There were new lands.
His heart lifted.
This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary War.
It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattledrovers and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South Carolina.
And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South.
When Oliver first came to it it had begun to get some reputation not only as a summer resort, but as a sanitarium for tuberculars.
Several rich men from the North had established hunting lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain land and, with an army of imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the greatest country estate in America — something in limestone, with pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms.
It was modelled on the chateau at Blois.
There was also a vast new hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit of a commanding hill.
But most of the population was still native, recruited from the hill and country people in the surrounding districts.
They were Scotch–Irish mountaineers, rugged, provincial, intelligent, and industrious.
Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from the wreckage of Cynthia’s estate.
During the winter he rented a little shack at one edge of the town’s public square, acquired a small stock of marbles, and set up business.
But he had little to do at first save to think of the prospect of his death.
During the bitter and lonely winter, while he thought he was dying, the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped muttering through the streets became an object of familiar gossip to the townspeople.
All the people at his boarding-house knew that at night he walked his room with great caged strides, and that a long low moan that seemed wrung from his bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips.
But he spoke to no one about it.
And then the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief spurting winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts of balsam.
The great wound in Oliver began to heal.
His voice was heard in the land once more, there were purple flashes of the old rhetoric, the ghost of the old eagerness.
One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he stood before his shop, watching the flurry of life in the square, Oliver heard behind him the voice of a man who was passing.
And that voice, flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden light a picture that had lain dead in him for twenty years.
“Hit’s a comin’!
Accordin’ to my figgers hit’s due June 11, 1886.”
Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive figure of the prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to Gettysburg and Armageddon.
“Who is that?” he asked a man.
The man looked and grinned.
“That’s Bacchus Pentland,” he said.
“He’s quite a character.
There are a lot of his folks around here.”
Oliver wet his great thumb briefly.
Then, with a grin, he said:
“Has Armageddon come yet?”
“He’s expecting it any day now,” said the man.
Then Oliver met Eliza.
He lay one afternoon in Spring upon the smooth leather sofa of his little office, listening to the bright piping noises in the Square.
A restoring peace brooded over his great extended body.
He thought of the loamy black earth with its sudden young light of flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of the plumtree’s dropping blossoms.
Then he heard the brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among the marbles, and he got hastily to his feet.
He was drawing on his well brushed coat of heavy black just as she entered.
“I tell you what,” said Eliza, pursing her lips in reproachful banter, “I wish I was a man and had nothing to do but lie around all day on a good easy sofa.”
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Oliver with a flourishing bow.
“Yes,” he said, as a faint sly grin bent the corners of his thin mouth, “I reckon you’ve caught me taking my constitutional.
As a matter of fact I very rarely lie down in the daytime, but I’ve been in bad health for the last year now, and I’m not able to do the work I used to.”
He was silent a moment; his face drooped in an expression of hangdog dejection.
“Ah, Lord!
I don’t know what’s to become of me!”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza briskly and contemptuously.
“There’s nothing wrong with you in my opinion.
You’re a big strapping fellow, in the prime of life.