Part 7

The cloud of that day on the mountain still clung around his fancy as he went out upon the street again. A horrible something, as penetrable as mist, as keen as the sting of conscience, as inevitable as the burden of life, seemed to inwrap him. He felt it dully, and wondered how much of it was physical and how much mental, and he didn't care which it was.

He ate a little breakfast, though it was odious to him, and went out to meet again the lantern-jawed mountaineers, who, like him,--_like him_,--were drifting towards the Federal Building.

Yes, he was going to the court-room to be tried for a criminal offence; he was a criminal, a criminal, a criminal. It buzzed angrily through his head.

He stumbled over a child sitting beside his mother on the edge of the sidewalk in front of the post-office. The woman had her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, and in her eyes was the look of waiting that comes to women with uncertain husbands. She cuffed the child, and then shook him to still the uproar she had created. Two more children sat on the curb beyond her, and beyond them, up Haywood Street, men leaned against the iron fence or squatted in pairs upon the sidewalk. Friedrich wondered how they kept their balance, and went on up the stairs, through pools of tobacco-juice, to the court-room, where the day's work already had begun.

He secured a seat, and leaned his head against the wall. A negro man, accused of fraudulently obtaining a pension, was explaining volubly how he had received the injury upon which he based his claim.

His case was given to the jury, which filed out, and the second set of men made themselves comfortable in the abandoned seats, with much scraping of chairs and of throats, and adjustment of cuspidors to the range of each juror.

The case of the next prisoner, tried on a charge of a fraudulent use of the mails, lashed to frenzy the prosecuting attorney. He compared this foul violator of the laws of his country with Sextus and Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot. The national eagle had been insulted in his nest, and his screams were ringing from mountain-peak to mountain-peak. The echoes of Mitchell were sending back the cry, and Saint Elias's snowy top gave forth an answering sound.

Von Rittenheim understood enough of the rapid English to realize its irrelevancy, and wondered idly why the man was such a fool, not knowing that it was the presence of a visiting national senator from the hotel that had inspired this eloquence.

The air grew worse as more and more people pushed into the already crowded room. Some one opened a window, and some one else immediately begged to have it shut. There was a constant shuffling of feet and a restless moving of hands. Friedrich found himself smothered by the evil-smelling clothes of his companions as he sat against the wall, and he stood, to bring his head up into a clearer air. The steam in one of the radiators began to thump and clang, and each crash smote a raw nerve in his beating temple.

The feeling of striving against the mist, yielding but inexorable, had him fully in its possession, and through the fog he saw the face of Wilder, the deputy-marshal. Their eyes met, and the malice in the officer's drove the German mad. How long must he stand here and wait among these swine? Yet he remembered many hours of waiting motionless upon his horse, and he rebuked himself for a poor soldier.

Ah, if only he could tell the whole truth; if only he could stand before the bar of the world--of God himself--and say, "I am guilty. Of violating the law I am guilty. I am willing to bear my punishment for what I have done. But if I am guilty, how is he innocent who brake my bread and then tempted me? He who ate my last mouthful, and then offered me an unlawful chance to get more? Is the law of hospitality to be held of no account? And how is he innocent who poses as my friend, who drinks from my cup, who holds my hand in his, and who goes forth to betray me? Is there no law that binds a friend in honor? I have broken a law--the law of man. Those two men of whom I speak have broken the laws of the heart, the ties of honor and of love. I am a criminal in the eyes of men. They are sinners before the face of God."

Friedrich was trembling as he felt these words flow through his mind. The men on each side of him noticed his agitation, and drew away from the emotion of his tense face. So insistently did the words ring in his ears that it seemed to him that he must have spoken them aloud. Yet he was conscious that he had not, and that when the time came for him to face this throng he would never go beyond the first three words, "I am guilty."

He found himself speaking quietly to Mr. Weaver, and looked on at the conversation as if he were a thing apart from himself.

