Audrey
by Mary Johnston · English · Gutenberg #14513 · 683,451 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Audrey
Author: Mary Johnston
Illustrator: F. C. Yohn
Release date: December 29, 2004 [eBook #14513]
Most recently updated: August 20, 2023
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14513
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUDREY ***
AUDREY
BY
MARY JOHNSTON
AUTHOR OF “TO HAVE AND TO HOLD” AND
“PRISONERS OF HOPE”
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
F.C. YOHN
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1902
COPYRIGHT, 1901, 1902, BY MARY JOHNSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published February, 1902_
_Books by Mary Johnston._
AUDREY. With Illustrations in color. Crown 8vo, $1.50
PRISONERS OF HOPE. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD. With 8 Illustrations
by HOWARD PYLE, E.B. THOMPSON,
A.W. BETTS, and EMLEN McCONNELL.
Crown 8vo, $1.50.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
[Illustration: GAZED WITH WIDE-OPEN EYES AT THE INTRUDER (page 106)]
TO
ELOISE, ANNE, AND ELIZABETH
CONTENTS
CHAPTER TITLE PAGE
I. THE CABIN IN THE VALLEY 1
II. THE COURT OF THE ORPHAN 16
III. DARDEN’S AUDREY 38
IV. THE ROAD TO WILLIAMSBURGH 52
V. THE STOREKEEPER 63
VI. MASTER AND MAN 73
VII. THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON 92
VIII. UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE 106
IX. MACLEAN TO THE RESCUE 117
X. HAWARD AND EVELYN 131
XI. AUDREY OF THE GARDEN 145
XII. THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN 163
XIII. A SABBATH DAY’S JOURNEY 179
XIV. THE BEND IN THE ROAD 194
XV. HUGON SPEAKS HIS MIND 206
XVI. AUDREY AND EVELYN 222
XVII. WITHIN THE PLAYHOUSE 237
XVIII. A QUESTION OF COLORS 249
XIX. THE GOVERNOR’S BALL 262
XX. THE UNINVITED GUEST 273
XXI. AUDREY AWAKES 287
XXII. BY THE RIVERSIDE 300
XXIII. A DUEL 312
XXIV. AUDREY COMES TO WESTOVER 322
XXV. TWO WOMEN 337
XXVI. SANCTUARY 349
XXVII. THE MISSION OF TRUELOVE 363
XXVIII. THE PLAYER 375
XXIX. AMOR VINCIT 391
XXX. THE LAST ACT 401
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
GAZED WITH WIDE-OPEN EYES AT THE INTRUDER (page 106) _Frontispiece_
“HAD YOU LOVED ME--I HAD BEEN HAPPY” 58
AUDREY LEFT HER WARNING TO BE SPOKEN BY MACLEAN 206
“I DO NOT THINK I HAVE THE HONOR OF KNOWING”-- 270
HER DARK EYES MADE APPEAL 342
“JEAN! JEAN HUGON!” 414
AUDREY
CHAPTER I
THE CABIN IN THE VALLEY
The valley lay like a ribbon thrown into the midst of the encompassing
hills. The grass which grew there was soft and fine and abundant; the
trees which sprang from its dark, rich mould were tall and great of
girth. A bright stream flashed through it, and the sunshine fell warm
upon the grass and changed the tassels of the maize into golden plumes.
Above the valley, east and north and south, rose the hills, clad in
living green, mantled with the purpling grape, wreathed morn and eve
with trailing mist. To the westward were the mountains, and they dwelt
apart in a blue haze. Only in the morning, if the mist were not there,
the sunrise struck upon their long summits, and in the evening they
stood out, high and black and fearful, against the splendid sky. The
child who played beside the cabin door often watched them as the valley
filled with shadows, and thought of them as a great wall between her
and some land of the fairies which must needs lie beyond that barrier,
beneath the splendor and the evening star. The Indians called them the
Endless Mountains, and the child never doubted that they ran across the
world and touched the floor of heaven.
In the hands of the woman who was spinning the thread broke and the
song died in the white throat of the girl who stood in the doorway.
For a moment the two gazed with widening eyes into the green September
world without the cabin; then the woman sprang to her feet, tore from
the wall a horn, and, running to the door, wound it lustily. The echoes
from the hills had not died when a man and a boy, the one bearing a
musket, the other an axe, burst from the shadow of the forest, and at
a run crossed the greensward and the field of maize between them and
the women. The child let fall her pine cones and pebbles, and fled to
her mother, to cling to her skirts, and look with brown, frightened
eyes for the wonder that should follow the winding of the horn. Only
twice could she remember that clear summons for her father: once when
it was winter and snow was on the ground, and a great wolf, gaunt and
bold, had fallen upon their sheep; and once when a drunken trader from
Germanna, with a Pamunkey who had tasted of the trader’s rum, had not
waited for an invitation before entering the cabin. It was not winter
now, and there was no sign of the red-faced trader or of the dreadful,
capering Indian. There was only a sound in the air, a strange noise
coming to them from the pass between the hills over which rose the sun.
The man with the musket sent his voice before him as he approached
the group upon the doorstep: “Alce, woman! What’s amiss? I see naught
wrong!”
His wife stepped forward to meet him. “There’s naught to see, William.
It’s to hear. There was a noise. Molly and I heard it, and then we lost
it. There it is again!”
Fronting the cabin, beyond the maize field and the rich green grass
and the placid stream, rose two hills, steep and thickly wooded, and
between them ran a narrow, winding, and rocky pass. Down this gorge, to
the listening pioneer, now came a confused and trampling sound.
“It is iron striking against the rocks!” he announced. “The hoofs of
horses”--
“Iron!” cried his wife. “The horses in Virginia go unshod! And what
should a troop of horse do here, beyond the frontier, where even the
rangers never come?”
The man shook his head, a frown of perplexity upon his bronzed and
bearded face. “It is the sound of the hoofs of horses,” he said, “and
they are coming through the pass. Hark!”
A trumpet blew, and there came a noise of laughter. The child pressed
close to her brother’s side. “Oh, Robin, maybe ’t is the fairies!”
Out from the gloom of the pass into the sunshine of the valley,
splashing through the stream, trampling the long grass, laughing, and
calling one rider to the other, burst a company of fifty horsemen. The
trumpet blew again, and the entire party, drawing rein, stared at the
unexpected maize field, the cabin, and the people about the door.
Between the intruders and the lonely folk, whose nearest neighbors were
twenty miles away, was only a strip of sunny grass, dotted over with
the stumps of trees that had been felled lest they afford cover for
attacking savages. A man, riding at the head of the invading party,
beckoned, somewhat imperiously, to the pioneer; and the latter, still
with his musket in the hollow of his arm, strode across the greensward,
and finding himself in the midst, not of rude traders and rangers,
but of easy, smiling, periwigged gentlemen, handsomely dressed and
accoutred, dropped the butt of his gun upon the ground, and took off
his squirrel-skin cap.
“You are deep in the wilderness, good fellow,” said the man who
had beckoned, and who was possessed of a stately figure, a martial
countenance, and an air of great authority. “How far is it to the
mountains?”
The pioneer stared at the long blue range, cloudlike in the distance.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I hunt to the eastward. Twenty miles,
maybe. You’re never going to climb them?”
“We are come out expressly to do so,” answered the other heartily,
“having a mind to drink the King’s health with our heads in the clouds!
We need another axeman to clear away the fallen trees and break the
nets of grapevine. Wilt go along amongst our rangers yonder, and earn a
pistole and undying fame?”
The woodsman looked from the knot of gentlemen to the troop of hardy
rangers, who, with a dozen ebony servants and four Meherrin Indians,
made up the company. Under charge of the slaves were a number of
packhorses. Thrown across one was a noble deer; a second bore a brace
of wild turkeys and a two-year-old bear, fat and tender; a third had a
legion of pots and pans for the cooking of the woodland cheer; while
the burden of several others promised heart’s content of good liquor.
From the entire troop breathed a most enticing air of gay daring and
good-fellowship. The gentlemen were young and of cheerful countenances;
the rangers in the rear sat their horses and whistled to the
woodpeckers in the sugar-trees; the negroes grinned broadly; even the
Indians appeared a shade less saturnine than usual. The golden sunshine
poured upon them all, and the blue mountains that no Englishman had
ever passed seemed for the moment as soft and yielding as the cloud
that slept along their summits. And no man knew what might be just
beyond the mountains: Frenchmen, certainly, and the great lakes and
the South Sea: but, besides these, might there not be gold, glittering
stones, new birds and beasts and plants, strange secrets of the hills?
It was only westward-ho! for a week or two, with good company and good
drink--
The woodsman shifted from one foot to the other, but his wife, who had
now crossed the grass to his side, had no doubts.
“You’ll not go, William!” she cried. “Remember the smoke that you saw
yesterday from the hilltop! If the Northern Indians are on the warpath
against the Southern, and are passing between us and the mountains,
there may be straying bands. I’ll not let you go!”
In her eagerness she clasped his arm with her hands. She was a comely,
buxom dame, and the circle on horseback, being for the most part young
and gallant, and not having seen a woman for some days, looked kindly
upon her.
“And so you saw a smoke, goodwife, and are afraid of roving Indians?”
said the gentleman who had spoken before. “That being the case, your
husband has our permission to stay behind. On my life, ’t is a shame to
ride away and leave you in danger of such marauders!”
“Will your Excellency permit me to volunteer for guard duty?” demanded
a young man who had pressed his horse to the leader’s side. “It’s odds,
though, that when you return this way you’ll find me turned Papist.
I’ll swear your Excellency never saw in Flanders carved or painted
saint so worthy of your prayers as yonder breathing one!”
The girl Molly had followed her parents, and now stood upon a little
grassy knoll, surveying with wide brown eyes the gay troop before her.
A light wind was blowing, and it wrapped her dress of tender, faded
blue around her young limbs, and lifted her loosened hair, gilded by
the sunshine into the likeness of an aureole. Her face was serious and
wondering, but fair as a woodland flower. She had placed her hand upon
the head of the child who was with her, clinging to her dress. The
green knoll formed a pedestal; behind was the sky, as blue as that of
Italy; the two figures might have been some painted altar-piece.
The sprightly company, which had taken for its motto “Sic juvat
transcendere montes,” looked and worshiped. There was a moment of
silent devotion, broken by one of the gentlemen demanding if ’t were
not time for dinner; another remarked that they might go much farther
and fare much worse, in respect of a cool, sweet spot in which to rest
during the heat of the afternoon; and a third boldly proposed that
they go no farther at all that day. Their leader settled the question
by announcing that, Mr. Mason’s suggestion finding favor in his sight,
they would forthwith dismount, dine, drink red wine and white, and
wear out the heat of the day in this sylvan paradise until four of
the clock, when the trumpet should sound for the mount; also, that if
the goodwife and her daughter would do them the honor to partake of
their rustic fare, their healths should be drunk in nothing less than
Burgundy.
As he spoke he swung himself from the saddle, pulled out his ruffles,
and raised his hat. “Ladies, permit me,”--a wave of his hand toward his
escort, who were now also on foot. “Colonel Robertson, Captain Clonder,
Captain Brooke, Mr. Haward, Mr. Beverley, Dr. Robinson, Mr. Fontaine,
Mr. Todd, Mr. Mason,--all of the Tramontane Order. For myself, I am
Alexander Spotswood, at your service.”
The pioneer, standing behind his wife, plucked her by the sleeve.
“Ecod, Alce, ’t is the Governor himself! Mind your manners!”
Alce, who had been a red-cheeked dairymaid in a great house in
England, needed no admonition. Her curtsy was profound; and when the
Governor took her by the hand and kissed her still blooming cheek, she
curtsied again. Molly, who had no memories of fine gentlemen and the
complaisance which was their due, blushed fire-red at the touch of his
Excellency’s lips, forgot to curtsy, and knew not where to look. When,
in her confusion, she turned her head aside, her eyes met those of the
young man who had threatened to turn Papist. He bowed, with his hand
upon his heart, and she blushed more deeply than before.
By now every man had dismounted, and the valley was ringing with the
merriment of the jovial crew. The negroes led the horses down the
stream, lightened them of saddle and bridle, and left them tethered
to saplings beneath which the grass grew long and green. The rangers
gathered fallen wood, and kindled two mighty fires, while the gentlemen
of the party threw themselves down beside the stream, upon a little
grassy rise shadowed by a huge sugar-tree. A mound of turf, flanked
by two spreading roots, was the Governor’s chair of state, and Alce
and Molly he must needs seat beside him. Not one of his gay company
but seemed an adept in the high-flown compliment of the age; out of
very idleness and the mirth born of that summer hour they followed
his Excellency’s lead, and plied the two simple women with all the
wordy ammunition that a tolerable acquaintance with the mythology of
the ancients and the polite literature of the present could furnish.
The mother and daughter did not understand the fine speeches, but
liked them passing well. In their lonely lives, a little thing made
conversation for many and many a day. As for these golden hours,--the
jingle and clank and mellow laughter, the ruffles and gold buttons
and fine cloth, these gentlemen, young and handsome, friendly-eyed,
silver-tongued, the taste of wine, the taste of flattery, the sunshine
that surely was never yet so bright,--ten years from now they would
still be talking of these things, still wishing that such a day could
come again.
The negroes were now busy around the fires, and soon the cheerful odor
of broiling meat rose and blended with the fragrance of the forest.
The pioneer, hospitably minded, beckoned to the four Meherrins, and
hastening with them to the patch of waving corn, returned with a goodly
lading of plump, green ears. A second foraging party, under guidance
of the boy, brought into the larder of the gentry half a dozen noble
melons, golden within and without. The woman whispered to the child,
and the latter ran to the cabin, filled her upgathered skirts with the
loaves of her mother’s baking, and came back to the group upon the
knoll beneath the sugar-tree. The Governor himself took the bread from
the little maid, then drew her toward him.
“Thanks, my pretty one,” he said, with a smile that for the moment
quite dispelled the expression of haughtiness which marred an otherwise
comely countenance. “Come, give me a kiss, sweeting, and tell me thy
name.”
The child looked at him gravely. “My name is Audrey,” she answered,
“and if you eat all of our bread we’ll have none for supper.”
The Governor laughed, and kissed the small dark face. “I’ll give thee a
gold moidore, instead, my maid. Odso! thou’rt as dark and wild, almost,
as was my little Queen of the Saponies that died last year. Hast never
been away from the mountains, child?”
Audrey shook her head, and thought the question but a foolish one. The
mountains were everywhere. Had she not been to the top of the hills,
and seen for herself that they went from one edge of the world to the
other? She was glad to slip from the Governor’s encircling arm, and
from the gay ring beneath the sugar-tree; to take refuge with herself
down by the water side, and watch the fairy tale from afar off.
The rangers, with the pioneer and his son for their guests, dined
beside the kitchen fire, which they had kindled at a respectful
distance from the group upon the knoll. Active, bronzed and daring men,
wild riders, bold fighters, lovers of the freedom of the woods, they
sprawled upon the dark earth beneath the walnut-trees, laughed and
joked, and told old tales of hunting or of Indian warfare. The four
Meherrins ate apart and in stately silence, but the grinning negroes
must needs endure their hunger until their masters should be served.
One black detachment spread before the gentlemen of the expedition a
damask cloth; another placed upon the snowy field platters of smoking
venison and turkey, flanked by rockahominy and sea-biscuit, corn
roasted Indian fashion, golden melons, and a quantity of wild grapes
gathered from the vines that rioted over the hillside; while a third
set down, with due solemnity, a formidable array of bottles. There
being no chaplain in the party, the grace was short. The two captains
carved, but every man was his own Ganymede. The wines were good and
abundant: there was champagne for the King’s health; claret in which
to pledge themselves, gay stormers of the mountains; Burgundy for the
oreads who were so gracious as to sit beside them, smile upon them,
taste of their mortal fare.
Sooth to say, the oreads were somewhat dazed by the company they
were keeping, and found the wine a more potent brew than the liquid
crystal of their mountain streams. Red roses bloomed in Molly’s
cheeks; her eyes grew starry, and no longer sought the ground; when
one of the gentlemen wove a chaplet of oak leaves, and with it crowned
her loosened hair, she laughed, and the sound was so silvery and
delightful that the company laughed with her. When the viands were
gone, the negroes drew the cloth, but left the wine. When the wine
was well-nigh spent, they brought to their masters long pipes and
japanned boxes filled with sweet-scented. The fragrant smoke, arising,
wrapped the knoll in a bluish haze. A wind had arisen, tempering the
blazing sunshine, and making low music up and down the hillsides.
The maples blossomed into silver, the restless poplar leaves danced
more and more madly, the hemlocks and great white pines waved their
broad, dark banners. Above the hilltops the sky was very blue, and the
distant heights seemed dream mountains and easy of climbing. A soft
and pleasing indolence, born of the afternoon, the sunlight, and the
red wine, came to dwell in the valley. One of the company beneath the
spreading sugar-tree laid his pipe upon the grass, clasped his hands
behind his head, and, with his eyes on the azure heaven showing between
branch and leaf, sang the song of Amiens of such another tree in such
another forest. The voice was manly, strong, and sweet; the rangers
quit their talk of war and hunting to listen, and the negroes, down by
the fire which they had built for themselves, laughed for very pleasure.
When the wine was all drunken and the smoke of the tobacco quite blown
away, a gentleman who seemed of a somewhat saturnine disposition, and
less susceptible than his brother adventurers to the charms of the
wood nymphs, rose, and declared that he would go a-fishing in the
dark crystal of the stream below. His servant brought him hook and
line, while the grasshoppers in the tall grass served for bait. A rock
jutting over the flood formed a convenient seat, and a tulip-tree lent
a grateful shade. The fish were abundant and obliging; the fisherman
was happy. Three shining trophies had been landed, and he was in the
act of baiting the hook that should capture the fourth, when his eyes
chanced to meet the eyes of the child Audrey, who had left her covert
of purple-berried alder, and now stood beside him. Tithonus, green and
hale, skipped from between his fingers, and he let fall his line to
put out a good-natured hand and draw the child down to a seat upon the
rock. “Wouldst like to try thy skill, moppet?” he demanded.
The child shook her head. “Are you a prince?” she asked, “and is the
grand gentleman with, the long hair and the purple coat the King?”
The fisherman laughed. “No, little one, I’m only a poor ensign. The
gentleman yonder, being the representative in Virginia of my Lord of
Orkney and his Majesty King George the First, may somewhat smack of
royalty. Indeed, there are good Virginians who think that were the King
himself amongst us he could not more thoroughly play my Lord Absolute.
But he’s only the Governor of Virginia, after all, bright eyes.”
“Does he live in a palace, like the King? My father once saw the King’s
house in a place they call London.”
The gentleman laughed again. “Ay, he lives in a palace, a red brick
palace, sixty feet long and forty feet deep, with a bauble on top
that’s all afire on birth-nights. There are green gardens, too, with
winding paths, and sometimes pretty ladies walk in them. Wouldst like
to see all these fine things?”
The child nodded. “Ay, that I would! Who is the gentleman that sang,
and that now sits by Molly? See! with his hand touching her hair. Is he
a Governor, too?”
The other glanced in the direction of the sugar-tree, raised his
eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his fishing. “That
is Mr. Marmaduke Haward,” he said, “who, having just come into a great
estate, goes abroad next month to be taught the newest, most genteel
mode of squandering it. Dost not like his looks, child? Half the ladies
of Williamsburgh are enamored of his _beaux yeux_.”
Audrey made no answer, for just then the trumpet blew for the mount,
and the fisherman must needs draw in and pocket his hook and line.
Clear, high, and sweet, the triumphant notes pierced the air, and were
answered from the hills by a thousand fairy horns. The martial-minded
Governor would play the soldier in the wilderness; his little troop of
gentlemen and rangers and ebony servants had come out well drilled for
their tilt against the mountains. The echoes were still ringing, when,
with laughter, some expenditure of wit, and much cheerful swearing, the
camp was struck. The packhorses were again laden, the rangers swung
themselves into their saddles, and the gentlemen beneath the sugar-tree
rose from the grass, and tendered their farewells to the oreads.
Alce roundly hoped that their Honors would pass that way again upon
their return from the high mountains, and the deepening rose of Molly’s
cheeks and her wistful eyes added weight to her mother’s importunity.
The Governor swore that in no great time they would dine again in the
valley, and his companions confirmed the oath. His Excellency, turning
to mount his horse, found the pioneer at the animal’s head.
“So, honest fellow,” he exclaimed good-naturedly, “you will not with
us to grave your name upon the mountain tops? Let me tell you that you
are giving Fame the go-by. To march against the mountains and overcome
them as though they were so many Frenchmen, and then to gaze into the
promised land beyond--Odso, man, we are as great as were Cortez and
Pizarro and their crew! We are heroes and paladins! We are the Knights
of”--
His horse, impatient to be gone, struck with a ringing sound an
iron-shod hoof against a bit of rock. “The Knights of the Horseshoe,”
said the gentleman nearest the Governor.
