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The Ordeal: A Mountain Romance of Tennessee, a novel by Mary Noailles Murfree |
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Chapter 11 |
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_ CHAPTER XI How the mother-heart would have rejoiced could Lillian have divined that her child was well and happy, though affectionate in new ties while she languished in his absence! Archie had begun to adore the old Indian fortune-teller who cuddled and coddled him in loving delight. She lived for a time in grievous fear of his departure, but when no news came of the men who had placed him there, and the date fixed for their return passed without event, she began to gloat on the possibility of desertion. She tried all her ancient savage spells and methods of forecast--many strange jugglings with terrapin shells and white beads and pointed sticks and the aspect of the decoction of magic herbs. With fervor, she gave herself also to her pagan invocations to those spirits of Zootheism and personified elements of Nature, so real even to the modern Cherokee, esteemed so potent in the ordering of human affairs. Suddenly her hope glowed into triumph! She had a fantastic conviction that the child was bound fast. The signs intimated that the great mystic Red Spider, _Kananiski gigage_, had woven his unseen web about the boy, and he could not escape from those constraining meshes. As to the men--she concluded that they were blown away somewhere. The wind had attended to that little matter. "_Agaluga Hegwa! Atigale yata tsutu negliga_," she exclaimed in grateful rapture. ("Oh, great Whirlwind! By you they must have been scattered.") Happiness had long held aloof. She was of the poorest of the tribe; childless, for many years; a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism; she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster, and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she lived in peculiar solitude, and the two spent the long months of the winter within the cabin together, while the mountain snows lay heavy on the eaves and the mountain winds beat and gibed at the door. Great icicles hung from the dark fissures of the crags; frosty scintillations tipped the fibres of the pines; wolves were a-prowl--sometimes their blood-curdling howls from afar penetrated to the hut where the ill-assorted companions sat together in the red glow of the fire, and roasted their sweet potatoes and apples on the hearth, and cracked nuts to pound into the rich paste affected by the Cherokees, and drank the bland "hominy-water," and gazed happily into each other's eyes, despite their distance apart at the two termini of life, the beginning and the end. As she could speak no English, yet they must needs find a medium of exchange for their valuable views, she tried to teach him to speak Cherokee. He was a bird, her little bird, she told him by signs, and his name was _Tsiskwa_. This she repeated again and again in the velvet-soft fluting of her voice. But no! he revolted. His name was Archie Royston, he declaimed proudly. He soon became the monarch of this poor hearth, and he deported himself in royal fashion. "Oo tan't talk," he said patronizingly to her one day, after listening in futile seriousness to her unintelligible jargon. Forthwith he essayed to teach her to speak English, and, humoring his every freak, she sought to profit. She would fix intent eyes upon him and turn her head askew to listen heedfully while she lisped after his lisping exposition of "Archie Royston." He grew heady with his sense of erudition. He would fairly roll on the puncheon floor in the vainglory of his delight when she identified chair and fire and bed and door by their accurate English names. Sometimes, in a surge of emotion, hardly gratitude or a sense of comfort, neither trust nor hope, but the sheer joy of love, the child would come at her in a tumultuous rush, cast himself in her arms, and cover her face with kisses--the face that had at first so terrified him, that was so typical of cruelty and craft and repellent pride. Then as they nestled together they would repeat in concert--poor woman! perhaps she thought it a mystic invocation charged with some potent power of prayer or magic--"Ding-dong-bell!" and the comparative biographies of little Johnny Green and little Johnny Stout, and the vicissitudes of the poor pussycat submitted to their diverse ministrations. He was wont to sing for her also, albeit tunelessly, and as he sat blond and roseate and gay, warbling after his fashion on the hearth, her clouded old eyes were relumed with a radiance that came from within and was independent of the prosaic light of day. His favorite ditty was an old nursery rhyme in which the name "Pretty Polly Hopkins" occurs with flattering iteration, and he began to apply it to her, for he had come to think her very beautiful--such is the gracious power of love! And while the snow was flying, and the sleet and hail tinkled on the batten shutter, and the draughts bleated and whined in the crevices, he made the rafters ring: "'None the better, Tommy Tompkins, "'Polly, I've been to France "'More the fool for you, Mister Tompkins,
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