"The next case but one after this will begin the moonshine cases, and you-all surely won't come on until to-morrow morning. You might as well go now."

"I thank you," said Friedrich, and stumbled from the room.

In the corridor he leaned for a moment against the wall, that he might be sure to keep his balance as he went down the steep stairs dizzying before him.

How he reached the court on the next day he never could remember. He was conscious of feeling very ill, worse than ever he had felt in his life. His spine pulsed painfully up into his brain; his eyes burned back in their sockets until the two shafts of anguish met in one well-nigh unbearable torture. The cloud-mist wrapped about him and hindered him, and yielded only to blind him more. The same evil smells reeked around him, and a wave of nausea surged within him.

He heard his name called, and some one guided him to that part of the Judge's platform that served as a dock. He raised his hand, and heard afar off some words about the truth and God. He was bidden to kiss the filthy cover of a book. Dimly he heard a question and answered it.

"I am guilty."

A chair was pushed towards him and he sat down, conscious of a strange silence in the usually noisy room.

He heard Wilder telling his story of his purchase of a quart of whisky, "an' he owned it was blockade," and a long and detailed account of "the Dutchy's" resistance to arrest, in which the ferocity of his behavior would have been creditable to a bloodthirsty villain driven to desperate straits.

A voice asked him if he had anything to say, and he heard himself repeating once again, "I am guilty."

Then the voice of the laureate of the eagle's nest soared, and fell to a whisper, and swelled again, and Friedrich wondered if "example" would be "_Muster_" or "_Beispiel_." And "different class,"--what did that mean? How stupid he was about English!

By-and-by there was silence, and the Judge's voice said,--

"Three months or a hundred dollars."

And then there was a long, long silence.

XI

In the Corn

Summer had come.

The soft days of spring had gone by, the days when the feeling of growth impresses every sense. The haze-filled April mornings, warming into the forcing ardor of noon, had stirred into life the activity latent in root and twig. May's glowing sun, shining through the scantily covered branches, made dancing motes of heat wave above the surface of red clay. The aspens fluttered into exquisite greenness. The sourwood put forth the satin of its tender leaves. All over the mountain-sides and through the forest thickets the oak-tips blushed faint pink, a delicate velvet against the stout bristles of the yellow pines.

Birds flew over, bound for the North, each with his instinctive goal; some almost at their journey's end, others with many a long ethereal mile before them. Some of them sojourned for a few days, following the ploughman as he overturned the mellow earth. Others let this high land be the end of their wanderings, and settled here to the duty of love-making and the pleasures of domestic life.

The azalea flamed in yellow and orange and scarlet glory, a note of savage color on spring's soft palette. The delicate clusters of the laurel, and, later, of the rhododendron, crowned the stems of the parent bush, as sometimes a fair girl springs from a rough and ugly father.

The germ grew strong within its warm seed-prison, and sent inquiring leaflets into the upper world; and the adventurers never returned, but sent back demands for food and drink, as colonists to a new land rely upon the mother-country for sustenance and support.

On the steep mountain-sides, and in the coves that dimple the lower slopes; on the flat lands of the plateau, and in the meadows along the French Broad, the slender shafts of the corn-leaves were pushing upward with what success their position fostered. By mid-June the crop in the bottom-land was knee-high, while that nourished by the field over which Sydney had stumbled on the top of Buck Mountain was only half as tall.

Bud Yarebrough and Pink Pressley were hoeing among stalks half-way between these heights on the upland slopes of the Baron's farm, whose cultivable land they had hired for the season. Stripped to their shirts, whose open throats showed each a triangle of sunburned skin, they worked rapidly down the adjoining furrows, one keeping a hoe's length behind the other, that their tools might not interfere. Conversation was more pithy than voluble.

"Damn hot," ejaculated Pink, stopping to hitch up his trousers, and then to spit on his hands before resuming his hoe.

"Mos' dinner time," returned Bud, looking up at the sun, and then over his shoulder towards the spring-betraying group of trees to which Melissa was accustomed to bring his dinner when he was working here. "They's some feller tyin' his horse in front of the cabin. Who is hit?"