Spotswood uttered a delighted exclamation: “’Gad, Mr. Haward, you’ve
hit it! Well-nigh the first horseshoes used in Virginia--the number
we were forced to bring along--the sound of the iron against the
rocks--the Knights of the Horseshoe! ’Gad, I’ll send to London and have
little horseshoes--little gold horseshoes--made, and every man of us
shall wear one. The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe! It hath an odd,
charming sound, eh, gentlemen?”
None of the gentlemen were prepared to deny that it was a quaint and
pleasing title. Instead, out of very lightness of heart and fantastic
humor, they must needs have the Burgundy again unpacked, that they
might pledge at once all valorous discoverers, his Excellency the
Governor of Virginia, and their new-named order. And when the wine was
drunk, the rangers were drawn up, the muskets were loaded, and a volley
was fired that brought the echoes crashing about their heads. The
Governor mounted, the trumpet sounded once more, and the joyous company
swept down the narrow valley toward the long, blue, distant ranges.
The pioneer, his wife and children, watched them go. One of the
gentlemen turned in his saddle and waved his hand. Alce curtsied, but
Molly, at whom he had looked, saw him not, because her eyes were full
of tears. The company reached and entered a cleft between the hills; a
moment, and men and horses were lost to sight; a little longer, and not
even a sound could be heard.
It was as though they had taken the sunshine with them; for a cloud had
come up from the west, and the sun was hidden. All at once the valley
seemed a sombre and lonely place, and the hills with their whispering
trees looked menacingly down upon the clearing, the cabin, and the five
simple English folk. The glory of the day was gone. After a little more
of idle staring, the frontiersman and his son returned to their work in
the forest, while Alce and Molly went indoors to their spinning, and
Audrey sat down upon the doorstep to listen to the hurry of voices in
the trees, and to watch the ever-deepening shadow of the cloud above
the valley.
CHAPTER II
THE COURT OF THE ORPHAN
An hour before dusk found the company that had dined in the valley
making their way up the dry bed of a stream, through a gorge which
cleft a line of precipitous hills. On either hand the bank rose
steeply, giving no footing for man or beast. The road was a difficult
one; for here a tall, fern-crowned rock left but a narrow passage
between itself and the shaggy hillside, and there smooth and slippery
ledges, mounting one above the other, spanned the way. In places,
too, the drought had left pools of dark, still water, difficult to
avoid, and not infrequently the entire party must come to a halt while
the axemen cleared from the path a fallen birch or hemlock. Every
man was afoot, none caring to risk a fall upon the rocks or into
the black, cold water of the pools. The hoofs of the horses and the
spurs of the men clanked against the stones; now and then one of the
heavily laden packhorses stumbled and was sworn at, and once a warning
rattle, issuing from a rank growth of fern on the hillside, caused
a momentary commotion. There was no more laughter, or whistling, or
calling from the van to the rear guard. The way was arduous, and every
man must watch his footsteps; moreover, the last rays of the sun were
gilding the hilltops above them, and the level that should form their
camping-place must be reached before the falling of the night.
The sunlight had all but faded from the heights, when one of the
company, stumbling over a round and mossy rock, measured his length
upon the ground, amid his own oaths at his mishap, and the exclamations
of the man immediately in his rear, whose progress he had thus
unceremoniously blocked. The horse of the fallen man, startled by the
dragging at the reins, reared and plunged, and in a moment the entire
column was in disorder. When the frightened animals were at last
quieted, and the line re-formed, the Governor called out to know who it
was that had fallen, and whether any damage had been suffered.
“It was Mr. Haward, sir!” cried two or three; and presently the injured
gentleman himself, limping painfully, and with one side of his fine
green coat all stained by reason of contact with a bit of muddy ground,
appeared before his Excellency.
“I have had a cursed mishap,--saving your presence, sir,” he explained.
“The right ankle is, I fear, badly sprained. The pain, is exquisite,
and I know not how I am to climb mountains.”
The Governor uttered an exclamation of concern: “Unfortunate! Dr.
Robinson must look to the hurt at once.”
“Your Excellency forgets my dispute with Dr. Robinson as to the dose
of Jesuit bark for my servant,” said the sufferer blandly. “Were I _in
extremis_ I should not apply to him for relief.”
“I’ll lay my life that you are not _in extremis_ now,” retorted the
doctor. “If ever I saw a man with a sprained ankle keep his color so
marvelously, or heard him speak in so composed a tone! The pain must be
of a very unusual degree indeed!”
“It is,” answered Mr. Haward calmly. “I cannot possibly go on in this
condition, your Excellency, nor can I dream of allowing my unlucky
accident to delay this worshipful company in their ascent of the
mountains. I will therefore take my servant and ride slowly back to
the cabin which we left this afternoon. Doubtless the worthy pioneer
will give me shelter until my foot is healed, and I will rejoin your
Excellency upon your return through the valley.”
As he spoke, for the greater ease of the injured member, he leaned
against a towering lock. He was a handsome youth, with a trick of
keeping an unmoved countenance under even such a fire of laughter and
exclamation as greeted his announcement.
“And for this you would lose the passing of the Appalachian Mountains!”
cried Spotswood. “Why, man! from those heights we may almost see Lake
Erie; may find out how near we are to the French, how easily the
mountains may be traversed, what promise of success should his Majesty
determine to plant settlements beyond them or to hold the mountain
passes! There is service to be done and honor to be gained, and you
would lag behind because of a wrenched ankle! Zoons, sir! at Blenheim I
charged a whole regiment of Frenchmen, with a wound in my breast into
which you might have thrust your hand!”
The younger man shrugged his shoulders. “Beggars may not be choosers,”
he said coolly. “The sunlight is fast fading, and if we would be out of
this gorge before nightfall we must make no further tarrying. I have
your Excellency’s permission to depart?”
One of the gentlemen made a low-voiced but audible remark to his
neighbor, and another hummed a line from a love song. The horses moved
impatiently amongst the loose stones, and the rangers began to mutter
that night would be upon them before they reached a safer footing.
“Mr. Haward! Mr. Haward!” said the Governor sternly. “It is in my mind
that you meditate inflicting a greater harm than you have received.
Let me tell you, sir, if you think to so repay a simple-minded
hospitality”--
Mr. Haward’s eyes narrowed. “I own Colonel Spotswood for Governor of
Virginia,” he said, speaking slowly, as was his wont when he was angry.
“His office does not, I think, extend farther than that. As for these
pleasant-minded gentlemen who are not protected by their rank I beg to
inform them that in my fall my sword arm suffered no whit.”
Turning, he beckoned to a negro who had worked his way from the
servants in the rear, along the line of rangers, to the outskirts of
the group of gentlemen gathered around the Governor and the injured
man. “Juba,” he ordered, “draw your horse and mine to one side. Your
Excellency, may I again remind you that it draws toward nightfall, and
that this road will be no pleasant one to travel in the dark?”
What he said was true; moreover, upon the setting out of the expedition
it had been laughingly agreed that any gentleman who might find his
spirits dashed by the dangers and difficulties of the way should be at
liberty at any time to turn his back upon the mountains, and his face
toward safety and the settlements. The Governor frowned, bit his lips,
but finally burst into unwilling laughter.
“You are a very young gentleman, Mr. Marmaduke Haward!” he cried. “Were
you a little younger, I know what ointment I should prescribe for
your hurt. Go your ways with your broken ankle; but if, when I come
again to the cabin in the valley, I find that your own injury has not
contented you, look to it that I do not make you build a bridge across
the bay itself! Gentlemen, Mr. Haward is bent upon intrusting his cure
to other and softer hands than Dr. Robinson’s, and the expedition must
go forward without him. We sorrow to lose him from our number, but we
know better than to reason with--ahem!--a twisted ankle. _En avant_,
gentlemen! Mr. Haward, pray have a care of yourself. I would advise
that the ankle be well bandaged, and that you stir not from the chimney
corner”--
“I thank your Excellency for your advice,” said Mr. Haward
imperturbably, “and will consider of taking it. I wish your Excellency
and these merry gentlemen a most complete victory over the mountains,
from which conquest I will no longer detain you.”
He bowed as he spoke, and began to move, slowly and haltingly, across
the width of the rocky way to where his negro stood with the two horses.
“Mr. Haward!” called the Governor.
The recreant turned his head. “Your Excellency?”
“It was the right foot, was it not?” queried his sometime leader. “Ah,
I thought so! Then it were best not to limp with the left.”
Homeric laughter shook the air; but while Mr. Haward laughed not,
neither did he frown or blush. “I will remember, sir,” he said simply,
and at once began to limp with the proper foot. When he reached the
bank he turned, and, standing with his arm around his horse’s neck,
watched the company which he had so summarily deserted, as it put
itself into motion and went slowly past him up its dusky road. The
laughter and bantering farewells moved him not; he could at will draw
a line around himself across which few things could step. Not far
away the bed of the stream turned, and a hillside, dark with hemlock,
closed the view. He watched the train pass him, reach this bend, and
disappear. The axemen and the four Meherrins, the Governor and the
gentlemen of the Horseshoe, the rangers, the negroes,--all were gone
at last. With that passing, and with the ceasing of the laughter and
the trampling, came the twilight. A whippoorwill began to call, and the
wind sighed in the trees. Juba, the negro, moved closer to his master;
then upon an impulse stooped, and lifting above his head a great rock,
threw it with might into one of the shallow pools. The crashing sound
broke the spell of the loneliness and quiet that had fallen upon the
place. The white man drew his breath, shrugged his shoulders, and
turned his horse’s head down the way up which he had so lately come.
The cabin in the valley was not three miles away. Down this ravine to
a level place of pines, through the pines to a strip of sassafras and
a poisoned field, past these into a dark, rich wood of mighty trees
linked together with the ripening grape, then three low hills, then
the valley and the cabin and a pair of starry eyes. It was full moon.
Once out from under the stifling walls of the ravine, and the silver
would tremble through the leaves, and show the path beneath. The trees,
too, that they had blazed,--with white wood pointing to white wood, the
backward way should be easy.
The earth, rising sheer in darkness on either hand, shut in the bed
of the stream. In the warm, scented dusk the locusts shrilled in the
trees, and far up the gorge the whippoorwill called and called. The
air was filled with the gold of fireflies, a maze of spangles, now
darkening, now brightening, restless and bewildering. The small, round
pools caught the light from the yet faintly colored sky, and gleamed
among the rocks; a star shone out, and a hot wind, heavy with the smell
of the forest, moved the hemlock boughs and rustled in the laurels.
The white man and the negro, each leading his horse, picked their way
with caution among the pitfalls of the rocky and uneven road. With the
passing of the Governor and his train a sudden cure had been wrought,
for now Haward’s step was as firm and light as it had been before his
fall. The negro looked at him once or twice with a puzzled face, but
made no comment and received no enlightenment. Indeed, so difficult
was their way that they were left but scant leisure for speech. Moment
by moment the darkness deepened, and once Haward’s horse came to its
knees, crashing down among the rocks and awakening every echo.
The way, if hard, was short. The hills fell farther apart, the banks
became low and broad, and fair in front, between two slender pines,
shone out the great round moon. Leaving the bed of the stream, the two
men entered a pine wood, dim and fragrant and easy to thread. The moon
rose higher, and the light fell in wide shafts between trees that stood
well apart, with no vines to grapple one to another or undergrowth to
press about their knees.
There needed no watchfulness: the ground was smooth, the light was
fair; no motion save the pale flicker of the fireflies, no sound save
the sigh of the night wind in the boughs that were so high overhead.
Master and man, riding slowly and steadily onward through a wood that
seemed interminably the same, came at last to think of other things
than the road which they were traveling. Their hands lost grasp upon
the reins, and their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed
steadfastly down the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no
longer hole and branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe
had made for guidance. The vision of the slave was of supper at the
quarters, of the scraping of the fiddle in the red firelight, of the
dancing and the singing. The white man saw, at first, only a girl’s
face, shy and innocent,--the face of the woodland maid who had fired
his fancy, who was drawing him through the wilderness back to the cabin
in the valley. But after a while, in the gray stillness, he lost the
face, and suddenly thought, instead, of the stone that was to cover
his father’s grave. The ship that was to bring the great, dark, carven
slab should be in by now; the day after his return to Williamsburgh the
stone must be put in place, covering in the green sod and that which
lay below. _Here, lieth in the hope of a joyful resurrection_--
His mind left the grave in the churchyard at Williamsburgh, and
visited the great plantation of which he was now sole master. There
was the house, foursquare, high-roofed, many-windowed, built of dark
red brick that glowed behind the veil of the walnuts and the oaks.
There, too, were the quarters,--the home quarter, that at the creek,
that on the ridge. Fifty white servants, three hundred slaves,--and
he was the master. The honeysuckles in the garden that had been his
father’s pride, the shining expanse of the river, the ship--his ship,
the Golden Rose--that was to take him home to England,--he forgot
the night and the forest, and saw these things quite plainly. Then
he fell to thinking of London and the sweets that he meant to taste,
the heady wine of youth and life that he meant to drain to the lees.
He was young; he could spare the years. One day he would come back to
Virginia, to the dim old garden and quiet house. His factor would give
account, and he would settle down in the red brick house, with the
tobacco to the north and east, the corn to the west, and to the south
the mighty river,--the river silvered by the moon, the river that lay
just beyond him, gleaming through the trees--
Startled by the sudden tightening of the reins, or by the tearing of
some frightened thing through the canes that beset the low, miry bank,
the horse sprang aside; then stood trembling with pricked ears. The
white man stared at the stream; turned in his saddle and stared at the
tree trunks, the patches of moonlight, and the impenetrable shadow that
closed each vista. “The blazed trees!” he exclaimed at last. “How long
since we saw one?”
The slave shook his head. “Juba forgot to look. He was away by a river
that he knew.”
“We have passed from out the pines,” said Haward. “These are oaks. But
what is that water, and how far we are out of our reckoning the Lord
only knows!”
As he spoke he pushed his horse through the tall reeds to the bank of
the stream. Here in the open, away from the shadow of the trees, the
full moon had changed the night-time into a wonderful, silver day.
Narrow above and belows the stream widened before him into a fairy
basin, rimmed with reeds, unruffled, crystal-clear, stiller than a
dream. The trees that grew upon the farther side were faint gray clouds
in the moonlight, and the gold of the fireflies was very pale. From
over the water, out of the heart of the moonlit wood, came the song
of a mockingbird, a tumultuous ecstasy, possessing the air and making
elfin the night.
Haward backed his horse from the reeds to the oak beneath which waited
the negro. “’Tis plain that we have lost our way, Juba,” he said,
with a laugh. “If you were an Indian, we should turn and straightway
retrace our steps to the blazed trees. Being what you are, you are more
valuable in the tobacco fields than in the forest. Perhaps this is the
stream which flows by the cabin in the valley. We’ll follow it down,
and so arrive, at least, at a conclusion.”
They dismounted, and, leading their horses, followed the stream for
some distance, to arrive at the conclusion that it was not the one
beside which they had dined that day. When they were certain of this,
they turned and made their way back to the line of reeds which they had
broken to mark their starting-point. By now the moon was high, and the
mockingbird in the wood across the water was singing madly. Turning
from the still, moonlit sheet, the silent reeds, the clear mimicker in
the slumbrous wood, the two wayfarers plunged into the darkness beneath
the spreading branches of the oak-trees. They could not have ridden far
from the pines; in a very little while they might reach and recognize
the path which they should tread.
An hour later, the great trees, oak and chestnut, beech and poplar,
suddenly gave way to saplings, many, close-set, and overrun with
grapevines. So dense was the growth, so unyielding the curtain of
vines, that men and horses were brought to a halt as before a fortress
wall. Again they turned, and, skirting that stubborn network, came upon
a swamp, where leafless trees, white as leprosy, stood up like ghosts
from the water that gleamed between the lily-pads. Leaving the swamp
they climbed a hill, and at the summit found only the moon and the
stars and a long plateau of sighing grass. Behind them were the great
mountains; before them, lesser heights, wooded hills, narrow valleys,
each like its fellow, each indistinct and shadowy, with no sign of
human tenant.
Haward gazed at the climbing moon and at the wide and universal dimness
of the world beneath; then turned to the negro, and pointed to a few
low trees growing at the eastern end of the plateau.
“Fasten the horses there, Juba,” he said. “We will wait upon this
hilltop until morning. When the light comes, we may be able to see the
clearing or the smoke from the cabin.”
When the horses had been tethered, master and man lay down upon the
grass. It was so still upon the hilltop, and the heavens pressed so
closely, that the slave grew restless and strove to make talk. Failing
in this, he began to croon a savage, mournful air, and presently,
forgetting himself, to sing outright.
“Be quiet!” ordered his master. “There may be Indians abroad.”
The song came to an end as abruptly as it lad begun, and the singer,
having nothing better to do, went fast asleep. His companion, more
wakeful, lay with his hands behind his head and his eyes upon the
splendor of the firmament. Lying so, he could not see the valleys nor
the looming mountains. There were only the dome of the sky, the grass,
and himself. He stared at the moon, and made pictures of her shadowy
places; then fell to thinking of the morrow, and of the possibility
that after all he might never find again the cabin in the valley. While
he laughed at this supposition, yet he played with it. He was in a mood
to think the loss of the trail of the expedition no great matter. The
woods were full of game, the waters of fish; he and Juba had only to
keep their faces to the eastward, and a fortnight at most would bring
them to the settlements. But the valleys folded among the hills were
many; what if the one he sought should still elude him? What if the
cabin, the sugar-tree, the crystal stream, had sunk from sight, like
the city in one of Monsieur Gralland’s fantastic tales? Perhaps they
had done so,--the spot had all the air of a bit of fairyland,--and the
woodland maid was gone to walk with the elves. Well, perchance for
her it would be better so. And yet it would be pleasant if she should
climb the hillside now and sit beside him, with her shy dark eyes and
floating hair. Her hair was long and fine, and the wind would lift it;
her face was fair, and another than the wind should kiss it. The night
would not then be so slow in going.
He turned upon his side, and looked along the grassy summit to the
woods upon the opposite slope and to the distant mountains. Dull
silver, immutable, perpetual, they reared themselves to meet the
moonbeams. Between him and those stern and changeless fronts, pallid as
with snows, stretched the gray woods. The moon shone very brightly, and
there was no wind. So unearthly was the quiet of the night, so solemn
the light, so high and still and calm the universe around him, that awe
fell upon his soul. It was well to lie upon the hilltop and guess at
the riddle of the world; now dimly to see the meaning, now to lose it
quite, to wonder, to think of death. The easy consciousness that for
him death was scores of years away, that he should not meet the spectre
until the wine was all drunken, the garlands withered, and he, the
guest, ready to depart, made these speculations not at all unpleasing.
He looked at his hand, blanched by the moonlight, lying beside him upon
the grass, and thought how like a dead hand it seemed, and what if he
could not move it, nor his body, nor could ever rise from the grass,
but must lie there upon the lonely hilltop in the untrodden wilderness,
until that which had ridden and hunted and passed so buoyantly through
life should become but a few dry bones, a handful of dust. He was of
his time, and its laxness of principle and conduct; if he held within
himself the potential scholar, statesman, and philosopher, there were
also the skeptic, the egotist, and the libertine. He followed the
fashion and disbelieved much, but he knew that if he died to-night
his soul would not stay with his body upon the hilltop. He wondered,
somewhat grimly, what it would do when so much that had clothed it
round--pride of life, love of pleasure, desire, ambition--should
be plucked away. Poor soul! Surely it would feel itself something
shrunken, stripped of warmth, shiveringly bare to all the winds of
heaven. The radiance of the moon usurped the sky, but behind that veil
of light the invisible and multitudinous stars were shining. Beyond
those stars were other stars, beyond those yet others; on and on went
the stars, wise men said. Beyond them all, what then? And where was the
place of the soul? What would it do? What heaven or hell would it find
or make for itself? Guesswork all!
The silver pomp of the night began to be oppressive to him. There was
beauty, but it was a beauty cold and distant, infinitely withdrawn
from man and his concerns. Woods and mountains held aloof, communing
with the stars. They were kindred and of one house; it was man who
was alien, a stranger and alone. The hilltop cared not that he lay
thereon; the grass would grow as greenly when he was in his grave; all
his tragedies since time began he might reenact there below, and the
mountains would not bend to look.
He flung his arm across his eyes to shut out the moonlight, and tried
to sleep. Finding the attempt a vain one, and that the night pressed
more and more heavily upon him, he sat up with the intention of shaking
the negro awake, and so providing himself with other company than his
own thoughts.
His eyes had been upon the mountains, but now, with the sudden
movement, he faced the eastern horizon and a long cleft between the
hills. Far down this opening something was on fire, burning fiercely
and redly. Some one must have put torch to the forest; and yet it did
not burn as trees burn. It was like a bonfire ... it was a bonfire in a
clearing! There were not woods about it, but a field--and the glint of
water--
The negro, awakened by foot and voice, sprang up, and stood bewildered
beside his master. “It is the valley that we have been seeking, Juba,”
said the latter, speaking rapidly and low. “That burning pile is the
cabin, and ’t is like that there are Indians between us and it! Leave
the horses; we shall go faster without them. Look to the priming of
your gun, and make no noise. Now!”
