HIS VANISHED STAR

BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1894

Copyright, 1894, By MARY N. MURFREE.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company.

I.

It was a great property, reckoned by metes and bounds. A day's journey might hardly suffice to traverse the whole of his domain. Yet there was no commensurate money value attaching to these leagues of mountain wilderness, that bore indeed a merely nominal price, and Kenneth Kenniston's was hardly the temperament to experience an æsthetic gratulation that his were those majestic domes which touched the clouds and withstood the lightnings and lifted up an awesome voice to answer the thunder, or that his title-deeds called for all the vast slopes thence down to the unimagined abysses of the abandoned mine in the depths of the gorge. It was the spirit of speculation that informed his glance with a certain respect for them, as he turned his eye upon the mountains, and bethought himself how these austere craggy splendors were calculated to impress the shallow gaze of the wandering human swallow. He even appraised, in the interest of possible summer sojourners, the rare, pure, soft air with which his lungs expanded. Science was presently set a-prying about the margins of rocky springs,

hitherto undiscovered and unnoticed save by oread or deer; a few blasts of dynamite, a great outgushing of exhaustless mineral waters, a triumphant chemical analysis ensued, and an infusion of enthusiasm began to pervade his consciousness. Such resources—infinitely smaller resources—elsewhere in the world meant a fortune; why not here?

He was an architect by profession, and the aspect of the world seemed to him parceled out in available sites. It cost his imagination, trained by study and enriched by travel, no conscious effort to perceive standing in fair proportions, turreted and terraced, finished to the last finial, the perfected structure of his projected summer hotel, on that level space above craggy heights, facing the moon and the valley, with the background of still greater heights, ever rising, heavily wooded, to the peak towering above. He saw it, as a true architect, in completion; as the wren sees his builded nest, not as the single straw or wisp of hair. Yet the day of small things must needs be overpassed,—of straws and wisps,—of struts and purlins, plates and tie-beams. His day of small things was full of wrangling and bitter bafflings, heart-burnings and discouragements. His partners in the undertaking had not been induced to cast their lot with his save by the exercise of infinite suavities of crafty eloquence, overpowering doubt

and fear, and indisputable demonstrations of disproportionate profits in the very air. One was a seer in a commercial sort, an adept in prognosticating unexpected expenses for which no covenant of provision had been entered into, and he beheld full-armed disaster menacing every plan save that of his own preference. The other had no imagination whatever, architectural or otherwise. He recognized no needs which required adornment, and measured the taste of the public by his own disposition to spend money to gratify it. That Kenniston's plans should have come through the ordeal of their councils, with the ever lopping-off incidents common to the moneyed non-professional, retaining any element of symmetry or grace or beauty argued much for their pristine value. He regarded them for a time with a sort of pity and affronted tenderness for their maimed estate, but little by little the original intentions faded from his mental view, and he could see with renewed satisfaction the flag flying from the tower without remembering

that he had held this octagonal gaud upon the building by main force, as it were, against the iconoclastic grasp of the practical men.

Nevertheless he was relieved to be free from their presence. He felt that it was well that their legitimate business—one as a stock-broker, the other a real-estate agent—held them to their desks in the city of Bretonville. The manifest purpose of their creation, he thought, was fully served in their furnishing forth their quota of the sinews of war. He was much younger than either, but he had learned something beyond their knowledge in this internecine strife, and when it became necessary to provide for them occupation, to prevent further interference in the venture which had come to be of most hopeful interest to both, he wrote to them touching the finding of a suitable man to keep the hotel when built, certain that in this quest for a Boniface he had set them by the ears, and relying on their different temperaments to keep them wrangling together and to leave him in peace.

