe, tossing his great beard from side to side of his mighty chest. “My chaps is all as peaceful as kittens; but some old woman gits to talkin’ and gives ’em a bad name, and it goes from lip to lip that the Turrentine boys is lawless. Hit’s a sad thing when a woman’s tongue is too long and limber, and hung in the middle so it works at both ends; the reppytations hit can destroy is a sight.”

      “But a body’s own child—they’ son! They’ bound to stan’ up for him, whether he’s in the right or the wrong,” maintained Nancy stoutly.

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