Rapidly descending the hill, they threw themselves into the woods at
its base. Here they could not see the fire, but now and then, as they
ran, they caught the glow, far down the lines of trees. Though they
went swiftly they went warily as well, keeping an eye and ear open
and muskets ready. But there was no sound other than their own quick
footfalls upon the floor of rotting leaves, or the eager brushing of
their bodies through occasional undergrowth; no sight but the serried
trees and the checkered light and shade upon the ground.
They came to the shallow stream that flashed through the valley, and
crossing it found themselves on cleared ground, with only a long strip
of corn between them and what had been a home for English folk. It was
that no longer: for lack of fuel the flames were dying down; there was
only a charred and smoking pile, out of which leaped here and there a
red tongue.
Haward had expected to hear a noise of savage triumph, and to see dark
figures moving about their handiwork. There was no noise, and the
moonlight showed no living being. The night was changelessly still and
bright; the tragedy had been played, and the mountains and the hills
and the running water had not looked.
It took but a few minutes to break through the rustling corn and reach
the smouldering logs. Once before them, there seemed naught to do but
to stand and stare at the ruin, until a tongue of flame caught upon a
piece of uncharred wood, and showed them the body of the pioneer lying
at a little distance from the stone that had formed his doorstep. At a
sign from Haward the negro went and turned it over, then, let it sink
again into the seared grass. “Two arrows, Marse Duke,” he said, coming
back to the other’s side. “An’ they’ve taken his scalp.”
Three times Haward made the round of the yet burning heap. Was it only
ruined and fallen walls, or was it a funeral pyre as well? To know, he
must wait for the day and until the fire had burned itself out. If the
former were the case, if the dead man alone kept the valley, then now,
through the forest and the moonlight, captives were being haled to some
Indian village, and to a fate more terrible than that of the man who
lay there upon the grass with an arrow through his heart.
If the girl were still alive, yet was she dead to him. He was no
Quixote to tilt with windmills. Had a way to rescue her lain fair
before him, he would have risked his life without a thought. But the
woods were deep and pathless, and only an Indian could find and keep a
trail by night. To challenge the wilderness; to strike blindly at the
forest, now here, now there; to dare all, and know that it was hopeless
daring,--a madman might do this for love. But it was only Haward’s
fancy that had been touched, and if he lacked not courage, neither did
he lack a certain cool good sense which divided for him the possible
from that which was impossible, and therefore not to be undertaken.
Turning from the ruin, he walked across the trampled sward to the
sugar-tree in whose shade, in the golden afternoon, he had sung to his
companions and to a simple girl. Idle and happy and far from harm had
the valley seemed.
“Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.”
Suddenly he found that he was trembling, and that a sensation of
faintness and of dull and sick revolt against all things under the
stars was upon him. Sitting down in the shadow of the tree, he rested
his face in his hands and shut his eyes, preferring the darkness within
to that outer night which hid not and cared not, which was so coldly at
peace. He was young, and though stories of such dismal things as that
before him were part of the stock in trade of every ancient, garrulous
man or woman of his acquaintance, they had been for him but tales; not
horrible truths to stare him in the face. He had seen his father die;
but he had died, in his bed, and like one who went to sleep.
The negro had followed him, and now stood with his eyes upon the
dying flames, muttering to himself some heathenish charm. When it was
ended, he looked about him uneasily for a time; then bent and plucked
his master by the sleeve. “We cyarn’ do nothin’ here, Marse Duke,” he
whispered. “An’ the wolves may get the horses.”
With a laugh and a groan, the young man rose to his feet. “That is
true, Juba,” he said. “It’s all over here,--we were too late. And it’s
not a pleasant place to lie awake in, waiting for the morning. We’ll go
back to the hilltop.”
Leaving the tree, they struck across the grass and entered the strip
of corn. Something low and dark that had lain upon the ground started
up before them, and ran down the narrow way between the stalks. Haward
made after it and caught it.
“Child!” he cried. “Where are the others?”
The child had struggled for a moment, desperately if weakly, but at the
sound of his voice she lay still in his grasp, with her eyes upon his
face. In the moonlight each could see the other quite plainly. Raising
her in his arms, Haward bore her to the brink of the stream, laved her
face and chafed the small, cold hands.
“Now tell me, Audrey,” he said at last. “Audrey is your name, isn’t it?
Cry, if you like, child, but try to tell me.”
Audrey did not cry. She was very, very tired, and she wanted to go to
sleep. “The Indians came,” she told him in a whisper, with her head
upon his breast. “We all waked up, and father fired at them through the
hole in the door. Then they broke the door down, and he went outside,
and they killed him. Mother put me under the bed, and told me to stay
there, and to make no noise. Then the Indians came in at the door,
and killed her and Molly and Robin. I don’t remember anything after
that,--maybe I went to sleep. When I was awake again the Indians were
gone, but there was fire and smoke everywhere. I was afraid of the
fire, and so I crept from under the bed, and kissed mother and Molly
and Robin, and left them lying in the cabin, and came away.”
She sighed with weariness, and the hand with which she put back her
dark hair that had fallen over her face was almost too heavy to lift.
“I sat beside father and watched the fire,” she said. “And then I heard
you and the black man coming over the stones in the stream. I thought
that you were Indians, and I went and hid in the corn.”
Her voice failed, and her eyelids drooped. In some anxiety Haward
watched her breathing and felt for the pulse in the slight brown wrist;
then, satisfied, he lifted the light burden, and, nodding to the negro
to go before, recommenced his progress to the hill which he had left an
hour agone.
It was not far away. He could see the bare summit above the treetops,
and in a little while they were upon its slope. A minute more and they
came to the clump of trees, and found the horses in safety, Haward
paused to take from the roll strapped behind his saddle a riding cloak;
then, leaving the negro with the horses, climbed to the grassy level.
Here he spread the cloak upon the ground, and laid the sleeping child
upon it, which done, he stood and looked at his new-found charge for a
moment; then turning, began to pace up and down upon the hilltop.
It was necessary to decide upon a course of action. They had the
horses, the two muskets, powder and shot. The earth was dry and warm,
and the skies were cloudless. Was it best to push on to Germanna, or
was it best to wait down there in the valley for the return of the
Governor and his party? They would come that way, that was certain, and
would look to find him there. If they found only the ruined cabin, they
might think him dead or taken by the Indians, and an attempt to seek
him, as dangerous, perhaps, as fruitless, might be made. He decided
that he would wait. To-morrow he would take Juba and the horses and the
child and go down into the valley; not back to the sugar-tree and that
yet smouldering pyre, but to the woods on this side of the stream.
This plan thought out, he went; and took his seat beside the child. She
was moaning in her sleep, and he bent over and soothed her. When she
was quiet he still kept her hand in his, as he sat there waiting for
the dawn. He gave the child small thought. Together he and Juba must
care for her until they could rejoin the expedition: then the Governor,
who was so fond of children, might take her in hand, and give her for
nurse old Dominick, who was as gentle as a woman. Once at Germanna
perhaps some scolding _Hausfrau_ would take her, for the sake of the
scrubbing and lifting to be gotten out of those small hands and that
slender frame. If not, she must on to Williamsburgh and the keeping of
the vestry there. The next Orphan Court would bind her to some master
or mistress who might (or might not) be kind to her, and so there would
be an end to the matter.
The day was breaking. Moon and stars were gone, and the east was dull
pink, like faded roses. A ribbon of silver mist, marking the course of
the stream below, drew itself like a serpent through the woods that
were changing from gray to green. The dank smell of early morning rose
from the dew-drenched earth, and in the countless trees of the forest
the birds began to sing.
A word or phrase which is as common and familiar as our hand may, in
some one minute of time, take on a significance and present a face so
keen and strange that it is as if we had never met it before. An Orphan
Court! Again he said the words to himself, and then aloud. No doubt
the law did its best for the fatherless and motherless, for such waifs
and strays as that which lay beside him. When it bound out children,
it was most emphatic that they should be fed and clothed and taught;
not starved or beaten unduly, or let to grow up ignorant as negroes.
Sometimes the law was obeyed, sometimes not.
The roses in the east bloomed again, and the pink of their petals
melted into the clear blue of the upper skies. Because their beauty
compelled him Haward looked at the heavens. The Court of the Orphan!...
_When my father and my mother forsake, me, the Lord taketh me up_.
Haward acknowledged with surprise that portions of the Psalter did
somehow stick in the memory.
The face of the child was dark and thin, but the eyes were large and
there was promise in the mouth. It was a pity--
He looked at her again, and suddenly resolved that he, Marmaduke
Haward, would provide for her future. When they met once more, he
should tell the Governor and his brother adventurers as much; and if
they chose to laugh, why, let them do so! He would take the child to
Williamsburgh with him, and get some woman to tend her until he could
find kind and decent folk with whom to bestow her. There were the new
minister of Fair View parish and his wife,--they might do. He would
give them two thousand pounds of sweet-scented a year for the child’s
maintenance. Oh, she should be well cared for! He would--if he thought
of it--send her gifts from London; and when she was grown, and asked in
marriage, he would give her for dowry a hundred acres of land.
As the strengthening rays of the sun, shining alike upon the just
and the unjust, warmed his body, so his own benevolence warmed his
heart. He knew that he was doing a generous thing, and his soul felt
in tune with the beamy light, the caroling of the birds, the freshness
and fragrance of the morning. When at last the child awoke, and, the
recollection of the night coming full upon her, clung to him, weeping
and trembling, he put his arm around her and comforted her with all the
pet names his memory could conjure up.
CHAPTER III
DARDEN’S AUDREY
It was May Day in Virginia, in the year 1727. In England there were
George the First, by the grace of God of Great Britain, France, and
Ireland King and Defender of the Faith; my Lord of Orkney, Governor
in chief of Virginia; and William Gooch, newly appointed Lieutenant
Governor. In Virginia there were Colonel Robert Carter, President of
the Council and Governor _pro tem._; the Council itself; and Mistress
Martha Jaquelin.
By virtue of her good looks and sprightliness, the position of her
father in the community, and the fact that this 1st of May was one and
the same with her sixteenth birthday, young Mistress Jaquelin was May
Queen in Jamestown. And because her father was a worthy gentleman and
a gay one, with French blood in his veins and Virginia hospitality in
his heart, he had made a feast for divers of his acquaintances, and,
moreover, had provided, in a grassy meadow down by the water side, a
noble and seasonable entertainment for them, and for the handful of
townsfolk, and for all chance comers.
Meadow and woodland and marsh, ploughed earth and blossoming orchards,
lay warm in the sunshine. Even the ruined town, fallen from her estate,
and become but as a handmaid to her younger sister, put a good face
upon her melancholy fortunes. Honeysuckle and ivy embraced and hid
crumbling walls, broken foundations, mounds of brick and rubbish, all
the untouched memorials of the last burning of the place. Grass grew
in the street, and the silent square was strewn with the gold of the
buttercups. The houses that yet stood and were lived in might have been
counted on the fingers of one hand, with the thumb for the church.
But in their gardens the flowers bloomed gayly, and the sycamores and
mulberries in the churchyard were haunts of song. The dead below had
music, and violets in the blowing grass, and the undertone of the
river. Perhaps they liked the peace of the town that was dead as they
were dead; that, like them, had seen of the travail of life, and now,
with shut eyes and folded hands, knew that it was vanity.
But the Jaquelin house was built to the eastward of the churchyard and
the ruins of the town, and, facing the sparkling river, squarely turned
its back upon the quiet desolation at the upper end of the island and
upon the text from Ecclesiastes.
In the level meadow, around a Maypole gay with garlands and with
fluttering ribbons, the grass had been closely mown, for there were
to be foot-races and wrestling bouts for the amusement of the guests.
Beneath a spreading tree a dozen fiddlers put their instruments in
tune, while behind the open windows of a small, ruinous house, dwelt in
by the sexton, a rustic choir was trying over “The Beggar’s Daughter of
Bednall Green.” Young men and maidens of the meaner sort, drawn from
the surrounding country, from small plantation, store and ordinary,
mill and ferry, clad in their holiday best and prone to laughter,
strayed here and there, or, walking up and down the river bank, where
it commanded a view of both the landing and the road, watched for the
coming of the gentlefolk. Children, too, were not lacking, but rolled
amidst the buttercups or caught at the ribbons flying from the Maypole,
while aged folk sat in the sun, and a procession of wide-lipped
negroes, carrying benches and chairs, advanced to the shaven green and
put the seats in order about the sylvan stage. It was but nine of the
clock, and the shadow of the Maypole was long upon the grass. Along the
slightly rising ground behind the meadow stretched an apple orchard in
full bloom, and between that line of rose and snow and the lapping of
the tide upon the yellow sands lay, for the length of a spring day, the
kingdom of all content.
The shadow of the Maypole was not much shrunken when the guests of the
house of Jaquelin began to arrive. First to come, and from farthest
away, was Mr. Richard Ambler, of Yorktown, who had ridden from that
place to Williamsburgh the afternoon before, and had that morning
used the planter’s pace to Jamestown,--his industry being due to the
fact that he was courting the May Queen’s elder sister. Following
him came five Lees in a chariot, then a delegation of Burwells, then
two Digges in a chaise. A Bland and a Bassett and a Randolph came on
horseback, while a barge brought up river a bevy of blooming Carters, a
white-sailed sloop from Warwick landed a dozen Carys, great and small,
and two periaguas, filled with Harrisons, Aliens, and Cockes, shot over
from the Surrey shore.
From a stand at one end of the grassy stage, trumpet and drum
proclaimed that the company had gathered beneath the sycamores before
the house, and was about to enter the meadow. Shrill-voiced mothers
warned their children from the Maypole, the fiddlers ceased their
twanging, and Pretty Bessee, her name cut in twain, died upon the air.
The throng of humble folk--largely made up of contestants for the
prizes of the day, and of their friends and kindred--scurried to its
appointed place, and with the issuing from the house gates of the May
Queen and her court the festivities commenced.
An hour later, in the midst of a bout at quarterstaff between the
Jamestown blacksmith and the miller from Princess Creek, a coach and
four, accompanied by a horseman, crossed the neck, rolled through the
street, and, entering the meadow, drew up a hundred feet from the ring
of spectators.
The eyes of the commonalty still hung upon every motion of the
blacksmith and the miller, but by the people of quality the cudgelers
were for the moment quite forgot. The head of the house of Jaquelin
hurried over the grass to the coach door. “Ha, Colonel Byrd! When we
heard that you were staying overnight at Green Spring, we hoped that,
being so near, you would come to our merrymaking. Mistress Evelyn, I
kiss your hands. Though we can’t give you the diversions of Spring
Garden, yet such as we have are at your feet. Mr. Marmaduke Haward,
your servant, sir! Virginia has missed you these ten years and more.
We were heartily glad to hear, t’other day, that the Golden Rose had
brought you home.”
As he spoke the worthy gentleman strove to open the coach door; but the
horseman, to whom the latter part of his speech was addressed, and who
had now dismounted, was beforehand with him. The door swung open, and a
young lady, of a delicate and pensive beauty, placed one hand upon the
deferential arm of Mr. Marmaduke Haward and descended from the painted
coach to the flower-enameled sward. The women amongst the assembled
guests fluttered and whispered; for this was youth, beauty, wealth,
London, and the Court, all drawn in the person of Mistress Evelyn Byrd,
bred since childhood in the politest society of England, newly returned
with her father to his estate of Westover in Virginia, and, from her
garlanded gypsy hat to the point of her silken shoe, suggestive of the
rainbow world of _mode_.
Her father--alert, vivacious, handsome, with finely cut lips that
were quick to smile, and dark eyes that smiled when the lips were
still--followed her to the earth, shook out his ruffles, and extended
his gold snuffbox to his good friend Mr. Jaquelin. The gentleman who
had ridden beside the coach threw the reins of his horse to one of the
negroes who had come running from the Jaquelin stables, and, together
with their host, the three walked across the strip of grass to the row
of expectant gentry. Down went the town-bred lady until the skirt of
her blue-green gown lay in folds upon the buttercups; down went the
ladies opposite in curtsies as profound, if less exquisitely graceful.
Off came the hats of the gentlemen; the bows were of the lowest;
snuffboxes were drawn out, handkerchiefs of fine holland flourished;
the welcoming speeches were hearty and not unpolished.
It was a society less provincial than that of more than one shire that
was nearer to London by a thousand leagues. It dwelt upon the banks
of the Chesapeake and of great rivers; ships dropped their anchors
before its very doors. Now and again the planter followed his tobacco
aboard. The sands did not then run so swiftly through the hourglass;
if the voyage to England was long, why, so was life! The planters
went, sold their tobacco,--Sweet-scented, E. Dees, Oronoko, Cowpen,
Non-burning,--talked with their agents, visited their English kindred;
saw the town, the opera, and the play,--perhaps, afar off, the King;
and returned to Virginia and their plantations with the last but one
novelty in ideas, manner, and dress. Of their sons not a few were
educated in English schools, while their wives and daughters, if for
the most part they saw the enchanted ground only through the eyes of
husband, father, or brother, yet followed its fashions, when learned,
with religious zeal. In Williamsburgh, where all men went on occasion,
there was polite enough living: there were the college, the Capitol,
and the playhouse; the palace was a toy St. James; the Governors that
came and went almost as proper gentlemen, fitted to rule over English
people, as if they had been born in Hanover and could not speak their
subjects’ tongue.
So it was that the assembly which had risen to greet Mr. Jaquelin’s
latest guests, besides being sufficiently well born, was not at all
ill bred, nor uninformed, nor untraveled. But it was not of the gay
world as were the three whom it welcomed. It had spent only months, not
years, in England; it had never kissed the King’s hand; it did not know
Bath nor the Wells; it was innocent of drums and routs and masquerades;
had not even a speaking acquaintance with great lords and ladies; had
never supped with Pope, or been grimly smiled upon by the Dean of St.
Patrick’s, or courted by the Earl of Peterborough. It had not, like the
elder of the two men, studied in the Low Countries, visited the Court
of France, and contracted friendships with men of illustrious names;
nor, like the younger, had it written a play that ran for two weeks,
fought a duel in the Field of Forty Footsteps, and lost and won at the
Cocoa Tree, between the lighting and snuffing of the candles, three
thousand pounds.
Therefore it stood slightly in awe of the wit and manners and fine
feathers, curled newest fashion, of its sometime friends and neighbors,
and its welcome, if warm at heart, was stiff as cloth of gold with
ceremony. The May Queen tripped in her speech as she besought Mistress
Evelyn to take the flower-wreathed great chair standing proudly forth
from the humbler seats, and colored charmingly at the lady of fashion’s
smiling shake of the head and few graceful words of homage. The young
men slyly noted the length of the Colonel’s periwig and the quality of
Mr. Hayward’s Mechlin, while their elders, suddenly lacking material
for discourse, made shift to take a deal of snuff. The Colonel took
matters into his own capable hands.
“Mr. Jaquelin, I wish that my tobacco at Westover may look as finely
a fortnight hence as does yours to-day! There promise to be more
Frenchmen in my fields than Germans at St. James. Mr. Gary, if I
come to Denbigh when the peaches are ripe, will you teach me to make
persico? Mr. Allen, I hear that you breed cocks as courageous as those
of Tanagra. I shall borrow from you for a fight that I mean to give.
Ladies, for how much gold will you sell the recipe for that balm of
Mecca you must use? There are dames at Court would come barefoot to
Virginia for so dazzling a bloom. Why do you patch only upon the Whig
side of the face? Are you all of one camp, and does not one of you grow
a white rosebush against the 29th of May? May it please your Majesty
the May Queen, I shall watch the sports from this seat upon your right
hand. Egad, the miller quits himself as though he were the moss-grown
fellow of Sherwood Forest!”
The ice had thawed; and by the time the victorious miller had
been pushed forward to receive the smart cocked hat which was the
Virginia rendition of the crown of wild olive, it had quite melted.
Conversation became general, and food was found or made for laughter.
When the twelve fiddlers who succeeded the blacksmith and the miller
came trooping upon the green, they played, one by one, to perhaps as
light-hearted a company as a May Day ever shone upon. All their tunes
were gay and lively ones, and the younger men moved their feet to the
music, while a Strephon at the lower end of the lists seized upon a
blooming Chloe, and the two began to dance “as if,” quoth the Colonel,
“the musicians were so many tarantula doctors.”
A flower-wreathed instrument of his calling went to the player of the
sprightliest air; after which awardment, the fiddlers, each to the tune
of his own choosing, marched off the green to make room for Pretty
Bessee, her father the beggar, and her suitors the innkeeper, the
merchant, the gentleman, and the knight.