Every sylvan detail of the scene pleased his artistic and receptive sense, as he stood on the great natural terrace, the site of the future building, and surveyed the landscape. It was a phenomenally felicitous opportunity. This plateau projected from a lateral spur of the Great Smoky chain, and faced the southeast. Thus the main body of the mountain range, diagonally across the Cove, seemed strangely near at hand; one could study its chasms and abysses, its jungles of laurel and vast forests, as it were from mid-air; it was the point of view of a bird. Through a gap lower down, the parallel lines of the eastern ranges became visible, elsewhere hidden by the great boundary ridge,—a wonderful fantasy painted in every gradation of blue, from the slaty grayish hue near at hand under the shadow of a cloud, the velvet-like tones of ultramarine beyond, and still further the metallic hardness of tint as of lapis lazuli, till the most delicate azure outline of peaks faintly obliterated its identity against the azure eastern sky.

All unflushed the sky was here, although to the right the clouds were red above the western mountains. They closely hemmed in the Cove, heavy, massive, purple and bronze and deeply green, in such limited latitude of color as their lowering shadows would permit. Far down their slopes the river ran, threading the deep forests with elusive steely glimmers. He could not hear its voice, but from great cliffs hard by the silvery melody of the mineral springs beat upon the air with a rhythm inexpressibly sweet and wild and alluring. So definite it was that it seemed odd that one did not "catch the tune." In an open space some scattered sheep were feeding,—the effect pastoral and pictorial. The whole scene, with its blended solemnity and beauty and dignity, would well accord with the castellated edifice his fancy had set in its midst. It might indeed be a mediæval world upon which the windows should look, instead of the prosaic nineteenth century, so far it would appear from sordid to-day, so well would the fashion of the building aid the illusion, were it not for a section of the

foreground immediately below the cliffs of the terrace, where there stood, bare and open and unsheltered, a primitive log cabin, a stretch of cornfields, a horse-lot, a pig-pen, and all the accessories of most modern and unimpressive American poverty and ignorance. Being near, and bearing human significance, the prosaic little home seemed the most salient point, in its incongruity, in the whole magnificent landscape. The methods of the mountaineer furthered, too, the effect of antagonism. Along the side of one of the ranges near at hand, a great gaunt blackened area bore token of a "fire-scald." Kenniston's eyes rested frowningly on this deep burnt scar upon the face of nature. It came from the pernicious habit of "setting out fire in the woods" in the autumn, to burn away the undergrowth and dead leaves, in order to give freer pasturage to wandering cattle. Here, as is not unfrequently the case, the fire, instead of merely consuming leaves, twigs, and shoots, had gathered strength and fury, burning the giant trees to great blackened, deadened skeletons, bleakly standing, and had

devastated some hundred acres. He could see in the sparse shadows the cattle feeding on the lush herbage, and he ground his teeth to reflect upon the alarm any future conflagration would spread among the autumnal lingerers of summer sojourners and the catastrophe that might ensue to the chateau on the rocks.

"We must buy him out," he muttered. "He must be made to go."

Kenniston's heart was as heavy with presage as if his flimsy chateau stood on the cliffs behind him; for it was not to be mediæval in point of strength of materials.

The project of buying out Luther Tems seemed hardly so feasible as when first presented to the minds of the company. The proposition to this effect had already been made to the astounded mountaineer, and rejected with a plump No. A second and better considered effort, coupled with a disproportionately large pecuniary consideration, had fared no better. There Luther Tems was, and there he meant to stay, as his father and his grandfather had before him to a great age, till Death bethought himself at last of these loiterers in so obscure a corner of the world, and, although belated, gathered them in. The company was now at its wits' end. The place was an eyesore, a trail of the serpent in this seeming Paradise. It was, too, a source of danger and discomfort, and to seek to remove it was one of Kenniston's errands here, as well as to confer with the contractor, in his dictatorial character as one of the company rather than the architect. His visit was so timed that he was on the ground a day or so in advance of his coadjutor, and in

furtherance of his project had asked for quarters in Luther Tems's house.

