Charles Buck - The Roof Tree

By the time supper had been eaten, the storm voices had dwindled from boisterous violence to exhausted quiet, and even the soft patter of warm rain died away until through the door, which now stood ajar, the visitor could see the moonlight and the soft stars that seemed to hang just out of arm's reach.

Dorothy had slipped quietly into the room and chosen a seat at the chimney corner where she sat as voiceless as a nun who has taken vows of silence. Soon the old man's head began to nod in drowsy contentment. At first he made dutiful resistance against the pleasant temptation of languor – then succumbed.

The young man, who had been burning with impatience for this moment, made a pretense of refilling his pipe. Over there out of the direct flare and leaping of the flames the girl sat in shadow and he wanted to see her face. Yet upon him had descended an unaccustomed embarrassment which found no easy door opening upon conversation.

So they sat in a diffident silence that stretched itself to greater awkwardness, until at last Dorothy rose abruptly to her feet and Thornton feared that she meant to take flight.

"'Pears like ter me," she asserted, suddenly, "hit's nigh suffocatin' hot in hyar."

"I war jest a-studyin' erbout thet myself," affirmed Maggard whose quickness of uptake was more eager than truthful. "Ther moon's a-shinin' outdoors. Let's go out thar an' breathe free."

As though breathing free were the most immediate of her needs, the girl rose and stood for a moment with the firelight catching the pink of her cheeks and bronzing her heavy hair, then she turned and led the way out to the porch where, in the moisture of the fresh-washed air, the honeysuckle vines were heavy with fragrance.

The walnut tree, no longer lashed into storm incantations, stood now in quiet majesty, solitary though, at a respectful distance, surrounded. The frogs and whippoorwills were voiceful, and from the silvery foreground, shadow-blotted with cobalt, to the indigo-deep walls of the ranges, the earth spilled over influences of sentient youth.

Maggard gazed down at the girl and the girl, with a hand resting on a porch post, stood looking off out of eyes that caught and gave back the soft light from the moon. To Maggard she seemed unconditionally lovely, but the fetters of shyness still held them both.

"I don't know many folks hyarabouts yit," he said with impetuous suddenness. "I'd plumb love ter hev ye befriend me."

Dorothy turned toward him and her lips relaxed their shyness into a friendly smile – then impulsively she demanded: "Did yore foreparents dwell hyarabouts a long time back?"

Thornton's face, with the moonlight upon it, stiffened into a mask-like reticence at this touching upon the sensitive topic which threatened his identification as a hunted man.

"I've done heered thet they lived somewhars in Kaintuck ginerations afore my time," he made evasive answer. "What made ye ask me that question?"

Then it was she who became hesitant but after a little she suggested, "Come on down hyar under thet old walnuck tree. Seems like I kin talk freer thar."

Together they went to the place where the shadows lay deep, like an island in a lake of moonshine, and the girl talked on in the hurried, shy fashion of one with a new secret and the need of a confidant.

"Ther mornin' ye fust come by … an' stopped thar in ther high road … I'd jest been readin' somethin' thet … was writ by one of my foreparents … way back, upwards of a hundred y'ars ago, I reckon." She paused but he nodded his interest so sympathetically that she went on, reassured; "She told how come she planted this hyar tree … in them days when ther Injins still scalped folks … an' she writ down jest what her husband looked like."

"What did he look like?" inquired the man, gravely, and the girl found herself no longer bashful with him but at ease, as with an old friend.

"Hit war right then I looked out an' seed ye," she said, simply, "an' 'peared like ye'd plum bodily walked outen them pages of handwrite. Thet's why I asked whether yore folks didn't dwell hyar onc't. Mebby we mout be kin."

Cal Maggard shook his head.

"My folks moved away to Virginny so fur back," he informed her, "thet hit's apt ter be right distant kinship."

"This was all fur back," she reminded him, and in order that the sound of her voice might continue, he begged:

"Tell me somethin' else erbout this tree … an' what ye read in ther book."

She was standing close to him, and as she talked it seemed to him that the combined fragrances of the freshly washed night all came from her. He was conscious of the whippoorwill calls and the soft crooning of the river, but only as far-away voices of accompaniment, and she, answering to dreamy influences, too, went on with her recitals from the journal of the woman who had been a lady in Virginia and who probably lay buried under the spot on which they stood.

"Hit's right amazin' ter listen at ye," he said at length. "But plentiful amazin' things comes ter pass."

An amazing thing was coming to pass with him at that moment, for his arms were twitching with an eagerness to close about her, and he seemed struggling against forces of impulse stronger than himself.

It was amazing because he had sworn to avoid the folly of chancing everything on too hasty a love declaration, and because the discipline of patient self-control was strong in him. It was amazing, too, because, with a warning recently received and appreciated, his ears had become deaf to all sounds save her voice, and when the thicket stirred some fifty yards away he heard nothing.

Even the girl herself would ordinarily have paused to bend her head and listen to an unaccustomed sound, but in her as well as in him the close-centred magic was working absorption.

Each of them felt the tense, new something that neither fully understood, but which set them vibrating to a single impulse as the two prongs of a tuning fork answer to one note. Neither of them thought of the figure that hitched its way toward them – more cautious after that first warning rustle – to watch and listen – the figure of an armed man.

For the girl reality seemed to recede into the gossamer of dreams. She could fancy herself the other woman who had lived and died before her – and the face of the man in the moonlight might have been that of the pioneer Thornton. Fancy was stronger than actuality.

"Hit almost seems like," she whispered, "that ther old tree's got a spell in hit – ter bewitch folks with."

"Ef hit has … hit's a spell I loves right good," he fervently protested.

He heard her breath come quick and sudden, as if under a hypnotic force, and following the prompting of some instinctive mentor, he held out his arms toward her.

Still she stood with the wide-eyed raptness of a sleepwalker, and when Cal Maggard moved slowly forward, she, who had been so shy an hour ago, made no retreat.

It was all as though each of them reacted to the command of some controlling volition beyond themselves. The man's arms closed about her slender body and pressed it close to his breast. His lips met her upturned ones, and held them in a long kiss that was returned. Each felt the stir of the other's breath. To each came the fluttering tumult of the other's heart. Then after a long while they drew apart, and the girl's hands went spasmodically to her face.

"What hev we been doin', Cal?" she demanded in the bewildered tone of returning realization. "I don't skeercely know ye yit, nuther."

"Mebby hit war ther spell," he answered in a low but triumphant voice. "Ef hit war, I reckon God Hisself worked hit."

The figure in the tangle had drawn noiselessly back now and slipped off into the woods a few hundred yards away where it joined another that stood waiting there.