The high, quick notes of the song suited the sunshiny weather, the
sheen of the river, the azure skies. A light wind brought from the
orchard a vagrant troop of pink and white petals to camp upon the
silken sleeve of Mistress Evelyn Byrd. The gentleman sitting beside her
gathered them up and gave them again to the breeze.
“It sounds sweetly enough,” he said, “but terribly old-fashioned:--
‘I weigh not true love by the weight of the purse,
And beauty is beauty in every degree.’
That’s not Court doctrine.”
The lady to whom he spoke rested her cheek upon her hand, and looked
past the singers to the blossoming slope and the sky above. “So much
the worse for the Court,” she said. “So much the better for”--
Haward glanced at her. “For Virginia?” he ended, with a smile. “Do you
think that they do not weigh love with gold here in Virginia, Evelyn?
It isn’t really Arcady.”
“So much the better for some place, somewhere,” she answered quietly.
“I did not say Virginia. Indeed, from what travelers like yourself have
told me, I think the country lies not upon this earth. But the story is
at an end, and we must applaud with the rest. It sounded sweetly, after
all,--though it was only a lying song. What next?”
Her father, from his station beside the May Queen, caught the question,
and broke the flow of his smiling compliments to answer it. “A race
between young girls, my love,--the lucky fair who proves her descent
from Atalanta to find, not a golden apple, but a golden guinea. Here
come from the sexton’s house the pretty light o’ heels!”
The crowd, gentle and simple, arose, and pushed back all benches,
stools, and chairs, so as to enlarge the circumference of the ring, and
the six girls who were to run stepped out upon the green. The youngest
son of the house of Jaquelin checked them off in a shrill treble:--
“The blacksmith’s Meg--Mall and Jenny from the crossroads ordinary--the
Widow Constance’s Barbara--red-headed Bess--Parson Darden’s Audrey!”
A tall, thin, grave gentleman, standing behind Haward, gave an
impatient jerk of his body and said something beneath his breath.
Haward looked over his shoulder. “Ha, Mr. Le Neve! I did not know you
were there. I had the pleasure of hearing you read at Williamsburgh
last Sunday afternoon,--though this is your parish, I believe? What was
that last name that the youngster cried? I failed to catch it.”
“Audrey, sir,” answered the minister of James City parish; “Gideon
Darden’s Audrey. You can’t but have heard of Darden? A minister of the
gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, sir; and a scandal, a shame, and a
stumbling-block to the Church! A foul-mouthed, brawling, learned sot! A
stranger to good works, but a frequenter of tippling houses! A brazen,
dissembling, atheistical Demas, who will neither let go of the lusts
of the flesh nor of his parish,--a sweet-scented parish, sir, with the
best glebe in three counties! And he’s inducted, sir, inducted, which
is more than most of the clergy of Virginia, who neither fight nor
drink nor swear, can say for themselves!”
The minister had lost his gravity, and spoke with warmth and
bitterness. As he paused for breath, Mistress Evelyn took her eyes from
the group of those about to run and opened her fan. “A careless father,
at least,” she said. “If he hath learning, he should know better than
to set his daughter there.”
“She’s not his own, ma’am. She’s an orphan, bound to Darden and his
wife, I suppose. There’s some story or other about her, but, not being
curious in Mr. Darden’s affairs, I have never learned it. When I came
to Virginia, five years ago, she was a slip of a girl of thirteen
or so. Once, when I had occasion to visit Darden, she waylaid me in
the road as I was riding away, and asked me how far it was to the
mountains, and if there were Indians between them and us.”
“Did she so?” asked Haward. “And which is--Audrey?”
“The dark one--brown as a gypsy--with the dogwood in her hair. And mark
me, there’ll be Darden’s own luck and she’ll win. She’s fleeter than
a greyhound. I’ve seen her running in and out and to and fro in the
forest like a wild thing.”
Bare of foot and slender ankle, bare of arm and shoulder, with heaving
bosom, shut lips, and steady eyes, each of the six runners awaited the
trumpet sound that should send her forth like an arrow to the goal, and
to the shining guinea that lay thereby. The spectators ceased to talk
and laugh, and bent forward, watching. Wagers had been laid, and each
man kept his eyes upon his favorite, measuring her chances. The trumpet
blew, and the race was on.
When it was over and won, the May Queen rose from her seat and crossed
the grass to her fine lady guest. “There are left only the prizes for
this and for the boys’ race and for the best dancer. Will you not give
them, Mistress Evelyn, and so make them of more value?”
More curtsying, more complimenting, and the gold was in Evelyn’s white
hand. The trumpet blew, the drum beat, the fiddlers swung into a quick,
staccato air, and Darden’s Audrey, leaving the post which she had
touched some seconds in advance of the foremost of those with whom she
had raced, came forward to receive the guinea.
The straight, short skirt of dull blue linen could not hide the lines
of the young limbs; beneath the thin, white, sleeveless bodice showed
the tint of the flesh, the rise and fall of the bosom. The bare feet
trod the grass lightly and firmly; the brown eyes looked from under the
dogwood chaplet in a gaze that was serious, innocent, and unashamed. To
Audrey they were only people out of a fairy tale,--all those gay folk,
dressed in silks and with curled hair. They lived in “great houses,”
and men and women were born to till their fields, to row their boats,
to doff hats or curtsy as they passed. They were not real; if you
pricked them they would not bleed. In the mountains that she remembered
as a dream there were pale masses of bloom far up among the cliffs;
very beautiful, but no more to be gained than the moon or than rainbow
gold. She looked at the May party before which she had been called much
as, when a child, she had looked at the gorgeous, distant bloom,--not
without longing, perhaps, but indifferent, too, knowing that it was
beyond her reach.
When the gold piece was held out to her, she took it, having earned it;
when the little speech with which the lady gave the guinea was ended,
she was ready with her curtsy and her “Thank you, ma’am.” The red came
into her cheeks because she was not used to so many eyes upon her, but
she did not blush for her bare feet, nor for her dress that had slipped
low over her shoulder, nor for the fact that she had run her swiftest
five times around the Maypole, all for the love of a golden guinea, and
for mere youth and pure-minded ignorance, and the springtime in the
pulses.
The gold piece lay within her brown fingers a thought too lightly, for
as she stepped back from the row of gentlefolk it slid from her hand to
the ground. A gentleman, sitting beside the lady who had spoken to her,
stooped, and picking up the money gave it again into her hand. Though
she curtsied to him, she did not look at him, but turned away, glad to
be quit of all the eyes, and in a moment had slipped into the crowd
from which she had come. It was midday, and old Israel, the fisherman,
who had brought her and the Widow Constance’s Barbara up the river
in his boat, would be going back with the tide. She was not loath to
leave: the green meadow, the gaudy Maypole, and the music were good,
but the silence on the river, the shadow of the brooding forest, the
darting of the fish hawk, were better.
In the meadow the boys’ race and the rustic dance were soon over. The
dinner at the Jaquelin house to its guests lasted longer, but it too
was hurried; for in the afternoon Mr. Harrison’s mare Nelly was to run
against Major Burwell’s Fearnaught, and the stakes were heavy.
Not all of the company went from the banquet back to the meadow, where
the humbler folk, having eaten their dinner of bread and meat and
ale, were whiling away with sports of their own the hour before the
race. Colonel Byrd had business at Williamsburgh, and must reach his
lodgings there an hour before sunset. His four black horses brought
to the door the great vermilion-and-cream coach; an ebony coachman in
scarlet cracked his whip at a couple of negro urchins who had kept
pace with the vehicle as it lumbered from the stables, and a light
brown footman flung open the door and lowered the steps. The Colonel,
much regretting that occasion should call him away, vowed that he had
never spent a pleasanter May Day, kissed the May Queen’s hand, and was
prodigal of well-turned compliments, like the gay and gallant gentleman
that he was. His daughter made her graceful adieux in her clear, low,
and singularly sweet voice, and together they were swallowed up of
the mammoth coach. Mr. Haward took snuff with Mr. Jaquelin; then,
mounting his horse,--it was supposed that he too had business in
Williamsburgh,--raised his hat and bade farewell to the company with
one low and comprehensive bow.
The equipage made a wide turn; the ladies and gentlemen upon the
Jaquelin porch fluttered fans and handkerchiefs; the Colonel, leaning
from the coach window, waved his hand; and the horseman lifted his hat
the second time. The very especial guests were gone; and though the
remainder of the afternoon was as merry as heart could wish, yet a
bouquet, a flavor, a tang of the Court and the great world, a breath of
air that was not colonial, had gone with them. For a moment the women
stood in a brown study, revolving in their minds Mistress Evelyn’s
gypsy hat and the exceeding thinness and fineness of her tucker; while
to each of the younger men came, linked to the memory of a charming
face, a vision of many-acred Westover.
But the trumpet blew, summoning them to the sport of the afternoon, and
work stopped upon castles in Spain. When a horse-race was on, a meadow
in Virginia sufficed.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROAD TO WILLIAMSBURGH
April had gone out in rain, and though the sun now shone brightly from
a cloudless sky, the streams were swollen and the road was heavy.
The ponderous coach and the four black horses made slow progress.
The creeping pace, the languid warmth of the afternoon, the scent of
flowering trees, the ceaseless singing of redbird, catbird, robin, and
thrush, made it drowsy in the forest. In the midst of an agreeable
dissertation upon May Day sports of more ancient times the Colonel
paused to smother a yawn; and when he had done with the clown, the
piper, and the hobby-horse, he yawned again, this time outright.
“What with Ludwell’s Burgundy, piquet, and the French peace, we sat
late last night. My eyes are as heavy as the road. Have you noticed,
my dear, how bland and dreamy is the air? On such an afternoon one is
content to be in Virginia, and out of the world. It is a very land of
the Lotophagi,--a lazy clime that Ulysses touched at, my love.”
The equipage slowly climbed an easy ascent, and as slowly descended
to the level again. The road was narrow, and now and then a wild
cherry-tree struck the coach with a white arm, or a grapevine swung
through the window a fragrant trailer. The woods on either hand were
pale green and silver gray, save where they were starred with dogwood,
or where rose the pink mist of the Judas-tree. At the foot of the hill
the road skirted a mantled pond, choked with broad green leaves and
the half-submerged trunks of fallen trees. Upon these logs, basking in
the sunlight, lay small tortoises by the score. A snake glided across
the road in front of the horses, and from a bit of muddy ground rose a
cloud of yellow butterflies.
The Colonel yawned for the third time, looked at his watch, sighed,
lifted his finely arched brows with a whimsical smile for his own
somnolence; then, with an “I beg your pardon, my love,” took out a lace
handkerchief, spread it over his face and head, and, crossing his legs,
sunk back into the capacious corner of the coach. In three minutes the
placid rise and fall of his ruffles bore witness that he slept.
The horseman, who, riding beside the lowered glass, had at intervals
conversed with the occupants of the coach, now glanced from the
sleeping gentleman to the lady, in whose dark, almond-shaped eyes
lurked no sign of drowsiness. The pond had been passed, and before
them, between low banks crowned with ferns and overshadowed by
beech-trees, lay a long stretch of shady road.
Haward drew rein, dismounted, and motioned to the coachman to check the
horses. When the coach had come to a standstill, he opened the door
with as little creaking as might be, and held out a petitionary hand.
“Will you not walk with me a little way, Evelyn?” he asked, speaking in
a low voice that he might not wake the sleeper. “It is much pleasanter
out here, with the birds and the flowers.”
His eyes and the smile upon his lips added, “and with me.” From what he
had been upon a hilltop, one moonlight night eleven years before, he
had become a somewhat silent, handsome gentleman, composed in manner,
experienced, not unkindly, looking abroad from his apportioned mountain
crag and solitary fortress upon men, and the busy ways of men, with
a tolerant gaze. That to certain of his London acquaintance he was
simply the well-bred philosopher and man of letters; that in the minds
of others he was associated with the peacock plumage of the world
of fashion, with the flare of candles, the hot breath of gamesters,
the ring of gold upon the tables; that one clique had tales to tell
of a magnanimous spirit and a generous hand, while yet another grew
red at mention of his name, and put to his credit much that was not
creditable, was perhaps not strange. He, like his neighbors, had many
selves, and each in its turn--the scholar, the man of pleasure, the
indolent, kindly, reflective self, the self of pride and cool assurance
and stubborn will--took its place behind the mask, and went through
its allotted part. His self of all selves, the quiet, remote, crowned,
and inscrutable _I_, sat apart, alike curious and indifferent, watched
the others, and knew how little worth the while was the stir in the
ant-hill.
But on a May Day, in the sunshine and the blossoming woods and the
company of Mistress Evelyn Byrd, it seemed, for the moment, worth the
while. At his invitation she had taken his hand and descended from
the coach. The great, painted thing moved slowly forward, bearing the
unconscious Colonel, and the two pedestrians walked behind it: he with
his horse’s reins over his arm and his hat in his hand; she lifting her
silken skirts from contact with the ground, and looking, not at her
companion, but at the greening boughs, and at the sunlight striking
upon smooth, pale beech trunks and the leaf-strewn earth beneath. Out
of the woods came a sudden medley of bird notes, clear, sweet, and
inexpressibly joyous.
“That is a mockingbird,” said Haward. “I once heard one of a moonlight
night, beside a still water”--
He broke off, and they listened in silence. The bird flew away, and
they came to a brook traversing the road, and flowing in wide meanders
through the forest. There were stepping-stones, and Haward, crossing
first, turned and held out his hand to the lady. When she was upon his
side of the streamlet, and before he released the slender fingers, he
bent and kissed them; then, as there was no answering smile or blush,
but only a quiet withdrawal of the hand and a remark about the crystal
clearness of the brook, looked at her, with interrogation in his smile.
“What is that crested bird upon yonder bough,” she asked,--“the one
that gave the piercing cry?”
“A kingfisher,” he answered, “and cousin to the halcyon of the
ancients. If, when next you go to sea, you take its feathers with you,
you need have no fear of storms.”
A tree, leafless, but purplish pink with bloom, leaned from the
bank above them. He broke a branch and gave it to her. “It is the
Judas-tree,” he told her. “Iscariot hanged himself thereon.”
Around the trunk of a beech a lizard ran like a green flame, and they
heard the distant barking of a fox. Large white butterflies went past
them, and a hummingbird whirred into the heart of a wild honeysuckle
that had hasted to bloom. “How different from the English forests!” she
said. “I could love these best. What are all those broad-leaved plants
with the white, waxen flowers?”
“May-apples. Some call them mandrakes, but they do not rise shrieking,
nor kill the wight that plucks them. Will you have me gather them for
you?”
“I will not trouble you,” she answered, and presently turned aside to
pull them for herself.
He looked at the graceful, bending figure and lifted his brows; then,
quickening his pace until he was up with the coach, he spoke to the
negro upon the box. “Tyre, drive on to that big pine, and wait there
for your mistress and me. Sidon,”--to the footman,--“get down and take
my horse. If your master wakes, tell him that Mistress Evelyn tired of
the coach, and that I am picking her a nosegay.”
Tyre and Sidon, Haward’s steed, the four black coach horses, the
vermilion-and-cream coach, and the slumbering Colonel, all made a
progress of an hundred yards to the pine-tree, where the cortége came
to a halt. Mistress Evelyn looked up from the flower-gathering to find
the road bare before her, and Haward, sitting upon a log, watching her
with something between a smile and a frown.
“You think that I, also, weigh true love by the weight of the purse,”
he said. “I do not care overmuch for your gold, Evelyn.”
She did not answer at once, but stood with her head slightly bent,
fingering the waxen flowers with a delicate, lingering touch. Now that
there was no longer the noise of the wheels and the horses’ hoofs,
the forest stillness, which is composed of sound, made itself felt.
The call of birds, the whir of insects, the murmur of the wind in the
treetops, low, grave, incessant, and eternal as the sound of the sea,
joined themselves to the slow waves of fragrance, the stretch of road
whereon nothing moved, the sunlight lying on the earth, and made a
spacious quiet.
“I think that there is nothing for which you care overmuch,” she said
at last. “Not for gold or the lack of it, not for friends or for
enemies, not even for yourself.”
“I have known you for many years,” he answered. “I have watched you
grow from a child into a gracious and beautiful woman. Do you not think
that I care for you, Evelyn?”
Near where he sat so many violets were blooming that they made a purple
carpet for the ground. Going over to them, she knelt and began to
pluck them. “If any danger threatened me,” she began, in her clear,
low voice, “I believe that you would step between me and it, though
at the peril of your life. I believe that you take some pleasure in
what you are pleased to style my beauty, some pride in a mind that you
have largely formed. If I died early, it would grieve you for a little
while. I call you my friend.”
“I would be called your lover,” he said.
She laid her fan upon the ground, heaped it with violets, and turned
again to her reaping. “How might that be,” she asked, “when you do
not love me? I knew that you would marry me. What do the French call
it,--_mariage de convenance_?”
Her voice was even, and her head was bent so that he could not see
her face. In the pause that followed her words treetop whispered to
treetop, but the sunshine lay very still and bright upon the road and
upon the flowers by the wayside.
“There are worse marriages,” Haward said at last. Rising from the log,
he moved to the side of the kneeling figure. “Let the violets rest,
Evelyn, while we reason together. You are too clear-eyed. Since they
offend you, I will drop the idle compliments, the pretty phrases, in
which neither of us believes. What if this tinted dream of love does
not exist for us? What if we are only friends--dear and old friends”--
He stooped, and, taking her by the busy hands, made her stand up
beside him. “Cannot we marry and still be friends?” he demanded, with
something like laughter in his eyes. “My dear, I would strive to make
you happy; and happiness is as often found in that temperate land where
we would dwell as in Love’s flaming climate.” He smiled and tried to
find her eyes, downcast and hidden in the shadow of her hat. “This is
no flowery wooing such as women love,” he said; “but then you are like
no other woman. Always the truth was best with you.”
Upon her wrenching her hands from his, and suddenly and proudly raising
her head, he was amazed to find her white to the lips.
“The truth!” she said slowly. “Always the truth was best! Well, then,
take the truth, and afterwards and forever and ever leave me alone!
You have been frank; why should not I, who, you say, am like no other
woman, be so, too? I will not marry you, because--because”--The crimson
flowed over her face and neck; then ebbed, leaving her whiter than
before. She put her hands, that still held the wild flowers, to her
breast, and her eyes, dark with pain, met his. “Had you loved me,” she
said proudly and quietly, “I had been happy.”
[Illustration: “HAD YOU LOVED ME--I HAD BEEN HAPPY”]
Haward stepped backwards until there lay between them a strip of sunny
earth. The murmur of the wind went on and the birds were singing, and
yet the forest seemed more quiet than death. “I could not guess,” he
said, speaking slowly and with his eyes upon the ground. “I have spoken
like a brute. I beg your pardon.”
“You might have known! you might have guessed!” she cried, with
passion. “But, you walk an even way; you choose nor high nor low; you
look deep into your mind, but your heart you keep cool and vacant.
Oh, a very temperate land! I think that others less wise than you may
also be less blind. Never speak to me of this day! Let it die as these
blooms are dying in this hot sunshine! Now let us walk to the coach and
waken my father. I have gathered flowers enough.”
Side by side, but without speaking, they moved from shadow to sunlight,
and from sunlight to shadow, down the road to the great pine-tree. The
white and purple flowers lay in her hand and along her bended arm; from
the folds of her dress, of some rich and silken stuff, chameleon-like
in its changing colors, breathed the subtle fragrance of the perfume
then most in fashion; over the thin lawn that half revealed, half
concealed neck and bosom was drawn a long and glossy curl, carefully
let to escape from the waved and banded hair beneath the gypsy hat.
Exquisite from head to foot, the figure had no place in the unpruned,
untrained, savage, and primeval beauty of those woods. Smooth sward,
with jets of water and carven nymphs embowered in clipped box or
yew, should have been its setting, and not this wild and tangled
growth, this license of bird and beast and growing things. And yet the
incongruous riot, the contrast of profuse, untended beauty, enhanced
the value of the picture, gave it piquancy and a completer charm.
When they were within a few feet of the coach and horses and negroes,
all drowsing in the sunny road, Haward made as if to speak, but she
stopped him with her lifted hand. “Spare me,” she begged. “It is bad
enough as it is, but words would make it worse. If ever a day might
come--I do not think that I am unlovely; I even rate myself so highly
as to think that I am worthy of your love. If ever the day shall come
when you can say to me, ‘Now I see that love is no tinted dream; now
I ask you to be my wife indeed,’ then, upon that day--But until then
ask not of me what you asked back there among the violets. I, too, am
proud”--Her voice broke.
“Evelyn!” he cried. “Poor child--poor friend”--
She turned her face upon him. “Don’t!” she said, and her lips were
smiling, though her eyes were full of tears. “We have forgot that it
is May Day, and that we must be light of heart. Look how white is that
dogwood-tree! Break me a bough for my chimney-piece at Williamsburgh.”