Far was it from Luther Tems, the fear of being over-persuaded. He was a lugubrious presentment of obstinacy, as he sat at his hearthstone. The immovable determination expressed in the lines of his face and the curve of his lips was incongruous with the other characteristics of his aspect. He was not of the gigantic build common among the mountaineers. He was singularly spare and alert, and there was something in his movements and in the lines of his figure which betokened that when endowed with more flesh it had expressed an unusual grace. His features were absolutely regular, and although the eye, sunken amidst a multitude of wrinkles and half hidden by the beetling eyebrow, no longer showed the fine lines of its setting and its pristine color and brilliancy, and his jaw was lank from the loss of teeth, and his well-cut lips were contorted over his quid of tobacco, he still exhibited to the discerning gaze of the architect enough traces of the beauty of his younger days to justify the feminine sobriquet of "Lucy." A good joke it had been in the Cove forty years before, but

custom had dulled its edge and hallowed its use, and now he would have had to think twice before he saw aught incongruous in the appellation. It was a convenience in some sort, too, and averted misunderstandings, for his son bore his name of Luther. Although inheriting a share of his father's good looks, it had been admixed with the "favor" of the Tates, his mother's people, who were a tall, burly folk. He was heavier far than his father, and slower at twenty-four than "Lucy" Tems would be at eighty. The strong resemblance in their faces ended there, for naught could be more unlike the elder than the meditative composure with which the younger man sat and smoked his pipe, and now slowly rose and replenished the fire and seated himself anew. He had nothing in look or motion of the panther-like, dangerous intimation that informed the old man's every gesture and glance. But this expressed itself with a certain supple, feline effect in his daughter, a tall girl, in whom the beauty of his youth was duplicated. She had the chestnut

hair, the exquisitely fair complexion with its shifting roseate suffusion, the large beautifully set dark blue eye, the high narrow forehead from which the hair grew backward, but lying on the temples in delicate fibrous waves,—all the fine detail that had graced her father's youth, and that had seemed so wasted on the wild scapegrace boy of the mountains, merely attaining the recognition of ridicule among his fellows, and unvalued by its possessor. She wore a dark blue homespun dress that enhanced her fairness, and she sat in a low chair in the firelit log room and busied herself, with a monotonous gesture and a certain sleek aspect, in carding cotton. Kenniston had seen her previously, and in his preoccupied mind she roused no interest, neither then nor now.

He sat down by the fire, among them, much nettled to observe that there was a stranger, a man whom he had never before seen here, ensconced on the opposite side of the hearth. The shadow of the primitive mantelshelf obscured his face, and even when the fire flashed up it barely sufficed to show his burly figure in an attitude of composed waiting and observation.

His presence added an element of doubt and difficulty to the already troublous negotiation, and Kenniston, accustomed to civilized methods, and having expected to carry all before him, felt a sinking of the heart out of proportion to the value of the property he coveted. He had, in his experience, conducted delicate and difficult negotiations, involving large considerations, many parties in interest, and conflicting claims, to a successful issue. And yet, what enterprise so unpromising as to buy from a man who will not sell! So did the half-masked presence of the stranger in the shadow shake his confidence that he did not at once open the subject nearest his heart. A short silence ensued upon the greetings, and he was fain to lay hold upon the weather as a subterfuge.

"It holds fair, colonel," he said.

He used the title in secret derision, as the usual sobriquet of men of dignity and substance in the lowlands. He had scant faith in the existence of any discerning perceptions and delicate sentiments in the minds or hearts of people in homespun; it had served to amuse him at his first meeting with old Tems, when he had not dreamed that so uncouth a character had a part to play upon the elaborate stage of his own future, which was a-building with such care and thought and hope, and he had laughed in his sleeve to observe the simplicity and acquiescence with which the fine title was accepted. He intended its use in no military sense, and he did not learn till afterward that old Tems bore a veritable title, which he had earned on stricken battlefields, and had later commanded a band of guerrillas whose name was a terror and a threat.

Tems took his pipe from between his lips. "It holds fair," he echoed drawlingly; then, "Dunno fur how long," as if to admonish any speculator in the weather to be not too happy in a vale of such incertitude.

"All signs favor!" A sudden singing feminine tone pervaded the conversation.

Kenniston glanced up. In one corner, a stairway from the attic above came down into the room. A young girl, whom he had not before noticed, was sitting on the steps midway. From this coigne of vantage she overlooked the room, and participated in the conversation when moved to do so.

