The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage. MacGowan Alice
in and sit alongside of you on the middle seats. You take your place on the women's side, like a good gal, and let me have some peace, settin' over with the men."
For a moment she was dumb. Half a dozen had pushed into view, and were listening to them now. They all understood that Lance knew well enough she must sit with the singers, yet his open refusal to accompany her to the middle seats, where the courting couples generally found place, was not the less galling.
"Tell him you won't never step yo' foot in church beside him, Callista," prompted a man's voice, and Flenton Hands stepped out on the path, twisting a bit of sassafras in his fingers and looking from one to the other with quick shiftings of his gray eyes.
Lance laughed radiantly but soundlessly, his face and eyes shining with mirthful defiance. The girl looked down and trifled with her hat ribbons.
"Why don't you say it?" inquired Cleaverage at length. Hands leaned forward and stared eagerly at her, his mouth a little open and his breath coming quick. He had always been the most pertinacious of Callista's followers; an older man than any of the others, he brought to bear on his wooing the persistence and determination of his years.
Callista just glanced at the younger man, and let her gaze rest on Hands.
"What's the use of telling him what he already knows mighty well and good?" she said finally.
"Give me the pleasure of walking up with you this morning, then," Hands encroached eagerly.
With negligent composure Callista looked about her. She was not willing to walk with Lance – she doubted if he would ask her again. She was not willing to discredit him and go with Hands. She was determined that Cleaverage should not walk with another girl.
"Come on, Ola," she coolly addressed the figure plainly to be seen behind Hands. "Let's you and me hurry over and see what hymns Brother Drumright is going to use. You sing mighty good counter, and I'd like to have you next to me."
Ola Derf could not refuse. It was almost equal to social rehabilitation to be allowed to walk with Callista Gentry from the spring to the church, to sit beside her in the singing seats; yet the brown girl cast uneasy glances backward till she saw Lance, whistling melodiously, turn to the blooming azalea bush and catch up his banjo from it. She stopped in her tracks, holding Callista back.
"Whar – whar ye gwine, Lance?" she inquired anxiously. If Cleaverage was not coming to church it would scarcely be worth while for her to torture herself with an hour of old Preacher Drumright's holding forth. "Whar ye gwine?" she reiterated, as the other girl pulled her sleeve and attempted to hurry on.
"Whar you and Callista ca'n't come," returned Lance, speaking over his shoulder unceremoniously.
"Ain't ye gwine to stay to preachin'?" persisted the brown girl. "I – I thought ye was, or I – ain't ye gwine to stay?"
"No," drawled Cleaverage. "I just brought the banjo to please Callista – because I promised her I would, when she begged me to. I had no notion of staying to listen to Drumright."
"Come on – if you're a-coming," Callista admonished the Derf girl with a little flash of temper which Lance did not fail to observe, any more than she missed the chuckle with which he received it.
"Well, I'm a-goin' with ye," announced Ola. She let go Callista's arm, and turned back to where Lance was taking a shadowy path into the forest.
"I told you, gals couldn't come," Cleaverage bantered her. But Ola persisted.
"I can go wherever you can go. Lance – wait! Wait for me – I'm a-comin'."
"Callista'll be mad," objected Cleaverage. "She begged and begged me, and I wouldn't leave her come along of me; now if I take you, she'll be mad."
"Like I cared where you went or who went with you!" Callista retorted, eyes shining blue fire, head crested. "Come on, Mr. Hands, it's time we were stepping, if we want to get in to go through the hymns."
"And you will sit alongside of me?" Hands's voice pleaded close to her ear.
Ola and Lance were of the same age; the blond girl, lingering half indignant, could remember how hardy, free little Ola Derf used to play with the boys, always singling Lance Cleaverage out as the companion for her truant expeditions. Now in mute denial of Hands's petition, Callista shook her head, and in doing so managed to glance round and get a tormenting glimpse of Ola and Lance disappearing together between the trees. Under the green domes of oak and liriodendron, the latter starred all over now with orange-tawny tulips, she saw them pass. Wine of summer was in the veins of the forest. Even the sober oaks, wreathed like bacchanals, overflowed with sweetness from their wrappings of wild grape. The two with the banjo took their way down a steep path toward a jade-green pool, a still reach of water arched over by fantastic tangles of laurel and rhododendron, black as the tents of Kedar, lighted only by the flash of a water-fall that caught the sun. This was the baptismal place.
The daughter of the house of Gentry turned her face resolutely toward respectability and the church, albeit there was no joy in the countenance. Strung out over a quarter of a mile were courting couples bent toward the same destination. To these young hearts it seemed well worth while to have lain under the heel of winter to attain this marvelous summer morning with its green-clothed forest, its wreathing of blossoms where they passed. Clean and cool as a bell's note, the song of a thrush deep in the wood spilled jeweled drops of sound through the trembling branches overhead. A catbird's sonata rippled boldly out upon the very path. A canopy of bloom was woven and flung over the spring by the black, knotty fingers of the laurel. Bees tumbled happily in the bosom of the fairest drooping clusters, their hum nearly drowned by the heavy gurgle of the creek water.
Callista drew in her breath sharply. Summer and sun and light and love everywhere – and she was walking up to the church-house with Flenton Hands, while back on some forest by-path, with music at his finger ends and Ola Derf beside him, Lance Cleaverage forgot her with a laugh.
CHAPTER II.
THE UP-SITTING
GRANNY YEARWOOD – the grandmother of Flenton Hands and his sisters – was dead. The work-hardened old body had parted with its flame of life reluctantly; for nearly a year she had been declining toward the end; and during the last months the family had cared for her almost day and night. They were worn out with the toil of it before she herself wore out. But now it was all over. The first outburst of noisy lamentation, which is fairly conventional in the Southern mountains, was past. The corpse had been decently composed on a rude plank scaffold, while Octavia Gentry and Roxy Griever took charge of the household and began to order things in that curious half-ecclesiastical fashion which follows the footsteps of death.
It was near noon, and Octavia dished up the dinner, while Roxy paid more attention to the impending funeral arrangements. Before the meal was over, young people began to come in, though none could quite say how they had received word. The girls made proffer of assistance, and swiftly the table was cleared away, the dishes washed, and the house and surroundings put in immaculate order. Work in the fields was stopped, that messengers might be sent, one on horseback to notify distant-dwelling kin, another with a wagon to buy the coffin down in Hepzibah, a third afoot to arrange with the strong young men of the family connection about helping to dig the grave. All the flowers in the dooryard were gathered and laid round the corpse. The withered old face was covered with a damp cloth, and then a borrowed sheet was drawn smoothly over the whole mound. The Widow Griever was so deeply versed in the etiquette of such occasions, and so satisfyingly exacting on all points, as to make an undertaker even more highly superfluous than he would usually have been among those simple folk. What with garments and accessories she had brought from her own scant widow's wardrobe, and articles hastily borrowed from the nearer neighbors, she managed inside of two hours to have Little Liza and her two sisters – the mother of the family was dead some years ago – clad in black and seated in state inferior only to that of the dead.
More flowers were brought by girls and small boys from the neighbors' yards – yellow and purple and red were the colors mostly in bloom now, and those which would have been favored for this occasion. Roxy gravely arranged them and set them in place. She had veiled the looking-glass and stopped the clock as soon as she came into the house.
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