He brought her a branch of the starry blossoms. “Did you notice,” she
asked, “that the girl who ran--Audrey--wore dogwood in her hair? You
could see her heart beat with very love of living. She was of the
woods, like a dryad. Had the prizes been of my choosing, she should
have had a gift more poetical than a guinea.”
Haward opened the coach door, and stood gravely aside while she entered
the vehicle and took her seat, depositing her flowers upon the cushions
beside her. The Colonel stirred, uncrossed his legs, yawned, pulled the
handkerchief from his face, and opened his eyes.
“Faith!” he exclaimed, straightening himself, and taking up his radiant
humor where, upon falling-asleep, he had let it drop. “The way must
have suddenly become smooth as a road in Venice, for I’ve felt no
jolting this half hour. Flowers, Evelyn? and Haward afoot? You’ve been
on a woodland saunter, then, while I enacted Solomon’s sluggard!”
The worthy parent’s eyes began to twinkle. “What flowers did you
find? They have strange blooms here, and yet I warrant that even in
these woods one might come across London pride and none-so-pretty and
forget-me-not”--
His daughter smiled, and asked him some idle question about the
May-apple and the Judas-tree. The master of Westover was a treasure
house of sprightly lore. Within ten minutes he had visited Palestine,
paid his compliments to the ancient herbalists, and landed again in his
own coach, to find in his late audience a somewhat _distraite_ daughter
and a friend in a brown study. The coach was lumbering on toward
Williamsburgh, and Haward, with level gaze and hand closed tightly upon
his horse’s reins, rode by the window, while the lady, sitting in her
corner with downcast eyes, fingered the dogwood blooms that were not
paler than her face.
The Colonel’s wits were keen. One glance, a lift of his arched brows,
the merest ghost of a smile, and, dragging the younger man with
him, he plunged into politics. Invective against a refractory House
of Burgesses brought them a quarter of a mile upon their way; the
necessity for an act to encourage adventurers in iron works carried
them past a milldam; and frauds in the customs enabled them to reach a
crossroads ordinary, where the Colonel ordered a halt, and called for
a tankard of ale. A slipshod, blue-eyed Cherry brought it, and spoke
her thanks in broad Scotch for the shilling which the gay Colonel flung
tinkling into the measure.
That versatile and considerate gentleman, having had his draught, cried
to the coachman to go on, and was beginning upon the question of the
militia, when Haward, who had dismounted, appeared at the coach door.
“I do not think that I will go on to Williamsburgh with you, sir,” he
said. “There’s some troublesome business with my overseer that ought
not to wait. If I take this road and the planter’s pace, I shall reach
Fair View by sunset. You do not return to Westover this week? Then I
shall see you at Williamsburgh within a day or two. Evelyn, good-day.”
Her hand lay upon the cushion nearest him. He would have taken it in
his own, as for years he had done when he bade her good-by; but though
she smiled and gave him “Good-day” in her usual voice, she drew the
hand away. The Colonel’s eyebrows went up another fraction of an inch,
but he was a discreet gentleman who had bought experience. Skillfully
unobservant, his parting words were at once cordial and few in number;
and after Haward had mounted and had turned into the side road, he put
his handsome, periwigged head out of the coach window and called to
him some advice about the transplanting of tobacco. This done, and the
horseman out of sight, and the coach once more upon its leisurely way
to Williamsburgh, the model father pulled out of his pocket a small
book, and, after affectionately advising his daughter to close her eyes
and sleep out the miles to Williamsburgh, himself retired with Horace
to the Sabine farm.
CHAPTER V
THE STOREKEEPER
It was now late afternoon, the sun’s rays coming slantingly into the
forest, and the warmth of the day past and gone. To Haward, riding at a
gallop down the road that was scarce more than a bridle path, the rush
of the cool air was grateful; the sharp striking of protruding twigs,
the violent brushing aside of hanging vines, not unwelcome.
It was of the man that the uppermost feeling in his mind was one of
disgust at his late infelicity of speech, and at the blindness which
had prompted it. That he had not divined, that he had been so dull as
to assume that as he felt, or did not feel, so must she, annoyed him
like the jar of rude noises or like sand blowing into face and eyes. It
was of him, too, that the annoyance was purely with himself; for her,
when at last he came to think of her, he found only the old, placid
affection, as far removed from love as from hate. If he knew himself,
it would always be as far removed from love as from hate.
All the days of her youth he had come and gone, a welcome guest at
her father’s house in London. He had grown to be her friend, watching
the crescent beauty of face and mind with something of the pride and
tenderness which a man might feel for a young and favorite sister; and
then, at last, when some turn of affairs sent them all home to Virginia
to take lot and part there, he had thought of marriage.
His mind had turned, not unwillingly, from the town and its apples
of Sodom to his Virginia plantation that he had not seen for more
than ten years. It was his birthplace, and there he had spent his
boyhood. Sometimes, in heated rooms, when the candles in the sconces
were guttering down, and the dawn looked palely in upon gaming tables
and heaped gold, and seamed faces, haggardly triumphant, haggardly
despairing, determinedly indifferent, there had come to him visions of
cool dawns upon the river, wide, misty expanses of marsh and forest,
indistinct and cold and pure. The lonely “great house,” too,--the house
which his father had built with so much love and pains, that his son
and his son’s sons should have a worthy home,--appealed to him, and the
garden, and the fishing-boats, and the old slaves in the quarters. He
told himself that he was glad to go back.
Had men called him ambitious, he would have smiled, and felt truly
that they had bungled in the word. Such and such things were simply
his appurtenances; in London, the regard due to a gentleman who to
a certain distinction in his manner of amusing himself added the
achievement of a successful comedy, three lampoons quoted at all
London tea-tables, and a piece of Whig invective, so able, stern, and
sustained that many cried that the Dean had met his match; in Virginia,
the deferential esteem of the colony at large, a place in the Council,
and a great estate. An alliance with the master of Westover was in
itself a desirable thing, advantageous to purse and to credit; his
house must have a mistress, and that mistress must please at every
point his fastidious taste.
What better to do than to give it for Mistress Evelyn Byrd? Evelyn, who
had had for all her suitors only a slow smile and shake of the head;
Evelyn, who was older than her years; Evelyn, who was his friend as he
was hers. Love! He had left that land behind, and she had never touched
its shores; the geography of the poets to the contrary, it did not lie
in the course of all who passed through life. He made his suit, and now
he had his answer.
If he did not take trouble to wonder at her confession, or to modestly
ask himself how he had deserved her love, neither did he insult her
with pity or with any lightness of thought. Nor was he ready to believe
that his rejection was final. Apparently indifferent as he was, it was
yet his way to move steadily and relentlessly, if very quietly, toward
what goal he desired to reach. He thought that Fair View might yet call
Evelyn Byrd its mistress.
Since turning into the crossroad that, running south and east, would
take him back to the banks of the James and to his own house, he had
not slackened speed, but now, as he saw through the trees before him a
long zigzag of rail fence, he drew rein. The road turned, and a gate
barred his way. When he had opened it and passed through, he was upon
his own land.
He had ridden off his irritation, and could now calmly tell himself
that the blunder was made and over with, and that it was the duty of
the philosopher to remember it only in so far as it must shape his
future course. His house of cards had toppled over; but the profound
indifferentism of his nature enabled him to view the ruins with
composure. After a while he would build the house again. The image of
Evelyn, as she had stood, dark-eyed and pale, with the flowers pressed
to her bosom, he put from him. He knew her strength of soul; and with
the curious hardness of the strong toward the strong, and also not
without the delicacy which, upon occasion, he could both feel and
exhibit, he shut the door upon that hour in the forest.
He had left the woods, and was now riding through a field of newly
planted tobacco. It and the tobacco house in the midst of it were
silent, deserted, bathed in the late sunshine. The ground rose
slightly, and when he had mounted with it he saw below him the huddle
of cabins which formed the ridge quarter, and winding down to it a
string of negroes. One turned his head, and saw the solitary horseman
upon the summit of the slope behind him; another looked, and another,
until each man in line had his head over his shoulder. They knew that
the horseman was their master. Some had been upon the plantation when
he was a boy; others were more recent acquisitions who knew not his
face; but alike they grinned and ducked. The white man walking beside
the line took off his hat and pulled a forelock. Haward raised his hand
that they might know he saw, and rode on.
Another piece of woods where a great number of felled trees cumbered
the ground, more tobacco, and then, in worn fields where the tobacco
had been, knee-deep wheat rippling in the evening breeze. The wheat
ran down to a marsh, and to a wide, slow creek that, save in the
shadow of its reedy banks, was blue as the sky above. Haward, riding
slowly beside his green fields and still waters, noted with quiet,
half-regretful pleasure this or that remembered feature of the
landscape. There had been little change. Here, where he remembered deep
woods, tobacco was planted; there, where the tobacco had been, were
now fields of wheat or corn, or wild tangles of vine-rid saplings and
brushwood: but for this it might have been yesterday that he had last
ridden that way.
Presently he saw the river, and then the marshes with brown dots that
were his cattle straying over them, and beyond these the home landing
and the masts of the Golden Rose. The sun was near its setting; the men
had left the fields; over all things were the stillness and peace, the
encroaching shadows, the dwindling light, so golden in its quality, of
late afternoon. When he crossed the bridge over the creek, the hollow
sound that the boards gave forth beneath his horse’s hoofs had the
depth and resonance of drumbeats, and the cry of a solitary heron in
the marsh seemed louder than its wont. He passed the rolling-house and
drew near to the river, riding again through tobacco. These plants were
Oronoko; the mild sweet-scented took the higher ground. Along the river
bank grew a row of tall and stately trees: passing beneath them, he saw
the shining water between brown columns or through a veil of slight,
unfolding leaves. Soon the trees fell away, and he came to a stretch of
bank,--here naked earth, there clad in grass and dewberry vines. Near
by was a small landing, with several boats fastened to its piles; and
at a little distance beyond it, shadowed by a locust-tree, a strongly
built, two-roomed wooden house, with the earth around it trodden hard
and bare, and with two or three benches before its open door. Haward
recognized the store which his father--after the manner of his kind,
merchant and trader as well as planter and maker of laws--had built,
and which, through his agent in Virginia, he had maintained.
Before one of the benches a man was kneeling with his back to Haward,
who could only see that his garb was that of a servant, and that his
hands were busily moving certain small objects this way and that upon
the board. At the edge of the space of bare earth were a horse-block
and a hitching-post. Haward rode up to them, dismounted, and fastened
his horse, then walked over to the man at the bench.
So intent was the latter upon his employment that he heard neither
horse nor rider. He had some shells, a few bits of turf, and a double
handful of sand, and he was arranging these trifles upon the rough,
unpainted boards in a curious and intricate pattern. He was a tall
man, with hair that was more red than brown, and he was dressed in a
shirt of dowlas, leather breeches, and coarse plantation-made shoes and
stockings.
“What are you doing?” asked Haward, after a moment’s silent watching of
the busy fingers and intent countenance.
There was no start of awakened consciousness upon the other’s part.
“Why,” he said, as if he had asked the question of himself, “with this
sand I have traced the shores of Loch-na-Keal. This turf is green
Ulva, and this is Gometra, and the shell is Little Colonsay. With this
wet sand I have moulded Ben Grieg, and this higher pile is Ben More.
If I had but a sprig of heather, now, or a pebble from the shore of
Scridain!”
The voice, while harsh, was not disagreeably so, and neither the words
nor the manner of using them smacked of the rustic.
“And where are Loch-na-Keal and Ulva and Scridain?” demanded Haward.
“Somewhere in North Britain, I presume?”
The second question broke the spell. The man glanced over his shoulder,
saw that he was not alone, and with one sweep of his hand blotting
loch and island and mountain out of existence, rose to his feet, and
opposed to Haward’s gaze a tall, muscular frame, high features slightly
pockmarked, and keen dark blue eyes.
“I was dreaming, and did not hear you,” he said, civilly enough. “It’s
not often that any one comes to the store at this time of day. What d’
ye lack?”
As he spoke he moved toward the doorway, through which showed shelves
and tables piled with the extraordinary variety of goods which were
deemed essential to the colonial trade. “Are you the storekeeper?”
asked Haward, keeping pace with the other’s long stride.
“It’s the name they call me by,” answered the man curtly; then, as he
chanced to turn his eyes upon the landing, his tone changed, and a
smile irradiated his countenance. “Here comes a customer,” he remarked,
“that’ll make you bide your turn.”
A boat, rowed by a young boy and carrying a woman, had slipped out
of the creek, and along the river bank to the steps of the landing.
When they were reached, the boy sat still, the oars resting across his
knees, and his face upturned to a palace beautiful of pearl and saffron
cloud; but the woman mounted the steps, and, crossing the boards, came
up to the door and the men beside it. Her dress was gray and unadorned,
and she was young and of a quiet loveliness.
“Mistress Truelove Taberer,” said the storekeeper, “what can you
choose, this May Day, that’s so fair as yourself?”
A pair of gray eyes were lifted for the sixth part of a second, and
a voice that bad learned of the doves in the forest proceeded to
rebuke the flatterer. “Thee is idle in thy speech, Angus MacLean,” it
declared. “I am not fair; nor, if I were, should thee tell me of it.
Also, friend, it is idle and tendeth toward idolatry to speak of the
first day of the fifth month as May Day. My mother sent me for a paper
of White-chapel needles, and two of manikin pins. Has thee them in thy
store of goods?”
“Come you in and look for yourself,” said the storekeeper. “There’s
woman’s gear enough, but it were easier for me to recount the names of
all the children of Gillean-ni-Tuaidhe than to remember how you call
the things you wear.”
So saying he entered the store. The Quakeress followed, and Haward,
tired of his own thoughts, and in the mood to be amused by trifles,
trod in their footsteps.
Door and window faced the west, and the glow from the sinking sun
illumined the thousand and one features of the place. Here was the
glint of tools and weapons; there pewter shone like silver, and
brass dazzled the eyes. Bales of red cotton, blue linen, flowered
Kidderminster, scarlet serge, gold and silver drugget, all sorts of
woven stuffs from lockram to brocade, made bright the shelves. Pendent
skins of buck and doe showed like brown satin, while looking-glasses
upon the wall reflected green trees and painted clouds. In one dark
corner lurked kegs of powder and of shot; another was the haunt of
aqua vitæ and right Jamaica. Playing-cards, snuffboxes, and fringed
gloves elbowed a shelf of books, and a full-bottomed wig ogled a
lady’s headdress of ribbon and malines. Knives and hatchets and duffel
blankets for the Indian trade were not wanting.
Haward, leaning against a table laden with so singular a miscellany
that a fine saddle with crimson velvet holsters took the head of the
board, while the foot was set with blue and white china, watched the
sometime moulder of peak and islet draw out a case filled with such
small and womanish articles as pins and needles, tape and thread, and
place it before his customer. She made her choice, and the storekeeper
brought a great book, and entered against the head of the house of
Taberer so many pounds of tobacco; then, as the maiden turned to
depart, heaved a sigh so piteous and profound that no tender saint
in gray could do less than pause, half turn her head, and lift two
compassionate eyes.
“Mistress Truelove, I have read the good book that you gave me, and I
cannot deny that I am much beholden to you,” and her debtor sighed like
a furnace.
The girl’s quiet face flushed to the pink of a seashell, and her eyes
grew eager.
“Then does thee not see the error of thy ways, Angus MacLean? If it
should be given me to pluck thee as a brand from the burning! Thee will
not again brag of war and revenge, nor sing vain and ruthless songs,
nor use dice or cards, nor will thee swear any more?”
The voice was persuasion’s own. “May I be set overtide on the Lady’s
Rock, or spare a false Campbell when I meet him, or throw up my cap for
the damned Hogan Mogan that sits in Jamie’s place, if I am not entirely
convert!” cried the neophyte. “Oh, the devil! what have I said?
Mistress Truelove--Truelove”--
But Truelove was gone,--not in anger or in haste, for that would have
been unseemly, but quietly and steadily, with no looking back. The
storekeeper, leaping over a keg of nails that stood in the way, made
for the door, and together with Haward, who was already there, watched
her go. The path to the landing and the boat was short; she had taken
her seat, and the boy had bent to the oars, while the unlucky Scot was
yet alternately calling out protestations of amendment and muttering
maledictions upon his unguarded tongue. The canoe slipped from the
rosy, unshadowed water into the darkness beneath the overhanging trees,
reached the mouth of the creek, and in a moment disappeared from sight.
CHAPTER VI
MASTER AND MAN
The two men, left alone, turned each toward the interior of the store,
and their eyes met. Alike in gray eyes and in dark blue there was
laughter. “Kittle folk, the Quakers,” said the storekeeper, with a
shrug, and went to put away his case of pins and needles. Haward, going
to the end of the store, found a row of dusty bottles, and breaking the
neck of one with a report like that of a pistol set the Madeira to his
lips, and therewith quenched his thirst. The wine cellar abutted upon
the library. Taking off his riding glove he ran his finger along the
bindings, and plucking forth The History of a Coy Lady looked at the
first page, read the last paragraph, and finally thrust the thin brown
and gilt volume into his pocket. Turning, he found himself face to face
with the storekeeper.
“I have not the honor of knowing your name, sir,” remarked the latter
dryly. “Do you buy at this store, and upon whose account?”
Haward shook his head, and applied himself again to the Madeira.
“Then you carry with you coin of the realm with which to settle?”
continued the other. “The wine is two shillings; the book you may have
for twelve-pence.”
“Here I need not pay, good fellow,” said Haward negligently, his eyes
upon a row of dangling objects. “Fetch me down yonder cane; ’t is as
delicately tapered and clouded as any at the Exchange.”
“Pay me first for the wine and the book,” answered the man composedly.
“It’s a dirty business enough, God knows, for a gentleman to put finger
to; but since needs must when the devil drives, and he has driven me
here, why, I, Angus MacLean, who have no concerns of my own, must e’en
be faithful to the concerns of another. Wherefore put down the silver
you owe the Sassenach whose wine you have drunken and whose book you
have taken.”
“And if I do not choose to pay?” asked Haward, with a smile.
“Then you must e’en choose to fight,” was the cool reply. “And as I
observe that you wear neither sword nor pistols, and as jack boots
and a fine tight-buttoned riding coat are not the easiest clothes to
wrestle in, it appears just possible that I might win the cause.”
“And when you’ve thrown me, what then?”
“Oh, I would just draw a rope around you and yonder cask of Jamaica,
and leave you to read your stolen book in peace until Saunderson
(that’s the overseer, and he’s none so bad if he was born in Fife)
shall come. You can have it out with him; or maybe he’ll hale you
before the man that owns the store. I hear they expect him home.”
Haward laughed, and abstracting another bottle from the shelf broke
its neck. “Hand me yonder cup,” he said easily, “and we’ll drink to
his home-coming. Good fellow, I am Mr. Marmaduke Haward, and I am glad
to find so honest a man in a place of no small trust. Long absence and
somewhat too complaisant a reference of all my Virginian affairs to my
agent have kept me much in ignorance of the economy of my plantation.
How long have you been my storekeeper?”
Neither cup for the wine nor answer to the question being forthcoming,
Haward looked up from his broken bottle. The man was standing with his
body bent forward and his hand pressed against the wood of a great cask
behind him until the finger-nails showed white. His head was high, his
face dark red and angry, his brows drawn down until the gleaming eyes
beneath were like pin points.
So sudden and so sinister was the change that Haward was startled. The
hour was late, the place deserted; as the man had discovered, he had no
weapons, nor, strong, active, and practiced as he was, did he flatter
himself that he could withstand the length of brawn and sinew before
him. Involuntarily, he stepped backward until there was a space between
them, casting at the same moment a glance toward the wall where hung
axe and knife and hatchet.
The man intercepted the look, and broke into a laugh. The sound was
harsh and gibing, but not menacing. “You need not be afraid,” he said.
“I do not want the feel of a rope around my neck,--though God knows
why I should care! Here is no clansman of mine, and no cursed Campbell
either, to see my end!”
“I am not afraid,” Haward answered calmly. Walking to the shelf that
held an array of drinking vessels, he took two cups, filled them with
wine, and going back to his former station, set one upon the cask
beside the storekeeper. “The wine is good,” he said. “Will you drink?”
The other loosened the clasp of his hand upon the wood and drew
himself upright. “I eat the bread and drink the water which you give
your servants,” he answered, speaking with the thickness of hardly
restrained passion. “The wine cup goes from equal to equal.”
As he spoke he took up the peace offering, eyed it for a moment with a
bitter smile, then flung it with force over his shoulder. The earthen
floor drank the wine; the china shivered into a thousand fragments. “I
have neither silver nor tobacco with which to pay for my pleasure,”
continued the still smiling storekeeper. “When I am come to the end of
my term, then, an it please you, I will serve out the damage.”
