The Starbucks Part 13

"Do you want him knocked down?"

"Why, Mr. Reverend! Just now you were talking of the doctrine of gentleness, and now you speak of knocking some one down. How can you be so changeable."

"I'm not changeable, ma'm. The doctrine of gentleness don't apply to a snake, and if that man didn't treat you right he is a snake. And I'm a preacher; I go out among them that needs prayer and I pray; in the night when it seems that everybody else in the world is asleep, I have gone out and knelt down in the dirt and prayed that the pain and the bitterness might be taken from the troubled hearts of my neighbors. I've gone to see many a young feller and begged him to give up fightin'--I've done all that, but if you was to tell me where I could find that man--man that was a brute to you, I'd hunt him and with my fist I would mash the teeth out of his mouth. Where does he live?"

"We must not think of him, Mr. Reverend. And besides, when I speak of him, how do you know that I tell the truth?"

"Ma'm, if a man should inspire you with a lie, it would be proof enough that he is a brute."

She clapped her hands and laughed. "Oh, Troubadour, recite your soul to me!"

"What did you say, ma'm?"

"Oh, nothing." She pointed and Jim saw Tom and Lou enter the vine-hung gulch leading to the place where corn had been ground at night.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SPIRIT THAT PLAYED WITH HER.

"This looks like the scenery in a theatre," said Tom, as slowly they walked up the gulch. She asked him what he meant and he explained as best he could the nature of a play-house, where to sweet music and amid flowers the hero told the heroine that he would die for her. She replied that it must be pretty, but that a book which she had read told her that it was wrong to go to such a place. In this book there was a girl, and one night she went with a young man to a theatre and when she came back her mother was dead. Tom suggested that possibly the old lady might have died anyway, but Lou shook her wavy hair till all sorts of witcheries fell out of it.

"No, she died because the girl went, and I have thought I'd be afraid to go as long as my mother was alive."

He helped her across the rivulet, though it was not more than a foot wide at this place, and a little further on, helped her across again when there was no necessity for it. "It didn't seem to have any influence on the old man, did it?" he remarked.

"The girl goin' to the theatre? Oh, no; it takes more than that to kill a man. Cousin Jim says when he went down to Memphis while the yeller fever was there, he saw the theatre house. He went inside, and the seats were red and soft--softer than the seats in a church, but there wasn't anybody there for all the people that went there were dead with the fever. But I have often wondered if there was so much music and so many flowers how it could be so bad. They say that the angels have harps and that in heaven there is music, but I haven't heard that there is any music at the other place. Oh, did you see that bird almost light on me?"

"Thought you were a flower," Tom replied, helping her across the rivulet again.

"Oh, it didn't. What makes you wanter talk that way for? Look, here is where I used to make my play-house, and here are pieces of the broken dishes yet, and that broken bottle was my bureau. Wait a minute and let me think. There was a little boy played with me and his name was Bud--not a sure enough little boy, but one that I pretended like; and I could hear him talk and he'd say the prettiest things. He lived up there under that big rock and would always come when I called him, but one time a woman come along and she heard me talkin' to him and she couldn't see him with her sort of eyes; and she went down to the house and told mother that I must be crazy, and after this Bud wouldn't come when I called him. That was a long time ago--a year and a half befo' year befo'

last. We will go on now."

When they came to the log hut, Tom cried out: "Oh, here is another play-house. Is it yours?"

"No, this is where they grind corn."

He looked in at the low door and marveled at the strangeness of the place, and after a long silence she asked him what he was thinking about and he replied:

"About that little boy. He must have been happy."

"Yes, till that hateful woman came along and killed him. Wasn't she mean? I wonder if hundreds of spirits haven't been killed that way. How beautiful everything is sometimes when we shut our eyes. It is then that we see spirits, but I was sick once and the spirits all got to be old and wrinkled and they'd come up and grin at me; and after that for a long time I was afraid to see things with my eyes shut. Isn't it nice to be as brave as you are?"

He looked at her and his eyes were aglow with softened fire, and his hand was near her own, resting on the log door-way, but he was not brave now for he trembled and when he spoke his voice wavered. "Don't mock me by calling me brave. There never was a bigger coward."

