The Quickening. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ thirst assuaged, he ascended the slope of the terrace to a height whence the flat top of the cubical boulder could be reached by the help of a low-branching tree. The summit of the great rock was one of the sacred places in the temple of the solitudes; and when the earth became too thickly peopled for comfort, he would come hither to lie on the very brink of the cliff overhanging the spring, heels in air, and hands for a chin-rest, looking down on a removed world mapping itself in softened outlines near and far.

      Men spoke of Paradise as "the valley," though it was rather a sheltered cove with Mount Lebanon for its background and a semicircular range of oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise ran the white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for the Dabney manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a ribbon of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's as Turkey Creek, but loved best by him under its almost forgotten Indian name of Chiawassee.

      Beyond the valley and its inclosing hills rose the "other mountain," blue in the sunlight and royal purple in the shadows—the Cumberland: source and birthplace of the cooling west wind that was whispering softly to the cedars on high Lebanon. Thomas Jefferson called the loftiest of the purple distances Pisgah, picturing it as the mountain from which Moses had looked over into the Promised Land. Sometime he would go and climb it and feast his eyes on the sight of the Canaan beyond; yea, he might even go down and possess the good land, if so the Lord should not hold him back as He had held Moses.

      That was a high thought, quite in keeping with the sense of overlordship bred of the upper stillnesses. To company with it, the home valley straightway began to idealize itself from the uplifted point of view on the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were delicately-outlined squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the warm red brown of the upturned earth in the fallow places. The old negro quarters on the Dabney grounds, many years gone to the ruin of disuse, were vine-grown and invisible save as a spot of summer verdure; and the manor-house itself, gray, grim and forbidding to a small boy scurrying past it in the deepening twilight, was now no more than a great square roof with the cheerful sunlight playing on it.

      Farther down the valley, near the place where the white pike twisted itself between two of the rampart hills to escape into the great valley of the Tennessee, the split-shingled roof under which Thomas Jefferson had eaten and slept since the earliest beginning of memories became also a part of the high-mountain harmony; and the ragged, red iron-ore beds on the slope above the furnace were softened into a blur of joyous color.

      The iron-furnace, with its alternating smoke puff and dull red flare, struck the one jarring note in a symphony blown otherwise on great nature's organ-pipes; but to Thomas Jefferson the furnace was as much a part of the immutable scheme as the hills or the forests or the creek which furnished the motive power for its air-blast. More, it stood for him as the summary of the world's industry, as the white pike was the world's great highway, and Major Dabney its chief citizen.

      He was knocking his bare heels together and thinking idly of Major Dabney and certain disquieting rumors lately come to Paradise, when the tinkling drip of the spring into the pool at the foot of his perch was interrupted by a sudden splash.

      By shifting a little to the right he could see the spring. A girl of about his own age, barefooted, and with only her tangled mat of dark hair for a head covering, was filling her bucket in the pool. He broke a dry twig from the nearest cedar and dropped it on her.

      "You better quit that, Tom-Jeff Gordon. I taken sight o' you up there," said the girl, ignoring him otherwise.

      "That's my spring, Nan Bryerson," he warned her dictatorially.

      The girl looked up and scoffed. Hers was a face made for scoffing: oval and finely lined, with a laughing mouth and dark eyes that had both the fear and the fierceness of wild things in them.

      "Shucks! it ain't your spring any more'n it's mine!" she retorted. "Hit's on Maje' Dabney's land."

      "Well, don't you muddy it none," said Thomas Jefferson, with threatening emphasis.

      For answer to this she put one brown foot deep into the pool and wriggled her toes in the sandy bottom. Things began to turn red for Thomas Jefferson, and a high, buzzing note, like the tocsin of the bees, sang in his ears.

      "Take your foot out o' that spring! Don't you mad me, Nan Bryerson!" he cried.

      She laughed up at him and flung him a taunt. "You don't darst to get mad, Tommy-Jeffy; you've got religion."

      It is a terrible thing to be angry in shackles. There are similes—pent volcanoes, overcharged boilers and the like—but they are all inadequate. Thomas Jefferson searched for missiles more deadly than dry twigs, found none, and fell headlong—not from the rock, but from grace. "Damn!" he screamed; and then, in an access of terrified remorse: "Oh, hell, hell, hell!"

      The girl laughed mockingly and took her foot from the pool, not in deference to his outburst, but because the water was icy cold and gave her a cramp.

      "Now you've done it," she remarked. "The devil'll shore get ye for sayin' that word, Tom-Jeff."

      There was no reply, and she stepped back to see what had become of him. He was prone, writhing in agony. She knew the way to the top of the rock, and was presently crouching beside him.

      "Don't take on like that!" she pleaded. "Times I cayn't he'p bein' mean: looks like I was made thataway. Get up and slap me, if you want to. I won't slap back."

      But Thomas Jefferson only ground his face deeper into the thick mat of cedar needles and begged to be let alone.

      "Go away; I don't want you to talk to me!" he groaned. "You're always making me sin!"

      "That's because you're Adam and I'm Eve, ain't it? Wasn't you tellin' me in revival time that Eve made all the 'ruction 'twixt the man and God? I reckon she was right sorry; don't you?"

      Thomas Jefferson sat up.

      "You're awfully wicked, Nan," he said definitively.

      "'Cause I don't believe all that about the woman and the snake and the apple and the man?"

      "You'll go to hell when you die, and then I guess you'll believe," said Thomas Jefferson, still more definitively.

      She took a red apple from the pocket of her ragged frock and gave it to him.

      "What's that for?" he asked suspiciously.

      "You eat it; it's the kind you like—off 'm the tree right back of Jim Stone's barn lot," she answered.

      "You stole it, Nan Bryerson!"

      "Well, what if I did? You didn't."

      He bit into it, and she held him in talk till it was eaten to the core.

      "Have you heard tell anything more about the new railroad?" she asked.

      Thomas Jefferson shook his head. "I heard Squire Bates and Major Dabney naming it one day last week."

      "Well, it's shore comin'—right thoo' Paradise. I heard tell how it was goin' to cut the old Maje's grass patch plumb in two, and run right smack thoo' you-uns' peach orchard."

      "Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson. "What do you reckon my father'd be doing СКАЧАТЬ