Haward sat down upon a keg of powder, crossed his knees, and, with
his chin upon his hand, looked from between the curled lengths of his
periwig at the figure opposite. “I am glad to find that in Virginia, at
least, there is honesty,” he said dryly. “I will try to remember the
cost of the cup and the wine against the expiry of your indenture. In
the mean time, I am curious to know why you are angry with me whom you
have never seen before to-day.”
With the dashing of the wine to earth the other’s passion had
apparently spent itself. The red slowly left his face, and he leaned
at ease against the cask, drumming upon its head with his fingers. The
sunlight, shrinking from floor and wall, had left but a single line of
gold. In the half light strange and sombre shapes possessed the room;
through the stillness, beneath the sound of the tattoo upon the cask
head, the river made itself heard.
“For ten years and more you have been my--master,” said the
storekeeper. “It is a word for which I have an invincible distaste. It
is not well--having neither love nor friendship to put in its place--to
let hatred die. When I came first to this slavery, I hated all
Campbells, all Whigs, Forster that betrayed us at Preston, and Ewin Mor
Mackinnon. But the years have come and the years have gone, and I am
older than I was at twenty-five. The Campbells I can never reach: they
walk secure, overseas, through Lorn and Argyle, couching in the tall
heather above Etive, tracking the red deer in the Forest of Dalness.
Forster is dead. Ewin Mackinnon is dead, I know; for five years ago
come Martinmas night I saw his perjured soul on its way to hell. All
the world is turning Whig. A man may hate the world, it is true, but he
needs a single foe.”
“And in that capacity you have adopted me?” demanded Haward.
MacLean let his gaze travel over the man opposite him, from the looped
hat and the face between the waves of hair to the gilt spurs upon the
great boots; then turned his eyes upon his own hand and coarsely clad
arm stretched across the cask. “I, too, am a gentleman, the brother of
a chieftain,” he declared. “I am not without schooling. I have seen
something of life, and of countries more polite than the land where
I was born, though not so dear. I have been free, and have loved my
freedom. Do you find it so strange that I should hate you?”
There was a silence; then, “Upon my soul, I do not know that I do,”
said Haward slowly. “And yet, until this day I did not know of your
existence.”
“But I knew of yours,” answered the storekeeper. “Your agent hath an
annoying trick of speech, and the overseers have caught it from him.
‘Your master’ this, and ‘your master’ that; in short, for ten years it
hath been, ‘Work, you dog, that your master may play!’ Well, I have
worked; it was that, or killing myself, or going mad. I have worked
for you in the fields, in the smithy, in this close room. But when you
bought my body, you could not buy my soul. Day after day, and night
after night, I sent it away; I would not let it bide in these dull
levels, in this cursed land of heat and stagnant waters. At first it
went home to its own country,--to its friends and its foes, to the
torrent and the mountain and the music of the pipes; but at last the
pain outweighed the pleasure, and I sent it there no more. And then it
began to follow you.”
“To follow me!” involuntarily exclaimed Haward.
“I have been in London,” went on the other, without heeding the
interruption. “I know the life of men of quality, and where they most
resort. I early learned from your other servants, and from the chance
words of those who had your affairs in charge, that you were young,
well-looking, a man of pleasure. At first when I thought of you the
blood came into my cheek, but at last I thought of you constantly,
and I felt for you a constant hatred. It began when I knew that Ewin
Mackinnon was dead. I had no need of love; I had need of hate. Day
after day, my body slaving here, my mind has dogged your footsteps. Up
and down, to and fro, in business and in pleasure, in whatever place I
have imagined you to be, there have I been also. Did you never, when
there seemed none by, look over your shoulder, feeling another presence
than your own?”
He ceased to speak, and the hand upon the cask was still. The sunshine
was clean gone from the room, and without the door the wind in the
locust-tree answered the voice of the river. Haward rose from his seat,
but made no further motion toward departing. “You have been frank,” he
said quietly. “Had you it in mind, all this while, so to speak to me
when we should meet?”
“No,” answered the other. “I thought not of words, but of”--
“But of deeds,” Haward finished for him. “Rather, I imagine, of one
deed.”
Composed as ever in voice and manner, he drew out his watch, and held
it aslant that the light might strike upon the dial. “’T is after six,”
he remarked as he put it away, “and I am yet a mile from the house.”
The wine that he had poured for himself had been standing, untouched,
upon the keg beside him. He took it up and drank it off; then wiped his
lips with his handkerchief, and passing the storekeeper with a slight
inclination of his head walked toward the door. A yard beyond the man
who had so coolly shown his side of the shield was a rude table, on
which were displayed hatchets and hunting knives. Haward passed the
gleaming steel; then, a foot beyond it, stood still, his face to the
open door, and his back to the storekeeper and the table with its
sinister lading.
“You do wrong to allow so much dust and disorder,” he said sharply. “I
could write my name in that mirror, and there is a piece of brocade
fallen to the floor. Look to it that you keep the place more neat.”
There was dead silence for a moment; then MacLean spoke in an even
voice: “Now a fool might call you as brave as Hector. For myself, I
only give you credit for some knowledge of men. You are right. It is
not my way to strike in the back an unarmed man. When you are gone, I
will wipe off the mirror and pick up the brocade.”
He followed Haward outside. “It’s a brave evening for riding,” he
remarked, “and you have a bonny bit of horseflesh there. You’ll get to
the house before candlelight.”
Beside one of the benches Haward made another pause. “You are a
Highlander and a Jacobite,” he said. “From your reference to Forster,
I gather that you were among the prisoners taken at Preston and
transported to Virginia.”
“In the Elizabeth and Anne of Liverpool, _alias_ a bit of hell afloat;
the master, Captain Edward Trafford, _alias_ Satan’s first mate,” quoth
the other grimly.
He stooped to the bench where lay the débris of the coast and mountains
he had been lately building, and picked up a small, deep shell. “My
story is short,” he began. “It could be packed into this. I was born
in the island of Mull, of my father a chieftain, and my mother a lady.
Some schooling I got in Aberdeen, some pleasure in Edinburgh and
London, and some service abroad. In my twenty-third year--being at home
at that time--I was asked to a hunting match at Braemar, and went. No
great while afterwards I was bidden to supper at an Edinburgh tavern,
and again I accepted the invitation. There was a small entertainment to
follow the supper,--just the taking of Edinburgh Castle. But the wine
was good, and we waited to powder our hair, and the entertainment could
hardly be called a success. Hard upon that convivial evening, I, with
many others, was asked across the Border to join a number of gentlemen
who drank to the King after our fashion, and had a like fancy for oak
boughs and white roses. The weather was pleasant, the company of the
best, the roads very noble after our Highland sheep tracks. Together
with our English friends, and enlivened by much good claret and by
music of bagpipe and drum, we strolled on through a fine, populous
country until we came to a town called Preston, where we thought we
would tarry for a day or two. However, circumstances arose which
detained us somewhat longer. (I dare say you have heard the story?)
When finally we took our leave, some of us went to heaven, some to
hell, and some to Barbadoes and Virginia. I was among those dispatched
to Virginia, and to all intents and purposes I died the day I landed.
There, the shell is full!”
He tossed it from him, and going to the hitching-post loosed Haward’s
horse. Haward took the reins from his hand. “It hath been ten years and
more since Virginia got her share of the rebels taken at Preston. If I
remember aright, their indentures were to be made for seven years. Why,
then, are you yet in my service?”
MacLean laughed. “I ran away,” he replied pleasantly, “and when I was
caught I made off a second time. I wonder that you planters do not
have a Society for the Encouragement of Runaways. Seeing that they are
nearly always retaken, and that their escapades so lengthen their term
of service, it would surely be to your advantage! There are yet several
years in which I am to call you master.”
He laughed again, but the sound was mirthless, and the eyes beneath
the half-closed lids were harder than steel. Haward mounted his horse
and gathered up the reins. “I am not responsible for the laws of the
realm,” he said calmly, “nor for rebellions and insurrections, nor for
the practice of transporting overseas those to whom have been given
the ugly names of ‘rebel’ and ‘traitor.’ Destiny that set you there
put me here. We are alike pawns; what the player means we have no way
of telling. Curse Fate and the gods, if you choose,--and find that
your cursing does small good,--but regard me with indifference, as one
neither more nor less the slave of circumstances than yourself. It has
been long since I went this way. Is there yet the path by the river?”
“Ay,” answered the other. “It is your shortest road.”
“Then I will be going,” said Haward. “It grows late, and I am not
looked for before to-morrow. Good-night.”
As he spoke he raised his hat and bowed to the gentleman from whom he
was parting. That rebel to King George gave a great start; then turned
very red, and shot a piercing glance at the man on horseback. The
latter’s mien was composed as ever, and, with his hat held beneath his
arm and his body slightly inclined, he was evidently awaiting a like
ceremony of leave-taking on the storekeeper’s part. MacLean drew a long
breath, stepped back a pace or two, and bowed to his equal. A second
“Good-night,” and one gentleman rode off in the direction of the great
house, while the other went thoughtfully back to the store, got a cloth
and wiped the dust from the mirror.
It was pleasant riding by the river in the cool evening wind, with the
colors of the sunset yet gay in sky and water. Haward went slowly,
glancing now at the great, bright stream, now at the wide, calm fields
and the rim of woodland, dark and distant, bounding his possessions.
The smell of salt marshes, of ploughed ground, of leagues of flowering
forests, was in his nostrils. Behind him was the crescent moon; before
him a terrace crowned with lofty trees. Within the ring of foliage
was the house; even as he looked a light sprang up in a high window,
and shone like a star through the gathering dusk. Below the hill the
home landing ran its gaunt black length far out into the carmine
of the river; upon the Golden Rose lights burned like lower stars;
from a thicket to the left of the bridle path sounded the call of a
whippoorwill. A gust of wind blowing from the bay made to waver the
lanterns of the Golden Rose, broke and darkened the coral peace of the
river, and pushed rudely against the master of those parts. Haward laid
his hand upon his horse that he loved. “This is better than the Ring,
isn’t it, Mirza?” he asked genially, and the horse whinnied under his
touch.
The land was quite gray, the river pearl-colored, and the fireflies
beginning to sparkle, when he rode through the home gates. In the dusk
of the world, out of the deeper shadow of the surrounding trees, his
house looked grimly upon him. The light had been at the side; all the
front was stark and black with shuttered windows. He rode to the back
of the house and hallooed to the slaves in the home quarter, where were
lights and noisy laughter, and one deep voice singing in an unknown
tongue.
It was but a stone’s throw to the nearest cabin, and Haward’s call made
itself heard above the babel. The noise suddenly lessened, and two or
three negroes, starting up from the doorstep, hurried across the grass
to horse and rider. Quickly as they came, some one within the house was
beforehand with them. The door swung open; there was the flare of a
lighted candle, and a voice cried out to know what was wanted.
“Wanted!” exclaimed Haward. “Ingress into my own house is wanted! Where
is Juba?”
One of the negroes pressed forward. “Heah I is, Marse Duke! House all
ready for you, but you done sont word”--
“I know,--I know,” answered Haward impatiently. “I changed my mind. Is
that you, Saunderson, with the light? Or is it Hide?”
The candle moved to one side, and there was disclosed a large white
face atop of a shambling figure dressed in some coarse, dark stuff.
“Neither, sir,” said an expressionless voice. “Will it please your
Honor to dismount?”
Haward swung himself out of the saddle, tossed the reins to a negro,
and, with Juba at his heels, climbed the five low stone steps and
entered the wide hall running through the house and broken only by the
broad, winding stairway. Save for the glimmer of the solitary candle
all was in darkness; the bare floor, the paneled walls, echoed to his
tread. On either hand squares of blackness proclaimed the open doors of
large, empty rooms, and down the stair came a wind that bent the weak
flame. The negro took the light from the hand of the man who had opened
the door, and, pressing past his master, lit three candles in a sconce
upon the wall.
“Yo’ room’s all ready, Marse Duke,” he declared. “Dere’s candles
enough, an’ de fire am laid an’ yo’ bed aired. Ef you wan’ some supper,
I kin get you bread an’ meat, an’ de wine was put in yesterday.”
Haward nodded, and taking the candle began to mount the stairs. Half
way up he found that the man in the sad-colored raiment was following
him. He raised his brows, but being in a taciturn humor, and having,
moreover, to shield the flame from the wind that drove down the stair,
he said nothing, going on in silence to the landing, and to the great
eastward-facing room that had been his father’s, and which now he meant
to make his own. There were candles on the table, the dresser, and the
mantelshelf. He lit them all, and the room changed from a place of
shadows and monstrous shapes to a gentleman’s bedchamber,--somewhat
sparsely furnished, but of a comfortable and cheerful aspect. A
cloth lay upon the floor, the windows were curtained, and the bed
had fresh hangings of green and white Kidderminster. Over the mantel
hung a painting of Haward and his mother, done when he was six years
old. Beneath the laughing child and the smiling lady, young and
flower-crowned, were crossed two ancient swords. In the middle of the
room stood a heavy table, and pushed back, as though some one had
lately risen from it, was an armchair of Russian leather. Books lay
upon the table; one of them open, with a horn snuffbox keeping down the
leaf.
Haward seated himself in the great chair, and looked around him with
a thoughtful and melancholy smile. He could not clearly remember his
mother. The rings upon her fingers and her silvery laughter were all
that dwelt in his mind, and now only the sound of that merriment
floated back to him and lingered in the room. But his father had died
upon that bed, and beside the dead man, between the candles at the head
and the candles at the foot, he had sat the night through. The curtains
were half drawn, and in their shadow his imagination laid again that
cold, inanimate form. Twelve years ago! How young he had been that
night, and how old he had thought himself as he watched beside the
dead, chilled by the cold of the crossed hands, awed by the silence,
half frighted by the shadows on the wall; now filled with natural
grief, now with surreptitious and shamefaced thoughts of his changed
estate,--yesterday son and dependent, to-day heir and master! Twelve
years! The sigh and the smile were not for the dead father, but for his
own dead youth, for the unjaded freshness of the morning, for the world
that had been, once upon a time.
Turning in his seat, his eyes fell upon the man who had followed
him, and who was now standing between the table and the door. “Well,
friend?” he demanded.
The man came a step or two nearer. His hat was in his hand, and his
body was obsequiously bent, but there was no discomposure in his
lifeless voice and manner. “I stayed to explain my presence in the
house, sir,” he said. “I am a lover of reading, and, knowing my
weakness, your overseer, who keeps the keys of the house, has been so
good as to let me, from time to time, come here to this room to mingle
in more delectable company than I can choose without these walls.
Your Honor doubtless remembers yonder goodly assemblage?” He motioned
with his hand toward a half-opened door, showing a closet lined with
well-filled bookshelves.
“I remember,” replied Haward dryly. “So you come to my room alone at
night, and occupy yourself in reading? And when you are wearied you
refresh yourself with my wine?” As he spoke he clinked together the
bottle and glass that stood beside the books.
“I plead guilty to the wine,” answered the intruder, as lifelessly as
ever, “but it is my only theft. I found the bottle below, and did not
think it would be missed. I trust that your Honor does not grudge it
to a poor devil who tastes Burgundy somewhat seldomer than does your
Worship. And my being in the house is pure innocence. Your overseer
knew that I would neither make nor meddle with aught but the books,
or he would not have given me the key to the little door, which I now
restore to your Honor’s keeping.” He advanced, and deposited upon the
table a large key.
“What is your name?” demanded Haward, leaning back in his chair.
“Bartholomew Paris, sir. I keep the school down by the swamp, where
I impart to fifteen or twenty of the youth of these parts the
rudiments of the ancient and modern tongues, mathematics, geography,
fortifications, navigation, philosophy”--
Haward yawned, and the schoolmaster broke the thread of his discourse.
“I weary you, sir,” he said. “I will, with your permission, take my
departure. May I make so bold as to beg your Honor that you will not
mention to the gentlemen hereabouts the small matter of this bottle of
wine? I would wish not to be prejudiced in the eyes of my patrons and
scholars.”
“I will think of it,” Haward replied. “Come and take your snuffbox--if
it be yours--from the book where you have left it.”
“It is mine,” said the man. “A present from the godly minister of this
parish.”
As he spoke he put out his hand to take the snuffbox. Haward leaned
forward, seized the hand, and, bending back the fingers, exposed the
palm to the light of the candles upon the table.
“The other, if you please,” he commanded.
For a second--no longer--a wicked soul looked blackly out of the face
to which he had raised his eyes. Then the window shut, and the wall
was blank again. Without any change in his listless demeanor, the
schoolmaster laid his left hand, palm out, beside his right.
“Humph!” exclaimed Haward. “So you have stolen before to-night? The
marks are old. When were you branded, and where?”
“In Bristol, fifteen years ago,” answered the man unblushingly. “It was
all a mistake. I was as innocent as a newborn babe”--
“But unfortunately could not prove it,” interrupted Haward. “That is of
course. Go on.”
“I was transported to South Carolina, and there served out my term. The
climate did not suit me, and I liked not the society, nor--being of a
peaceful disposition--the constant alarms of pirates and buccaneers.
So when I was once more my own man I traveled north to Virginia with
a party of traders. In my youth I had been an Oxford servitor, and
schoolmasters are in demand in Virginia. Weighed in the scales with
a knowledge of the humanities and some skill in imparting them, what
matters a little mishap with hot irons? My patrons are willing to let
bygones be bygones. My school flourishes like a green bay-tree, and the
minister of this parish will speak for the probity and sobriety of my
conduct. Now I will go, sir.”
He made an awkward but deep and obsequious reverence, turned and went
out of the door, passing Juba, who was entering with a salver laden
with bread and meat and a couple of bottles. “Put down the food, Juba,”
said Haward, “and see this gentleman out of the house.”
An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside
the table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The
overseer had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by
a message from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business;
the negro women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the
noises from the quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still.
In his rich, figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward
sat and drank his wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying
and the filling of the slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was
open, and the wind blowing in made the candles to flicker. With the
wind came a murmur of leaves and the wash of the river,--stealthy and
mournful sounds that sorted not with the lighted room, the cheerful
homeliness of the flowered hangings, the gleeful lady and child above
the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity: a slow sea voyage, and
a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years
before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought,
from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed them, and would
have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the walnut-tree outside
his window, and in the distance, as far away as the creek quarter, a
dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and began to walk
to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The past had
its ghosts,--not many; what spectres the future might raise only itself
could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored future;
but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of loneliness that
was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness without, of
lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of roses that
one thought.
Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat
looked out into the windy, starlit night. This was the eastern face
of the house, and, beyond the waving trees, there were visible both
the river and the second and narrower creek which on this side bounded
the plantation. The voice with which the waters swept to the sea came
strongly to him. A large white moth sailed out of the darkness to the
lit window, but his presence scared it away.
Looking through the walnut branches, he could see a light that burned
steadily, like a candle set in a window. For a moment he wondered
whence it shone; then he remembered that the glebe lands lay in that
direction. The parish was building a house for its new minister, when
he left Virginia, those many years ago. Suddenly he recalled that the
minister--who had seemed to him a bluff, downright, honest fellow--had
told him of a little room looking out upon an orchard, and had said
that it should be the child’s.
It was possible that the star which pierced the darkness might mark
that room. He knit his brows in an effort to remember when, before this
day, he had last thought of a child whom he had held in his arms and
comforted, one splendid dawn, upon a hilltop, in a mountainous region.
He came to the conclusion that he must have forgotten her quite six
years ago. Well, she would seem to have thriven under his neglect,--and
he saw again the girl who had run for the golden guinea. It was true
that when he had put her there where that light was shining, it was
with some shadowy idea of giving her gentle breeding, of making a
lady of her. But man’s purposes are fleeting, and often gone with the
morrow. He had forgotten his purpose; and perhaps it was best this
way,--perhaps it was best this way.
For a little longer he looked at the light and listened to the voice of
the river; then he rose from the window seat, drew the curtains, and
began thoughtfully to prepare for bed.
CHAPTER VII
THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON
To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense
“second growth” springing from earth where had once stood, decorously
apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young
trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender,
bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting,
ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading
vine. It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in
fairyland, thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years’ pine,
there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere
backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings
and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and
marshy grounds, where tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle
bushes. Later in the year women and children would venture in upon the
unstable earth for the sake of the myrtle berries and their yield of
fragrant wax, and once and again an outlying slave had been tracked
by men and dogs to the dark recesses of the place; but for the most
part it was given over to its immemorial silence. To the south and the
west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed in upon the glebe, taking
the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the crooked, slow-moving,
deeply shadowed creek, upon whose farther bank stood the house of the
Rev. Gideon Darden.
A more retired spot, a completer sequestration from the world of mart
and highway, it would have been hard to find. In the quiet of the early
morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy grass,
it was an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of
scholar or of anchorite could wish. On one side of the house lay a tiny
orchard, and the windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of
pink and white apple blooms. The fragrance of the blossoms had been
in the room, but could not prevail against the odor of tobacco and
rum lately introduced by the master of the house and minister of the
parish. Audrey, sitting beside a table which had been drawn in front of
the window, turned her face aside, and was away, sense and soul, out
of the meanly furnished room into the midst of the great bouquets of
bloom, with the blue between and above. Darden, walking up and down,
with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco smoke curling like an
aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the window.