"Why, you are trembling now. Is it because I told you of the spirits?

But you ain't a coward. My father says you are brave and he knows, for you wan't afraid of that mad dog, and there's nothin' as bad as that.

Oh, down yonder where the branch is bigger there is a water fall; and after a rain it roars and I used to go there with little Bud and we called it a scolding giant. Shall we go down there?"

"Yes, but you mustn't--mustn't think of that boy Bud so much."

"Oh, he was only a spirit."

"Yes, but so is everything that is anything. Take the spirit away and we'd all be cattle. And I know exactly what species of cattle I'd be--I'd be a calf--just a red calf with horns about an inch long, and in nosing around I'd get a basket on my head, be frightened and make myself ridiculous. I never knew it before, but I know now that I'd be a calf."

"Oh, no you wouldn't, no such of a thing. What makes you talk about yourself that way? Come on, now."

Over a bluff of rock fifty feet high the rivulet poured and in the spray they saw a rainbow. Down below where they stood ferns were rank and the rocks were soft with moss. Here they sat and chatted of nothing but themselves, he discovering faults in himself and she denying them, calling him prettily to task for his slander, and thrilled him from one indecision to another. The sun, emblazoning for a moment a distant mountain top, purpled the lower world and then all was in shade. For a long time they had been silent and when she spoke he started out of his revery and rubbed his eyes as if he had been asleep; but he had not, for as a spirit, a little boy Bud, he had played with her in the gulch, coming out from beneath the rock when she called him.

"Let us go back to the house," she said. "They will wonder what has become of us."

Jim and Mrs. Mayfield were coming down the hill. The preacher, too, had for the most part been silent, though not in reverie, but in a constant struggle. Once he said to her: "Ma'm, I can't get it out of my head that you are makin' fun of me."

"I make fun of you, Mr. Reverend? I admit that in the past my heart was gayer than wise, but there never was a time when I could have made fun of you."

Slowly they walked down the hill and he pondered over what she had said, but a simple heart is often a suspicious heart; rustic faith is afraid of itself, and he did not believe her. He was not wise enough to see that in her eye he was a moral Hercules. He did not know that in his great strength, in his very awkwardness, there was a fascination for this woman who had drunk wine from a golden goblet and found it bitter.

On every creed there are dark spots, and in his devotion to his calling he was afraid that she had come to him as a temptation, to lead him away from the work of saving souls. Sometimes he caught himself foolishly wis.h.i.+ng that suddenly she might develop into a man, the evil one himself, that he might defy him; and then the softness of her words would bring shame upon him and he would mutter imprecations against himself.

"The sun is no longer s.h.i.+ning upon it, but in my mind that hill-top will always glow," she said when they had reached the road. "It must ever remain a gold-tipped promontory of the past."

"Ma'm, I don't know what you mean."

CHAPTER IX.

AT DRY FORK.

The next day was Sunday, and immediately after breakfast Jasper announced that he was going "to haul a pa.s.sel of them" over to church, the place of wors.h.i.+p and of gossip being about five miles distant. And when everything was made ready, Mrs. Mayfield was delighted to find upon going out to the gate that they were to be drawn by two enormous oxen.

But Margaret objected. "Thar air two hosses out yander at the stable, and it is jest one of Jasper's pranks to take these steers," she said.

"And I jest know he's a doin' it to humiliate me." The old man, pretending to fix the yoke, ducked his head to hide his grinning countenance. "Hosses out thar, but here we go like n.i.g.g.e.rs to a camp-meetin'," she went on. "I'm not goin'."

"Oh, do go, Mrs. Starbuck," Mrs. Mayfield pleaded.

"No, I won't go a step. I won't be shamed in this way."

"Sorry, Margaret," said Jasper. "I 'lowed you'd enjoy yo'se'f, still if you don't want to go thar's no way of compellin' you. Wall, climb up, everybody."

Mrs. Mayfield and Lou were helped into the wagon, Jasper climbed up and had begun to swing his long lash when Margaret cried out: "You haven't fixed any place for me."

"For you?" Jasper replied. "Didn't know you was a goin'."

"Oh, you think you kin make me stay at home all day by myse'f, do you?