Belle was an intensely interested spectator of all this Midnight chapter. She wanted Jim to get a good horse that he would love, but oh, how she prayed and hoped he would not happen on another speeder! She knew quite well that it was about one chance in ten thousand; but she also knew that Jim could make a good horse out of mediocre material; and it was with anxiety just the reverse of his that she watched the black colt when first they rode together. He was strong and hard, but, thank heaven, she thought, showed no sign of racing blood.
"Of course, he'll come up a little later, when I get him well in hand," Jim explained apologetically.
And Belle added, "I hope not."
"Why?" asked Jim in surprise.
"Because, you might ride away from me." And she meant it.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The Sociable
Christmas time with its free days and its social gatherings was at hand; and the Church folk must needs respond to the spirit of the season with a "sociable." In such a meeting, the young minister is king—that is the tradition—and on this occasion it was easier than usual to crown the heir apparent. At least twenty girls were making love to Jim, and he was quite unconscious of it all, except that he thought them a little free, and at length he recited an appropriate couplet from "The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk": "They are so unaccustomed to man, their tameness is shocking to me." He joked and laughed with all; but ever he drifted over toward Belle, to consult, to whisper, to linger.
For such affairs there is a time-honoured and established programme that was fairly well adhered to at least in the early part. They met at the church parlours and gossiped; had a prayer, then more gossip; next followed tea and cakes in a poisonous abundance, and more gossip. Now the older preacher, as expected, read a chapter out of some safe story book, amid gossip—harmless in the main, but still gossip. Next the musical geniuses of the congregation were unchained. A perfectly well-meaning young lady sang, "Be kind to your brother, he may not last long," to an accompaniment of squeaks on the melodeon—and gossip. A boy orator recited "Chatham's speech on American Independence," and received an outburst of applause which, for a moment, overpowered the gossip.
Lou-Jane Hoomer, conspicuous for her intense hair and noisy laugh, had been active in getting up the sociable, and now she contributed of her talents by singing "Home, Sweet Home." About the middle of the second period, according to custom, the preacher should recite "Barbara Frietchie" to a whispering chorus of gossip. But Jim was brought up in a land not reached by Barbara's fame and he made a new departure by giving a Fenian poem—"Shamus O'Brien"—with such fervour that, for the moment, the whisperers forgot to gossip.
Belle, as the manager of the affair, was needed everywhere and all the time, but made no contribution to the programme. Lou-Jane scored such a success with "Home, Sweet Home" that she was afterward surrounded by a group of admirers, among them Jim Hartigan.
"Sure," he said, she "was liable to break up the meeting making every one so homesick," and she replied that "it would never break up as long as he was there to attract them all together."
John Higginbotham, with his unfailing insurance eye, pointed out that the stove-pipe wire had sagged, bringing the pipe perilously near the woodwork, and then gossiped about the robberies his company had suffered. A game of rhymes was proposed. In this one person gives a word and the next to him must at once match it with an appropriate rhyme. This diversion met with little enthusiasm and the party lagged until some one suggested that Jim recite. He chose a poem from Browning, "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." He put his very soul in those galloping horses and wondered why the poet said so much about the men and so little about the steeds. Dr. Jebb could not quite "see the lesson," but the fire and power of the rendering gripped the audience. Dr. Carson said, "Now you're doing real stuff! If you'd cut out all your piffling goody talk and give us life like that, you'd have all the town with you."
Lou-Jane was actually moved, and Belle glowed with pride to see her hero really touching the nobler strings of human emotion—strings that such a community is apt to lose sight of under cobwebs of long disuse but they are there and ready to resound to the strong, true soul that can touch them with music.
But what was it in the trampling horses that stirred some undiscovered depth in his own heart? How came it that those lines drove fogbanks back and showed another height in his soul, a high place never seen before, even by himself? And, as those simple townfolk, stirred they knew not how, all clamoured for another song, he felt the thrill that once was his in the far-off stable yard of Links, when Denny Denard, brandishing a dung-fork, chanted "The Raiding of Aymal." Now it all came back and Hartigan shouted out the rede:
"Haakon is dead! Haakon is dead! Haakon of the bronze-hilt sword is dead. His son's in his stead; Aymal, tall son of Haakon, Swings now the bronze-hilt sword of his father. He is gone to the High-fielden To the high pasture to possess the twelve mares of his father; Black and bay and yellow, as the herdsman drave them past him; Black and yellow, their manes on the wind; And galloped a colt by the side of each."
So he sang in a chant the saga-singer's tale of the king killing all the colts save one that it might have the nursing of the twelve. His eye sparkled and glowed; his colour mounted; his soul was so stirred with the story that his spirit could fill the gaps where his memory failed. The sense of power was on him; he told the swinging tale as though it were in verity his own; and the hearers gazed intensely, feeling that he sang of himself. It was no acting, but a king proclaiming himself a king, when he told of the world won by the bronze sword bearer mounted on the twelve-times-nourished stallion colt; and he finished with a royal gesture and injunction:
"Ho! ye, ye seven tall sons of Aymal, Comes there a time when face you many trails; Hear this for wisdom now; Twelve colts had I and all save one I slew. The twelve-times-nourished charger grew And round the world he bore me And never failed; so all the world was mine And all the world I ruled. Ho, children of the bronze-hilt sword, Take this for guiding creed: Pick out your one great steed And slay the rest and ride."
And when he smote the table with his fist the folk in that poor, simple hall were hushed with awe. They had no words to clothe the thoughts that came, no experience of their own to match them. There was a pauses—a silence; a slow, uncertain sounding of applause. Carson glared half hypnotized; then said to himself: "This is not Jim Hartigan; this is the royal saga who sang."
What he clearly expressed, the others vaguely but deeply felt. As for Belle, the passion and the power of it possessed her. She was deeply moved—and puzzled, too. It was a side of Jim she had not known before. Later, as they went home together hand on arm, she held on to him very tightly and said softly: "Now I know that you are marked for big things in the world."
CHAPTER XXXIV
Springtime
Have you seen the springtime dawn on the Black Hills? No? Then you have never seen a real spring.
For long, dark, silent months the land has lain under a broad white robe, the plains are levelled, hidden, and the whiteness of the high spaces sweeps down to meet, on the lower hills, the sudden blackness of the forest pine. And now you know why these are named Black Hills. Full four white moons have waned; the blizzard wind has hissed and stung, till the house-bound wonder if the days of spring will ever come. In March, when the northward-heading crows appear, the sting-wind weakens, halts; the sweet south wind springs up, the snow-robe of the plains turns yellow here and there as the grass comes through, then lo! comes forth a world of crocus bloom. The white robe shrivels fast now, the brown pursues it up the mountain side till at the last there is nothing left but a high-up snow-cap hiding beneath the pines, slowly dissolving in a million crystal rills to swell the rolling Cheyenne far below. The spring birds fill the air, the little ones that twitter as they pass, and the great gold-breasted prairie lark that sings and sings: "The Spring, the Spring, the glory of the Spring!" Then all the world is glad, and stronger than the soft new wind, deeper than the impulse of awakening flower bulbs, broader than the brightening tinge of green—is the thrill of a world-wide, sky-wide joy and power, the exquisite tenderness and yearning which if you know, you know; and if you do not know it none can make you understand.