“When you have written that which I have told you to write, say so,
Audrey,” he commanded. “Don’t sit there staring at nothing!”
Audrey came back to the present with a start, took up a pen, and drew
the standish nearer. “‘Answer of Gideon Darden, Minister of Fair View
Parish, in Virginia, to the several Queries contained in my Lord Bishop
of London’s Circular Letter to the Clergy in Virginia,’” she read, and
poised her pen in air.
“Read out the questions,” ordered Darden, “and write my answer to each
in the space beneath. No blots, mind you, and spell not after the
promptings of your woman’s nature.”
Going to a side table, be mixed for himself, in an old battered silver
cap, a generous draught of bombo; then, with the drink in his hand,
walked heavily across the uncarpeted floor to his armchair, which
creaked under his weight as he sank into its leathern lap. He put down
the rum and water with so unsteady a hand that the liquor spilled, and
when he refilled his pipe half the contents of his tobacco box showered
down upon his frayed and ancient and unclean coat and breeches. From
the pocket of the latter he now drew forth a silver coin, which he
balanced for a moment upon his fat forefinger, and finally sent
spinning across the table to Audrey.
“’Tis the dregs of thy guinea, child, that Paris and Hugon and I
drank at the crossroads last night. ‘Burn me,’ says I to them, ‘if
that long-legged lass of mine shan’t have a drop in the cup!’ And say
Hugon”--
What Hugon said did not appear, or was confided to the depths of the
tankard which the minister raised to his lips. Audrey looked at the
splendid shilling gleaming upon the table beside her, but made no
motion toward taking it into closer possession. A little red had come
into the clear brown of her cheeks. She was a young girl, with her
dreams and fancies, and the golden guinea would have made a dream or
two come true.
“‘Query the first,’” she read slowly, “‘How long since you went to the
plantations as missionary?’”
Darden, leaning back in his chair, with his eyes uplifted through the
smoke clouds to the ceiling, took his pipe from his mouth, for the
better answering of his diocesan. “‘My Lord, thirteen years come St.
Swithin’s day,’” he dictated. “‘Signed, Gideon Darden.’ Audrey, do not
forget thy capitals. Thirteen years! Lord, Lord, the years, how they
fly! Hast it down, Audrey?”
Audrey, writing in a slow, fair, clerkly hand, made her period, and
turned to the Bishop’s second question: “‘Had you any other church
before you came to that which you now possess?’”
“‘No, my Lord,’” said the minister to the Bishop; then to the ceiling:
“I came raw from the devil to this parish. Audrey, hast ever heard
children say that Satan comes and walks behind me when I go through the
forest?”
“Yes,” said Audrey, “but their eyes are not good. You go hand in hand.”
Darden paused in the lifting of his tankard. “Thy wits are brightening,
Audrey; but keep such observations to thyself. It is only the
schoolmaster with whom I walk. Go on to the next question.”
The Bishop desired to know how long the minister addressed had been
inducted into his living. The minister addressed, leaning forward,
laid it off to his Lordship how that the vestries in Virginia did not
incline to have ministers inducted, and, being very powerful, kept the
poor servants of the Church upon uneasy seats; but that he, Gideon
Darden, had the love of his flock, rich and poor, gentle and simple,
and that in the first year of his ministry the gentlemen of his vestry
had been pleased to present his name to the Governor for induction.
Which explanation made, the minister drank more rum, and looked out of
the window at the orchard and at his neighbor’s tobacco.
“You are only a woman, and can hold no office, Audrey,” he said, “but I
will impart to you words of wisdom whose price is above rubies. Always
agree with your vestry. Go, hat in hand, to each of its members in
turn, craving advice as to the management of your own affairs. Thunder
from the pulpit against Popery, which does not exist in this colony,
and the Pretender, who is at present in Italy. Wrap a dozen black sheep
of inferior breed in white sheets and set them arow at the church door,
but make it stuff of the conscience to see no blemish in the wealthier
and more honorable portion of your flock. So you will thrive, and come
to be inducted into your living, whether in Virginia or some other
quarter of the globe. What’s the worthy Bishop’s next demand? Hasten,
for Hugon is coming this morning, and there’s settlement to be made of
a small bet, and a hand at cards.”
By the circular letter and the lips of Audrey the Bishop proceeded
to propound a series of questions, which the minister answered with
portentous glibness. In the midst of an estimate of the value of a
living in a sweet-scented parish a face looked in at the window, and a
dark and sinewy hand laid before Audrey a bunch of scarlet columbine.
“The rock was high,” said a voice, “and the pool beneath was deep and
dark. Here are the flowers that waved from the rock and threw colored
shadows upon the pool.”
The girl shrank as from a sudden and mortal danger. Her lips trembled,
her eyes half closed, and with a hurried and passionate gesture she
rose from her chair, thrust from her the scarlet blooms, and with one
lithe movement of her body put between her and the window the heavy
writing table. The minister laid by his sum in arithmetic.
“Ha, Hugon, dog of a trader!” he cried. “Come in, man. Hast brought the
skins? There’s fire-water upon the table, and Audrey will be kind. Stay
to dinner, and tell us what lading you brought down river, and of your
kindred in the forest and your kindred in Monacan-Town.”
The man at the window shrugged his shoulders, lifted his brows, and
spread his hands. So a captain of Mousquetaires might have done; but
the face was dark-skinned, the cheek-bones were high, the black eyes
large, fierce, and restless. A great bushy peruke, of an ancient
fashion, and a coarse, much-laced cravat gave setting and lent a touch
of grotesqueness and of terror to a countenance wherein the blood of
the red man warred with that of the white.
“I will not come in now,” said the voice again. “I am going in my boat
to the big creek to take twelve doeskins to an old man named Taberer. I
will come back to dinner. May I not, ma’m’selle?”
The corners of the lips went up, and the thicket of false hair swept
the window sill, so low did the white man bow; but the Indian eyes were
watchful. Audrey made no answer; she stood with her face turned away
and her eyes upon the door, measuring her chances. If Darden would let
her pass, she might reach the stairway and her own room before the
trader could enter the house. There were bolts to its heavy door, and
Hugon might do as he had done before, and talk his heart out upon the
wrong side of the wood. Thanks be! lying upon her bed and pressing the
pillow over her ears, she did not have to hear.
At the trader’s announcement that his present path led past the house,
she ceased her stealthy progress toward her own demesne, and waited,
with her back to the window, and her eyes upon one long ray of sunshine
that struck high against the wall.
“I will come again,” said the voice without, and the apparition was
gone from the window. Once more blue sky and rosy bloom spanned the
opening, and the sunshine lay in a square upon the floor. The girl drew
a long breath, and turning to the table began to arrange the papers
upon it with trembling hands.
“‘Sixteen thousand pounds of sweet-scented, at ten shillings the
hundredweight; for marriage by banns, five shillings; for the preaching
of a funeral sermon, forty shillings; for christening’”--began Darden
for the Bishop’s information. Audrey took her pen and wrote; but before
the list of the minister’s perquisites had come to an end the door flew
open, and a woman with the face of a vixen came hurriedly into the
room. With her entered the breeze from the river, driving before it the
smoke wreaths, and blowing the papers from the table to the floor.
Darden stamped his foot. “Woman, I have business, I tell ye,--business
with the Bishop of London! I’ve kept his Lordship at the door this
se’nnight, and if I give him not audience Blair will presently be down
uon me with tooth and nail and his ancient threat of a visitation.
Begone and keep the house! Audrey, where are you, child?”
“Audrey, leave the room!” commanded the woman. “I have something to say
that’s not for your ears. Let her go, Darden. There’s news, I tell you.”
The minister glanced at his wife; then knocked the ashes from his pipe
and nodded dismissal to Audrey. His late secretary slipped from her
seat and left the room, not without alacrity.
“Well?” demanded Darden, when the sound of the quick young feet had
died away. “Open your budget, Deborah. There’s naught in it, I’ll
swear, but some fal-lal about your flowered gown or an old woman’s
black cat and corner broomstick.”
Mistress Deborah Darden pressed her thin lips together, and eyed her
lord and master with scant measure of conjugal fondness. “It’s about
some one nearer home than your bishops and commissaries,” she said.
“Hide passed by this morning, going to the river field. I was in the
garden, and he stopped to speak to me. Mr. Haward is home from England.
He came to the great house last night, and he ordered his horse for ten
o’clock this morning, and asked the nearest way through the fields to
the parsonage.”
Darden whistled, and put down his drink untasted.
“Enter the most powerful gentleman of my vestry!” he exclaimed. “He’ll
be that in a month’s time. A member of the Council, too, no doubt, and
with the Governor’s ear. He’s a scholar and fine gentleman. Deborah,
clear away this trash. Lay out my books, fetch a bottle of Canary,
and give me my Sunday coat. Put flowers on the table, and a dish of
bonchrétiens, and get on your tabby gown. Make your curtsy at the door;
then leave him to me.”
“And Audrey?” said his wife.
Darden, about to rise, sank back again and sat still, a hand upon
either arm of his chair. “Eh!” he said; then, in a meditative tone,
“That is so,--there is Audrey.”
“If he has eyes, he’ll see that for himself,” retorted Mistress Deborah
tartly. “‘More to the purpose,’ he’ll say, ‘where is the money that I
gave you for her?’”
“Why, it’s gone,” answered Darden “Gone in maintenance,--gone in meat
and drink and raiment. He didn’t want it buried. Pshaw, Deborah, he has
quite forgot his fine-lady plan! He forgot it years ago, I’ll swear.”
“I’ll send her now on an errand to the Widow Constance’s,” said the
mistress of the house. “Then before he comes again I’ll get her a
gown”--
The minister brought his hand down upon the table. “You’ll do no such
thing!” he thundered. “The girl’s got to be here when he comes. As for
her dress, can’t she borrow from you? The Lord knows that though only
the wife of a poor parson, you might throw for gewgaws with a bona
roba! Go trick her out, and bring her here. I’ll attend to the wine and
the books.”
When the door opened again, and Audrey, alarmed and wondering, slipped
with the wind into the room, and stood in the sunshine before the
minister, that worthy first frowned, then laughed, and finally swore.
“’Swounds, Deborah, your hand is out! If I hadn’t taken you from
service, I’d swear that you were never inside a fine lady’s chamber.
What’s the matter with the girl’s skirt?”
“She’s too tall!” cried the sometime waiting woman angrily. “As for
that great stain upon the silk, the wine made it when you threw your
tankard at me, last Sunday but one.”
“That manteau pins her arms to her sides,” interrupted the minister
calmly, “and the lace is dirty. You’ve hidden all her hair under that
mazarine, and too many patches become not a brown skin. Turn around,
child!”
While Audrey slowly revolved, the guardian of her fortunes, leaning
back in his chair, bent his bushy brows and gazed, not at the circling
figure in its tawdry apparel, but into the distance. When she stood
still and looked at him with a half-angry, half-frightened face, he
brought his bleared eyes to bear upon her, studied her for a minute,
then motioned to his wife.
“She must take off this paltry finery, Deborah,” he announced. “I’ll
have none of it. Go, child, and don your Cinderella gown.”
“What does it all mean?” cried Audrey, with heaving bosom. “Why did she
put these things upon me, and why will she tell me nothing? If Hugon
has hand in it”--
The minister made a gesture of contempt. “Hugon! Hugon, half Monacan
and half Frenchman, is bartering skins with a Quaker. Begone, child,
and when you are transformed return to us.”
When the door had closed he turned upon his wife. “The girl has
been cared for,” he said. “She has been fed,--if not with cates and
dainties, then with bread and meat; she has been clothed,--if not in
silk and lace, then in good blue linen and penistone. She is young and
of the springtime, hath more learning than had many a princess of old
times, is innocent and good to look at. Thou and the rest of thy sex
are fools, Deborah, but wise men died not with Solomon. It matters not
about her dress.”
Rising, he went to a shelf of battered, dog-eared books, and taking
down an armful proceeded to strew the volumes upon the table. The red
blooms of the columbine being in the way, he took up the bunch and
tossed it out of the window. With the light thud of the mass upon the
ground eyes of husband and wife met.
“Hugon would marry the girl,” said the latter, twisting the hem of her
apron with restless fingers.
Without change of countenance, Darden leaned forward, seized her by
the shoulder and shook her violently. “You are too given to idle and
meaningless words, Deborah,” he declared, releasing her. “By the Lord,
one of these days I’ll break you of the habit for good and all! Hugon,
and scarlet flowers, and who will marry Audrey, that is yet but a child
and useful about the house,--what has all this to do with the matter in
hand, which is simply to make ourselves and our house presentable in
the eyes of my chief parishioner? A man would think that thirteen years
in Virginia would teach any fool the necessity of standing well with
a powerful gentleman such as this. I’m no coward. Damn sanctimonious
parsons and my Lord Bishop’s Scotch hireling! If they yelp much longer
at my heels, I’ll scandalize them in good earnest! It’s thin ice,
though,--it’s thin ice; but I like this house and glebe, and I’m going
to live and die in them,--and die drunk, if I choose, Mr. Commissary
to the contrary! It’s of import, Deborah, that my parishioners, being
easy folk, willing to live and let live, should like me still, and that
a majority of my vestry should not be able to get on without me. With
this in mind, get out the wine, dust the best chair, and be ready with
thy curtsy. It will be time enough to cry Audrey’s banns when she is
asked in marriage.”
Audrey, in her brown dress, with the color yet in her cheeks, entering
at the moment, Mistress Deborah attempted no response to her husband’s
adjuration. Darden turned to the girl. “I’ve done with the writing for
the nonce, child,” he said, “and need you no longer. I’ll smoke a pipe
and think of my sermon. You’re tired; out with you into the sunshine!
Go to the wood or down by the creek, but not beyond call, d’ye mind.”
Audrey looked from one to the other, but said nothing. There were many
things in the world of other people which she did not understand; one
thing more or less made no great difference. But she did understand the
sunlit roof, the twilight halls, the patterned floor of the forest.
Blossoms drifting down, fleeing shadows, voices of wind and water,
and all murmurous elfin life spoke to her. They spoke the language of
her land; when she stepped out of the door into the air and faced the
portals of her world, they called to her to come. Lithe and slight and
light of foot, she answered to their piping. The orchard through which
she ran was fair with its rosy trees, like gayly dressed curtsying
dames; the slow, clear creek that held the double of the sky enticed,
but she passed it by. Straight as an arrow she pierced to the heart
of the wood that lay to the north. Thorn and bramble, branch of bloom
and entangling vine, stayed her not; long since she had found or had
made for herself a path to the centre of the labyrinth. Here was a
beech-tree, older by many a year than the young wood,--a solitary
tree spared by the axe what time its mates had fallen. Tall and
silver-gray the column of the trunk rose to meet wide branches and the
green lace-work of tender leaves. The earth beneath was clean swept,
and carpeted with the leaves of last year; a wide, dry, pale brown
enchanted ring, against whose borders pressed the riot of the forest.
Vine and bush, flower and fern, could not enter; but Audrey came and
laid herself down upon a cool and shady bed.
By human measurement the house that she had left was hard by; even
from under the beech-tree Mistress Deborah’s thin call could draw her
back to the walls which sheltered her, which she had been taught to
call her home. But it was not her soul’s home, and now the veil of the
kindly woods withdrew it league on league, shut it out, made it as if
it had never been. From the charmed ring beneath the beech-tree she
took possession of her world; for her the wind murmured, the birds
sang, insects hummed or shrilled, the green saplings nodded their
heads. Flowers, and the bedded moss, and the little stream that leaped
from a precipice of three feet into the calm of a hand-deep pool spoke
to her. She was happy. Gone was the house and its inmates; gone Paris
the schoolmaster, who had taught her to write, and whose hand touching
hers in guidance made her sick and cold; gone Hugon the trader, whom
she feared and hated. Here were no toil, no annoy, no frightened
flutterings of the heart; she had passed the frontier, and was safe in
her own land.
She pressed her cheek against the dead leaves, and, with the smell of
the earth in her nostrils, looked sideways with half-closed eyes and
made a radiant mist of the forest round about. A drowsy warmth was
in the air; the birds sang far away; through a rift in the foliage a
sunbeam came and rested beside her like A gilded snake.
For a time, wrapped in the warmth and the green and gold mist, she
lay as quiet as the sunbeam; of the earth earthy, in pact with the
mould beneath the leaves, with the slowly crescent trunks, brown or
silver-gray, with moss and lichened rock, and with all life that basked
or crept or flew. At last, however, the mind aroused, and she opened
her eyes, saw, and thought of what she saw. It was pleasant in the
forest. She watched the flash of a bird, as blue as the sky, from limb
to limb; she listened to the elfin waterfall; she drew herself with
hand and arm across the leaves to the edge of the pale brown ring,
plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it back to the silver column of
the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the rosy sprig within her hand,
she saw a man coming toward her, down the path that she had thought
hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against brier and branch,
and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he had come out to
seek.
CHAPTER VIII
UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
In the moment in which she sprang to her feet she saw that it was
not Hugon, and her heart grew calm again. In her torn gown, with her
brown hair loosed from its fastenings, and falling over her shoulders
in heavy waves whose crests caught the sunlight, she stood against
the tree beneath which she had lain, gazed with wide-open eyes at the
intruder, and guessed from his fine coat and the sparkling toy looping
his hat that he was a gentleman. She knew gentlemen when she saw them:
on a time one had cursed her for scurrying like a partridge across the
road before his horse, making the beast come nigh to unseating him;
another, coming upon her and the Widow Constance’s Barbara gathering
fagots in the November woods, had tossed to each a sixpence; a third,
on vestry business with the minister, had touched her beneath the chin,
and sworn that an she were not so brown she were fair; a fourth, lying
hidden upon the bank of the creek, had caught her boat head as she
pushed it into the reeds, and had tried to kiss her. They had certain
ways, had gentlemen, but she knew no great harm of them. There was
one, now--but he would be like a prince. When at eventide the sky was
piled with pale towering clouds, and she looked, as she often looked,
down the river, toward the bay and the sea beyond, she always saw this
prince that she had woven--warp of memory, woof of dreams--stand erect
in the pearly light. There was a gentleman indeed!
As to the possessor of the title now slowly and steadily making his way
toward her she was in a mere state of wonder. It was not possible that
he had lost his way; but if so, she was sorry that, in losing it, he
had found the slender zigzag of her path. A trustful child,--save where
Hugon was concerned,--she was not in the least afraid, and being of a
friendly mind looked at the approaching figure with shy kindliness, and
thought that he must have come from a distant part of the country. She
thought that had she ever seen him before she would have remembered it.
Upon the outskirts of the ring, clear of the close embrace of flowering
bush and spreading vine. Haward paused, and looked with smiling eyes at
this girl of the woods, this forest creature that, springing from the
earth, had set its back against the tree.
“Tarry awhile,” he said. “Slip not yet within the bark. Had I known, I
should have brought oblation of milk and honey.”
“This is the thicket between Fair View and the glebe lands,” said
Audrey, who knew not what bark of tree and milk and honey had to do
with the case. “Over yonder, sir, is the road to the great house. This
path ends here; you must go back to the edge of the wood, then turn to
the south”--
“I have not lost my way,” answered Haward, still smiling. “It is
pleasant here in the shade, after the warmth of the open. May I not sit
down upon the leaves and talk to you for a while? I came out to find
you, you know.”
As he spoke, and without waiting for the permission which he asked,
he crossed the rustling leaves, and threw himself down upon the earth
between two branching roots. Her skirt brushed his knee; with a
movement quick and shy she put more distance between them, then stood
and looked at him with wide, grave eyes. “Why do you say that you came
here to find me?” she asked. “I do not know you.”
Haward laughed, nursing his knee and looking about him. “Let that pass
for a moment. You have the prettiest woodland parlor, child! Tell me,
do they treat you well over there?” with a jerk of his thumb toward the
glebe house. “Madam the shrew and his reverence the bully, are they
kind to you? Though they let you go like a beggar maid,”--he glanced
kindly enough at her bare feet and torn gown,--“yet they starve you
not, nor beat you, nor deny you aught in reason?”
Audrey drew herself up. She had a proper pride, and she chose to
forget for this occasion a bruise upon her arm and the thrusting
upon her of Hugon’s company. “I do not know who you are, sir, that
ask me such questions,” she said sedately. “I have food and shelter
and--and--kindness. And I go barefoot only of week days”--
It was a brave beginning, but of a sudden she found it hard to go on.
She felt his eyes upon her and knew that he was unconvinced, and into
her own eyes came the large tears. They did not fall, but through
them she saw the forest swim in green and gold. “I have no father or
mother,” she said, “and no brother or sister. In all the world there is
no one that is kin to me.”