Kenniston fancied that from some real or affected rustic shyness because of his presence she had sought this retirement, for she flushed deeply at his glance, and bent her head over a piece of rough mending which she seemed to be perpetrating on a jeans coat with a gigantic needle and a very coarse thread. She could hardly have seen very well to set the stitches, and as her side was toward him he could ill distinguish her face for the shadow and her industrious attitude and her falling hair.

Julia Tems looked up at her with a laughing glance, half raillery, half sneer. But the brother took up the question with an air of contention; he wanted rain for his corn crop, and he believed the clouds must surely hold it in trust for him.

"The fog war a-getherin' along the mountings this evenin', an' I seen 'bout a hour ago a thunder-head a-loafin' round over Piomingo," he averred with a certain bitterness, as if to protest against the arguing away of these prospects.

"Waal," the singing voice, curiously vibrant, broke forth once more, "we air likely ter git a good full rain, ez would holp up the crap 'fore long, but we ain't goin' ter hev no steady set o' bad weather now. Signs don't favor it."

The old man again took his pipe from his mouth.

"Ye-es. An' a body mought b'lieve from yer talk that ef Satan war ter cotch us by the right leg this week, he'd be mighty likely ter turn us loose by the lef leg nex' week." He laughed sarcastically. "All of us air s'prisin' apt ter be suited, no matter how things turn out." He replaced his pipe, adding, with the stem between his teeth, "That's Ad'licia's notion," and then smoked imperturbably.

The little optimist looked at him with an indignant, affronted gaze for a moment, then bent once more to her sewing.

She had forgotten Kenniston, and her face was fully revealed in the moment that she had turned it on her critic,—an oval face, with a little round unassertive chin, a thin, delicate, aquiline nose, a small mouth with full lips, the indenture in the upper one so deep as to make it truly like a bow, and widely opened gray eyes that resembled nothing so much as moss agates. They were veiled by long, reddish lashes, and the hair that hung curling down about the nape of her neck was of a dull copper hue. Her complexion was exceedingly white, and she had that thin-skinned look which is incompatible with freckles as annuals; in those milk-white spaces about the eyes were sundry tokens of the sunny weather which even the dark days of winter would not obliterate. Her figure was slender, and she did not look strong. She wore a brown homespun dress, and she bit the coarse thread with a double row of small perfect white teeth as she addressed herself to threading her big needle anew.

"Studyin' 'bout the weather, an' gittin' onhappy 'bout yer buildin'?" demanded old Tems of his guest.

There was a slight twist of the lips, suggestive of covert ridicule on his part, as he asked the question.

Kenniston was totally unaware of furnishing in his proper person amusement to the mountaineer, but to his host he seemed a fool more bountifully endowed with folly than any other specimen of the genus with whom Tems had ever been brought into contact, and the projected hotel was accounted a ludicrous impossibility. It was Tems's secret persuasion that most of the population of this country had been slain in the war; he had himself seen much slaughter in its grim actuality. The idea that there were people who would wish to come long journeys to fill that vast projected structure seemed the most preposterous vaporing of imbecility.

"Ain't they got nowhar ter bide?" he would demand, in incredulous pity for the homeless summer birds.

He had come at last to treat it in his own mind as a bubble, a mere brainless figment, and only his courteous instincts prevented this from becoming apparent, although now and again it was perilously near revelation.

"Well, no; I think the weather won't affect my building for a good while yet," answered Kenniston. Then, with a sudden afterthought, and perceiving the opening, "I'm troubled, though, about the blasting for the coal cellars and wine cellar. There will of necessity be quite an avalanche of fragments of the rock falling into the valley, and I wanted to give you warning of it before it begins."

The look of attention deepened on the old face. The thin old head suavely nodded.

"Thanky, sir. I feel obligated." And old Tems relapsed into silence.

Kenniston was baffled for a moment, but presently he returned to the charge.

"You and your family could leave the premises while the blasting was in progress. It might be inconvenient, but"—

"Yes—ye-es—ef so minded," the ancient householder acquiesced.