Pink leaned on his hoe and squinted across the blazing field to the grove that sheltered von Rittenheim's house.

"Bob Morgan, Ah reckon. Looks like his horse."

"Come to get somethin' fo' Mr. Baron. O-oh, Bob!"

Bob looked around his horse's nose, and held up his hand in token of understanding. He unlocked the cabin and disappeared within, coming out again with a bundle, which he tied on to the saddle, and then led his animal towards the trees at the spring. The two laborers tossed down their hoes and moved to the same haven.

"What time is hit, Bob?"

Morgan looked at his watch.

"Five past twelve, Pink. Working hard?"

"Yep. Tol'able big crop." He sat down at the foot of a tree and opened his dinner-pail.

"Have some?" he asked, pointing the opening at Bob, who was settling into repose with his hat over his face.

"No, I thank you. I must be going home in a few minutes. How are you getting on? Bought any more stock lately?"

Bob lay on his back with one long leg balanced on the other knee like a see-saw on a saw-horse. The rowel of his spur rattled as he jerked his foot up and down at the ankle.

"No." Pink had his mouth full.

"How many head have you got now?"

"Oh, jus' a mule 'n a couple o' cows."

"Sold your horse?"

"'M. Here Bud, take some o' this. Ah jus' natchelly hate to have you-all die o' starvation."

"No, she's comin'. Ah see her now." And Bud ran to meet his wife and to relieve her of the baby.

"Hungry, ain' he?" sneered Pink, as he watched his partner's alacrity, while Bob struggled to his feet to greet Melissa.

"Say, you-all wasn' wantin' to buy a cow, was ye, Bob?" asked Pink.

"Got one to sell?"

"Yes, the muley cow."

"No, I don't guess I want her."

"You seemed so damn curious about my stock, Ah 'lowed ye were purchasin'."

"Oh, no. I just thought you must have an extra lot of cattle to be providing for, or you wouldn't have needed to hire this land and to make an extra big crop of corn."

A dull red showed on Pink's forehead above the tan-mark, and crowded into his pale-blue eyes, destitute of lashes. The two men looked steadily at each other. Then, as Melissa drew near, Pink broke into an ugly laugh.

"Give a dog a bad name, eh? You-all needn' be quite so bigoty now yo' fine friends have been at the same business."

He waved his hand towards the cabin, and Bob, in his turn, flushed as he shook hands with Melissa.

The girl gave scant greeting to Pressley. Her husband's new friendship with him was distasteful to her; it filled her with foreboding when she remembered his threats.

Yet there had been nothing definite of which she could complain to Bud since the day when Miss Carroll had caught Pink trying to kiss her. He had never been to the cabin since his rebuff, but she knew that he and Bud were constantly together, and this partnership in the hiring of the Baron's land was a culmination of their friendly relations.

"Ah don' see how ye c'n stan' him, nohow, Bud," she often said, and Bud as often replied,--

"Ah never did see anythin' like the prejudice o' women! They certainly ain' no doubt about yo' sex, M'lissy."

Pink bore his part in the present conversation with no trace of embarrassment. Indeed, there was an assertiveness in his bearing that reacted upon Melissa to produce extreme shyness. Neither cause nor effect escaped Morgan's shrewd black eyes.

"How's Mr. Baron?" asked Bud, between bites.

"Doing very well. He gets out on the porch every day now."

"Great luck he has," growled Pressley. "Yo' father never paid my fine when Ah was given mah choice between 'a hundred dollars or three months.'"

"My father likes to choose his friends," replied Bob, sternly. Melissa looked distressed.

"What's sauce fo' the goose ought to be sauce fo' the gander," argued the ex-moonshiner.

"It ain' fittin' fo' you-all to say anythin' ag'in' Dr. Morgan, whatever he may _se_-lect to do," asserted Bud, combatively, and Pink hastened to hedge.