Her voice, that was low and full and apt to fall into minor cadences,
died away, and she stood with her face raised and slightly turned from
the gentleman who lay at her feet, stretched out upon the sere beech
leaves. He did not seem inclined to speech, and for a time the little
brook and the birds and the wind in the trees sang undisturbed.
“These woods are very beautiful,” said Haward at last, with his gaze
upon her, “but if the land were less level it were more to my taste.
Now, if this plain were a little valley couched among the hills, if to
the westward rose dark blue mountains like a rampart, if the runlet
yonder were broad and clear, if this beech were a sugar-tree”--
He broke off, content to see her eyes dilate, her bosom rise and fall,
her hand go trembling for support to the column of the beech.
“Oh, the mountains!” she cried. “When the mist lifted, when the cloud
rested, when the sky was red behind them! Oh, the clear stream, and the
sugar-tree, and the cabin! Who are you? How did you know about these
things? Were you--were you there?”
She turned upon him, with her soul in her eyes. As for him, lying at
length upon the ground, he locked his hands beneath his head and began
to sing, though scarce above his breath. He sang the song of Amiens:--
“Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me.”
When he had come to the end of the stanza he half rose, and turned
toward the mute and breathless figure leaning against the beech-tree.
For her the years had rolled back: one moment she stood upon the
doorstep of the cabin, and the air was filled with the trampling of
horses, with quick laughter, whistling, singing, and the call of a
trumpet; the next she ran, in night-time and in terror, between rows of
rustling corn, felt again the clasp of her pursuer, heard at her ear
the comfort of his voice. A film came between her eyes and the man at
whom she stared, and her heart grew cold.
“Audrey,” said Haward, “come here, child.”
The blood returned to her heart, her vision cleared, and her arm fell
from its clasp upon the tree. The bark opened not; the hamadryad had
lost the spell. When at his repeated command she crossed to him, she
went as the trusting, dumbly loving, dumbly grateful child whose life
he had saved, and whose comforter, protector, and guardian he had been.
When he took her hands in his she was glad to feel them there again,
and she had no blushes ready when he kissed her upon the forehead. It
was sweet to her who hungered for affection, who long ago had set his
image up, loving him purely as a sovereign spirit or as a dear and
great elder brother, to hear him call her again “little maid;” tell her
that she had not changed save in height; ask her if she remembered this
or that adventure, what time they had strayed in the woods together.
Remember! When at last, beneath his admirable management, the wonder
and the shyness melted away, and she found her tongue, memories came
in a torrent. The hilltop, the deep woods and the giant trees, the
house he had built for her out of stones and moss, the grapes they
had gathered, the fish they had caught, the thunderstorm when he had
snatched her out of the path of a stricken and falling pine, an alarm
of Indians, an alarm of wolves, finally the first faint sounds of the
returning expedition, the distant trumpet note, the nearer approach,
the bursting again into the valley of the Governor and his party, the
journey from that loved spot to Williamsburgh,--all sights and sounds,
thoughts and emotions, of that time, fast held through lonely years,
came at her call, and passed again in procession before them. Haward,
first amazed, then touched, reached at length the conclusion that the
years of her residence beneath the minister’s roof could not have been
happy; that she must always have put from her with shuddering and
horror the memory of the night which orphaned her; but that she had
passionately nursed, cherished, and loved all that she had of sweet and
dear, and that this all was the memory of her childhood in the valley,
and of that brief season when he had been her savior, protector,
friend, and playmate. He learned also--for she was too simple and
too glad either to withhold the information or to know that she had
given it--that in her girlish and innocent imaginings she had made of
him a fairy knight, clothing him in a panoply of power, mercy, and
tenderness, and setting him on high, so high that his very heel was
above the heads of the mortals within her ken.
Keen enough in his perceptions, he was able to recognize that here was
a pure and imaginative spirit, strongly yearning after ideal strength,
beauty, and goodness. Given such a spirit, it was not unnatural that,
turning from sordid or unhappy surroundings as a flower turns from
shadow to the full face of the sun, she should have taken a memory
of valiant deeds, kind words, and a protecting arm, and have created
out of these a man after her own heart, endowing him with all heroic
attributes; at one and the same time sending him out into the world,
a knight-errant without fear and without reproach, and keeping him by
her side--the side of a child--in her own private wonderland. He saw
that she had done this, and he was ashamed. He did not tell her that
that eleven-years-distant fortnight was to him but a half-remembered
incident of a crowded life, and that to all intents and purposes she
herself had been forgotten. For one thing, it would have hurt her;
for another, he saw no reason why he should tell her. Upon occasion
he could be as ruthless as a stone; if he were so now he knew it
not, but in deceiving her deceived himself. Man of a world that was
corrupt enough, he was of course quietly assured that he could bend
this woodland creature--half child, half dryad--to the form of his
bidding. To do so was in his power, but not his pleasure. He meant to
leave her as she was; to accept the adoration of the child, but to
attempt no awakening of the woman. The girl was of the mountains, and
their higher, colder, purer air; though he had brought her body thence,
he would not have her spirit leave the climbing earth, the dreamlike
summits, for the hot and dusty plain. The plain, God knew, had dwellers
enough.
She was a thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment
in a dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child.
About her was a pathos, too,--the pathos of the flower taken from its
proper soil, and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward,
looking at her, watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the
dark eyes, beneath the felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy
of woe, felt for her a pity so real and great that for the moment his
heart ached as for some sorrow of his own. She was only a young girl,
poor and helpless, born of poor and helpless parents dead long ago.
There was in her veins no gentle blood; she had none of the world’s
goods; her gown was torn, her feet went bare. She had youth, but not
its heritage of gladness: beauty, but none to see it; a nature that
reached toward light and height, and for its home the house which he
had lately left. He was a man older by many years than the girl beside
him, knowing good and evil; by instinct preferring the former, but at
times stooping, open-eyed, to that degree of the latter which a lax
and gay world held to be not incompatible with a convention somewhat
misnamed “the honor of a gentleman.” Now, beneath the beech-tree in the
forest which touched upon one side the glebe, upon the other his own
lands, he chose at this time the good; said to himself, and believed
the thing he said, that in word and in deed he would prove himself her
friend.
Putting out his hand he drew her down upon the leaves; and she sat
beside him, still and happy, ready to answer him when he asked her
this or that, readier yet to sit in blissful, dreamy silence. She was
as pure as the flower which she held in her hand, and most innocent
in her imaginings. This was a very perfect knight, a great gentleman,
good and pitiful, that had saved her from the Indians when she was a
little girl, and had been kind to her,--ah, so kind! In that dreadful
night when she had lost father and mother and brother and sister, when
in the darkness her childish heart was a stone for terror, he had come,
like God, from the mountains, and straightway she was safe. Now into
her woods, from over the sea, he had come again, and at once the load
upon her heart, the dull longing and misery, the fear of Hugon, were
lifted. The chaplet which she laid at his feet was not loosely woven of
gay-colored flowers, but was compact of austerer blooms of gratitude,
reverence, and that love which is only a longing to serve. The glamour
was at hand, the enchanted light which breaks not from the east or the
west or the north or the south was upon its way; but she knew it not,
and she was happy in her ignorance.
“I am tired of the city,” he said. “Now I shall stay in Virginia. A
longing for the river and the marshes and the house where I was born
came upon me”--
“I know,” she answered. “When I shut my eyes I see the cabin in the
valley, and when I dream it is of things which happen in a mountainous
country.”
“I am alone in the great house,” he continued, “and the floors echo
somewhat loudly. The garden, too; beside myself there is no one
to smell the roses or to walk in the moonlight. I had forgotten
the isolation of these great plantations. Each is a province and a
despotism. If the despot has neither kith nor kin, has not yet made
friends, and cares not to draw company from the quarters, he is lonely.
They say that there are ladies in Virginia whose charms well-nigh
outweigh their dowries of sweet-scented and Oronoko. I will wed such an
one, and have laughter in my garden, and other footsteps than my own in
my house.”
“There are beautiful ladies in these parts,” said Audrey. “There is the
one that gave me the guinea for my running yesterday. She was so very
fair. I wished with all my heart that I were like her.”
“She is my friend,” said Haward slowly, “and her mind is as fair as her
face. I will tell her your story.”
The gilded streak upon the earth beneath the beech had crept away,
but over the ferns and weeds and flowering bushes between the slight
trees without the ring the sunshine gloated. The blue of the sky was
wonderful, and in the silence Haward and Audrey heard the wind whisper
in the treetops. A dove moaned, and a hare ran past.
“It was I who brought you from the mountains and placed you here,” said
Haward at last. “I thought it for the best, and that when I sailed away
I left you to a safe and happy life. It seems that I was mistaken. But
now that I am at home again, child, I wish you to look upon me, who am
so much your elder, as your guardian and protector still. If there is
anything which you lack, if you are misused, are in need of help, why,
think that your troubles are the Indians again, little maid, and turn
to me once more for help!”
Having spoken honestly and well and very unwisely, he looked at his
watch and said that it was late. When he rose to his feet Audrey did
not move, and when he looked down upon her he saw that her eyes, that
had been wet, were overflowing. He put out his hand, and she took it
and touched it with her lips; then, because he said that he had not
meant to set her crying, she smiled, and with her own hand dashed away
the tears.
“When I ride this way I shall always stop at the minister’s house,”
said Haward, “when, if there is aught which you need or wish, you must
tell me of it. Think of me as your friend, child.”
He laid his hand lightly and caressingly upon her head. The ruffles
at his wrist, soft, fine, and perfumed, brushed her forehead and her
eyes. “The path through your labyrinth to its beechen heart was hard
to find,” he continued, “but I can easily retrace it. No, trouble not
yourself, child. Stay for a time where you are. I wish to speak to the
minister alone.”
His hand was lifted. Audrey felt rather than saw him go. Only a few
feet, and the dogwood stars, the purple mist of the Judas-tree, the
white fragrance of a wild cherry, came like a painted arras between
them. For a time she could hear the movement of the branches as he put
them aside; but presently this too ceased, and the place was left to
her and to all the life that called it home.
It was the same wood, surely, into which she had run two hours before,
and yet--and yet--When her tears were spent, and she stood up, leaning,
with her loosened hair and her gown that was the color of oak bark,
against the beech-tree, she looked about her and wondered. The wonder
did not last, for she found an explanation.
“It has been blessed,” said Audrey, with all reverence and simplicity,
“and that is why the light is so different.”
CHAPTER IX
MACLEAN TO THE RESCUE
Saunderson, the overseer, having laboriously written and signed a pass,
laid down the quill, wiped his inky forefinger upon his sleeve, and
gave the paper to the storekeeper, who sat idly by.
“Ye’ll remember that the store chiefly lacks in broadcloth of Witney,
frieze and camlet, and in women’s shoes, both silk and callimanco. And
dinna forget to trade with Alick Ker for three small swords, a chafing
dish, and a dozen mourning and hand-and-heart rings. See that you have
the skins’ worth. Alick’s an awfu’ man to get the upper hand of.”
“I’m thinking a MacLean should have small difficulty with a Ker,” said
the storekeeper dryly. “What I’m wanting to know is why I am saddled
with the company of Monsieur Jean Hugon.” He jerked his thumb toward
the figure of the trader standing within the doorway. “I do not like
the gentleman, and I’d rather trudge it to Williamsburgh alone.”
“Ye ken not the value of the skins, nor how to show them off,” answered
the other. “Wherefore, for the consideration of a measure of rum, he’s
engaged to help you in the trading. As for his being half Indian,
Gude guide us! It’s been told me that no so many centuries ago the
Highlandmen painted their bodies and went into battle without taking
advantage even of feathers and silk grass. One half of him is of the
French nobeelity; he told me as much himself. And the best of ye--sic
as the Campbells--are no better than that.”
He looked at MacLean with a caustic smile. The latter shrugged his
shoulders. “So long as you tie him neck and heels with a Campbell I
am content,” he answered. “Are you going? I’ll just bar the windows
and lock the door, and then I’ll be off with yonder copper cadet of a
French house. Good-day to you. I’ll be back to-night.”
“Ye’d better,” said the overseer, with another widening of his thin
lips. “For myself, I bear ye no ill-will; for my grandmither--rest her
soul!--came frae the north, and I aye thought a Stewart better became
the throne than a foreign-speaking body frae Hanover. But if the store
is not open the morn I’ll raise hue and cry, and that without wasting
time. I’ve been told ye’re great huntsmen in the Highlands; if ye
choose to turn red deer yourself, I’ll give ye a chase, _and trade ye
down, man, and track ye down_.”
MacLean half turned from the window. “I have hunted the red deer,” he
said, “in the land where I was born, and which I shall see no more, and
I have been myself hunted in the land where I shall die. I have run
until I have fallen, and I have felt the teeth of the dogs. Were God
to send a miracle--which he will not do--and I were to go back to the
glen and the crag and the deep birch woods, I suppose that I would hunt
again, would drive the stag to bay, holloing to my hounds, and thinking
the sound of the horns sweet music in my ears. It is the way of the
earth. Hunter and hunted, we make the world and the pity of it.”
Setting to work again, he pushed to the heavy shutters. “You’ll find
them open in the morning,” he said, “and find me selling,--selling
clothing that I may not wear, wine that I may not drink, powder
and shot that I may not spend, swords that I may not use; and
giving,--giving pride, manhood, honor, heart’s blood”--
He broke off, shot to the bar across the shutters, and betook himself
in silence to the other window, where presently he burst into a fit
of laughter. The sound was harsh even to savagery. “Go your ways,
Saunderson,” he said. “I’ve tried the bars of the cage; they’re too
strong. Stop on your morning round, and I’ll give account of my
trading.”
The overseer gone, the windows barred, and the heavy door shut and
locked behind him, MacLean paused upon the doorstep to look down upon
his appointed companion. The trader, half sitting, half reclining upon
a log, was striking at something with the point of his hunting-knife,
lightly, delicately, and often. The something was a lizard, about
which, as it lay in the sunshine upon the log, he had wrought a pen of
leafy twigs. The creature, darting for liberty this way and that, was
met at every turn by the steel, and at every turn suffered a new wound.
MacLean looked; then bent over and with a heavy stick struck the thing
out of its pain.
“There’s a time to work and a time to play, Hugon,” he said coolly.
“Playtime’s over now. The sun is high, and Isaac and the oxen must have
the skins well-nigh to Williamsburgh. Up with you!”
Hugon rose to his feet, slid his knife into its sheath, and announced
in good enough English that he was ready. He had youth, the slender,
hardy, perfectly moulded figure of the Indian, a coloring and a
countenance that were not of the white and not of the brown. When
he went a-trading up the river, past the thickly settled country,
past the falls, past the French town which his Huguenot father had
helped to build, into the deep woods and to the Indian village
whence had strayed his mother, he wore the clothing that became the
woods,--beaded moccasins, fringed leggings, hunting-shirt of deerskin,
cap of fur,--looked his part and played it well. When he came back to
an English country, to wharves and stores, to halls and porches of
great houses and parlors of lesser ones, to the streets and ordinaries
of Williamsburgh, he pulled on jack boots, shrugged himself into a
coat with silver buttons, stuck lace of a so-so quality at neck and
wrists, wore a cocked hat and a Blenheim wig, and became a figure alike
grotesque and terrible. Two thirds of the time his business caused
him to be in the forests that were far away; but when he returned to
civilization, to stare it in the face and brag within himself, “I am
lot and part of what I see!” he dwelt at the crossroads ordinary, drank
and gamed with Paris the schoolmaster and Darden the minister, and
dreamed (at times) of Darden’s Audrey.
The miles to Williamsburgh were long and sunny, with the dust thick
beneath the feet. Warm and heavy, the scented spring possessed the
land. It was a day for drowsing in the shade: for them who must needs
walk in the sunshine, languor of thought overtook them, and sparsity of
speech. They walked rapidly, step with step, their two lean and sinewy
bodies casting the same length of shadow; but they kept their eyes upon
the long glare of white dust, and told not their dreams. At a point in
the road where the storekeeper saw only confused marks and a powdering
of dust upon the roadside bushes, the half-breed announced that there
had been that morning a scuffle in a gang of negroes; that a small man
had been thrown heavily to the earth, and a large man had made off
across a low ditch into the woods; that the overseer had parted the
combatants, and that some one’s back had bled. No sooner was this piece
of clairvoyance aired than he was vexed that he had shown a hall-mark
of the savage, and hastily explained that life in the woods, such as a
trader must live, would teach any man--an Englishman, now, as well as a
Frenchman--how to read what was written on the earth. Farther on, when
they came to a miniature glen between the semblance of two hills, down
which, in mockery of a torrent, brabbled a slim brown stream, MacLean
stood still, gazed for a minute, then, whistling, caught up with his
companion, and spoke at length upon the subject of the skins awaiting
them at Williamsburgh.
The road had other travelers than themselves. At intervals a cloud of
dust would meet or overtake them, and out of the windows of coach or
chariot or lighter chaise faces would glance at them. In the thick dust
wheels and horses’ hoofs made no noise, the black coachmen sat still
upon the boxes, the faces were languid with the springtime. A moment
and all were gone. Oftener there passed a horseman. If he were riding
the planter’s pace, he went by like a whirlwind, troubling only to
curse them out of his path; if he had more leisure, he threw them a
good-morning, or perhaps drew rein to ask this or that of Hugon. The
trader was well known, and was an authority upon all matters pertaining
to hunting or trapping. The foot passengers were few, for in Virginia
no man walked that could ride, and on a morn of early May they that
walked were like to be busy in the fields. An ancient seaman, lame and
vagabond, lurched beside them for a while, then lagged behind; a witch,
old and bowed and bleared of eye, crossed their path; and a Sapony
hunter, with three wolves’ heads slung across his shoulder, slipped
by them on his way to claim the reward decreed by the Assembly. At a
turn of the road they came upon a small ordinary, with horses fastened
before it, and with laughter, oaths, and the rattling of dice issuing
from the open windows. The trader had money; the storekeeper had none.
The latter, though he was thirsty, would have passed on; but Hugon
twitched him by the sleeve, and producing from the depths of his great
flapped pocket a handful of crusadoes, écues, and pieces of eight,
indicated with a flourish that he was prepared to share with his less
fortunate companion.
They drank standing, kissed the girl who served them, and took to the
road again. There were no more thick woods, the road running in a blaze
of sunshine past clumps of cedars and wayside tangles of blackberry,
sumac, and elder. Presently, beyond a group of elms, came into sight
the goodly college of William and Mary, and, dazzling white against the
blue, the spire of Bruton church.
Within a wide pasture pertaining to the college, close to the roadside
and under the boughs of a vast poplar, half a score of students were
at play. Their lithe young bodies were dark of hue and were not
overburdened with clothing; their countenances remained unmoved,
without laughter or grimacing; and no excitement breathed in the voices
with which they called one to another. In deep gravity they tossed a
ball, or pitched a quoit, or engaged in wrestling. A white man, with a
singularly pure and gentle face, sat upon the grass at the foot of the
tree, and watched the studious efforts of his pupils with an approving
smile.
“Wildcats to purr upon the hearth, and Indians to go to school!” quoth
MacLean. “Were you taught here, Hugon, and did you play so sadly?”
The trader, his head held very high, drew out a large and bedizened
snuffbox, and took snuff with ostentation. “My father was of a great
tribe--I would say a great house--in the country called France,” he
explained, with dignity. “Oh, he was of a very great name indeed! His
blood was--what do you call it?--_blue_. I am the son of my father:
I am a Frenchman. _Bien_! My father dies, having always kept me with
him at Monacan-Town; and when they have laid him full length in the
ground, Monsieur le Marquis calls me to him. ‘Jean,’ says he, and his
voice is like the ice in the stream, ‘Jean, you have ten years, and
your father--may _le bon Dieu_ pardon his sins!--has left his wishes
regarding you and money for your maintenance. To-morrow Messieurs de
Sailly and de Breuil go down the river to talk of affairs with the
English Governor. You will go with them, and they will leave you at the
Indian school which the English have built near to the great college
in their town of Williamsburgh. There you will stay, learning all that
Englishmen can teach you, until you have eighteen years. Come back to
me then, and with the money left by your father you shall be fitted out
as a trader. Go!’ ... Yes, I went to school here; but I learned fast,
and did not forget the things I learned, and I played with the English
boys--there being no scholars from France--on the other side of the
pasture.”
He waved his hand toward an irruption of laughing, shouting figures
from the north wing of the college. The white man under the tree had
been quietly observant of the two wayfarers, and he now rose to his
feet, and came over to the rail fence against which they leaned.
“Ha, Jean Hugon!” he said pleasantly, touching with his thin white hand
the brown one of the trader. “I thought it had been my old scholar!
Canst say the belief and the Commandments yet, Jean? Yonder great
fellow with the ball is Meshawa,--Meshawa that was a little, little
fellow when you went away. All your other playmates are gone,--though
you did not play much, Jean, but gloomed and gloomed because you must
stay this side of the meadow with your own color. Will you not cross
the fence and sit awhile with your old master?”
As he spoke
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