The sight of his broad, retreating back evidently spurred Judith to fresh effort. "Uncle Jep!" she screamed, cupping her hands about her red lips to make the sound carry. "Ef you see Creed Bonbright tell him--howdy--for me!"
The sound may not have carried to the old man"s ears, but it reached a younger pair. Blatch Turrentine was just crossing through the gra.s.sy yard toward the "big road," and Broyles"s mill over on Clear Fork, where his load of corn would be ground to meal with which to feed that blockaded still on the old Turrentine place which sometimes flung a delicate trail of smoke out over the flank of the slope across the gulch. As he heard Judith"s bantering cry, Blatch pulled up his team with a muttered curse.
He looked down at her through narrowed eyes, jerking his mules savagely and swearing at them in an undertone. He was a well-made fellow with a certain slouching grace about him as he sat on his load of corn; but there were evil promising b.u.mps on either side of his jaws that spoke of obstinacy, even of ferocity; and there was something menacing in his surly pa.s.sivity of att.i.tude. He looked at the girl and his lip lifted with a peculiar sidelong sneer.
"Holler a little louder an" Bonbright hisself"ll hear ye," he commented as he started up his team and rattled away down the steep, stony road.
Sunday brought its usual train of visitors. The Turrentine place was within long walking distance of Brush Arbor church, and whenever there was preaching they could count on a considerable overflow from that direction. The Sunday after Creed Bonbright put in an appearance at Nancy Card"s, there was preaching at Brush Arbor, but Judith, nourishing what secret hopes may be conjectured, refused to make any preparation for attending service.
"An" ye think ye won"t go to meeting this fine sunshiny Sabbath mornin", Sister Barrier?" Elder Drane put the query, standing anxious and carefully attired in his best before Judith on the doorstep of her home.
She shook her dark head, and looked past the Elder toward the distant ranges.
"I jest p"intedly cain"t git away this morning," she said carelessly.
The Elder combed his sandy whiskers with a thoughtful forefinger. Not thus had Judith been wont to reply to him. Always before, if there had been denial, there were too, reasons adduced, shy looks from the corners of those dark eyes and tender inquiries as to the health of his children.
"Is they--is they some particular reason that you cain"t go this morning?" the widower inquired cautiously.
There was, and that particular reason lay as far afield as the Edge and Nancy Card"s place, but Judith Barrier did not see fit to name it to this one of her suitors, who had brought her perhaps more glory than any other. She was impatient to be rid of him. Like her mother Earth, having occupied her time for lo! these several years in the building of an ideal from such unpromising materials as were then at hand, she was ready to sweep those tentative makings--confessed failures now that she found the type she really wanted--swiftly, ruthlessly to the limbo of oblivion.
Elihu Drane stood high among his neighbours; he was a man of some education as well as comfortable means. His attention had been worth retaining once; now she smiled at him with a vague, impersonal sweetness, and repeated her statement that she couldn"t go to church.
"I"ve got too much to do," she qualified finally. "Looks like the work in this house never is finished. And there"s chicken and dumplin"s to cook for dinner."
The Elder"s pale blue eyes brightened. "Walk down to the gate with me, won"t you?" he said hopefully, "I"ve got somethin" to talk to you about."
When they were out of earshot of the house, he began eagerly, "Sister Barrier you"re workin" yourse"f to death here, in the sweet days of your youth. I did promise the last time that I never would beg you again to wed me, but looks like I can"t stand by and hold my peace. If you was to trust yourse"f to me things would be different. I never did hold with a woman killin" herse"f with hard work. My first and second had everything that they could wish for, and I was good and ready to do more any time they named what it was. I"ve got a crank churn. None of these old back-breaking, up-and-down dashers for me. I hired a woman whenever my wife said the word. I don"t think either of mine ever killed a chicken or cut a stick of firewood from the time they walked in the front door as a bride till they was carried out of it in their coffins."
He stared eagerly into the downcast face beside him, but somewhere Judith found strength to resist even these dazzling propositions.
"I ain"t studyin" about gittin" wedded," she told him most untruthfully.
"Looks like I"m a mighty cold-hearted somebody, Elder Drane. I jest can"t fix it no way but to live here with my Uncle Jep and take care of him in his old days. Oh, would you wait a minute?" as they reached the horse-block and the Elder began to untie his mount with a discouraged countenance. "Jest let me run back to the house--I won"t keep you a second. I got some little sugar cookies for Mart and Lucy."
Mart and Lucy were the Elder"s children. He stood looking after her as she ran lithely up the path, and wondered why she could love them so much and him so little. She came back laughing and a bit out of breath.
"I expect we"ll have company to-day," she told him comfortably. "We always do when there"s preaching at the church, and I "low I"d better stay home and see to the dinner."
The Elder had scarcely made his chastened adieux when the Lusk girls came through the grove walking on either side of a young man.
The Lusk girls were Judith"s nearest neighbours--if you excepted Huldah Spiller at Jim Cal"s cabin, and at the present Judith certainly was in the mind to make an exception of her. The sisters were seldom seen apart; narrow shouldered, short waisted, thin limbed young creatures, they were even at seventeen bowing to a deprecating stoop. Their little faces were alike, short-chinned with pink mouths inclined to be tremulous, the eyes big, blue, and half-frightened in expression, and the drab hair drawn away from the small foreheads so tightly that it looked almost grey. They inevitably reminded one of a pair of blue and white night-moths, scarcely fitted for a daylight world, and continually afraid of it.
"Cousin Lacey"s over from the Far Cove," called Pendrilla before they reached Judith. "Ain"t it fine? Ef we-all can git up a play-party he says he"ll sh.o.r.e come ef we let him know in time."
The young fellow with them, their cousin Lacey Rountree, showed sufficient resemblance to mark the family type, but his light eyes were lit with reckless fires, and his short chin was carried with a defiant tilt.
"What you foolin" along o" that old feller for, Judith?" he asked jerking an irreverent thumb after the departing Elder.
"I wasn"t fooling with him," returned Judith, her red lips demure, her brown eyes laughing above them through their thick fringe of lashes.
"Elder Drane was consulting me about church matters--sech as children like you have no call to meddle with."
Young Rountree smiled, "I"ll bet he was!" picking up a stone and firing it far into the blue in sheer exuberance of youthful joy. "Did he name anything about a weddin" in church?"
"Elder Drane is a mighty fine man," a.s.serted Judith, suddenly sober. "Any gal might be glad to git him. But its my belief and opinion that his heart is buried with his first--or his second," and she laughed out suddenly at the unintentional humorous conclusion she had made.
"See here, Jude," the boy put it boldly as the four young people strolled toward the house, "you"re too pretty and sweet to be anybody"s thirdly.
Next time old man Drane comes pesterin" round you, you tell him that you"re promised to me--hear?"
Again Judith laughed. It is impossible to talk seriously to a boy with whom one has played hat-ball and prisoner"s base, whose hair one has pulled, and who has, in retort courteous, rolled one in the dust.
"I"m in earnest if I ever was in my life," a.s.serted Lacey, taking it quite as a matter of course that Cliantha and Pendrilla should be made party to his courting.
And the two little old maids of seventeen looked with wondering admiration at Judith"s management of all this masculine attention--her careless, discounting smile for their swaggering young cousin, her calm acceptance of imposing Elder Drane"s humble and persistent wooing.
Chapter IV
Building
Judith awakened that morning with the song of the first thrush sounding in her ears. Day was not yet come, but she knew instantly it was near dawn, so soon as she heard the keen, cool, unmatched thrush voice. Not elaborate the song like the bobolink, nor pa.s.sionate 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, pa.s.sionless, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 n.o.body 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."