"Ah 'low not. He certainly was white to me when Ah broke mah laig. 'N as fo' Mr. Baron, Ah always did like him, 'n this is a new tie between us. Now we're brothers."

He chuckled with a full appreciation of his insolence, for the story of von Rittenheim's downfall and its cause was well known throughout the country.

Melissa went white at the malignity of his tone. She turned to Bob with a question:

"Mrs. Carroll 'n Miss Sydney--are they wore to a frazzle takin' care o' him?"

"Mrs. Carroll's all right. They've had two nurses from Asheville all the time, you know. Miss Sydney's wonderful. There's such a lot to do about a house when there's a serious illness, even for people who aren't doing the actual nursing."

"Ah s'pose so. Wouldn' hit be nice, jus' like a story, 'f they'd fall in love with each other--Mr. Baron 'n Miss Sydney?"

"Now, ain' that jus' like a girl!" ejaculated Bud, gulping the last of his coffee.

Bob sat down and fanned himself with his hat.

"Hot, ain' hit?" observed Pink, dryly. Then he turned to Melissa.

"You-all's fo'gittin' that he might be in prison at this minute. No woman o' his class would marry him now. No woman likes to think her man's guilty o' breakin' the law, eh? You-all wouldn' like yo' husband to be a moonshiner, would ye?"

The man's body leaned towards the girl, and he fixed her with a cruel stare from which she seemed unable to move her eyes. Seated as he was, he looked like a huge snake upreared to strike.

He went on mercilessly. "O' co'se ye wouldn'. Ah expect you'd never hol' up yo' haid ag'in. What woman can when her man's that-a-way?"

"Oh, dry up, Pink," cried Bud. "You-all make me feel like Ah had the constable after me now, 'n Lawd knows hit ain' _me_ that's raced 'em through these woods."

Pink acknowledged the shot with a grunt.

Melissa rose to go, and Bud picked up the baby and handed it to her.

"Hit's her busy day fo' sleepin', ain' hit?" he said, poking a blunt finger into the soft cheek.

"I must go, too," said Bob, "or my mother'll jar me up for being late."

"Good-by," said Bud, genially. "Stop by ag'in some time."

"Miss Sydney's been so busy she ain' rode over here fo' a long time. Will you-all give mah love to her, please?" said Melissa, timidly.

"'N mine," Pink started to add, but a dangerous look in Bob's eye induced him to change it to "'N mah _re_-gards to Mr. Baron," though his grin remained unaltered.

XII

Illumination

For the first time since the beginning of his illness, von Rittenheim was walking unassisted towards the cluster of trees on the Oakwood lawn, beneath whose shelter rugs and low chairs and a tea-table made a summer sitting-room. Mrs. Carroll, who already was established in the shade, watched anxiously her guest's feeble approach.

"You should have let the nurse or James come with you," she called to him. "It's too far for you to walk alone."

"Ah, dear Mrs. Carroll, it is so good not to have that admirable nurse or the good Uncle Yimmy with me."

He let himself down carefully into a big chair.

"And you see that not yet do I disdain cushions. The down of that pr-rovident bird, the eider duck, makes a substitute for the flesh that ought to pad my poor bones. Thank you, Uncle Yimmy," to the old negro, who had just set down the tea-tray, "thank you, yes, one more pillow behind my shoulders."

"You'll have tea?"

"May I have tea? Is it possible that I r-return in one same day to two examples of independence? I walk abr-road alone, and I say again to my dear Mrs. Carroll, 'I thank you. It does me pleasure to accept a cup of tea from your hands.'" He held up his own hand against the sun. "A little worse for the wear, my hand, eh? But still of use."

A slight change of position brought into view the field at the foot of the knoll upon whose top they were. Friedrich sat upright in his chair, while a flush tinged his worn cheeks.

"What makes Miss Sydney down there?" he cried.

"Sydney? Oh, she is breaking some of the colts; teaching them to jump, I think she said, to-day."

Mrs. Carroll adjusted her eye-glasses. Two negro grooms were setting up a low hurdle with wings, while two small black boys dangled joyously from the halters of a couple of young horses, and a third bore Sydney's saddle upon his head.

"Is it Bob Mor-rgan with Miss Sydney?" asked Friedrich, wistfully, as the girl walked across the field beside a man who was leading a tall gray, already saddled.

"Yes, that's Bob. A huge fellow, isn't he?"

"And fear you not that Miss Sydney should ride those so wild colts?"

"Not now. I used to be frightened to death, but I've seen her and Bob down there doing that for so many years that I've learned not to be afraid. She rides really very well, you know, and Bob is careful of her."

"He would be."

Von Rittenheim sighed, and leaned back with closed eyes. He wished with all his soul that it were he down in the field fitting the saddle--that _dear_ side-saddle--to that dancing creature; that it were he who was responsible for the safety of Sydney.

"Bob gives her a lead over, you see, on his horse, which is a well-trained animal."

Friedrich opened his eyes in time to see the gray take off neatly. Sydney followed, and lifted her mount so cleverly that he had leaped his first hurdle before he knew what he was doing. The watchers on the knoll could see Bob, sitting on his horse at one side, clap his hands in approval, while the pickaninnies turned cartwheels in the grass.

"She does r-ride most beautifully, Miss Sydney. It is truly pleasurable to see her," murmured von Rittenheim, though his expression was one of approval rather than delight.

"Do you know, Mrs. Carroll, have I told you how much this _Aussicht--view_, is it not?--and the position of your house make me to think of my home? It is on the edge of the Schwarzwald, and we look down from the Schloss into a valley, oh, so lovely! with trees and a little r-river."

"A much wilder prospect than we have here at Oakwood."

"But not more beautiful, and the feeling is the same."

A vulgar emotion assailed the well-kept precincts of Mrs. Carroll's mind. Curiosity, commonplace curiosity surged within her. She yielded to its force.

"How could you bear to leave it?"

"It was the old pr-reference of the man in the window of the burning castle,--behind, the flames r-roaring mightily, and below, the spears of his enemies."

"A choice between evils."

"Yes, if you will for-rgive my calling your country an evil. I was unhappy--too unhappy to stay where every day I saw something to make me worse; and that evil was gr-reater than to banish myself, even though I do love my country dearly."

"Was it necessary for you to come so far? Could you not find peace in your own land?"

"I thought not. You see--if I do not weary you I will tell you. Shall I tell you?"

"You never weary me," returned Mrs. Carroll, heartily. "I shall consider that you do me an honor if you care to speak to me about yourself."

"It shall be only a little," began Friedrich, repenting of his expansiveness. "Perhaps I have told you that I am the older of my family. I have one br-rother four years younger. Our parents are dead several years, and Maximilian is married two years ago with Hilda von Arnim."

"You spoke of them both when you were ill; in your delirium, you know."

"Of Max and Hilda? What did I say?"

A sharp note was in Friedrich's voice.

"My dear Baron, I must make the humiliating confession that long disuse has impaired sadly my understanding of German. If you should speak to me very slowly, probably I could comprehend you, but at that time you were not speaking slowly."

"My nurses?"

"Neither of them speaks a word of anything but English."

"It is an escape," he murmured. "Forgive me, _gnädige Frau_. It is a startle to think that perhaps you have given to the world your heart's thoughts."

"Be reassured. It was only the names, Max and Hilda, that we understood."

"When my tr-rouble came to me, it was unbearable to stay at the Schloss, so I must go away. Yet Maximilian was not able to pr-reserve the estate as it should be kept. He is not r-rich, Max, and he is a little what you call swift, eh? He spends much."

"I see."

"So if I leave him to care for the Schloss I must leave him also my incomings, and, if I act so, I cannot live myself in my own country where I have friends of the army and of society; where I have a--what is it?--a stand?"

"Position?"